No one is totally lost

They may be the hardest words to believe in our turbulent times, but I commend them to you nonetheless – "no one is totally lost."

I refrain from saying that any person is evil – I confess that we are all capable of committing profound evils, and that we may even love what is evil, but no creature can be evil in the core of their existence, for as St. Paul declared to the philosophers on Mar's Hill, "in Him we live, and move, and have our being."

Elsewhere, St. Paul also clarifies the true nature of the conflict in which we find ourselves, saying "our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." (Eph 6:12)

This verse entails the corollary that, while our true struggle is against the forces and the archons, every human we encounter is not ultimately our enemy. Since they remain also flesh and blood, they are always still a potential ally.

If we are to believe the good news announced by God in His son Jesus Christ, we must accept that anyone can change – by God's grace even the hardest heart can turn from their evil and begin to pursue what is good, right, and true. No one is beyond hope, no one is truly evil, and no one is ultimately lost.

The battle lines of this fight cut through every human heart, from the most powerful bureaucrat to the humble steelworker. Since we do not struggle against flesh and blood, no human is our enemy – they are only allies of the enemy, and thus remain ripe for betrayal by joining God's cosmic conspiracy against evil.

Others may endeavor to make themselves our enemy, but in the freedom we have received from God we can refuse to take up the role they offer us, that of the opposing force which corresponds to their action, and we may occupy instead a new possibility which breaks with all previous possibilities.

One way to see grace might be the power to create new and unexpected timelines. Grace breaks the law of karma, almost like a heat sink which diverts and dissipates the power of evil, and which chooses instead to enact a new moment which could not have been predicted or deduced from any prior moment. Grace finds itself both beyond and outside of all these laws.

While vengeance appears to us like an iron law, akin even to a higher moral duty, grace is free from the tyrannical mandate to extract an eye for an eye. No necessity compels one to forgive, yet having forgiven, a different timeline has opened in which the evil received no longer has to ripple forward indefinitely into the future. Grace's breaking of the cycle of vengeance clears a space in which truer and more beautiful happenings might poke up their tender shoots from the fertile ground.

A shorter piece this week, but I trust that the length of an essay does not indicate the power which its words can exercise over our hearts and minds.

I would briefly point out that we're starting a reading group to read some of Jakob Böhme's work – he was a Lutheran mystic described by Hegel as "Germany's first philosopher." You can join us every other Friday at noon (Pacific) starting on August 30th. To learn more, check out the event here.