Awakening to Our Belovedness
B.R.E.A.T.H. Circle One
And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
–Matthew 3:16-17 (NRSV)
In my previous post I suggested B.R.E.A.T.H. as a trauma-informed discipleship and church planting framework. Each movement is less a step we take and more an ever-widening circle of growing in love with God and neighbor. I’ve chosen expanding circles as the primary image based on the insights of African womanist theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye…
A Circle expands forever.
It covers all who wish to hold hands
And its size depends on each other.
It is a vision of solidarity
It turns outward to interact with the outside
And inward for self-critique.
A Circle expands for ever
It is a vision of accountability
It grows as the other is moved to grow
A Circle must have a centre
But a single dot does not make a Circle
One tree does not make a forest
A Circle, a vision for cooperation, mutuality and care
Does not harbor exclusiveness.”[1]
Circles, like our discipleship journey are never complete, but always expanding. The first circle of the journey is awakening to our belovedness.
Beloved: grounding ourselves in our core identity as God’s beloved, healing false self-images and harmful God-images.
The starting point of our journey as Christians is to open ourselves to God’s unconditional love. Before you were flesh and blood, you were a vision in the imagination of God. The Psalmist realizes this condition, writing, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalm 139:14 NIV).
God knitted you together in love. God formed you as a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. God broke the mold when God designed you.
All your life, God has been pursuing you. Even when you were unaware, God was wooing, calling, and desiring a relationship with you.
In the moment of Jesus’ baptism, a voice from heaven proclaims, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3: 17). For most of us we have understood God’s pronouncement over Jesus as a peculiar statement about the uniqueness of Jesus. Of course, he’s God’s beloved, he’s Jesus, the unique, perfect, son of God!
Perhaps there’s more to this story. Notice how all three persons of the Trinity are present, Jesus, down in the murky waters of the Jordan, the Holy Spirit, descending like a dove, and God the Father, as a voice from the heavens.
Sure, God is proclaiming the uniqueness of God’s treasured son, but the Trinity is also modeling something out here. This is the ideal parent-child relationship. God is proclaiming over all humanity our treasured nature as God’s beloved. God is affirming every human being, that you are “very good,” made in the image of God.
God proclaims this over Jesus before he does anything significant in ministry. This identity is based on his being, not his doing.
When we live from the place of God’s belovedness, we can truly love others.
Belovedness, “innate goodness” is at the core of our identity. God loves you just as you are, not as you should be. Only in a safe community where we can truly be human can real discipleship take place.
However, we don’t have to look far either in the world or in ourselves to see that there is also something wrong.
The world is filled with violence, division, racism, poverty, sickness, and death. The outward expressions of these visible signs also stir in our own souls. Every person is capable of great good, and equally capable of great evil. So, in every human being there is a dialectical tension, or seemingly these two opposing forces. We are all in some sense wounded and in need of God’s healing grace.
How did we get here? The Bible tells us that shortly after receiving God’s pronouncement over us, “very good” something goes wrong.
In the Garden of Eden there is only one restriction, don’t eat of a single tree, for if we eat of that tree we “will surely die” (Genesis 2:17). In the next scene a strange newcomer to the story arrives, a talking serpent. The serpent beguiles humanity into doing that very thing we should not do, manipulating us into thinking there is something more that God is withholding. It’s not enough to be made in the “image of God” but we want to be “like God” (Genesis 3:5).
Humanity caves to this temptation, and then we play the blame game. However, the damage is done. Sin enters the picture which emerges as a fragmenting of the relationship with God and each other. Male and female flee from God and themselves, hiding naked in the garden (Genesis 3:8). The implications of this action are like a stone being thrown in a pond, the impact causes ripples in the water that stretch out across the entire cosmos. Every aspect of creation and everything is affected, all that is “very good” is also now wounded and fragmented.
I like to think of this as our original trauma. Imagine that we are innocent children, and a creepy, trusted family member shows up, manipulates, and abuses us in some way. Our innocence is stolen. Our relationships are fragmented. In our pain, we might act out and cause harm to others. This is the universal human condition.
The trauma that we carry from this abuse is like a virus. We can think of it as “inbeing sin.” Every person and every living thing is born infected with it. It’s literally embedded in our cells in a latent way. We need healing from this infection.
Fortunately, in the very next scene we find God coming to the garden with the gentle call “Where are you?” (Genesis 3: 9). Where we are in that moment is naked, afraid, and aware of our nakedness and afraidness. This virus has caused a transformation in our consciousness. Our eyes are opened in a new way (Genesis 3:5).
One aspect of this new condition is guilt and shame. Guilt is like a God-given alarm system for the soul. It alerts us to the reality that we have done something wrong and need to make amends. Shame is toxic and never good, a side effect of the virus. It has to do with a warped self-image. Guilt says, “I made a mistake and need to make it right.” Whereas shame says, “I am a mistake and have no worth.”
The temptation that led us down this road flowed from egotistical, self-obsession, another skewed self-understanding. It’s the temptation to say being made in the image of God is not enough, we want to be “like God” in a perverse way. Perhaps eating of the fruit of temptation is the first act of narcissism, a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own needs, often at the expense of others. Narcissism leads to an overly inflated sense of self—we see every person and situation as a way to fill our own selfish desires.
When God calls “Where are you?” Do you think God, our creator, doesn’t really know? It’s actually a relational question. Where are you in proximity to me? You have broken our relationship. But the good news is from the very beginning God is trying to put that relationship back together. God does that through liberation from bondage in the Exodus, life-giving laws that give graceful boundaries for life in the Covenant, and prophets who offer course corrections along the journey to wholeness as we fail forward.
Ultimately, God heals this breach of relationship by coming to us in the person of Jesus Christ. He refuses to be God without us, so he becomes Immanuel “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). Jesus is the embodiment of God’s garden call, “Where are you?” He’s the God who comes to find us and rescue us from our fragmented state. He heals us of the disease, restoring us fully to the “very good” state. He awakens us to our belovedness.
[1] Mercy Amba Oduyoye, “The Story of a Circle” (Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians), The Ecumenical Review 53, no. 1 (Jan 2001): 97.