”Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come." (Franz Kafka 18 October 1921)
Franz Kafka claims (in a different quotation that may or may not be apocryphal): “We were happy all the time, but we just didn’t know it.” All those years we thought we were miserable—stressed and distressed—we were really bubbling with an untapped spring of joy just below the surface of consciousness. We passed though life unaware of our own plenitude.
The writer of 1 John makes a similar claim when he tells us: “See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are…Beloved, we are God’s children now…” Such is the amazing claim of faith—we are both from God and of God. In fact, we resemble God already. Our ignorance of this fact is what shrinks our souls and makes us act in ungodlike ways. All that is unlovely in us—our selfishness, our jealousy, our anger, and our apathy—flows from our forgetting of our true nature.
“We were happy all the time, but just didn’t know it…” What a reversal! Instead of depression lurking at the edges of thought, ecstasy hovers. Now, so many of us keep busy for fear of the darkness awaiting us when we pause. However, what if we’ve been lying to ourselves? What if, when we stopped our frenzied filling up of mental sandbags, we were inundated with the realization that we are of God, and by nature full and satisfied? Being one with God, we would then overflow with benevolence and creativity. Currently, we scrabble and clutch at the littleness that is “ours” when we are already so much vaster than that. God’s children now, like God now, what are we clinging to?
“Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness. If you summon it by its right name, it will come…” Today our pastor told us that we usually get repentance and resurrection in the wrong order. We think that we repent first in order to get the “goods” of resurrection in a quid pro quo arrangement. In contrast, he speculated, God reveals resurrection to us first, and our response to that unbelievable vitality is an outpouring of repentance—Faced with so much life, we can’t turn away quickly enough from all that hinders. We race to cut free our ballast.
How can we summon this splendor? Perhaps in the voice of Mary, who said, “Let it be done to me according to thy will.” In response, God filled her with divinity and helped her birth promise. We are already one with the One, happy if we only knew it. It’s time to believe it, to stop hunkering down and step into fullness.
August Miles Funk-Levenson. August was born Feb 8th of this year, and has already spent months in the NICU. August and Janet visited Felix at Emanuel this summer, and it was such a blessing to be with the two young warriors.