You are both good and not-so-good

We have been conditioned somehow to think of many things in terms of black and white, turning things into polar opposites. Another way of saying this is that we are often addicted to either/or thinking: something is either right or wrong, either good or bad, either saint or sinner, either holy or evil, either introvert or extrovert, either progressive or conservative, either lightness or darkness.

In truth, however, we are living in a world where things are gray, not black or white. We, too, are a mixture of both good and not-so-good (I don’t want to color it by saying “bad” or “evil”). We have strengths and weaknesses, we have victories and losses, we practice virtues and we fall in times of temptation, we are charitable and selfish, we are strong and weak, we have done things we are proud of and things that we are ashamed of.

And God loves us with all of this. And God is in all of this. And God works through all of this, all of the time.

God is also just and merciful, and this seeming contradiction is hard for us to reconcile at times. The most eloquent statement of the pair is one offered by Richard Rohr in his book, Things Hidden: Scripture and Spirituality which I have often recommended and which I recommend again, because I am re-reading it and finding great wealth in it.

Rohr puts it this way: “. . . every time God forgives or shows mercy, God is breaking God’s own rules and showing terrible inconsistency” (p. 20). How many times have we been called inconsistent and we want to stamp our feet in frustration because the one accusing us simply doesn’t get it, simply doesn’t get us. Because we are all inconsistent in one way or another.

So anyway, God, as I said, works with all of this and we do not have to pretend we are all good and holy people. That is the posture of the self-impressed (and self-deluded) hypocrite. That is the worldview of the Pharisee. That is the folly and pomposity of many of our religious leaders, which is why so many of us find Pope Francis to be so refreshing, and so many of our contemporary religious leaders find him so hard to take. (And when I hear of these things, all I can think of is the battlefield between Jesus and the Pharisees, do vividly depicted in the Gospels, especially in the Gospel of John).

Study the Bible and take consolation in the fact that so many of the characters and “heroes” in Scripture are also inconsistent mixtures of black and white. Rohr puts it this way, and I find this to be a very consoling passage:

In the Bible we see God using the very wounded lives of very ordinary people, who would never have passed the tests of later roman canonization processes. Moses, Deborah, Elijah and Paul were at least complicit in murdering; David was both and adulterer and a liar; there were rather neurotic prophets like Ezekiel, Obadiah and Jeremiah; an entire history of ridiculously evil kings and warriors—yet all these are the ones God works with. (p. 17)

And, my friends, God works with you and through you.

God bless you!