Cultivating Calling and Pilgrimage is a meandering column documenting the pilgrimage of faith. It’s an occasional letter arriving in the mail from that shabby, wandering uncle you only see a few times year, describing the odd bits and bobs of books, songs, stories, people and places that have struck his fancy, put a lump in his throat, or kept him putting one foot in front of the other toward the Face of Jesus, that Joy set before us all.
“Charity means pardoning the unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.”
—G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
“You need to think of marriage less in terms of love or friendship and more in terms of starting a business partnership with someone.” This and similar sentiments I’ve been hearing more lately from various Christian advisors on the internet. In a conversation with a new friend on the topic, we came to the conclusion that something about this approach felt sad, even cynical.
There’s an interesting phenomenon when it comes to cynicism. I’ve written about it in Where the River Goes:
[The] Christian is assured by the deposit of the Holy Spirit that there’s plenty more where that came from. God is casting a vision out in front of us, a vision so good it seems incredible. I mean, it strains our sense of what is credible, especially for us, so well-trained by fear and sorrow. Resignation is the word I think of most often to describe what it’s like when one’s heart collapses into a foregone conclusion about life’s sad absurdity. That resignation often appears, externally at least, as confidence and authority. But it is a confidence in hopelessness.
“Despair,” says Gandalf, “is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.” Despair requires a level of certainty about the future we do not have, because some unexpected good is just as likely as some expected bad. Wrong though she was, I imagine despair seemed a foregone conclusion for the Samaritan woman—a confidently held sense of resignation. She simply couldn’t have dreamed she was actually “living her life on the brink of a great beginning.” Until there was an apocalypse at Jacob’s well—an unveiling of the delighted face of God himself, shining upon her, of all people! Incredible. [1]
It’s easy to fall into the trap of even very subtle cynicism when it’s presented so confidently, isn’t it? The belief that real joy is an unrealistic expectation, even a silly goal. We need a more pragmatic view: let’s approach this like a mechanism, a business partnership, perhaps? That way we can cover at least two bases: our reasons for failing to stay lovingly interested in the other will, in the business context, seem perfectly excusable, and the sorrow we feel that the joy of love has withered will seem unreasonable, since this is mainly a practical arrangement anyway—you’d be a fool to expect more. Tamp down those hopes, we’re told.
Hope can be wearying work. Our embodied experience of having the trap door fall out from under us so many times as loves we thought we could put our weight on failed us makes trust an anxious endeavor. We may wind up thinking disappointment is the best we can hope for. Could there be an enduring love to live both in and by?
This morning I was reading the famous “Christ Hymn” in Philippians chapter 2. Paul sings this song about a picture of astonishing, humble love that has broken into the world. It turns out that God Himself is better than we ever could’ve imagined. Jesus doesn’t cling to His position, doesn’t use His power to take advantage of us. In a bizarre twist (bizarre to us, at least, but perfectly normal within the life of the Trinity), the Great King humbly serves.
Right after that, Paul inserts one of these “in view of God’s mercy” moments. In other words, now that the true nature of reality has been revealed in this way by Jesus, our vision expands as all kinds of impossible things become possible for us. Now that Jesus has unveiled the fact that at the core of reality itself is an enduring, humble, joyful love, we suddenly discover that we can live in ways that had always seemed foolish, given the sad state of the world. All that has changed.
Who can believe in love anymore? Not just romantic love, but who can believe in the beauty of humble, self-sacrificing love in any context? Many would have us believe that life at its core is about power, competition, dominance. If that’s the case, everyone I come into contact with is a potential threat. Even the ones I most long to love, if they cause me any discomfort, become obstacles. They become enemies, and defensiveness is necessary.
All that would be perfectly true, if. If what? If Jesus had not disclosed the true nature of reality, namely, that it is not naturally competitive. Whatever sense of competition we feel is unnatural, even though it may have come to feel necessary in a world where predators have become a real threat.
