The Restoration Project

by Christopher H Martin

  Step Five:

  Seeing the Image of God in Ourselves

  a person does not conceal

  — THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:44

  In The Rule of Saint Benedict, the fifth step is "that a man does not conceal from his abbot any sinful thoughts entering his heart, or any wrongs committed in secret but rather confesses them humbly. Concerning this, scripture exhorts us: Make known your way to the Lord and hope in him." (THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:44-5) In order to become mature we must cultivate the skill of speaking honestly about ourselves without illusion or evasion. Because we were made in the image of God and yet reveal to the world something far less, the truth about ourselves is some ugliness layered over great beauty. Part of our work of restoration is being able to see the beauty underneath the grime.

  I invite us to claim the greatest beauty in ourselves by exploring three areas of our lives in depth and learning to speak adeptly about them. In each of these areas, it will be like we are spelunking, going down into the depths of our human experience. Because we are made in the image of God, we are each unfathomably deep mysteries. But the fact that the cave has no bottom doesn't mean we can't take our flashlights and try to go down to some depth in each of these areas.

  In these reflections I am imitating Saint Augustine. In his book, On the Trinity, he invites those who seek after God to take with total seriousness the biblical claim that we are made in God's image. Furthermore, he starts with our core belief that God is both one and three, traditionally named Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we were made in the image of God, then we too must somehow be both one and three.

  Through the course of the book, Augustine finds and tests a series of trinities within the human person. These include mind, knowledge, and love; sight, seeing, and the thing seen; and memory, understanding, and will. In each case, Augustine finds things that are similar to the Trinity—and things that don't match so well. But he always proceeds with great confidence that somewhere within our human capacities is the image of the Trinity and that even the search itself will yield insight.22 He never arrives at one perfect analogy, and suggests that others might continue to explore this mystery of a trinity in our human souls.

  Inspired by Augustine, I want to offer a trinity of our human capacities as a way of thinking about God's image in us. This trinity is our capacities to remember, to receive, and to love. I invite you to think and remember and explore with me. What is in our memory and which memories do we choose to dwell on? Whom do we receive into our hearts and how do we treat them? Whom do we love, and how? By exploring our own memory, hospitality, and love, I wonder if we might, by grace, see at least a rough sketch of God's image in ourselves.

  Remembering God

  When my wife Chloe was in college, her mother, Claire, developed terminal cancer. When she was very close to death, Chloe's father Lyman called all the family to come to her bedside in California and keep vigil. Chloe and I had been dating for about a year, and I had gotten to know her whole family. I waited back in Connecticut and talked with Chloe every day to hear how things were unfolding.

  As Claire was lying in the hospital bed, immobilized in the last days of her life, one of the things Lyman did was to take her hand and lead her through a common memory. They had spent some of the best years of their lives in a house near a medieval village in the south of France. Every morning Claire would take a brisk walk to the village, passing some small farms and a convent that had been converted into a private estate. She would walk up the narrow streets and alleys of the village to the church at the top of the village where she would stretch in the churchyard as she looked out over the valley. She would then descend to the bakery to buy baguettes and croissants for her family. As Lyman held Claire's hand, he described, in great loving detail, each stage of her morning walk: the mottled horse in the field of the farm, the light as it began to hit the medieval stone, the fountain underneath the ancient archway.

  Our memories are among our most powerful human capacities. They give our life its sense of meaning and fullness, and define and even redeem our most significant relationships. Saint Augustine called memory "fields and spacious palaces where lie the treasures of innumerable images of all kinds of things brought into it by the senses."23 For all of us, the contents of our "fields and spacious palaces" are a decidedly mixed bag. The lyrics from 1970s disco tunes lie side by side with snippets of scripture. Memories of high school athletic triumphs are next to memories of high school sexual shame. Recollections of a fabulous dinner party are close to memories of the wedding to which we were not invited.

  Part of the work of radical self-knowledge is to carefully tend the wild, lush, and sometimes unruly fields of our memories. A good place to begin is by calling to mind moments that seemed particularly graceful. That is, we can heed Paul's advice in Philippians: "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Philippians 4:8). Among the greatest of "these things" are the experiences of our lives where we felt closest to God.

  Most of us never speak of these experiences and rarely bring them to mind. A practice for recovering the image of God in us is to dare to remember and celebrate the moments in our lives when we felt intimacy with God. Perhaps we can try to do this ourselves by taking some time to write out brief accounts, or even just a list, of three memories. Even better, we can seek a small community like a Discipleship Group where we can tell our stories and hear the stories of others.

