Day 18: Humanity is a terminal condition

This weekend has been the type to make me wrestle with the condition of humanity. I debated with a friend the purpose of modern miracles, got word of someone who passed away with unresolved arguments,  and had to talk to the police about a friend who is,  by all definitions,  a hot mess. 

It all got me thinking about our hopefulness that people will change and how often it actually happens.  But even more,  when it is clear someone will never change how much effort do we put in to help them.  As if the only reason to help is to inact change. I think of our judgement of people asking for money.  Our isn't worth doing if they are going to turn around and spend it on booze.  On one hand it is wreckless to waste our resources... time, money,  energy on hopeless situations.  Or is it?

I pondered this as I set about endless housework.  Cleaning the dining room table for the fourth time today. Making beds for them to be torn apart in a few hours.  The kids whining.... why do we have to clean up when the house just gets messy again.  

Indeed.  Life is terminal.  We just keep struggling with the same stuff. Over and over. 

I thought of my friend.  Her destructive patterns of behavior.  How she can't see a better life even if it knocks her against the head. But then,  so we all stay stuck in our own behavior patterns that trap us even when a new life is right there for the taking. 

A few weeks ago I was listening to Brene Brown interviewing Richard Rohr about his book Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the 12 steps.  They talked about themselves as achievers,  the need to keep doing,  keep achieving... here's a bit of the transcript 

Brene mentions this quote:

I am trapped by certain grace and enclosed in the constant need for mercy.

Then proceeds to say

" I just turned it into a prayer, because I think to myself, “I don’t want to surrender to win. I want to fight to win. I don’t want to die to live. I want to fight. I want to fight on all these, and I don’t want to give anything away to keep it. I want to fight for it and keep it. I want to fight. I want to fight all the time.”

I have a deeply engrained Midwestern ethic that says - Do better.  Be better. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and fix your life.  There is a place for that,  but being trapped in God's grace is a recognition of the terminal nature of the human condition.  We can only take ourselves so far and we are all trapped in our own destructive cycles.  We might make "progress" and like the bed,  wake up the next morning to only find ourselves needing to be made all over again.  

But in Christ,  we are trapped in grace.  Simultaneously unable to "fix" ourselves and free to embrace the yoke of Christ which is light. And,  in the fullness of time,  become transformed into our resurrected selves,  born in the new earth,  fully accepting of God's amazing grace. 

For now,  we hold the human condition in a holy hospice. Loving each other in our brokenness even as we hold the heartbreak that comes with an inability to break the destructive cycles that bind us.  We pray for grace to break through and open our eyes to the life Christ calls us into. 

Until then we are left with these three things.

 

Faith.

Hope. 

Love. 

And these greatest of these is.....