Scripps Sunday #109

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 I ran across this last week when googling images about "considering lilies" and loved this...

lily of the valley 

This is a newsletter I read from Yale Center for Faith and Culture: 

"Over the past week I’ve seen the campus halls come to life. The familiar presence of friends and returning students. The hopeful faces of new students. The movement and sacred bustling of life. The refreshing conversation that draws us in. It reminds me of two simple truths we must hold together.

First, we are essentially connected to and interwoven with each other. In bearing the image of God, our humanity mirrors the triune mutual indwelling of God.

Years ago, I wrote about the porousness of our individual identities in Exclusion & Embrace. The more we allow others to indwell us, the richer and more expansive our lives will be. I still believe and hope for us all to inhabit a sense of self that is “transformed by the Spirit of the new creation and engaged in the transformation of the world.”

But second, we can and should celebrate the form of humanity that is specifically ours. Soren Kierkegaard offers a witty and vivid—yet tragic—interpretation of Jesus’s call to “Consider the lilies…” (Matthew 6:28). In his imaginative extrapolation captured in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, a beautiful lily stands glorious, isolated near a small brook. When a bird visits the lily, befriends it, and starts naughtily comparing her with other lilies in faraway fields, the lily becomes anxious and worried. “It felt imprisoned and bound … in self-concern it began to be preoccupied with itself and the condition of its life—all the day long” (168). When the lily can take no more, the bird hatches a plan to transplant the flower to another field where it can become a truly gorgeous lily, “envied by all the others” (169). The tempter bird pecks the soil away from her roots, and carries her under its wing, only for the lily to wither and die on the way.

The lilies teach us to be content with ourselves in being human.

I hope we can hold these two truths together. We must stand in our own place, fully content in our individual creatureliness, crowned in our humanity.  And we must also allow the glory and goodness of others to permeate our being. For such has God made us.

Flourishing life recognizes the journey is both mine and ours. I cannot know what it is for me to flourish apart from asking what it is for you to flourish. I cannot understand who I am apart from the ways those in my life have shaped me. I would not be who I am apart from you, nor would you be who you are apart from those around you. We shape one another.  Through this, each of us is unique and all of us are better.

. . . May you find the courage and contentedness to stand glorious where you are, and may your lives be continually indwelled with the goodness of others.

-Miroslav Volf 

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