The Perspective of Infinity
Peace,
Wholeness,
Ultimate good
Perfect fulfillment,
The way things were supposed to be.
In Hebrew You called it shalom. It was Your original plan for Your creation,
a beatific vision for Your beloved creatures.
Man was designed for a sublime equilibrium of harmonious relationships
between himself, other men, the creation, and You. Peace was to resonate throughout these connections,
proceeding to the rhythm of Your own heartbeat. Psychological wholeness,
sociological perfection, ecological equipoise, theological consummation – these
were the seeds of the Garden of Eden and their symphonic interactions, the
branches of the Tree of Life.
Yet the brilliant light of perfection cast a shadow. Man made a choice to remove You from Your
throne of Glory and exalt himself as god.
As he ascended the steps of the throne, shalom crumbled around him and dissolved into obscurity. As he sat and placed the crown on his head,
The music stopped,
The garden died,
Corruption
Reigned.
When the divine reality is juxtaposed against the worldly, I
feel as though I’m overlooking the edge of a chasm, transfixed by what I do not
see, crushed by the weight of the void. We’ve
fallen so far from Your Beatific Vision for us. Since the time we usurped Your throne, history
has unfolded as a perversion of Your original story, a debased specter of what
could have been.
And here we are now in 2016, our country on the eve of a
presidential election that has reminded us how profoundly wide is the gap
between the good life that You want for us and the corrupt reality that we
inevitably produce. I cannot help but
feel a profound sense of loss of Your shalom.
Lord of Peace, Jehovah
Shalom, my prayer is that we see the world, and this election, from your
infinite perspective.
I pray for the United
States.
From the time our country was founded we have claimed to be
exceptional, a city on a hill, a light that cannot be hidden. Yet we continue
to fall short of that ideal. We claim to
be pro-life, pro-choice, pro-marriage, pro-equality, pro-American,
pro-immigrant, pro-business, pro-worker.
Yet all these things we are for
set us against our fellow
countryman. Racial tension, religious
animosity, tribal culturalism, corporate greed, and public corruption dominate
our news cycle. Our societal dialectic has thrust us into discord, and from the
very existence of the “other” we’ve fled toward “us” to rid ourselves of
“them”. The gap between our reality and
Your shalom is widening. Lord let us feel the weight of its
absence.
I pray for the
candidates, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.
Through the rancor of election rhetoric, it easy to forget
that behind the political façade are real people created in your image in the
same existential state as the rest of us.
I do not know either of them personally, nor can I speak to their
motivations or the state of their hearts.
All I can do is humbly compare their public image to the harmonious
state which you have intended for man, and, acknowledging my own epistemic
limitations, evaluate their policy proposals against the resonant perfection of
the created order which You intended. By
this comparison, their political personas measure so small against your
Beatific Vision, it is as if they disappear.
All that remains of them is the enduring part common to all of us, the divine
image-bearers which you created and humanity itself corrupted. So we are left with Donald Trump, the man,
and Hilary Clinton, the woman, desperately clambering for something that does
not seem to be Your shalom, and
therefore tragically missing the only thing of true value in this life. Lord let them see Your glory.
I pray for the state
of my own soul as I relate to my fellow man
Am I in so different a state than the candidates? How often
do I aim at futility or run after destruction?
Looking the candidates in the face shows me that I’m not so different
from them. There are no stones to throw
here. I too have ascended the throne and displaced You as king of my life. I have participated in the disunity of national
tribalism. I measure to the same infinitesimal
height as Trump or Clinton when compared to Your shalom. Lord let me not look
past my own illness, as I too readily diagnose it in others.
Hope
So it is that the nation, the candidates, and I are all in
the same situation. Side by side, we
occupy the same strident reality, perched on the edge of the chasm, peering
into the darkness for something more.
Yet, thankfully, incredibly, You offer us hope for
redemption. Your Son has provided the
possibility of restoration. An infinite
God paid an infinite sacrifice displaying infinite love toward us, the
idolatrous usurpers. And so You have
closed the infinite gap between our corruption and Your perfection.
Election 2016 will come and go. People will yell, emotions will flair,
politicians will scream. The discordant
parade of history will march onward.
Yet from the perspective of infinity,
the noise will echo
into the void
until shalom
returns.
