Don’t Let The Brokenness Fool You

Many passages in the Bible, as St. Augustine once noted, are difficult to understand. They require interpretation. He, for example, read many Old Testament stories allegorically.

Certain other passages in the Bible are so familiar that I simply read over their complexities. 

If we're honest, most of the books, poems, and stories we read are like this. Reading is a struggle between strange passages difficult to interpret and overly familiar passages that wind up in quotation books and appear every other week in Facebook postings.

I Corinthians 13 certainly is familiar, maybe too familiar. Serious atheists I have known are not merely aware of it; they sometimes give it more consideration than Christians do. Casual, busy people who don't read much hear it frequently enough at weddings.

Even if we don’t remember its sense, most of us can at least remember its cadences. As with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…,” the opening to Charles Dickens’  A Tale of Two Cities, we also remember “Love is patient, love is kind…”

Love is a Song...

I Corinthians 13 is so familiar that it almost no longer seems to apply. Try as I might to really hear the words and not just the rhythms, I generally tune both out and experience that same frustration I get when hearing a song I am sick-to-death of hearing again. 

I am not patient. I am not kind. I replay wrongs, and I regularly don't trust people. And most of the time, nobody I know notices this about me, because we're all pretty much going down the same river.

I have begun to suspect that what St. Paul describes is the mark of an otherworldly consciousness. My problem might be my own lack of imagination in dealing with it, in the way I view the world, and in my dealings with the people around me.

In the best of times, to quote Dickens, I like people. And, for some reason that seems so alien to my own thought processes that I can only call it illumination, I also sometimes sense that the people around me, regardless of what they can and can’t do for me, are limitless with potential. As a writer, I love the way the people I know surprise me. 

But in the worst of times—most of the time, that is—I sense the brokenness among us, and I live in my own brokenness in fear. This fear requires a nervous imagination, even failure of it.

A Life of Paradox

When these new possibilities spelled out in I Corinthians 13 get read out-loud, if I don't tune them out, I get twisted with the suspicion they must result from an involvement with God I don't have: Someone's imagination is inspired to the point of seeing in paradoxes. They accept opposites: they love with the understanding of others' brokenness, that is, their contradictory, paradoxical uselessness and their being made in the alien image of God as targets of sacrificial love.

Most of the time, my thoughts are practical and run toward nihilism: How will this person benefit me? How do I get the most for me out of this situation? 

But when I think about the paradoxes, I suspect that all this brokenness is some sort of a clue. With the wild stuff about incarnation, it is possible to see that there is more to that biblical figure "your neighbor" than meets the eye.

It is my current suspicion that those who consider and act on the needs and qualities in others are among the most imaginative of people I could possibly meet.

Love is patient, kind, and takes an imagination. 

Works Cited

Augustine.  On Christian Doctrine. Trans. J.F. Shaw. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952.