The Unworthy Saint

“A parable is a small story with a large point.”
-Frederick Buechner

Dictionary.com defines “humanitarian” as:

One who is devoted to the promotion of human welfare and the advancement of social reforms; a philanthropist.

With that definition, the term “eternitarian” could be defined as:

One who is devoted to the promotion of a person’s eternal welfare and the advancement of spiritual reforms; a philanthropist.

This is how the eternitarian lives:

The eternitarian treats people not just as humans, but as eternal beings. They are mindful of the reality that each person is an eternal being who will spend eternity in either Heaven or Hell. Their focus is on aligning hearts and souls with the truth of eternity. They work for the eternal benefit of everyone, through evangelism and discipleship, with love for people around the world.

Have you ever wanted to mute life for a day? I wonder what that would be like. I bought ear plugs a while back and a noise reduction headset, but even with both on I could still hear. It’s a funny fact of life that we can take in sound through our skulls and not just our ears directly. Anyway, point being, my effort to artificially mute the world didn’t work. The closest thing I can think of is when I put on my head phones, tune in to a song I know very well and crank the volume – I can hear nothing of the outside, only what’s coming through my phones. And if the song is familiar enough, it mutes itself in some sense, and I am left observing the movements of the people around me, the shapes and colors, the uniquities floating around me. Never-the-less, I still wonder what it’d be like to mute the world.

I would say that Christ is beauty incarnate – as in, He is the only thing in all creation that retained the perfection God intended when He created the world. His story, the way He walked, His actions, thoughts, feelings, His purpose; all these things aligned perfectly with God’s purpose for His life. Jesus is the only perfect human being ever. The reason I call Him beauty incarnate is because of this perfection, because of this perfect alignment with God’s will. Because of Jesus, I think beauty has something to do with anomaly and something to do with symmetry.

Jesus was sui generis. He lived a unique life, had a unique purpose, enjoyed unique life experiences – which is something that can be said for all of us. We are all created with some uniquity about us. In this way we are all beautiful because we were all formed (as a potter forms a pot), all massaged, all loved into being the way we are – individually.

Similarly, we are all called to symmetry, to conformaty, we are all called to align ourselves to the will of God. In some way we should all look alike, look like Christ, both in our obedience and our aligning of our will with God’s. Just like a forest where the trees all look much alike, there is beauty in the symmetry that is created when we all start looking more like Christ.

For those reasons I recognize beauty as not just anomaly or symmetry, but as a combination of both – the measure of beauty being the degree to which the individual conforms to the will of God’s.

“It’s useful being top banana in the shock department.”
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I killed the Christ
I killed the One
I killed the Man
I killed the Son

Hotel lobby, marble floor
Up the shaft to number four
Hand in hand and through the door
Seen a little and want some more

I killed the Christ
I killed the One
I killed the Man
I killed the Son

I killed the Christ
I killed the One
I killed the Man
I killed the Son

Fingers glide across my skin
She grabs hold and pulls me in
Flesh meets as we begin
Sweet indulgence in the sin

I killed the Christ
I killed the One
I killed the Man
I killed the Son

I killed the Christ
I killed the One
I killed the Man
I killed the Son

Eyes stare at mary jane
Shift outside, right through the pane
Head spins as feelings wane
Tears form and turn to rain

I killed the Christ
I killed the One
I killed the Man
I killed the Son

“Well, I think I’ll get saddled up and go looking for a woman. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of days. I’m not picky as long as she’s smart and pretty… sweet… and gentle and… tender and refined and… lovely and carefree.”
-The Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Even if you don’t believe in God, you owe it to yourself to find out who Jesus was – if for no other reason, because all time is measured by either being before Him or after Him. And you might say “oh, well, this is kind of like Augustus naming the month of August after himself,” but the difference is that it wasn’t Jesus who based time around his birth – it was other human beings.

It would be kind of like a bunch of people getting together and throwing out our current concept of time in favor of a calendar where everything before 1981 was “before Philip” and everything after was counted from that date. So it would be 24 whatever right now. Can you imagine? Wouldn’t you wonder how I lived, what I did that I had such an impact to cause that kind of change?

No other man has time based around his birth like this man has. Hitler, Ghandi and Ceasar do not touch the impact this one man has had on the world. Oscar Wilde even goes so far to say that nothing in Greek tragedy comes close to touching the story of Christ. In other words, no mythological story can even touch the real life story Jesus lived.

If none of that makes you wonder about Christ, so be it. But if you do wonder, even a little, about who He was, check out the gospel of John. If you read through it, ask yourself a few questions along the way: Who was Christ? What was His personality like? Who did He hang out with? What types of things did He do with His time? What did He care about?

It occurs to me that our lives are a recipe of sorts, a collection of ingredients that God, the Master Chef uses to make us into whatever perfect concoction he dreams up. He never uses the same collection of ingredients, nor the same amount of any one ingredient, and never dreams up the same perfect concoction twice. Which is to say, no one has the same life experiences, the same revelations, as you – God always speaks in a unique way, always works in a unique way in our individual lives.

What’s also interesting to me is how God can take the still-forming, uncooked, incomplete, sticky, nasty mess that is our life and use it as an ingredient in another person’s. It’s like He knows the precise moment when the incomplete concoction that is our life will be the perfect ingredient in the life of another. He seems to know the exact moment when the sharing of our revelations, our experiences and our personal testimonies can be used as a bit of yeast or a bit of salt in someone else’s life – which is the everyday miracle we must be careful not to miss.

But the miracles do not stop in the everyday – God is not just an everyday chef, but the Master Chef who has a great feast planned. He has billions of foods cooking, He is mixing and matching ingredients, using a bit of this dish in that, and that in the other, but His concoctions always come out perfect as promised, each one fitting into it’s planned place on the great table. And that is the great miracle – that God, because of His planning and provision, has us each simmering, perfecting for a place in Heaven, when we all begin as just a mixture of flawed ingredients. In the hands of any other, this great feast would fall apart, but in the hands of the Master Chef, everything, everyone is appointed, mixed, cooked, perfected just as He envisioned and promised from the beginning.

Sometimes I just need good friends. Sometimes I just feel like staying mellow. Sometimes I don’t feel as though I have the emotional energy to get up a game face for people I don’t know well.

It’s a little like chinese food. Rich says if he’s burnt out on chinese food, eating more of it will only make the burnout last longer. It’s similar for me with low emotional energy and people. If I am to recharge, I need to be either around my close friends, or no people at all. If I’m put around people I don’t know, the burnout, the tiredness, the emotional low will last longer.

This is the “I” in my INFJ.