Upside down world

To those who are accustomed to living in a world turned upside down, setting it right cannot help but appear to be turning it upside down. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Oh, this is so true, and not merely in the ways which we consider obvious, the disordered priorities and skewed values that our society embraces. Even when we have begun to accept the impossible reversal of judgment which God has accepted on our behalf, when we have begun to agree that the ways which we have been taught are valuable are in fact empty vapors, we continue to make evaluations in the same ways we have learned.

I am appalled by how hard and judgmental we are with one another and with ourselves. We see the harshness of the cross and somehow we interpret that as God's way rather than as ours, and we are unrelenting in continuing to think of ourselves as better than those around us, or as worse. Perhaps it is because we are afraid of what it will cost us to accept and love our brothers and our sisters and our selves in the midst of their brokenness as God has done for us. We see the scandal and complete heartbreak of the cross and it confuses our upside down minds for us to know that this is the glory of healing, transforming, boundless love.

So in the midst of trying to take ten minutes to reflect on this, I find myself locked in frustrated conflict with a five-year-old, and modeling this love for her is a challenge that I find beyond me.