  At the heart of the spiritual life of my church is an experience I call Basic Discipleship. A group of four to six of us meets for five or six weeks to encourage each other in a rhythm of daily prayer and to share our stories. In the first session, I always tell three stories from my own life. For example, I might recount the time, back when I thought I was an atheist, when I was recruited at the last minute to assist at a worship service. As the service began, I found I couldn't contain my tears as I saw and felt the packed church in hushed anticipation, awaiting the presence of God. Or I might relate the time I was sitting in silent meditation and the presence of God burst inside my heart like a fountain of water, cleansing and strengthening me, turning me from a seeker of God to a believer in Jesus. And I might tell of the time I was simply standing at the end of a dock on a pond and, as I looked, the nature around me seemed to throb with the presence of life, of God.

  Each week in our group, a different person tells his or her story. I've found that everyone has stories, some subtle and others dramatic. Some stories are about church, some about friendship, others about nature, and still others are about experiences of sickness and death. Always, there are people in a small Basic Discipleship class who have never told these stories in their lives. The stories are the treasure hidden in the often untended garden of their memories. Many times, our experiences of God are peculiar and even hard to fit into our usual categories of what is "real." Sometimes we may be almost ashamed of them. One beauty of an experience like Basic Discipleship is that hearing other people's stories so often evokes or helps us recover memories of our own, memories that may be buried. Our work is to recover and claim the experiences God has already given us.

  Another practice is to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest"24 the scriptures and other reliable Christian spiritual writings. Our goal is to fill our memories with the words and images that are most likely to lead us to the image of God, and we do this best by a daily practice of prayer. Our minds are filled with detritus and data. I can recall once coming back to Los Angeles from an evening spent at a hilltop monastery in Santa Barbara. For about half the drive back on Highway 101, the ocean was to my right and hills to the left. My mind was free to wander or to simply gaze at and appreciate the scenery before me. As I passed through Ventura and approached Los Angeles, however, I saw my first billboard, and it was a fairly explicit one of a woman and a beer. The marketers had do
ne a professional job of plugging into the primal part of my brain and so, for several miles, my mind and memory were filled with women and beer. Unwittingly, if only briefly, my memory and imagination had been shaped.

  The other part of the experience of Basic Discipleship is getting into the rhythm of twenty minutes of prayer a day, anchored in scripture. Like any other practice, there will be dry patches where it seems like nothing is happening. However, we will experience an effect over time. We will be driving in our car, with the radio turned off, no sexy billboards in sight, and a phrase from scripture—perhaps "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding" (Phillippians 4:7) or "your faith has saved you; go in peace" (Luke 7:50) or simply "Abide in me" (John 15:4) —will gently come into our mind and envelop our being, filling us with the curious warmth of gratitude and presence. A daily practice of prayer gradually fills our memories with words, images, thoughts, and feelings that can, at any moment of the day, draw us closer to God. We lead very distracted lives with each day offering more stimulation than our poor brains can handle. Twenty minutes focused solely on our relationship with God provides an essential spiritual balance to the worldly weight of each day.

  We can connect even deeper with God through our capacity of memory, but in order to glimpse this truth we need to go beyond our usual understanding of memory. Imagine that within our spacious palace of memory, there is a secret, hidden room in the basement foundation. Although this room is in everyone's mansion, not all venture down into the dark to seek it. The room is locked much of the time, and, because the keys to unlocking the room make no sense, there are even fewer who unlock it and enter. And even those who enter only ever stay a brief time before they are called back to the upper floors. In this basement room are kept the primal stories that tell us who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. Often, to hear them as they are meant to be heard, we must listen again as a little child.

  Here is one example. We are all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Once upon a time Adam and Eve dwelt in a place that was perfect, their every need easily attended to in perfect proportion. They looked around at creation and everything they saw showed the masterful hand of God, their creator. Above all, they never, not even for one instant, doubted that they were loved by God or by each other. Adam and Eve rested in perfect knowledge of love. Then, tragically, they made a bad choice. It is a mystery why they did it. Mere curiosity? Why, when God had asked of them only one thing, did they go against the request?

  But they did it, and in that moment something snapped, something broke, and paradise receded from view. Those of us who are sons of Adam and daughters of Eve have deep in our consciousness, in the palace of our minds, memories of paradise, and hints of the tragic moment when paradise was lost. We carry them with us like a phantom limb or the space in our mouth from a missing tooth. Part of cultivating our memories to recover the image of God is opening ourselves to these stories that remind us of our ancient and true myth of creation, fall, and redemption.

  Receiving Jesus

  One of my favorite poets is a man named James Merrill. Before his death in the mid-1990s, many called him America's greatest living poet. His poems are elegant, precise, and deeply felt. They also reveal a person who seemed to me both generous and kind. My impression was confirmed when I went with my friend Candler to hear Merrill read his poetry. The large lecture hall was packed with an appreciative audience, but at the event's end, we were able to make our way up to the front to meet him. Candler's mother was a distant cousin of Merrill's, and he remembered brief visits from the poet when he was a child. As soon as Candler introduced himself, Merrill's eyes lit up. He couldn't have been more kind, attentive, or present. Years later, after he died, I found out that he was well-known for his ability to make and keep friends. When it came to friendship, it was said of him that his heart was like "wax to receive and marble to retain."25 He was soft and receptive when meeting a new friend, and firm and loyal once the friendship was made.

