Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our reading from Isaiah 49 this morning comes well into what’s often called “Second Isaiah.” Some scholars break Isaiah up into three distinct chunks: prophecies and writings that anticipate and process the trauma of the Babylonian Exile and the events leading up to it; prophecies and writings that anticipate the return from exile and express the hope of that return; and prophecies and writings that speak to the experience of returning or of being on the way and what it means to imagine life, the world, experience, on the other side of return. Here, this morning, we’re squarely in the middle of that second set of prophecies and writings as we witness someone waking up from the dark night of exile, opening their bleary eyes, looking around them, and suddenly realizing that scarcity isn’t their reality, that their life is more wonderful than they could have ever anticipated, that they have found themselves in the midst of an unimaginable work of grace of which they were hitherto unaware.

We’re getting an inside view of what it looks like when God expands the horizons of our becoming, when God stretches our vision of what is possible for us.

It’s sometimes the case that we live our lives with our eyes closed and our heads down—and often, we do so for a completely understandable reason: as a survival strategy. Sometimes awful things have happened to us or we fear they might happen. And sometimes those awful things or our fears concerning them are so tremendous that they’ve foreclosed possible futures or shut down parts of our hearts, and we become accustomed to living life in the shadow of the foreclosed future, accustomed to making ourselves as small as possible in order to avoid the attention of anyone or anything that might bring down upon us another awful thing.

That doesn’t mean, though, that God isn’t at work in the world or in us, gently opening doors, re-imagining and re-inventing futures, restarting hearts, undoing knots, expanding our horizons, until we one day manage to open our eyes and discover ourselves in the midst of something bafflingly and mystifyingly beautiful: we discover ourselves on the inside of God’s grace, on the inside of God’s own life. We discover we’ve become the people we thought we could never be. We discover that we’re loved. We discover that we can love. We discover we’re alive and there’s more to living than we could’ve ever imagined. And we might wonder how we got there.

We got there because God loved us there: through the people and circumstances of our lives, through the byways of our own souls, God loved us into a newness we couldn’t imagine. God opened our eyes and God lifted up our heads.

Sometimes it’s important to get that look at what it means to be on the inside of grace…because whatever’s happened to us, whatever our experience has been, God is loving us into lives of goodness, beauty and wonder: the inside of grace is where we’re meant to be. And even if we can’t, for whatever reason, open our eyes now and look around, we can still know that it’s possible for us, that’s it’s meant for us, that it’s coming to us. And even that realization is an open and opening door. Even that realization stretches our expectations just a little, hastens the day when God lifts us up and opens our eyes and we wonder, wide-eyed and awe-struck: how did we get here?

You are loved, Friend. You are loved. You are loved! Good morning!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+