When I Survey this Wondrous Life

His dying Crimson, like a Robe, 

Spreads o'er his Body on the Tree; 

Then I am dead to all the Globe, 

And all the Globe is dead to me.

― "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" by Isaac Watts

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Dear Kate,

"What would you not leave home without?" is a good ice-breaker question.  It is not too embarrassing but does provide the chance for mild self-deprecating humor, personal in a very impersonal way.

Personal because it's supposed to tell people about you; impersonal, cynical, because in being non-negotiable in our needs we find ourselves able, even pleasant, to negotiate with each other our togetherness.

I remember one time a friend said mascara, that she would rather stay in her burning house than to leave without it.  Other ladies laughed and said So true.  Gentlemen shook their heads but could sympathize: we too have acquired the fine taste of putting a few things necessary on our skin.  Thou shall not judge. 

Our phones, I am sure it's now a common answer, a new obsession as it is, cementing in no time its "iconic" status in the realm of human solidarity, with Wi-Fi has become an unassailable human right, its deprivation the stuff of nightmares.

Just by considering these two examples, can I suggest our hunger is more like a learned behavior?  Not that we don't get hungry without learning how to, but what we hunger for, what we must have, what we cannot live without, is often unheard of even by our own ears not too long ago.

"What was the last time you feel perfectly at home, fully satisfied within?" is a bad ice-breaker question.  Any answer would be out of too great a self-awareness, too shallow a self-understanding: of childish words.  Yes, a child and only a child could answer that―if only you can explain to her the adult need for such a question at all.

The first and only chance we had to feel no need to negotiate for our happiness has come and gone, when it happened we did not notice, only its being non-negotiable in leaving us a damaged, shattered adult, forever yearning to recover the once givenness, giftedness of fully alive within, not contingent to the vicissitudes without.  Once we never begged for love, never bartered for attention, never bargained for acceptance; we now crave for all the mascaras and phones we can get our hands on.

"May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world," from the Epistle to the Galatians, is obviously where the quoted text above came from, which is the often omitted fourth stanza of the famous hymn "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross."

On the cross Jesus negotiates for us the non-negotiable, so that there is nothing more for us to negotiate.  No more illusions.  No more excuses.  "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" becomes the rhetorical question by which every genuine human question can be asked.

Now that we are recovered, are we going to rediscover the always givenness, evermore giftedness of life?

Yours, Alex