Christ our King is risen, Alleluia."
It is hard to believe "Glory fills you!" when you have coffee breath, a dirty ponytail, and are wearing green cutoff sweats and linty wool socks, as I was the morning I read this from my dog-eared copy of Celtic daily prayers. But no matter what you are wearing, it is hard hard hard to believe the weighty beauty of Christ's resurrected glory dwells within us. Harder, I would contest, than accepting the apparent truth that we are as dirty and linty as our clothes indicate, and sorrowful and mean and weary to boot.
How difficult is it to recount stories of our failure? For that matter, how difficult is it to tell the story of humanity's failure? I think it is even trendy nowadays to talk about how shitty we all are. Excuse the language, but I did use the word purposely, because it reflects a blase, comfortable colloquialism toward our depravity. We are used to depravity, because it presents itself to our senses every minute and every day, such that many agree with the famous summation of human existence written by Thomas Hobbes: it is, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." (Ever the optimist, that Thomas Hobbes.)
What I am saying is this: it is more complex to understand oneself as an object of grace, a child of resurrection, a creature of glory. It contradicts our experience. It requires powerful imagination because it concerns an often-unseen reality. Accounts of people committing acts of great mercy or justice or loveliness seem rare. And if it is hard to see beauty in humanity collectively, I think it might be most difficult of all to see it in myself. I know better than anyone how selfish and small and blind and hardened I can be. Back to the linty wool socks. "Christ's glory fills me? You must be joking. Can you see my socks?" I am faced with the crucial choice of living in the one-dimensional truth of my dirtiness, or living in multi-faceted tension as one who is filled with squalor and splendor, shame and glory, death and life.
But mostly life. After all, it is the Life of God Himself that fills you and I, and if that isn't a trump card I don't know what is.
