I
picked up a book recently that I put down very soon after, which nonetheless gave me an image for which I am grateful. The author relates a story of encountering a homeless man -- and "this guy was particularly homeless", as Louie CK has put. The author offered to buy the man food, and was accompanied into a corner store by him. The man was small, skinny, in tattered rags and stinking of urine. The nervous woman behind the counter asked the author "Are you together?", and he, himself nervous, replied "Yes. We're together."
The author draws the immediate parallel to our relation to Jesus, the Christ; we are in desperate straits, but He has told us that He is with us -- that we are together (it is not lost on me that the author is perhaps presumputuously comparing himself to God, but admittedly, in our actions of charity, we are precisely called to be Perfect, like Him). We are stained, broken, confused, and in need, every one of us, and the Lord has offered His hand.
This is what the Gospel teaches us. But so often, in this modern, comfortable world in which my self, friends, and family find ourselves, we feel a radical disconnect between the description that Scripture offers of us, and the state we feel ourselves to be in. Most of the time, I do not feel like a shattered beggar. I accept that I have done wrong in the past, but can rationalize away most guilt. I don't feel, deeply and unshakably, in need. My life experience has built into me a habit of thought that "things will pretty generally work out alright" if I stick to a few ingrained patterns of behavior. I seem to have it more or less "figured out". If you have it figured out, who needs a Savior?
For people for whom things don't "generally work out alright", I think it's often easier to have a visceral sense of the necessity of God's intervention in one's life. Perhaps they feel the Bible's description of them to be pretty on point, instead of a sort of work of imaginative metaphor, as is can feel to those to whom life has been good, like myself. I can understand the premises, I can assent to the words, and sometimes I can even feel them. But the bone-deep assessment that without God's help, I am utterly fucked... it does not come naturally. My mind has not been shaped that way by the world, and our material experiences have a great deal to do with our spiritual experiences.
The mystics are adamant that every day we sin before the Lord. There is no natural peace in our souls; all that has been sundered. But now -- we can be forgiven. We can set our burdens down, and walk in love with Him who is Goodness itself. The secret is secret no more.