I run with cynics. I find them in the church. I find them in bars and coffee houses and at baseball games and all over the screens we stare at all the time.
And the first thing I want to say is that I am at times one myself. The shadow of the world breeds cynicism in our souls. It is wise at times to be mistrusting of strangers, of leaders, of institutions, of politicians, of the people we are programmed all our lives to trust.
I get it.
I once served a weekend in jail for a protest. I have had asthma most of my life and it used to be a lot more severe than it is now. I woke up on my jail cot gasping for air. I shuffled across the common area to the nearest guard and handed him my medical slip. It was clear I was in distress. He crumpled it up, threw it on the ground, and walked away.
In one moment a lot of things I’d trusted in my privilege melted away. I have never thought of prisoners or guards in quite the standard way again. Now jails and prisons—when I am in them visiting prisoners or guards—are one of the few places I am able to see the world most clearly, in its brokenness and in its beauty.
In places of incarceration, all the bullshit and all of the distractions disappear. The failure of human justice and the goodness of divine mercy crystallize. I am not able to deny that the world is a living hell subservient to death. I am not able to escape to a realm of fantasy. I do some of my clearest thinking and living when I am behind bars.
And here’s what I’ve learned:
We cannot live well—we especially cannot thrive—as unalloyed cynics. It is not only not healthy, it is not honest to remain a vigilant skeptic. Eventually it becomes a kind of denial. Yes, the natural order is broken and people are crooked but that’s not nearly the whole story. Not by a long shot.
I need gratitude to live and to thrive and such thankfulness is as much about attitude—about an internal disposition granted by grace—as it is about gratitude’s gift to see things as they actually are, the capacity to remain in child-like awe at the wonder and beauty of everything even when you know all is not as it should be. Not by a long shot.
I need what Jesus calls the eyes to see—the eyes of faith, the eyes of the heart. I need to see the world and its people with the eyes of God, with the human and divine vision of Jesus that is mine by the Spirit.
If on a cloudless night you drive on Interstate 40 far enough into the desert of New Mexico and pull your car over and get out and look up, you’ll see a curtain made of stars, a fabric of lights, like a billowing lacework in the sky.
Have you ever seen a doe or a mare give birth or watched a Clark Little video of sapphire waves crashing on the dark blonde sands of the North Shore Oahu or walked among giant sequoias, their trunks worn by standing in forests for millennia?
And it’s not just raw nature that inspires wonder. There is the life of great cities like New York, Paris, or Shanghai, bustling hives of creative activity, everywhere the artistry of men and women who have erected from nature an intricate fabricated world to inhabit.
And while there’s plenty of darkness close at hand in our cities to inspire suspicion and detachment there is also—if one looks beyond the unswept alleys and the dead ahead stares of the rushed and preoccupied, beyond our collective caution and greed and disinterest—something to behold of the collective imagination and ingenuity and diversity of humanity, whom God has made in their image.
And there is also human courage and loyalty and empathy and self-sacrifice in places that are not shiny with constructed beauty or limitless resources. In places where the good things necessary to life are in shortest supply, we find the image of God in men and women is very much alive and well. We find a pure joy for life in places of genuine poverty.
We find pure joy amid hell.
It is, of course, Christ the human who is the true measure of humanity, who laid down his life so that we might find our life, our humanity, in him. And he is in his actions and words finally the end of all cynicism and suspicion and fear, the origin of faith and trust and confidence.
Look to Christ and trust and you will find joy not as anticipation of another place alien to earth or as a denial of this fractured one but by a transfiguring vision that sees this darkened planet with the vibrant colors and sacred textures of the kingdom God intends right here, right now, and onward, world without end.
You will see this created world not by the natural light of the sun or moon but by the uncreated light of the Father that shines on the face of Jesus Christ, the light that illuminates every thing and every person and reveals its, reveals her, hidden deep down goodness.
Comments