A New Reality!

We come from Love, We Return to Love, and Love is All Around.

Julian of Norwich, so-named because she lived in a hut on the outside wall of the Church of St. Julian in Norwich, heard Jesus say to her in a vision, “All shall be well. All shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well.” One needs to repeat this over and over in any and all circumstances to even begin to hear what she is saying. All shall be well.

Meanwhile, every day one opens one’s news feed or Facebook account, the paper or TV News, it becomes perfectly obvious that all things are not well. Jean Vanier died last week, the founder of L’Arche communities for persons with disabilities to live in a house with others of us who might be considered “the abled population.” But are we? Is it possible that we who consider ourselves able and well are in fact, in Vanier’s words, weak, vulnerable and broken?

We pray, “Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life…” Do we “truly know” the God whom we invoke both in prayer and in argument? What Julian of Norwich and Jean Vanier both know is that often we have things backwards. Vanier began the L’Arche communities with the notion of healing the disabled residents. What he discovered, much to his surprise, is that it would be they who would lead him toward a life of transformation and healing. For in attending to them day and night his own weaknesses, vulnerability and brokenness were revealed.

In his book, We Need Each Other: Responding to God’s Call to Live Together [Paraclete Press, 2018], he draws upon the story of Jesus in the Gospels, and most especially in John. For it is in John that God, the Word, is Jesus. And that this Word, this Jesus becomes flesh to dwell among us. That is, God humbles God’s self to become vulnerable, weak and broken flesh and blood like all of us. “We however,” he continues, “are afraid of the vulnerability of Jesus, so we reject him, perpetuating division, and avoiding communion of hearts. The message Jesus gives us is that he has come to give us a new reality: that we can accept ourselves as we are in our brokenness. And when this happens, it is possible to accept each other, and the walls can come down.” [p 35]

One dimension of how we might come to “truly know God” is to listen to the words from Revelation chapter 21, “"See, I am making all things new." A new reality, which we reject. We reject it because we either do not want to “truly know God,” or because we are tenured to the current reality. We may as well face it: we do not want to change. Even if it means perpetuating all things not being well – including ourselves.

In John’s version of the Last Supper, Jesus speaks of Love. To demonstrate what he means, he strips down to become even more vulnerable, gets on his knees in a position of weakness, and washes feet. He says to follow him means to do likewise – especially the part of letting ourselves be vulnerable, weak and recognize our brokenness, which part is overshadowed by the washing of feet.

Earlier in John Jesus sits down near a well where we learn he is alone with a Samaritan woman. This in itself was taboo in their culture: being alone with a woman not your wife, and as the story makes clear, Samaritans and Jews did not exactly like one another. Further, we learn later that she has had a long string of broken marriages, and the man with whom she currently lives is not her husband. Vanier has described her as the most broken character in the New Testament.

Yet, the first thing Jesus does is to reveal his weakness and his need when he asks her for a drink of water. In so doing he acknowledges to this broken woman of Samaria that he too has needs, he too is weak and vulnerable, and most importantly, despite her brokenness, there is something she can do for him. He grants her personhood! This may be the most important scene in all of John!

Vanier learned from those in his L’Arche home that they could help him break down his feelings of superiority and importance and projecting “well being and abilities.” He learns that God has brought them together so that being with them they will begin to heal him of so much that passes for “life” and “success” in today’s world. “However, I cannot say that I am healed,” he writes. “I can only say I am on the road to healing. I cannot say that I am transformed. I can only say that I am on the road to transformation.” [ibid] This he wrote near the end of his lifetime in L’Arche.

We work hard to preserve an old reality. It is a reality that has moved us and people around the world away from ours and their cultural life together to a world based on competition – a world in which there are only winners and losers. This competition leads to consumption, which leads to real or perceived scarcity, which leads to violence and demonizing or hating “the other” – those with whom you are competing. To have any chance of truly knowing God, to have any chance of following Jesus, to have any chance of sharing in his willingness to become weak, vulnerable and reveal our true brokenness and our need for a new reality, we need to stop building walls and begin building bridges.

“In a globalized reality we have to see what is happening and to see where the place of Jesus is, as the world moves from a society of culture to a society of competition. We must be wise, and we must be united in weakness – our own, and that of our sisters and brothers…I feel sad and wounded when I hear people say, ‘God cannot exist, because there is too much pain in the world,” as if it is God’s fault. We know that it is not God’s fault; it is the fault of all of us. If someone is hungry and the food available is not enough, we have to learn to share. We human beings have been given a beautiful responsibility: to build something new. We are invited to move from a closed culture to the realization that every person is important, that every person should have a place in the Church and in society. This is an invitation that has immense implications for all of us.” [44-45] And, I would add, implications for every creature and for the planet itself.

The Most Reverend Melissa Skelton summed it up this way last week at convention: God made all things, makes all things and shall make all things well. If only we will take the time to accept the invitation to know God, be with God and recognize God in others – all others – as we become a society in which All Participate, All Cooperate, and All are set on the road to Change, the road to Transformation, the road to Healing. This is what Jesus means by Love.

The French Jesuit Priest and Scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed that love is the very physical structure of the universe. Love is an energy that attracts all things and beings to one another, in a movement toward ever greater complexity and diversity – and yet ironically also toward unification at deeper levels. What keeps us from accepting such a New Reality?

Julian of Norwich wrote, “Know it well, love is its meaning. Who reveals this to you? Love. What does he reveal? Love. Why? For love. Remain in this and you will know more of the same.” All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well.