  Most of us aren't so gracious in either receiving or remaining faithful to our friends. Like our memories, our record of friendship is likely to be a mixed bag. Some friends we are faithful to. We return their emails promptly and take the initiative to call them. Perhaps we carry them in our hearts, wondering how they would react to certain situations. We hear a new piece of music and think they might like it. We wonder from time to time how their marriage is going.

  Other friends we let slip away. We hesitate to return calls. When we do think of them, we realize it's the first time we have remembered them in months.

  In John's Gospel, Jesus says, "I do not call you servants... but I have called you friends" (John 15:15). Most Sundays, we have the opportunity to play host to the greatest guest and friend, Jesus. How we receive and hold him in those moments and in the time afterward is the center of how we discover and nurture the image of God. Jesus is present in many ways in a Sunday morning church experience. Examples include the words of the scripture, the work of the pastor in making a connection between the scripture and our daily lives, and the kindness and hospitality of the members of the community. But for me and for many others, there is nothing as reliable or as moving as the act of eating the bread and drinking the wine with our baptized brothers and sisters in Christ.

  The church remembers that on the night before he died, Jesus took bread and wine, said "this is my body and blood," shared the food and drink with his friends, and told them to do the same in remembrance of him. He also said, in my favorite words in all of scripture, "abide in me as I abide in you." (John 15:4). Every Sunday, I feel like I am enacting Jesus' command to me by having him abide in me, in my body, through the primal acts of eating and drinking.

  At my church, the communion bread is made by a parishioner. It is a special recipe that creates perfect small cakes that break easily so they can be shared. The bread has a distinctive, delicious taste. The recipe includes milk and honey as a very subtle reminder of the Old Testament promise that God would lead the people of Israel into a good land, a land of milk and honey. The bread is a reminder that Jesus is our way, as Christians, to the Promised Land.

  The wine, too, is distinctive. It is ruby port, a thick, heavy wine. It's not the kind of wine you would have with a meal because it's too heavy. But for communion, just a sip feels rich and significant. When we leave the altar, we feel like we have been fed. Even ten and fifteen minutes later, we can still taste the communion meal.

  But what happens then? Our bodies process the bread and wine like any other food and drink, but from the start we have been invited to imagine that something else is going on. We are asked to carry the presence of Jesus in our lives beyond the doors of the church and into our lives. Years ago I read a strange and wonderful image from a late nineteenth-century mystic, Richard Meux Benson. He had communion every day and imagined that with each Eucharistic meal a part of him was being replaced with part of Jesus. He believed our spiritual heart is like our skin. Several times a year our skin is shed and replaced with new material while still keeping its form. By receiving Jesus on a regular basis, we are restored to God's image and likeness, each piece of Christ's spiritual body replacing our own.26

  Our task is to keep showing up, to keep saying yes to this presence of Jesus in our lives. Bread and wine are only outward and visible signs of an inward and invisible movement of God's love in our lives. The inward and invisible movement of love and grace and presence is not limited to communion or the preacher's pulpit. Jesus, at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, says, "and remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). And I believe he meant it. In ways known and, more often, unknown, Jesus is always with those who seek to know him.

  For some, in some specially graced moments, Jesus appears in ways that are impossible to deny. From scripture we know that even after his death and even after all the appearances to his disciples after the resurrection, Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus. In one of the most moving contemporary s
tories of conversion, Anne Lamott tells how Jesus appeared to her as she hit rock bottom in her addiction to marijuana and alcohol. One night, after a binge, she feels that someone is in the room with her, and with a kind of deep knowing, she recognizes Jesus. She writes, "I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn't help because that's not what I was seeing him with "27

  I have a very sane friend who was serving in the military. One night as he was sleeping on the upper bed of a bunk bed, he woke up and Jesus was right there, standing by the bunk bed, his head and shoulders visible, holding his gaze. Soon after, my friend left the military to become a minister. And my friend isn't alone in this type of vision. A parishioner was once walking up the center of the chapel at a retreat center. He looked to the side, and there was Jesus walking beside him. What struck him was that Jesus was the exact same height as himself.

  I have only had a few elusive experiences myself. One was on an eight-day retreat where I was encouraged to use my imagination. As a former amateur actor, it was delightful for me to follow the pattern of the Ignatian spiritual exercises under the daily guidance of a fine director. I found myself particularly drawn to the apostle Peter and spent time imagining what he was like and what it might have been like for him to traverse the ups and downs of his relationship with Jesus. Peter, after all, is the one who has the faith and insight to say to Jesus, "You are the Messiah" (Matthew 16:16), only to be called "Satan" moments later for trying to stop Jesus from going to Jerusalem (Matthew 16:23). Like many of us, Peter gets it, and then he doesn't get it.