Growing in Wisdom -- Part 3

To allow yourself to be God's beloved is to be God's beloved.  To allow yourself to be chosen is to be chosen.  To allow yourself to be blessed is to be blessed.  It is so hard to accept being accepted, especially from God.  It takes a certain kind of humility to surrender to it, and even more to persist in believing it.  .... our usability comes from our willingness to allow ourselves to be chosen in the first place.  What a paradox! (R. Rohr: Things Hidden, p. 168).

 

When men and women have not begun to have the experience of God and of God's spirit who liberates us from the most profound anxieties of life, and from our endless guilt, there is really no point in proclaiming to them the ethical norms of Christianity (Karl Rahner, 1972:  The Shape of the Church to Come).

 

We have been given a God who not only allows us to make mistakes, but who even uses our mistakes in our favor! (R. Rohr:  Things Hidden, p.84).

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To know the Law-- the Word of God -- the instruction, and to fail in keeping the Law, brings us to the humiliation of sin.  We are not the people we imagined ourselves to be; we are not as smart, we are not as good, we are not as loving as we thought. 

 

Paul says in Romans 7, "In my mind, I agree with the law of God, but in my flesh, I still do the things I do not want to do."  To see our own failures is to open ourselves to the mercy of God, who gives strength to the lowly but who resists the proud.  In other words, we win by losing!  Once we know ourselves to be weak, to be "sinners," choosing our own way to our own destruction, we tend to lose our dualistic thinking of "right and wrong," "sinners and saints," etc.  In the presence of failure and grace, we become different people  -- and we, like Jesus, are willing to sit down at table with "the others," the tax collectors and the prostitutes. 

 

Wisdom is not knowledge; it is "another way of knowing."  It can hold two opposing things in balance -- the righteousness of the law and our human failing to obey the law.  Abraham, Moses, David, and Peter all failed God at some point.  They were not so much "faithful" as humbled by their failures.  These are people God can use because they have no illusions of their own power.  A well-grounded person is both humble and confident; he has no need to lord it over others or to control others, for his confidence rests in what God is doing in the situation.

 

One of my favorite authors is Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a humble monastery cook -- but I don't recall which century.  His basic assumption toward life was that if God did not uphold him at every moment, he would automatically make the wrong choice.  Now I can relate to that; if I stop listening for guidance from the Holy Spirit and start listening to my own thoughts and ideas, I can really mess things up!  It is only when I set my face toward God and allow Him to direct both my thoughts and my actions that I begin to see wonders unfold.

 

When I was a child, I began to pray for wisdom; for some reason, I fell in love with wisdom even before I knew what it meant -- and that was a good thing, for if I had realized that wisdom follows failure, even multiple failure, I might have thought twice before asking.  Fortunately, now that I know the grace that follows failure and the confidence in God that follows a lost self-confidence, I am glad that I did ask!