“How should we live in a way which is compatible with our being a likeness of God?”
~ Abraham Joshau Heschel

“Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.”
~ John of the Cross

“Tell me how much you know of the sufferings of your fellow humans and I will tell you how much you have loved them.”
~ Helmut Thielicke

The Good News: Love that Carries Suffering and Suffering that Carries Love

The premise, paradox, and promise of the paschal mystery to which we try to align ourselves and humbly but audaciously dare to call the good news is that real living always carries within itself real dying and real death, just as real loving always carries within itself real suffering— one’s own, but more importantly the suffering of others and the suffering of our planet. Conversely, real dying always carries within itself real living and real love, though we may not be able to glimpse them, just as on some days the ominous skies hide the dazzling sun.

The good news is the original news of who God is— Source and Giver of life in whom we live and move and have our being, the Embodiment of Extravagant Love, and the continually gifting and animating Spirit who sustains and inspires all creatures and all creation whether they know and acknowledge it or not. The good news and the original news is also about us. For if God in Jesus is not only the Embodiment of Extravagant Love but the Lavish Lover as well, then we are the beloved of God. The good news and original news is also that “the earth is the Lord’s” and is therefore infused with the divine spirit and is the sacred community through whose hospitality and generosity we also live and move and have our being. The resplendent earth itself holds the incarnational presence of God and is the sacrament of suffering and loving, dying and rising.

In the midst of a bruised and broken, violent and lethal world, the good news is good because it speaks a truer truth, a larger truth, a more primordial and lasting truth than the bad news which it sees, knows, confronts, and calls into question. The good news is too-often spun as “cheap grace” when in reality it is daring, audacious, and counter-cultural news that is a prophetic challenge to the controlling, violent, numbing, dismissive, or trite messages of the dominant culture. In addition, authentic spiritual audacity (also called faith, hope, and love), which is equally humble and courageous, looks far different than the spiritual smugness with which so many Christians are immediately and understandably identified.

In a world that simultaneously denies and deals death, more is asked of us who claim to have been Christ-ened than standing at the corner of 5th and Market and spinning the arrow-shaped sign that simply reads “LIFE.” Like the women water-carriers who set out each day from their desert village for the distant water source and return after the long trek to their parched communities bearing the water of life, we are called each day to carry life into places where there is little or none. John of the Cross wrote, “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.” In the end, the good news is the extravagance of God’s love which is embodied in the passion of Christ— that is, in a love that carries suffering and in a suffering that carries love.

So, this is who we are and this is why we gather as The Human & the Holy (H&H) community:

• to learn “the secret of becoming human and holy” in kinship with the earth
• to self-identify as Christ-ened ones and consequently
• to participate consciously in the dying and rising of Christ,
• to resist cultural fads and fundamentalisms by instead trusting the hidden wisdom and contradiction of the Christ path which is through death into life and into life through death,
• to hold the blessed tension while feeling the burning pain of that tension and still have the courage to hold it with the “spiritual audacity” that, contrary to appearance and public opinion, it is nonetheless blessed,
• to not let the pain blot out the humor any more than we let the humor blot out the pain,
• to live the passionate life of Christ which means to carry love within suffering and suffering within love, and
• to be a life-carrier and a love-bearer, a sherpa of hope and a transporter of peace, a bringer of joy and a giver of God.

The only way we can do this deep work is alone together— with the help of grace.

Your Companion on the Way,
╬ Dan

Friends, if these reflections on THE ALMOND TREE serve your own ongoing becoming, please pass it on to family members or friends