Thursday Thinking - A Little Friend of Jesus

Krista Tippett's interview with Jean Vanier was really a special episode of the ON BEING broadcast. I would encourage you to listen to it and let it provoke your thinking about life, community, meaning, and personhood.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM HERE

Here are some excerpts from the transcript to pique your curiosity:

"So, thus, the cry of God saying, 'Do you love me?' and the cry of people who have been wounded, put aside, who have lost trust in themselves, they've been considered as mad and all the rest. And their cry is, 'Do you love me?' And it's these two cries that come together."

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"We are a frightened people. And, of course, the big question is, why are we so frightened of people with disabilities? Like a woman who said to me just recently, asked me where I — what I was doing. And I said that I had the privilege of living with people with disabilities. And she said, 'Oh, but I could never work with people.' And I said, 'Why not?' And she said, 'Well, I am frightened of them.' It touches very — and I believe we're in front of a mystery of the human reality and people who are very deeply disfigured in their face, in their body. And so — and it's the fault of nobody. It's a reality that is there. And maybe we can work things out and discover what gene it is and so on. But the history of humanity is a history of people being born extremely fragile because sickness and death is part of our — of our reality."

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"My experience today is much more the discovery how vulnerable God is. You see, God is so respectful of our freedom. And if as the Epistle of John says that God is love, anyone who has loved in their life knows they've become vulnerable. Where are you and the other person and do you love me back? So if God is love, it means that God is terribly vulnerable. And God doesn't want to enter into a relationship where he's obliging or she is obliging us to do something. The beautiful text in the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelations: 'I stand at the door and I knock. If somebody hears me and opens the door, then I will enter.' What touches me there is God knocking at the door, not kicking the door down, but waiting. Do you, will you open? Do you hear me? Because we're in a world where there's so much going on in our heads and our hearts and anxiety and projects that we don't hear God knocking at the door of our hearts. So I'd say that what touches me the deepest, maybe because I'm becoming myself more vulnerable, is the discovery of the vulnerability of God, who doesn't oblige. The other element, which is probably, again, linked to that, is that the only thing that's, what I see important for myself is just to become a friend of Jesus and nothing else. And the whole I think of the mystery of Christianity is just living with Jesus the way Jesus lived in Nazareth with his, with Mary, his mother, and with Joseph. A relationship."

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"...what is important is just to become a little friend of Jesus."