The first time Susan prayed for me, I was having an anxiety attack about a sermon I heard only as "You have to be Jesus". This sermon was delivered while I was in the middle of a struggle with depression (a condition that makes you deeply aware of the ways you are not Jesus - which makes an anxiety attack a "rational" outcome). Susan took the time to meet me the week after on a cold day in early March. I remember feeling peaceful around her. The next week was the pandemic.
The second time Susan prayed for me I told her all of my art felt like lost time. She told me she felt the Spirit move through my voice and art, and that the work I was doing was precious and vital. I told her I wanted to have a heart as gentle and kind as hers because so often I feel angry, like a forest that won't stop burning.
Susan and I do not match on paper. She is a soft-spoken grandmother who has been the leader of the prayer team in our church since I started attending 7 years ago. What we have in common is both of us often struggle to see our unique gifts. I wouldn’t have met Susan without the panic attacks, the depression, and some dreams getting crushed on pointy rocks. I wouldn't have met Susan if both of us were doing quite well enough on our own. The surprising grace of friendship exists because we have an understanding of one another's weaknesses. Over the past years I've lost friends to moves and divorces, that loss pushed me into something new.
In the Flannery O'Connor story, "Parker's Back" a boy named Obadiah is haunted by the tattooed back of a man at the fair, driving him to try to recreate his own story across his back. As he grows into a man, he marries a woman named Sarah Ruth who refers to the tattoos on his back as vanity. He falls in love with her harsh judgment of him. Eventually, his dissatisfaction with his life results in an accident which leads him to his final tattoo, a large image of Christ. Sarah Ruth calls his final tattoo an act of idolatry and throws him out of the house. The story ends with Obadiah weeping against a tree. In the wake of having her judgment stripped away, he is left with a broken heart and an unclear path forward with Christ now tattooed across his back.
When Jesus speaks about how trying to save your life will result in the loss of life, I think this is the experience He is referring to: We cling to the parts of our lives that we feel will make us matter. The desire to "matter" is human, but it also leads to deep disappointment when it turns out that our passions and our relationships remain shockingly immune to easy quantification. A person with 100 friends can be shockingly lonely. A person with one close friend can feel deeply loved. As much as we try to measure the output of our lives, the things we desire to know always remain out of reach. In Christianity this "mattering" is simply a given. It is earned by the merit of simply being.
For many of us here some of that is probably tied to receiving recognition as an artist (or maybe you were going to be a perfect spouse or a perfect parent). I'm not saying the desire is empty, but sometimes desire for an exact, specific, rational, quantifiable outcome can limit creativity, which can steal the capacity to see the unexpected. It is difficult to see clearly without the clarity of joy (which I cannot overstate enough, is a different animal than performed happiness). Sometimes the most beautiful thing about a piece of art is the thing we might mistake as a tragedy in our worst moments.
Life is a burning away of dross. In that process, you learn that you need the eyes and hearts of people who are different (you know, your neighbors). The grace of God doesn't make sense until self-salvation projects fail. This often gets defined as a one-time (Saved!) instance, but I think we do ourselves a disservice when we frame it this way. What if instead Jesus just keeps delivering us from false narratives and the process has the downside of feeling like an ongoing loss to us?