M,
There are no strong tales
about the real state of the human soul, are they? None that we will recognise
anyway. It is now more fashionable to know what you are doing in work, play and
life itself, to have all the answers and be on the progress road, to have
suffering pay off in material terms and to not be a burden, a flake or anything
that smells of the lower half of the totem pole we have put at the centre of
modern life. We wish away the weak states of addiction, mental illness,
anxiety, frailty and other ‘dregs’ of the human experience and since most of us
only minutely deal with any of these things, we are grateful to an imaginary
god that these things have passed over our private houses of self.
We are sadly mistaken. The god
we think we pray to when we wish these things away does not really exist. The God
that is comes down for broken people and stilled up hearts. He is here for the
weak, the poor, the diseased, the fallen, the oppressed and never the
oppressor.
We are sadly mistaken
because deity looks not at what a man or woman appears to be but what they
really are. He sets a high bar by just being and we all fall short. We will not
all sell all we have and give to the poor. We will not all die for those we
consider wicked. We live in cycles of sublime self-preservation and furious
self-justification. We do what we can to look the part and sometimes tend to
the garden within with brash strokes and ailing platitudes to cover up the
things we cannot face. No one is perfect. Everyone is broken. There is not
poetry to hide it. No roman a clef to obscure the truth in. We are all of
course, fallen from original purpose and in need of some serious saving to make
life mean anything at all other than attending to things that should be
dismissed to begin with.
This is fine, though. There is
no need for panic. He is the God for the broken.