Creators of Reality in a Broken World
What do you do on a dark rainy day? I normally fall deep into contemplation on scripture and theological thought. This morning I was thinking about how being created in the likeness of God is our participation in the creation of reality. I was connecting this with God's self-revelation in Exodus 34.
In Ex. 34 the sins of the father(s) are visited upon the children. This is not a curse it is simply how God has created us as human beings. We are connected in very real (relational) ways that touch us and affect us beyond our cognitive recognition.
God is not reaching into our moment in time to punish anyone for the sins of their ancestor(s). Rather, we as mimetic creatures who learn through copying, enter a reality already formed by many sins, damaged by many sins.
For example, a loving mother who (for the sake of the family) hid the adulterous activity of a philandering husband and loved both her husband and her children could not hide her suffering regardless of her smile. The pain of her reality would show through and her children would feel and suffer that pain in often unrecognized ways. The father's behavior as a philanderer (no matter how hidden) would show up in the family dynamic and affect the children even though they were cognitively ignorant of their father's affairs.
The many sins of humanity have entered the world until John would write that the whole world lies in wickedness. There is hope, yet healing cannot avoid pain, especially for those who see clearly into the depth of our condition as human beings.
There is a way, there is a path, it is not identical with the life our Lord suffered at the powers of our political, religious, and unreliably erratic crowd's assent to those powers. It is a way of love and humility, of a dependency upon the Spirit of the Lord.
Everything doesn't get fixed in this life, it doesn't always get healed, trauma isn't always overcome or cured, rather we find peace to carry the pain knowing salvation is completed in a resurrection that enters a life with the Lord Jesus Christ in a world we grasp for but cannot reach, we feel, but cannot hold onto, a world we have not yet seen, a Kingdom ruled by a human being who overcame all the sins of the world to create a reality without sin; we call that place heaven.
