by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Once upon a time, when I was around twenty, I think, I drove out to a state park somewhere in Mississippi late at night in a rainstorm. I was a late adopter to cell phones, and somewhat enjoyed being unreachable at the time. What that means is that all I had were some general directions to the little lodge where a dear friend of mine was teaching Bible for a group of college students. This guy had been a mentor to me growing up, and I hadn’t seen him in a while. Last minute, I decided to crash this retreat, hear him teach, and give this longtime friend a big hug. But, I got lost. 

The big rainstorm descended upon the state park right alongside the darkness of night before I got there. I had no GPS, and I couldn’t find the retreat center. I knew I was pretty close, but after a while, I decided to give up for the night. 

I’ve had two vehicles in my adult life. Right now, I have a Sprinter van that I converted into a camper. Back then, I had a nissan maxima that I eventually put about 300,000 miles on. When I decided I was more likely to find my friend in the daylight in clearer weather, I crawled through the backseat of my maxima and curled up in a little nest of blankets in the trunk. That’s where I slept. The next morning, sure enough, I found the retreat center in the daylight and met my friend.  

I’ll never forget what he said to me, after hearing about the prior evening’s adventures. He looked me in the face and said, “Matthew, you are a risk-taker.” And he smiled proudly. A took a sip of the hot coffee he’d given me a few minutes earlier, but the warmth I felt all over had more to do with the praise from this older brother in the Lord I so deeply respected.  

I started this podcast with a famous C.S. Lewis quote: “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” Love is a risk. It may be a calculated risk. I mean we do our best to be wise about it, but, in the end, to love is to voluntarily put ourselves in someone else’s hands. 

Before Holy Week, I posted Part 1 on this City Walls theme. That’s episode 12, if you want to go back and listen to it. In it, I talked about how Cain is portrayed as someone who, after killing his brother Abel, is sent into the wilderness where he “walls himself off,” rather than trusting God’s way of vulnerable relationality. That way of vulnerable relationality was gifted to us by God a few chapters earlier in the form of a strong delivering ally called woman. The man can only be truly human and escape the trap of not-good aloneness if he learns to love and be loved by someone outside of himself. But to go outside of ourselves is a risk. To allow someone to be truly other than us and to refuse to dominate, control, or manipulate that other means we are choosing to be wound-able. Cain, as he goes out, chooses to secure his own invulnerability by walling himself off. He’s not taking any risks. 

This week, in part two, I wanted to look at some less obvious ‘walls’ that we build around ourselves. 

Right now, I’m looking at a screen. I wish you and I were talking face to face. That’s the ideal, but we make do with what we’ve got, and I’m thankful for the technology that allows for some measure of connection to grow or be maintained at great distances. I really am. But what I long for is real presence, don’t you? Or maybe you don’t? Maybe sometimes I don’t? Why not? Because the screen is less risky, less vulnerable. Our screens can become like Cain’s city walls–devices that allow us to simulate connection without having to be truly vulnerable. 

Screens and devices are walls that pretend not to be walls. Real connection just can’t be reduced like that. We can watch people instead of knowing them, interact without being known, receive without giving. Risk, push-back, and real personhood are beyond reach, even as a strong sense of connection is simulated. I mean they give us a sensation of being connected, but we’re missing out on so much. Screens are like the old idols that have eyes but can’t see, ears but can’t hear, and so on. The danger we’re in is that we become like the things we worship, and if we worship walls that pretend not to be walls, it becomes easier and easier to be deaf and blind to the real people in our lives, even to our own hearts.  

Vulnerability, mutuality, and the full presence of the person are what God established as the ways he intended for us to find safety and flourishing in this world. You may have heard it called “attachment,” and it’s something I think we are all struggling to find these days. 

Lately, I’m on the lookout for the ways that I’m walking in the footsteps of Cain, instead of Jesus. If the way of Cain is to build walls, avoid vulnerability, simulate connection, trust myself alone, and ultimately become less and less human, it seems the way of Christ is to take risks, accept vulnerability as a good feature calling me to move toward real relationships, trust others, and become more human. 

In the end, God never asks us to do anything he’s not willing to do. He always goes first and blazes the trail to joy. God doesn’t wall himself off. He makes a world and allows it real otherness from himself, so that he can enter into relationship with us. It’s a vulnerable move. God is choosing to take a risk by not controlling or manipulating us. Our God is brave and wound-able, he refuses the way of coercion and trespass. He chooses to humbly serve, quietly die, opening to us an ongoing invitation of beauty. He tears down the dividing wall of hostility, the defensive mechanisms we construct that cut us off from deep connection, he tears the curtain of the temple in two, carrying his cross outside the city walls to die naked — to meet anyone who is willing to leave a simulated life of self-preservation and take a risk on real attachment. Jesus is showing up, and he is inviting us to choose the richness and risk of relationality over the isolation and control of fearful self-protection. Like the woman before the fall, God himself is our Ezer, our strong delivering ally who meets us in our loneliness, making a way for a life together that is “very good.”

The post S6:E21 – City Walls, pt 2 appeared first on Matthew Clark.