Wholehearted Faith

It is nearly impossible to believe: God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb. God growing fingers and toes. God kicking and hiccupping in utero. God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered in blood, perhaps into the steady, waiting arms of a midwife. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s lap. “On the days and nights when I believe this story that we call Christianity, I cannot entirely make sense of the storyline: God trusted God’s very self, totally and completely and in full bodily form, to the care of a woman. God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: ‘This is my body, given for you.

Even on those days when I struggle to believe in God, I cannot deny the existence of my neighbor.

Acknowledging uncertainty doesn't make a person less faithful; it just makes her more honest. Admitting how much we don't know doesn't make a person less faithful; it just makes him more candid - and perhaps more curious. Anne Lamott has chronicled the meanderings of the heart as well as anyone, and as she famously puts it, " The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.

To love oneself well is to regard one’s place in the world with candor and grace, grounded in a humble realization of one’s strengths as well as a clear-eyed understanding of one’s weaknesses. To love oneself well is to be able to distinguish between what one wants and what one needs. To love oneself well means not to diminish the beautiful creature that God made nor to cultivate an outsize image of that same person.

So convinced God lived in the boxes I’d constructed, I failed to look for God in God’s favorite place: the margins.

The telos of a human-your telos, my telos, our telos-is to love lavishly and indiscriminately because we have been loved lavishly and indiscriminately. We can be gracious because we are grateful. We can love because we have been loved.

Love is what we were made to do. But even more than that, love is who we were made to be.

Wholeheartedness means that we can be doubtful and still find rest in the tender embrace of a God who isn't threatened by human inconsistency.

live and love fully, to embrace human vulnerability rather than exploit it, to try to make sense of our place in this fragile yet beautiful world, to seek to understand our role in proclaiming God’s love and justice—this has been the work of generations. It’s the quest that creates our greatest works of art and our most profound moments of quiet tenderness. It’s the promise that calls us to greet every sunrise and surrender to every sunset. It’s the best hope of our oldest prayers, both on the days when I believe as well as on the days when I don’t.

All Sabbath is rest, but not all rest is Sabbath. Rest is not Sabbath if your comfort is contingent on others' discomfort. Rest is not Sabbath if it exacerbates inequity rather than diminishing it.

It’s not a story about how humans lost their worth; it’s a story about how humans lost their innocence. And most important, it’s not a story about how God turned away from creation but rather a story about how God, in God’s relentless way, moved toward creation while giving people the freedom to make choices, to test boundaries, to rebel, to wreak havoc, to grow up.

There is liberation in not having to know everything and not having to impress everyone with that boundless knowledge.

The groundbreaking writing of Brené Brown has inspired millions to pursue what Brown calls “wholehearted living,” a posture of resilience and compassion that begins with the conviction that “yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.

...I stumbled upon a poem by Daniel Ladinsky drawn from the words of that eccentric saint: I think God might be a little prejudiced. For once He asked me to join Him on a walk through this world, and we gazed into every heart on this earth, and I noticed He lingered a bit longer before any face that was weeping, and before any eyes that were laughing. And sometimes when we passed a soul in worship, God too would kneel down. I have come to learn: God adores His creation. ...Still, I think, deep in their hearts, most people want to believe that they are somehow worthy of love and belonging, that their worst day of suffering or their best day of wholeheartedness is not better than they deserve. I think most people yearn for a God who not merely tolerates but also adores God's creation. I think most people still long for a God who kneels down.

Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: ‘This is my body, given for you.

I am a Christian because of women who showed up. I am a Christian because of women who said yes.

To live and to love [well] is not easy. If it were easy, if it came naturally, we wouldn't need that prayer

The one thing upon which the Gospels agree is that the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus were women.

God invites us to take the risk of love.

God became vulnerable. I can't help but read the story this way. God was humbled, choosing to put down roots in a particular family at a particular time in a particular place.

Prayer is a sacred space in which God invites us just to be—to be imperfect, to be messy, to be a ball of conflicting emotions, to be all of who we are this side of heaven.

May the church be resurrected to the way of humility. May the church be resurrected to the way of curiosity. May the church be resurrected to the way of mercy. May the church be resurrected to the way of service. May the church be resurrected to the way of wholeness. May the church be resurrected to the way of the cross. May the church be resurrected like Jesus. May the church be resurrected by love.

The reality is that we weren't created to go, go, go, or to do, do, do. We were made to be.

Something tells me that we might all be a bit more careful, a bit more gentle, if we knew how our words can travel through another's ear and linger for a long time in their soul.

My fingers felt awkward. They weren't used to moving in these ways. They weren't used to making creases and folding with precision. My eyes had to adjust as well, because they naturally gravitated to the painful words that I knew were on these pieces of paper. Forget about my heart; you know how I said this was a Lenten practice: It's called a practice because it's an act of training, a discipline to do something you're not naturally inclined to do.

Trying to keep in mind that how I respond to the death of my enemies says as much about me as it does about my enemies.

Maybe one of the lessons is that the wilderness is a place where we can't rely on the familiar, which can seem like a hardship but might also be an invitation-an invitation into the reality of our existence, an invitation into the truth of our vulnerability.

Maybe the call of the wilderness is to ask us to think more deeply, more broadly, more adventurously, more boldly, about the maybes.

How is it that a mountain goat can find such steady footing on these vertiginous slopes? What map does it read that shows it the way home? Maybe the wilderness seems as forbidding as it does just because we don't have the muscle memory to navigate or the skills to climb and sense. What does a western hemlock, the grand conifer that can live more than half a millennium, think when a youngster like me comes along? Chanterelle mushrooms got to know this tree, finding ample places to grow at its feet. Native Americans got to know this tree too. They understood that its bark was edible and a good base for cakes, and that its young needles could be brewed into a tea rich in vitamin C. The Coastal Salish peoples of what is now Canada built shelters for menstruating women using western hemlock branches, and this species was said to have particularly feminine energy. What if the "problem" with the wilderness isn't a problem with the wilderness at all but rather with us, with our lack of knowledge, and with our truncated imagination? The wilderness reminds us that things aren't usually as simple or one-dimensional as they seem. Our stereotypes of such spaces imagine them as places of exile, spaces of lifelessness. That would be a surprise to the creatures that call it home. Perhaps the real struggle is ours. We don't like knowing. Indeed, we fear it.