Whose Wisdom Has Brought Us

People can be like messenger angels; I like to imagine them with wings, so as to remain mindful of this.

This is especially true of my husband, my family members, and the people given me to heal, yet who miraculously also have healed me. For many years, I attributed much of my happiness or unhappiness to others. Though I used to struggle to lovingly detach from this compulsion to find my joys or sorrows in others, and could momentarily detach, I always returned, slave-like, to seek wholeness, joy, or excuses in the Other.

One day or week or year, the finger of God touched me and I changed. I hadn’t looked for this or asked for it, for I was missing something I couldn’t perceive. How can a person ask for what she can’t imagine? Yet I woke up one day and I was changed.

After that, I was able to look at others and feel a pity and compassion that I hadn’t had before. I saw that when others were flailing at me or others or life, they were resisting their own selves, just as I had resisted my own self. We all seem to be born seeing our joys or pains as arising outside of us. Indeed, they do arise externally in the beginning. Babies can’t calm themselves, feed themselves, change themselves. Yet, even long after we’re capable of caring for ourselves, we refuse to sometimes, and we demand that others do it. We demand that others make us happy and comfortable.

I became furious, offended, hurt, betrayed, abandoned; joyful, full of life, satisfied, smug. All because of others.  I flailed at Other and at life much of the time, seeing my pain or joy as being outside of myself. Rather than seeing myself as an abandoner, I noticed and nursed wounds arising from how others had abandoned me. Rather than seeing how I had depleted and failed to nurture myself, I blamed others for requiring, even demanding, care and tending.

All roads seemed to end in “Me,” not in a Savior. What I was doing will be familiar to others, because we all do it; the problem is that most people keep on doing it, keep on externalizing their pain, insisting another did it to them. This is so familiar to me. I’m ashamed of myself for having lived for so many years outside of myself and my path, the path God set for me to walk. I did this even though I knew that Jesus had insisted that “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”

I was so afraid of looking inside myself that I created reasons to look outwardly. I did not believe or perceive that God had created me in His wisdom. Pause and think about that with me for just a moment:

God created me in His wisdom.

I am not an accident resulting from the passion of two unmarried lovers; I am not the hastily-begotton bastard of hastily-married parents; I am not merely a beloved first-born daughter, nor simply someone’s sister or aunt, granddaughter or ancestor.

I am a being created by the wisdom of God.

From the Liturgy of the Hours, we pray:

Lord, as daylight fills the sky, fill us with your holy light. May our lives mirror our love for you, whose wisdom has brought us into being, and whose care guides us on our way.

Before the day God’s wisdom touched me and I saw that this same wisdom had created me, there was never a time in my life where I saw that who I was connected with God’s wisdom. There was not a time before then when I could see that I was, in truth and reality, created in God’s wisdom and by His wisdom, for Him and for the universe.

When my evangelical brothers or sisters said that God had a wonderful plan for my life, I didn’t believe them. Even I didn’t have a plan for my whole life; why would God plan my life on some divine road map, having created me with free will to do as I pleased? This didn’t fit with my theology; so I externalized my self and found it outside of me.

Until I saw one day that I was created by God’s wisdom. Purposely created, not created with a predestined plan, but created by purpose, by the wisdom of God. He had an intention, and that intention is me, it resides with me, and it is in me and I am in that purpose. My evangelical brothers and sisters almost had it right.

God’s entire kingdom, within me; within you. Intentional, wise, and good.

“You. . .whose wisdom has brought us into being.”

Amen.