The sins of others
When I am resting in confidence about the true depth of God’s love for me I cannot see your sins. They dissolve in the love that is our birthright. But when I forget love and begin to think that I am not enough, not beloved, or not up to the task, fear creeps in and your sins are all I see. It’s all projection, of course. See, if I can cast my fear onto you and focus on how you come up short, then I don’t have to face the fact that I sometimes white knuckle my own life to the degree that I crowd grace out. Blinded, I stumble into a hell of my own making, and it feels like God has left me.
This is why Julian says, “The one who wants peace will flee from thoughts of the sins of others as she would run from the pains of hell. For when we pay attention to the faults of others a thick mist descends upon our eyes and for a time we cannot see the face of the Divine.”
Not only does God not want us to focus on the sins of others, it is also not God’s intention that we become overly focused on our own transgressions. We should be aware of the ways that we miss the mark just to the extent that we can change course and shift our attention to God. We are not here to be miserable! Life is for joy and is intended to be fun as we live it immersed in and made buoyant by love. It is God’s deep dream that you would feel that God’s love for you is so vast and boundless that it seems to you that everything that God does is done just for you. Julian says that God loves each of us with the same measure of boundless love with which He loves Jesus. That’s amazing! I know and believe that, which makes it so silly that I can still conjure up the strange, self-righteous pride required to dislike, or even hate, another human being, a creature whom God adores.
I am not talking about condoning bad behavior. I’m talking about loving people. I always circle back to Etty who says, “The absence of hate in no way implies the absence of moral indignation. Only love will make the world habitable again.”
One time years ago I told a group of people that I thought we’d all have license to hate the politician of our choice after we’d first learned to love them sincerely and deeply with the love of Jesus. A man came up to me after the talk and said angrily, “What you said is wrong. There is a clear distinction between the candidates. I know which one to hate. He gives me no cause to love him.” I remembered that when Julian said, “God’s love for humanity is so vast that he makes no distinction between the blessed Christ and the least soul among us.” I understand that man, and I have a lot of compassion for him because it’s not easy to live in this world sometimes. At least sometimes it’s hard for me. How about you?
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