January 26, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.

You Are My Beloved

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 139:7–18
Isaiah 49:13–18
Luke 3:21–22

Aren’t you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? . . . But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter . . . never fully satisfied. You know that this is the compulsiveness that keeps us going and busy. . . . This is the way to spiritual exhaustion and burn-out. This is the way to spiritual death. Well, you and I don’t have to kill ourselves. We are the Beloved. . . . That’s the truth of our lives.

Henri Nouwen
Life of the Beloved

In the movie City Slickers, the main character, Mitch Robbins, played by Billy Crystal, is a man who just turned thirty-nine years old and is having a midlife crisis. His two best friends are having midlife crises of their own. Mitch is given a birthday gift of joining a cattle drive for two weeks, so he and his two buddies go out west and join some cowboys on a ranch. Their trail boss seems tough as nails, but on the inside he is wise. He senses these men are lost. At one point, this boss advises Mitch and his friends to face their problems by considering the one thing that is most important in life. In the movie it appears that he is about ready to say what that one, most important thing in life is. Mitch is attentively poised to finally hear what is the key that will get him through his midlife crisis and bring direction and meaning to his life. What is that one thing? But after a pregnant pause, the trail boss is struck by a massive heart attack and dies instantly. So Mitch and all movie viewers are left wondering what is that one, most important thing in life?

As Christians we have some guidance from the scriptures and the creedal statements of the church to answer that question. For example, the Westminster Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian Church poses the question “What is the chief end of [humanity]?” The answer: our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. So, there we have it, the answer to the question “Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life?” To glorify God and enjoy God forever. Right?

Right. Except we may not know how to glorify God. How do we give God honor and praise with our lives? How do we enjoy God forever?

Thomas Merton wrote that,

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It consents . . . to God’s creative love. It is expressing an idea . . . which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.

The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like God. . . . This particular tree will give God glory by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do. . . .

The special clumsy beauty of the particular colt on this April day in this field under these clouds is a holiness consecrated to God by God’s own creative wisdom and it declares the glory of God. . . . The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of the road are saints looking up into the face of God.

This leaf has its own texture and its own pattern of being and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonized by their beauty and their strength. The lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too is a saint who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance. The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God’s saints. There is no other like him. He is alone in his own character; nothing else in the world ever did or ever will imitate God in quite the same way. That is his sanctity (or holiness).

But what about you? What about me? . . . For me sanctity consists in being myself and for you sanctity consists in being yourself and that, in the last analysis, your sanctity will never be mine and mine will never be yours. . . . For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. . . .

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny. . . . We are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity. . . . Not to accept and love and do God’s will is to refuse the fullness of my existence. (Thomas Merton, “Things in Their Identity,” New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 29–36)

Thomas Merton encourages us to become what God meant for us to be. Like the tree, we give glory to God by being our true selves. Our true self is the one made in the image of God. It is the one who knows and lives the truth that we are God’s Beloved.

Henri Nouwen wrote that the core truth of our lives is that we are God’s Beloved. At the center of our existence, we can hear God’s voice say, “I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.” It is not just to Jesus, but to all the people God has created, that God says, “You are my Beloved.”

Nouwen acknowledges that, “It certainly is not easy to hear that voice in a world filled with voices that shout: ‘You are no good, you are ugly; you are worthless; you are despicable, you are nobody—unless you can demonstrate the opposite.’ These negative voices are so loud and so persistent that it is easy to believe them. That’s the great trap. It is the trap of self-rejection” (Henri M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p. 26).

This trap of self-rejection and trying to remake ourselves to be more acceptable can be placed in the context of the myth of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. In the garden, God provided all that Adam and Eve needed. But Eve and Adam were tempted to move out on their own. So they did, gaining knowledge of good and evil. But with that knowledge, humanity began to divide and separate reality. It is part of human development. But God’s care for creation is not based on division but on unity and wholeness. God looks upon everything as good. It is we humans who make the basic mistake of thinking we need to be walled off from others and parts of ourselves in order to survive.

Sister Suzanne Zuercher wrote, “We hide away from the one who cares for us by choosing to care for ourselves. . . . We begin to collect information that gradually adds up to the conclusion that we are unloved. We decide that our All Provider does not totally accept who we are, does not allow our being to develop freely.” It is a short journey from telling ourselves that we are unloved to seeing ourselves as unloveable (Suzanne Zuercher, Enneagram Spirituality, p. 20).

That short journey may be launched by a casual remark, such as “Don’t bother me now” or “You will sit there until you finish your breakfast” or “That was not a nice thing to do.”

It might be changes in our family situation, perhaps the addition of a brother or sister. Feelings of being unloved might result from the illness of a parent or grandparent. Perhaps this sense of abandonment results because of the physical death of father or mother. Parents might divorce. Business travel or wartime service might take a parent away from home for prolonged periods. It might be that something genuinely rejecting occurs, such as physical or mental abuse.” (Enneagram Spirituality, p. 20)

We might internalize the racism and sexism in the culture that says we are inferior to others.

Whether or not we can identify a particular moment from which we started believing that we were unlovable, it is important for us to recognize and reflect on how we have adapted, or twisted, ourselves to survive and thrive in this world. Merton wrote that “my false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion” (Enneagram Spirituality, p. 34).

There is an ancient personality typology called the Enneagram, which explores nine different types of personalities into which people fall. Each one is marked by a particular lens on life and set of choices we make for how to move through life based on what we think we will get rewarded for. Some seek perfection in themselves and in the world. Others want to be helpful to others. Some strive to succeed or stand out as someone special. Others seek to make sense of life by gaining knowledge and ordering ideas. Some seek security and stability while others pursue pleasures and avoid pain. Some protect their own vulnerability by gaining power, while others avoid conflict and do whatever will keep the peace. Each type develops a strength. But because that strength is overemphasized and overused, persons distort the fullness of who we truly are. We are no longer fully the people God created us to be but are something of a cartoon, an image with exaggerated characteristics based on our judgments of ourselves.

The trees and animals have it easy. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied. With people it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal.

Thomas Merton wrote that the secret of our identities is hidden in the love and mercy of God. God alone can make you who you are, or rather who you will be when at last you fully begin to be. But unless you desire this identity and work to find it with God and in God, the work will never be done. The way of doing it is a secret you can learn from no one else but God. There is no way of attaining to the secret without faith. We discover ourselves in discovering God. If we find God we will find ourselves, and if we find our true selves we will find God (Thomas Merton, “Things in Their Identity,” New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 33, 36).

Our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. We glorify God by embracing and becoming our true, real selves. That becoming evolves in part by increasing our awareness of how we create our own image, how we reject parts of ourselves and distort our fullness.

And that becoming also evolves by truly believing and fully immersing ourselves in God’s love. So let us embrace the good news. Hear these words, from Henri Nouwen, that God says to you:

You are my Beloved. I have molded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother’s womb. I have carved you in the palms of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace. I look at you with infinite tenderness and care for you with a care more intimate than that of a mother for her child. I have counted every hair on your head and guided you at every step. Wherever you go, I go with you, and wherever you rest, I keep watch. I will give you food that will satisfy all your hunger and drink that will quench all your thirst. I will not hide my face from you. You know me as your own as I know you as my own. You belong to me. I am your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your lover and your spouse . . . yes, even your child. . . . Wherever you are I will be. Nothing will ever separate us. We are one. (Henri M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, pp. 30–31)

Amen.