A Season for the Spirit: Exclusion and Embrace

Smith entitled his Tuesday March 4th devotional, "I Can Live with Mystery and the Unknown." The title captured my interest because I often need a good dose of the mystery of God. Or maybe a better way to put it that if I am to see Christ in others, then I need to learn to accept and love the mystery of them also.

Smith writes, "Fear of what we do not understand prevents us from being in community with them." It is interesting that the more America becomes complex and diverse, the less we see of true community. We divide up our churches by the color of our skin, we section off neighborhoods by religion and race, and exclude others from interacting with our families. And for many, doing just the opposite would be foolish.

But such is the "foolishness of God." Common-sense tells us to stick to our old ways and old habits. Common-sense tells us to build walls for protection. But to do so is like building a fortress in the desert. The fortress is strong, thick, and practical...but it is also isolated from the uniqueness of life in others. Faith is not common-sense and common-sense is not faith!

I have found that when we exclude others from ourselves and our churches, it is often based on fear (and the Bible is used as a shield). We must allow the Holy Spirit to "grapple" with this fear and finally strangers may let go and enter into relationships with one another.

Knowledge never leads to freedom. And Smith reminds us that, "people think that the Spirit, in leading us to truth, is going to fill our heads with all sorts of knowledge. Nothing could be further from the truth." Truth comes by unlearning bit by bit the prejudices we have against one another. We believe we have knowledge of others but this is groundless without entering into the life of others that we may not understand. Instead of accepting the mystery of another, we reject it; and thus we reject the mystery of God in them. We only pretend to know the inner parts of others and we must surrender the tendency of pretending to know about others what we do not know.

We quickly label others when we fear this type of understanding. But I, along with Smith, have murmured to myself at times, "if only people knew." Their is always a context in a life. Each life has a past and with it comes complicated issues, secrets, regrets, joys, abuses, mistakes, hate, love, bad advice, politics, and hurts. And when we discount all that is there and exclude others we have chosen to exclude God.

Carl Jung says, "True understanding seems to me to be one which does not understand, yet lives and works."

Holy Spirit, the more I contemplate your life in my heart, and Christ whom you make present within me, the more presumptuous my so-called self-knowledge seems. I am as much a mystery as you are! The more I revere the mystery of your life in me, the more prepared I will be to treat others, too, as bearers of mystery, and be in communion with them."
-Martin L. Smith