Such a Thing As Glory

This morning, new pieces are coming together in a naru hodo moment, so here I am. It's more accurate to say that old pieces are coming together with new clarity.

I was driving home from the airport this morning, enjoying a beautiful, bright sunny fall sky and getting inspired for my own turn to be dropped off there just several days from now. I was genuinely feeling this is good as I hummed down the highway. My this is good neural pathways are, frankly, about as frequently used as is the airport highway for me. I know where it is, but it is far from a daily or regular trip.

A decades-old memory popped up as I drove. One fine May Sunday in the early 90s I strolled through downtown Milwaukee in a state of being fairly drunk on the Holy Spirit. It was a rare moment, but it fit with a collection of graced moments I experienced when I was on my way into the Catholic Church. I did not really have a human companion in my life to encourage me on that path, but the Lord did it directly, with this collection. I remember that the weather was perfect and the sky was blue. I had gone to an earlier Mass, but returned to Gesu just to hear the thunderous pipe organ bathe the entire block with its beauty. Further up Wisconsin Avenue I stopped into a Taco Bell for a quick lunch, and I was overcome at the sight of a somewhat harried mother and her toddler. Again, it was the beauty that awed me. It was like that quote from C. S. Lewis about how an average person has the potential to appear to us as a goddess that we might be tempted to worship. The third panel in this memory was of returning home and looking down at the bricks that comprised the building I was passing. I nearly wept at the beauty of it, aware that I was beholding the work of a human being -- and even as a faint reflection of human dignity, those bricks spoke to me of the beauty and grandeur of God, shining through His human creation.

The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. So quoth St. Irenaeus.

So this morning, my neural pathways leaned into this is good with the delight of a human, safe in a world made by a God who loves not only this human, but all of us. And safe not only in a world made by God. Safe in a world impacted by other human beings. Flawed as we are, we are still the means through which God's glory is expressed in time and space. In fact, that expression of glory is not dependent on our perfection. It is dependent on our humanity. Our humanity is a given, but our acceptance and expression of it hinges on the degree to which we hum with the vision of God.

Then I had another memory. 

I belonged to a church -- we called it a non-denominational charismatic fellowship -- in the late 80s and early 90s with a pastor named Skip. Skip preached a sermon one Sunday which stayed with me, not in a good way. He made reference to a verse that was trending in that culture in those days -- 2 Chronicles 7:14 -- which reads:

If my people who are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. 

We were all about healing our land, understood to be the United States, and it specifically needed healing from the sin of abortion, and also homosexuality. 

Skip said what we really needed to do was to re-understand this verse by removing the word "wicked" and replacing it with "pleasurable." So he repeated it multiple times, that what we needed to do was to turn from our "pleasurable ways." He went on further to explain that he felt this meant giving up ice cream, and limiting his news intake to only include The Jerusalem Times. His sermon was really some kind of private rumination that he shared as a teaching.

I never held Skip to be a good or convincing preacher, and this was in fact one of the reasons I joined this fellowship. I had heard too many stories of people in charismatic circles following their pastors like brainless sheep, and I thought because I knew he was a bit off, that I would be protected in that regard. But I was more impressionable than I realized, and even though this sermon struck me as off, it lodged in my soul like the Satan's tare that it was. Evil boils down to anything that gives pleasure. Pleasure is wicked. It is my duty for the salvation of the world to live without pleasure. I knew it.

The glory of God is man fully alive. It is pleasant to be fully alive. 

It is pleasant to have a well constructed road that makes travel safe. It is pleasant to have a modest car that moves down the highway, with temperature controls that make me comfortable. It is pleasant to encounter another person and smile at them. So many things that we experience in this world are pleasant. When by grace we enter the vision of God, we in fact gain this pleasure. And the vision of God teaches us that we don't grow in aliveness by stockpiling pleasures like a filthy hoarder, clutching them to ourselves for dear life so they keep us alive. We also understand that part of the human vocation is the common good, where we are all entrusted with the goods of this world mutually. 

But my healing journey has taught me that many people operate as I have -- fearful on a deep level that this created world is wicked and untrustworthy, and that the only people we can trust are the ones who tell us that our misery deeply pleases God. Every bit of happiness feels stolen, or compromising. Many others angrily reject even a mention of God, because of people who represent Him this way.

We know that there is evil, but Satan is a clever bugger and he likes to switch labels. This world is God's world. Human beings are God's beloved creatures, who reflect Him. The center of the universe is not more power and money to get more goods to give us more pleasures, nor secret, shameful, slavish addictions that promise a few fleeting moments of pleasure -- until they can't. 

The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. 

God who died on a cross, and rose again. And we follow by faith that same path. 

And as Rich Mullins said, there is such a thing as glory.