Abiding In Exile
By Eric Rucker
December 3, 2020
“Jeremiah, if you have raced with foot-runners and they have wearied you, how will you run with horses?” (Jeremiah 12:5)
As the catastrophe of the Babylonian exile approached, Jeremiah lamented
to God – about the people’s self-centeredness, about Israel’s disregard
for vulnerable people and the land. Jeremiah was fed up with it all.
And then God spoke to Jeremiah this question:
“If you have raced with foot-runners and they have wearied you, how will you run with horses?”
In non-pandemic America, many of us were taught to live on the surface.
Dominant cultures encouraged us to invest in and identify with our
ego-selves. By “ego-self” I mean the masks we wear, the temporary
facades we have created to please others and succeed in our cultures.
The “ego-self” is the armor we wear to hide our darkness, our
vulnerability, and even our gifts.
We learned to believe that “I am what I have, I am what I do, and I am
what others think of me.” Living on the surface insulates us from facing
mortality, and keeps us from wading into the ethically complex
realities of human life and suffering. Living on the surface affords us
the delusion that life is black-and-white, and that what “faithfulness”
looks like is apparent.
But 2020 has assaulted us with a marathon-length challenge to our
ego-selves. We can no longer get by over-identifying with our crafted
self-images, because the routine answers to “what I have” and “what I
do” have for the most part been taken from us.
We are thrust into ongoing dilemmas of ethical complexity: we grieve as
children struggle with their stunted development due to COVID
restrictions, while knowing that the restrictions might be saving lives.
We witness friends saying goodbye to loved ones over screens, instead
of holding hands in a final moment. We feel the fractures in our
communities over politics and wonder whether violence will break
forth.
Living on the surface, we cannot stay truly present amidst the ongoing
loss, fear, and strife. Dwelling in the shallows, we lack the capacity
to remain true to our convictions while also maintaining the disciple of
nonviolent love toward our fellow humans.
Before this season, we might have run with people, but now we are being asked by God to run with horses.
This work is only possible if we cultivate new levels of
spiritual maturity. We must center down into God in whatever ways we
know how. We must sink down below the surface, where we find
our true identity solely in the love of God. We must swim from the
shallows into the deep. We must take off our masks before God.
We must draw from a serenity that is not contingent upon having answers
nor external validation. As Christian mystic Thomas Merton advised:
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the
idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and
pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its
innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of
conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit
oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is
to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work
for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys
the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner
wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
To center in God in this moment is not at all easy. Our families, our
coworkers, our parishioners, and our own harsh inner-critics might
demand of us constant action, quick solutions, or even perfection.
But to lead in this time – to be able to “run with horses” – we must
diligently seek our gracious God in silence, solitude, and Sabbath
moments. Only when we develop habitual contact with the divine love can
we bring back to our active lives the wisdom, insight, and courage
necessary for this moment.