Life of the Beloved

How do I feel about myself as God’s beloved?

This question was posed to me this week as the subject of a brief paper for a Servant Leadership class. Before answering this question it is important to define my perspective on who the real beloved is, and how I relate to him/her. From there, I can reflect on my experiences of myself as the beloved, or better yet, my experiences of being love. If I am not being and expressing love, then no matter how much I may want to, I will not be able to love myself. If I do not love myself, then I will find it hard to believe and trust in any other’s love for me, including that of God.

The beloved is not me, the person, it is the divine potential (Christ, if you will) that resides with me, waiting to be activated by my choice to enter into a committed relationship with the living God. As I make this choice, God and I enter into a covenant relationship through which “a child is born”. Through this relationship, this pure child of divine love, birthed by the infusion and promptings of the Holy Spirit, emerges into ever-greater regions of my consciousness. The more time I spend with God, and the more responsive I am to Spirit’s leadings, the greater experiences I will have of bringing this child’s LIFE into the world. The more I bring this child’s life into the world, the more I will experience myself as “being love”, and thus the more I will experience being loved by God.

In this context, I can now relay experiences of my life that allow me to reflect on how I feel as God’s beloved, starting with memories of my adolescence. Three experiences that come to mind now are those of watching the movie, “The Sound of Music”, reading the book, “The Diary of Anne Frank”, and looking at pictures of dogs and fire hoses unleashed on civil-rights marchers, children included, in Alabama. Despite whatever hardness had begun to envelope me by that time, I was able to view the events depicted through the lens of innocence and was moved to experiences of a terrible inner grief. In the case of “The Sound of Music”, I remember being on the couch of our living room, straining to hold back my tears in the presence of my parents. With “Anne Frank” and the civil-rights marchers, I was alone in my room, and was overtaken by prolonged sobbing. In these moments of being put in touch with God’s heart, though I had not yet made the choice to commit to this presence, and did not know what to call it, I experienced my first connections with the beloved. Also, as painful as these moments were, I recall that in the process of being put in touch with someone/something deep inside me that cared so much, I experienced a love of myself for my ability to feel that way.

For me, such experiences of this “connection” continued through my high-school years, most often surfacing while doing research and writing papers on the subjects of slavery and race relations in America’s South. I can remember weeping silently while reading Pat Conroy’s descriptions of brutal acts of racism in his book “Lords of Discipline”, “The Great Santini”, and “The Prince of Tides”. I recall sobbing uncontrollably in my boarding-school dorm room in the process of writing a 10-page paper entitled, “The History of Lynching in the Southeast”. Though I did not have a spiritual perspective at the time, and did not recognize a connection between the experiences and God, I can now look back on such moments as ones in which I experienced the aching of someone/something greater than just my own human heart. But why did such aching have to take place? And what could I possibly do about it?

While each of these questions has been important to the evolution of my relationship with God, the first question is better left for another discussion. The second question, however, points directly to how I feel as God’s beloved today. Though given moments of connection with my beloved presence as a teenager, it was not until my early 30’s that I was re-introduced to it in ways that amounted to a call to give greater life to it. Over a period of months that included multiple episodes of a heart greater than any human could carry alone, memories of my teenage “connection” experiences flooded in. As they poured in, though first surfacing as memories, they grew into instructions about who I really am. Next, or so it seems as I reflect on it all now, these instructions evolved into an awareness, and the awareness was accompanied by an invitation, and the invitation grew into a challenge…….a challenge to move beyond mere connection with this beloved presence, to acknowledge it as myself and to bring it forth boldly into the world.

How do I feel about myself as God’s beloved? Well, in response to God’s invitation and challenge of me I in turn invite God every day to be with, live in, work through, and love me as God wills. Out of this choice, I experience God’s love for me as well as many privileged opportunities to be and express God’s love in the world. As I have more and more experiences of embodying God’s beloved and begotten Son in me, it feels good.