One of the most difficult lessons to learn in life is knowing that you are not ready for something. Now this may come from your own estimation, but more often than not, it comes from someone else’s estimation. My next oldest sibling is four years older than me and he is a brother. When there was a neighborhood adventure that he was a part of, I invariably wanted to tag along with him. Even as a youngster, you yearn to be part of something much bigger than yourself. However, under my older brother’s ascertain, I was not old enough or strong enough to set out. There are times in life when we simply are not ready for something and usually it is someone else revealing it to us whether we like it or not.
Jesus says, “I have much more to tell you, but you can not bear it now.” The question for us today is, “Why can’t we bear it? Why can’t I do it now? Dog-gone-it I’m ready.” Jesus emphatically says, “No you’re not!” Saint Augustine says, “Simply by making us wait He increases our desire and it enlarges the capacity of our soul, making it able to receive what is to be given to us.”
The philosophy of existentalism is basically man’s self reflections and ruminations about who he is from the perspective of standing outside himself. Sorta like an imaginative twin standing in front of you and looking directly into your heart and trying to figure out what is going on inside. In the modern age, man is a question unto himself, alienated from the core of his identity because he no longer sees himself as child of God. This “existential angst” troubles us and we wonder, “Why am I not firing on all cylinders? Why am unnerved and restless? What’s wrong with me?”
Inevitably we begin to fill ourselves with garbage from the world. We separate ourselves more and more from the reality of who we are meant to be. This past week, we were in Nicaragua on a mission trip to Guadalupe Gardens Mission Center in San Marco. The guys were...how do I say? Primordial. They were in the fray, willing to get in the dirt. One evening we were invited into a family’s home, basically a tin shack with a dirt floor. The hodge-podge seats were arranged to cram 13 men into their tiny makeshift home. And it was a home, more of a home of any of our suburban monstrosities of cavernous castles. The seats were literally sunk into the dirt floor, symbolizing the groundedness of Manual’s family’s very being. They were connected to the earth. They knew instinctively that they belonged and they were at peace.
The book of Proverbs says that the Wisdom of God existed before all else. There were no depths, no fountains, no springs, no mountains or hills, no fields or sky and cloud. There wasn’t even the first clods of the world. What’s a clod anyway? Is this not a depiction of the human person? Without God, we are empty. There is nothing at all beautiful without God. The Trinity is the continual act of creating something within us that grounds our being. Where there is meant to be something, there is nothingness. We have created an altar reality of non-reality. In turn, we have become dead men walking, like zoombies at the end of the world, standing at the abyss of a canyon wall looking into the depths of darkness. Yet we are not ready to turn to God? The existential angst of man is discovering that he no longer has a home because he has isolated himself in the artificial noise and light of a concrete jungle. Divided, sliced, diced, an alter creation of a fragmented “un-whole” without an anchor, alienated from her very self.
Now we may tell ourselves that this is indeed not ourselves. Who me? No, look I’m here, at CYE ready and able. But the reality is, we are all in this place. We all have been a casualty of a faulty philosophy that has tainted our nature. We are not ready even though we may think we are. That is nothing less than pride. God is going to hold us back in order to reveal to us the Wisdom necessary to be truly human.
Jesus says, “But when He comes, the Spirit of Truth, He will guide you to all Truth. He will not speak on His own, but will speak what He hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming.” We must not speak on our own. For when we do, it is nothing other than a reflection of our own battered and war-torn reality of an existence gone astray by sin. God is a craftsmen of souls who wants to possess your hearts. The Spirit will arrive and reveal all that He hears. Do you hear Him? Of course we don’t because we are too busy hearing ourselves!
The Spirit will impart not just part of the picture, an incomplete reality, but a whole, grounded reality that we call love. Hearing it for the first time is a marvelous encounter with the person of Christ, the second person of the Trinity. Saint Paul knew it well that faith comes through our hearing. The Spirit then emanates the Divine Truths of the conversation between the Father and the Son. And not long after the ascension, does the Son is united to the Father agin. He no longer has to wait to be united to the Father. They exist in a mystical union of being, a communio of persons.
In C.S. Lewis’ book, The Screwtape Letters, Wormwood a demon-in-training receives a letter from his uncle, Screwtape, about the potential of the human person. He says, “The human becomes most fully himself when he gives himself most fully to God.” Proverbs says, “The Lord possessed me.” We have a potential far more powerful than what we realize. However, if we want to tap into this, we must be willing to understand that we are not ready. This is the necessary disposition of a heart that is ready to be formed as a disciple of Jesus Christ. We must realize that we are not ready. Jesus says, “I have much more to tell you, but you can not bear it now.”
God indeed wants to lead us into an adventure, but He will only allow us to follow in His time and not ours. We must realize that our alienation from Him is our own fault. We have purchased the lie of existential angst, substituting frivolous passions for the real thing, communio with the Triune God. A participation in the Life of the whole ground of being itself. If you feel held back this summer it will be because God is the craftsman of a work of art that can only come to completion if we are willing to be lead, not to a cavernous void of nothing, but a beautiful vista of grand colors of what He can make us to be. “He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. So lets us all hurry up and wait!
