angels

“When I get honest,” writes Brennan Manning, “I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.”

                              Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

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Either, or

Sometimes we get trapped in the world of black and white

I am good or bad

A success or a failure

Right or Wrong

Liberal or Conservative

Saint or sinner

Everything becomes a dichotomy

I must love or hate

Accept or reject

I am for this (or that) or against this (or that)

Ah duality

When you raise your ugly head we are forced into

False choices

And we become entrenched

Not to mention blind

And deaf

Sitting on the end of the spectrum

Right or left

We have lost our choices

Our flexibility

We are stuck

The reality is things are not either, or

They are both and..

We are good and both

We are strong and weak

We are right and wrong

Saint and sinner

The Sacred is found in non-dualism

In a God who is loving and demanding

Who is immense and intimate

Who is everywhere, and in everyone

And is right here and in me

God is in the saint

And in the sinner

And evil is in the sinner

And in the saint

And I can accept the God in the sinner

And accept the evil in the saint

For it is only in that acceptance

That grace makes sense

Grace which accepts and demands

Accepts and transforms

We are in fact

Beautiful disasters

Profoundly wonderful and tragic at the same time

Angels with an incredible capacity for debauchery

But angels still