Manning Monday

"Often the rhetoric we use to describe our life in Christ bears only a thin resemblance to where we really are. We boast of what we are giving because it hides what we are withholding. We allow ourselves to believe that we are capable of love just because we are capable of devout sentiment. Thomas Merton writes:

One dimension of this convenient spirituality is our total insistence on ideals and intentions, in complete divorce from reality, from actions, and from social commitment. Whatever we interiorly desire, whatever we dream, whatever we imagine: that is the beautiful, the godly and the true. Pretty thoughts are enough. They substitute for everything else including charity, including life itself.

We see avarice, rampant greed, and the exploitation of the poor on a community level. Frequently, our response is to denounce others and walk away from them, though we are all implicated.

The gospel presses us to painful honesty. If nothing else, we ought to be sincere. Get out and pant with the moneymaking street, become hedonists, and "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die," or repent and return to the spirit of the gospel. We are called to live as prophets and lovers in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Ca can't live a lie... (The Importance of Being Foolish, page 46)

It was really that last bit that caught me - but I wanted some context for it. "If nothing else, we ought to be sincere. Get out and pant with the moneymaking street...or repent and return to the spirit of the Gospel." I hear an echo of Martin Luther saying "Sin Boldly" and Paul saying where sin abounds, grace abound all the more. So should we sin all the more so that grace may abound? No!

What all this is saying to me is that we often aren't honest in even who we say we are. The truth is that I'm not always a Christ Follower - sometimes I'm a Bill follower, or a fad follower or whatever. I can chase after feeling good, I can chase after money, I can chase after escapism. And I'm not even all that honest about it TO MYSELF.

And so, I guess, I get how some people can just walk away from Christ and the Christian walk - at least they are honest with themselves and with God about who they are and who they worship.

And yet...

I repent. I take "one step closer to knowing" who God really is. I move one heartbeat closer to God's presence and God's grace and God's Truth. And I DO see myself for who I am - frail and broken and "prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the One I love."

And yet...

Manning goes on in the chapter (still in Transparency) to say,

Here is the essence of perfect sincerity in conduct - to care for nothing but God's judgment on our actions, not to vary our attitude to suit the company we are in, not to hold one opinion when alone and adopt another in conversation, but to speak and act as in the sight of God who can read our inmost thoughts. Sincerity means trying to make the outward man more and more like the inner man by simply being true to ourselves, so that no human respect can make us false. (page 48)

And I say to myself, "I don't change who I am for people." But, well, do I? I guess...sometimes. And yet - yet - it might be in areas that I know God already accepts me...but others would not... does that even make any sense? I guess I can just be more guarded with people - not letting them in on "who I really am" sometimes...because we're a judgmental lot - yes, especially church people. But then again, and this is topic for another time, we (and me) can be pretty good at justifying the wrong in our lives - at excusing the sin and the selfishness - even covering it over with a thin veneer of Truth & scripture.

Transparency...