My Lord and God is – to use the words of T.S. Eliot – an “Infinitely gentle infinitely suffering Thing.”
Have you ever been hurt by someone who you love?
I have. And I know that I have hurt people who I love very much.
And the other day, a dear one, who I love very much, hurt my feelings very very badly. And I was thinking about that as I was reflecting on how that hurt manifested in me.
The first thing that happened when I was hurt was that I got a very bad headache. Perhaps it was the suppressed emotion, or maybe it was the shock of being hurt by someone when I was not expecting to be hurt. Or maybe, I was hurt so badly that the emotional hurt had to come out in something and in my case, it came out physically in my sore head.
And I was living in that lonely moment of pain, when I was thinking about how shockingly terrible it is to be hurt by someone who I love, I suddenly thought of my God.
I am worthy of pain. I am sinful and have inflicted pain on others, and therefore if I experience pain, it is not a truly terrible thing, and is rather a natural consequence of my own sinfulness. In other words – and to use a colloquialism – when someone who I love hurst me, I simply get as good as I give…
But with God – He is Infinitely Gentle. And therefore, He suffers Infinitely at being hurt by my rejection of Him through sin. And just as an argument with a loved one can get out of hand with one insult soon becoming two then ten then twenty, when I sin, a small sin becomes a larger sin and the next sin and the next one.
And I have been thinking about that today. For the first sin of Adam and Eve was disobedience and pride. And that was bad enough. But the second sin of humankind was jealousy and murder when Cain killed Abel.
And I have been thinking about how the magnitude of sin grew after that first sin. And it is sort of like how the argument grows between two angry people. What starts as one angry word becomes two and three and ten and twenty. And before they realise the emotions between them are so big and the misunderstanding so great, that they are unable to seek peace between each other.
And when I think about God who has to fix the problem and clean up the mess when souls such as mine sin, I feel such shame as I cannot put it into words. For my Lord and God is – to use the words of T.S. Eliot – an “Infinitely gentle infinitely suffering Thing.”
And the thing that shames me today, is that I spend time thinking about my own hurt soul and invest almost nothing into thinking about how I have hurt my Beloved. And the idea of that shames me very greatly today…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.