There is a story near the beginning of Gregory Boyle’s wonderful book, Tattoos of the Heart, that moved me deeply. In the account, Father Greg is getting to know Rigo, a 15-year-old young man he’s visiting in prison, and he asks Rigo about his mother.
“That’s her over there,” Rigo points. “There’s no one like her. I’ve been locked up for more than a year and a half. She comes to see me every Sunday. You know how many buses she takes every Sunday—to see my sorry ass?”
He sobs fiercely, and when he gets his breath back, he struggles through tears: “Seven buses. She takes …..seven …….buses. Imagine.”
Father Greg then speaks to us: “How to imagine the expansive heart of this God—who takes seven buses, just to arrive at us. We settle sometimes for less than intimacy with God, when all God longs for IS this solidarity with us.”
In Mark’s story*, Jesus teaches on the Sabbath in his hometown synagogue. Many people were present, and as he began teaching, they were quite impressed. They spoke among themselves about the wisdom of his teaching, and of the healings he’d performed throughout the area. But the mood turns sour: “Who the heck does he think he is, anyway? He’s just the carpenter, grew up down the street, no one even knows who his father is.”
That is, those gathered are reminding each other of what they think they know: they have the facts, and no one is going to pull anything over on them. But the story shows that what they take as knowledge stands in the way of their seeing what is truth.
Why their obtuseness? Why their stubbornness?
What Jesus was sharing that morning was himself, much more than a specific teaching. Jesus standing before them was the embodiment of the loving presence of God, radiating the Love that takes seven …seven! …buses to be close to us. His heart overflows with a love that longs to pour itself out to them.
They must have felt that powerful loving energy. Then why wouldn’t they have wanted to open themselves to that love?
I empathize with those gathered in Nazareth: most of the time, I am much like them. I too resist what all of us most deeply long for: to be loved so fully and completely. I ask myself the same question: why wouldn’t I want to open myself to that love? I suspect that behind the resistance, theirs and mine, is always fear.
Opening to so full a love requires surrender of all the well-worn strategies for keeping my act together—my running commentary of ideas, notions, judgments–about good and bad, right and wrong, failure and success. And on the far side of my surrender, I strongly suspect my heart would break in grief, remorse, shame, pain.
I forget that it’s also on the far side of surrender that I can ever hope to find peace, freedom, and a wild, grace-filled aliveness.
And so I’ll keep practicing non-resistance: trying once again, over and over, to open myself in trust and surrender to the God who is ALWAYS taking seven buses to grace me with love without limits.
*Mark 6:1-13
-Jeanne Marcus
