JOHN DEMPSTER: Everything belongs– including life's unexpected intrusions
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I was impressed by my friend Maria’s reaction when her car broke down. She phoned a friend for help, and settled down to wait, smiling. ‘Thank you Lord for this unexpected hour or so of peace,’ she prayed. Everything belongs – including the unexpected.
I’m finding these words, ‘everything belongs’ (popularised by American Franciscan priest Richard Rohr) to be a very helpful, and thoroughly Christian take on reality.
The climate emergency reminds us that in nature everything is interrelated. And we know that despite multiple conflicts, there is but one human race. Everything belongs.
Maria teaches me that interruptions are best seen as part of the day rather than unwelcome intrusions. We make our plans, but there is a higher agenda in play. This was Jesus’s way of living. Joy and peace are to be found in entrusting each day to God, and welcoming the unexpected. Everything belongs.
I find in my heart not just good and loving impulses, but negative and dark things clamouring for attention. When you try to fight the darkness within, it grows stronger. But when you gently acknowledge it, while refusing to be shaped by it, its power wanes.
The dark stuff is a sign of our brokenness, but for the moment, to use Jesus’s picture, the wheat and the weeds co-exist. Everything belongs.
We can all think of different choices we could have made, mistakes we could have avoided. We fear that our lives will be forever blemished by what we have done.
But in fact it is through the mistakes, through the failures, through the remorse and repentance, through the seeking of forgiveness that we become the people we were made to be. Everything belongs.
But what about the abhorrent, scandalous things such as death, accident, bereavement, chronic ill-health, mental illness and many more. These things don’t belong, surely? Didn’t Jesus weep at the cruel, alien intrusion of death when his friend Lazarus passed?
But can we see these grim realities as part of our journey if we learn to entrust ourselves in everything to the love of God?
Do we reach a point where we can say of these things too, that ‘everything belongs’? Even the death of Jesus ‘belonged’ as the gateway to resurrection.
And to those who protest ‘I don’t belong!’ the God through whom all things will be healed and made whole says ‘My child, I love you. Everyone belongs!’
Maria was aware of God’s presence as she relaxed in the car waiting for help to arrive. And as we sit in our darknesses, the same loving God (whether or not we feel the divine presence) is with us, and for us, and on our side. Everything belongs.
