Choose Another Posture for Life

Consider Your Creatureliness

by

Creatureliness is worth considering.

Your flesh. Your breath. Your utter and complete dependence upon the created order. You are a part of that order, you know. You do not exist outside of it, on top of it, in charge of it. You are, as are all creatures of this universe, subject to it, a piece of it, part and not apart of it.

You are subject to its limitations. You are subject to its rules, even the ones you do not yet comprehend. You are subject to its grandeur. You are finite within an unimaginably vast and yet still finite universe.

In spite of what you may have heard, this Creation isn't fragile. It is robust and resilient. But it is finite in that the parameters upon which we depend for our very existence can be stretched and destroyed. Clearly, we can have tremendous impact. Thus, it is our place in it that may actually be fragile. Creation itself would not end, but the conditions upon which we depend can change so completely as to no longer have room for us. To put it another way, God would not cease to exist to call life into being. But we are at liberty to destroy ourselves. We are at liberty to cast ourselves outside of what gives life. This is the very heart of free will.

We are at liberty to destroy ourselves.

God honors us, trusts us, with such liberty, even the liberty of choosing our own oblivion.

Does this humble you? Does it give you pause? Does it cause you to wonder, O Christian, what the very image of God may be after all? Liberty.

Look at the trees. Look at the stones. Look at the stars and moon overhead. We spin as they spin in complex ellipticals around one another. Created good, revelation tells us, and we in God's image.

Somehow.

Some one. One. Some One in which we move in those ellipticals - orbits within unimaginable space and time. It is this One in which we move. It is this One who loves us. It is this One who Sounded us into being. This is the very model of dependance and finitude stretching into eternity, timeless and bounded simultaneously and we are cast in this One's image.

I have no concept of the fullness of what this means, but I do trust it to be true just as I trust the echo to return to me when I sound out onto the hillside.

I sit and wonder what it means to be so bound. I sit and wonder what it means to be timeless. I sit and wonder what it means to live into the dependance that is so evident. I sit too much.

How fragile is this Image? How might we end it all without even beginning to comprehend its vast beauty?

God spins and whirls, shimmers and glistens, breathing out over the Vast Deep and casts out Image after Image after Image. God spins out Love.

Sitting, I barely notice casting myself into oblivion with each passing moment. I am barely conscious of the choices I make.

I am, of course, at liberty to choose another posture. This is the hope of salvation, the power to choose another posture by which one may live into this life. Liberty is a response to grace and not its genesis.

Perhaps, I should not be sitting when pondering the im-ponderable. Perhaps, I should stand and sing. Perhaps, I too can sound love forth like the One in whose Image we are cast. Perhaps.

When I reach my end, the last of my days, will God find me seated and outcast or will God find me standing, singing love? May it be the latter.

Yet, I pray that no matter how God finds me, the sound I hear will be "Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away..." And that, at the end, I will discover the grace that is the liberty to do so.

Tripp Hudgins is a doctoral student in liturgical studies and ethnomusicology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. and director of admissions at American Baptist Seminary of the West. This post is republished with permission from his Facebook page.