Recently, I’ve been enjoying the Bible Project podcast on the theme of cities. An interesting connection they draw out is that in the original text there is a wordplay meant to connect two ideas, that of the woman built from the man’s side and the city wall that the murdering Cain builds after being banished to the wilderness. The woman is called an “ezer,” which means something like a delivering ally, or a strong ally. God calls man’s solitary state “not good,” and the solution is an “ezer.” Outside of the woman, only God Himself is referred to by the same title as humanity’s Strong, Delivering Ally. The pattern is set—the antidote to the danger of human loneliness will not be invulnerability, but rather the good vulnerability of trusting relationality. Of love. This and only this will enable the humans to truly image their Creator, who is three Persons living in eternal, enduring love.
On the other hand we have Cain. Cain rejects this relational pattern, kills his brother, and must leave. He is afraid to go into the wilderness, because he’ll be vulnerable to harm. God offers to protect him. What happens next? He builds a city. Here, the stories of the woman and the city are made to rhyme in the wordplay of the original Hebrew. A city is a thing with walls and defense mechanisms. Cain’s building of a wall, in opposition to God’s building of an ezer, becomes an image of self-preservation, invulnerability, distrust, and isolation. Humanity chooses to withdraw from the love through which God has ordained we might be saved and through which we might flourish.
It’s scary to extend charity. G. K. Chesterton says the whole point of the Christian virtues is that they are counterintuitive. “Charity means pardoning the unpardonable … Hope means hoping when things are hopeless … faith means believing the incredible,” he writes in Heretics. [2]
It is a courageous thing to love. It is valiant and brave when, like Cain after being offended, we feel the heat rise in our cheeks, but instead of doing harm we still ourselves and choose to care for the ones we feel are such a threat.
But what makes that kind of response possible?
The late Pope Benedict XVI said, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” [3]
The courage to be charitable, to enter into God’s counterintuitive way of self-sacrificial love, is not made possible for us because of some ethical willpower of our own or any lofty idea. It is only possible because our Heavenly Ezer has drawn us to His side—His own wounded, vulnerable side.
Jesus is calling us to join Him as apprentices in the craft of charitable love. He is shaping in the very stuff of our ordinary lives together a beauty that will endure throughout eternity.
Jesus has come. Reality’s true Center has been revealed. That which is actually natural, but was lost to us, has been made available again. Can a marriage, or a friendship, or a family, or even an enemy relationship be redeemed? Resignation is a faithless response. Even if it does come across as perfectly reasonable and authoritative, it is not true. God’s love is incredible—that is why faithful love is the most reasonable response. Can we really experience and enact an enduring love, then, in this world? Yes, but only by participation in the divine life. And that is precisely the invitation we’ve been offered. That is the anointing of the Holy Spirit that alone enables us to live differently, beautifully in this world.
The Lord is not instigating a business partnership. The incredible good news is far better than that. He is proposing a marriage—an endless romance. Again, Chesterton says, “Romance is the deepest thing in life.” Elsewhere, he describes romance as the perfect combination of wonder and welcome, strangeness and security. Life, at its deepest, is an odd union whose nature is that of a bewildering homeliness. Another word that may be useful alongside romance is amazement. It has the word “maze” in it—a place of bewilderment, but of a most desirable kind. To be amazed is to be lost in delight, embraced by a love so large it cannot be comprehended.
There is a love that will outlast every death, persevering past every evil. A joy that will endure beyond the end of every age, every dictator, every Cain-blooded city wall builder. There is a perfect love that overturns the reign of fear and opens the way for an enduring love and an everlasting romance beginning here on earth right now, and enduring forever.
[1] Where the River Goes, by Matthew Clark, pg. 25
[2] Heretics, by G. K. Chesterton
[3] Deus Caritas Est, by Benedict XVI
The featured image, “Summertime Reading,” is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Matthew Clark is a singer/songwriter and storyteller from Mississippi. He has recorded several full length albums, including Matthew’s latest project, “The Well Trilogy,” 3 full-length album/book combos released over three years. Each installment—Only the Lover Sings, A Tale of Two Trees, and Where the River Goes—is made up of 11 songs and a companion book of 13 essays written by a variety of contributors exploring themes around encountering Jesus, faith-keeping, and the return of Christ. You can find the books on Amazon and the albums on Spotify and Apple Music.
A founding member of The Maker’s Project and a columnist for Cultivating, Matthew’s essays reflect on faith-keeping and pilgrimage. Matthew travels as a touring musician and speaker sharing songs and stories in a van called Vandalf.
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