Life of the beloved

Adrianna and I have been reading the book life of the beloved by Henri Nouwen, a Jesuit scholar who left YALE to work with mentally handicapped people in the L'Arch community. He writes simply and profoundly, and I find his work inspirational. His basic premise throughout the whole book is that we are the beloved of God, and that if we can grasp this truth it will truly change our lives.

Some might find this kind of thinking as self-aggrandising, but the more I think about it, the more I don't believe this is so. It is actually one of the hardest truths to accept that God actually does love us, that we are the 'beloved'. A lot of people would actually be quite uncomfortable with this idea, or else shrug it off to 'get on' with their busy lives.

But I wonder, for all of our busyness, how empty our lives can be, how hollow. As captain Jack Sparrow said in Pirates of the Caribbean, 'The world's not smaller, there's just less in it.' Our lives are more busy but there is less in them. I know this feels true for myself. Perhaps we are busy trying to make something of ourselves, trying to become successful, respectable, even enviable, and maybe, just maybe lovable.

And yet most of us will have had experiences in life that tell us we are not lovable. Rejections, break-ups, betrayals, loss of jobs, humiliations, fights and falling-outs. These can all make us believe that we are not worthy to be loved, at least not as we are. So we try to become better, to become someone else, to become worthy. After a while of trying, we can forget the very person who we are, and I think at that point we either have to keep distracting ourselves by the trivialities of life or else face up to our brokenness and emptiness. And I would bet that under the surface many of us can identify with this reality.

Into this context the truth that we are the beloved, loved by God himself, and therefore created lovable, is something that we would meet with skepticism and mistrust. But what if it is true?