Weight of Holiness

I think that, if one truly understood what it is about God that makes His grace so irresistible, one could not help but fall face down in a reverence so profound that it can also be called horror. For the essential nature of grace is love and there is nothing so terrible or so relentless as love. In seeing it, we must also see ourselves and, in that moment, we learn one agonizing truth:

We will never deserve that love.

It can never be earned. It can never be repaid. It is not blind or gullible - that Love knows you as you truly are. And it will never go away.

This is the weight of glory.

~Pepper Darlington,
July 19, 2014, Anno Domini

One thing I miss about my old Facebook account is getting those "x years ago today, you wrote" status suggestions. My new account isn't even a year old yet, so it'll take time before I start getting those again. Meanwhile, there's updates on my old account all the time with interesting, brilliant statuses that I forget I was able to write at the time.

Like in July of 2014? I don't remember that month as being particularly fruitful spiritually. I remember being afraid constantly. I remember lots of isolation. My roommate moved out about a month and a half before our lease ended in... I dunno, May? June? Then I spent a month at some friends' house while they were traveling. Was I in the Ashburn house by July 19th?

If I was, then there'd been a chain of small miracles leading up to it. The friends who'd opened their house to me did so when I had a week left on my lease and nowhere to go. While I was there, I insisted on fighting with a different friend by email and, before I left for Ashburn, I'd started seeing signs that she might forgive me and even change the underlying causes of our multi-year tension. And, another friend, whom I'd assumed was giving me the silent treatment, started talking to me and did so with kindness and compassion.

Also, that was before things deteriorated at the end of summer. The most severe crisis of faith, both spiritual and social, occurred in the last three months of that year. Essentially, this is a statement made right before the thought underwent its worst testing.

Which makes it interesting that, yesterday afternoon, before I checked my old account, I'd been plotting a similar post on the weight of holiness.

I read a book recently about a "terrible event" that happened in an apple orchard. As one obtained pieces of the story, little facts that fit together, one came to realize that the speaker could not be using the word "terrible" in its most normal sense. She had to mean something else, something world-bending and earth-shattering in a reality that ought to be shattered.

We cling so strongly to our ordinary way of life, our ordinary understandings, and our ordinary self-destructive habits. Sometimes, that's not what we need, or even something we can tolerate. Reality is bigger and wilder than we can imagine, and it's no bad thing if the structures of our life get knocked down once or twice or more. Not if we take that opportunity to build back, and build better.

Many people, whether they realize it or not, have built their lives on a foundation of hate. Hate for a job. Hate for one's own appearance. Hate for someone who betrayed or abandoned you. Whatever that hate is for, when it's in the foundation, it will shape the whole building. Every interaction with every person you ever meet. In such cases, it is good to be rocked by love.

It just doesn't feel good.