My father was a preacher. He used to say he’d rather speak at a funeral than a wedding. At a funeral he said, people’s real selves show up. Not the best version of who they want the world to believe they are. But them, unmasked.
That place of raw and true is where he felt he was able to communicate the best. Beyond the masks, to where people were when they weren’t trying to be who they though they ought to be.
Our awareness of our fractures and brokenness is the lived experience of humanity right now. In our other lives, (B.C.*), we powdered them over, concealed the gaps, covered them with pretty and paid to have someone remove them.
That illusion has been stripped by the reality of our communal brokenness.
We’re exposed to our actual reality. Not reality TV or reality gameshows, but real time actuality.
The real of the dismissed, underpaid, unrepresented, invisible parts of society that we now can see are in fact the most honourable.
Our bin-men and women.
Our hospital porters.
Our bus drivers,
delivery guys,
grave diggers,
cleaners,
health staff,
factory workers,
shelf stackers,
social workers,
dinner ladies
and caretakers.
Brokenness has unveiled we are not all equal. That some, (as Orwell said) are more equal than others. That where ethnicity, tax bracket, and access to shelter, space and facts are in limited supply, death rates soar.
Our poor.
Our refugees.
Our homeless.
Our elderly.
Our voiceless.
Our oppressed.
Our prisoners.
Our soldiers.
Our abused.
We’re looking in a true mirror and finding out what it is that holds lasting meaning for us, the human race. Without the camoflage of privilege & individualism, without the coverup of money, activity and pretence.
These broken days have shown ourselves true. Unguarded. And you know what’s winning?
Selfless love is what’s winning right now.
Perhaps it’s because selflessness is the eternal currency of lasting love. It’s the one unopposable fact that trumps the lived reality of our hurt and brokenness. All of our fears and failures. All of our disappointments.
Love, lived out at cost, for me.
It’s remarkably moving that someone, even someone I’ve never met, would give everything for my future benefit.
Even their own life.
That kind of love surely can’t be offered at this scale without the world being changed forever.
It’s the whole story of the first Easter, lived out loud into this one.
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[*Before Coronavirus]
holding fireflies 