Freedom in Lent - Day 36
In her book Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation, Madeleine L’Engle remarked that “all God ever wanted from us is to allow ourselves to be loved.” As concise a statement as that is, it is profoundly meaningful and, I believe, profoundly liberating.
In my therapy work, I meet with people who suffer with their struggles to try to believe they could possibly be good enough for other people to accept them, to approve of them, to love them, or to find any value in them. In fact, the word dignity comes from the same Greek root as denarius, a unit of worth.
“I’ve been a dancing monkey all my life,” one client told me recently, “always performing for others.” I’ve taught courses on the many ways people feel they are still failing, still doomed to disappoint the people in their lives who ‘evaluate’ their ‘worth’ for them, even the people they turn to for help. And in therapy people are invited to consider the many ways they have already proven themselves to be of value, and to contemplate their pre-existing worth without any need to perform. But it is an extremely difficult principle for many to allow themselves to take to heart.
For me, this is the basic idea in our contemplative reflections in prayer, in our weekly Meditative Eucharists as we reflect together on a passage from any of the gospels, in our daily devotionals as we allow Scripture to inspire us, and in the ways we greet one another in Christ. It is also, I believe, an important part of what we celebrate symbolically each Sunday when we allow ourselves to be ministered to in the ritual of bread and wine: we are already loved, just as we are.
What would our lives be like, and what would the world be like, if each of us could actually know, deep down, that all our Creator ever wanted from us is to allow ourselves—and by extension, to allow each other—to be loved?
“God paid a high price for you, so don’t be enslaved by the world.”
1 Corinthians 7:23 (NLT)
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Artwork - Beloved by Jaroslaw Puczel