The Certain Bits

"We learn to look at all human faces with the rather disturbing knowledge that they are faces that God has already looked at ... Any divisions in our world, class, race, church loyalty, have to be confronted with the painful truth that apparently we find it easier than God does to manage without certain bits of the human creation."

― Rowan Williams on the resurrection of Jesus

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Dear Kate,

To see the world in black and white, blue or yellow, male vs female, etcetera, is to look at human faces and read off their skin.  It is an ideological tunnel vision that refuses to dwell in the storied presence of human beings, fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God.  What God is willing to enter, the history of Man, we find unsavory to dip our toes in, and must forcefully disembody humanity from the lurid details to sustain the rarefied moral stratosphere where the righteous ones would gather to discuss universal hygiene.

But life is full of lurid details, the tunnel-visionary also acknowledges; so what to do?  Keeping cleaning, she says, We are making good progress, and if we are to keep going at it, there would be a corporate human advance toward perfect wisdom and righteousness.

Meanwhile the lurid details in the visionary's own life is growing more lurid everyday, not least because of him being implicated in the very filths he claims to wipe clean, pure as his intention ever is, in his vocation as a freedom-fighter, justice-bearer.  But those are minor details, he says, They will work themselves out.  Let's focus on the dirty details that truly need our attention, zero in what truly matters, the speck of sawdust in our brother’s eye.

"Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities."  Ask the tunnel-visionary the last time she read through a novel and salted the pages with her tears.  One will never understand what one doesn't seek to understand, living in a tunnel of cardboard characters conveniently flattened for her easy categorizing, toy soldiers for her imaginary battles.

Read stories.  Whatever else you read, read stories.  Do not "manage without certain bits of the human creation" that God did not manage without to meet us where we are.  Whatever we think we are dealing with, God has already dealt with it on the Cross, in the history of Man.

Now what does this, the Cross, mean then, to our quest for social justice?  Please do ask.

Yours, Alex