Failure doesn't worry my Saviour .....

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"Humanity is a mess,
and the world at its most perceptive knows it.
We may be a nice mess,
a warmhearted, well-intentioned shambles,
but we remain intractable.
Why then are we so reluctant to come out and say flatly
that is precisely the mess that is Christ's metier? [so suited for]

We have put crucifixes on our altars for centuries,
but we have seldom proclaimed the point.
It is precisely the impossible, the horrendous, the hopeless,
the useless, that is the occasion of his work.

He is here to draw our debacle into His
and to bring His Passion into ours.
He will not have failures with the proviso
that at some stage they must quit being failures
and snap to.

He will, himself the great failure,
save them in failure by failure."


[i wrote a tweet on this,
then HG brought me to the above]

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"For, by the disaster of His Charity,
God plays out, at last, the Game that began with the dawn of history.
In the Garden of Eden -
in the paradise of pleasure -
where God laid out His [tennis] court
and first served a hint of meaning to humankind -
Adam strove with God over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But God does not accept "thrown-down racquets".
He refuses, at any cost, to take seriously,
our declination of the game;
if Adam will not have God's rules,
God will play by Adam's.

In another and darker garden he accepts the tree of our choosing,
and with nails through His hands and feet
He volleys back meaning for unmeaning.
As the darkness descends,
at the last foul drive of a desperate day,
He turns to the thief on the right
and brings off the dazzling backhand return
that fetches history Home in triumph :
Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.

God has Gardens to give away!
He has cities to spare!
He has history he hasn't even used!
The last of all the mercies is that
God is lighter than we are,
that in the Heart of the Passion
lies the Divine Mirth,

and that even in the cities of our exile
He still calls to Adam only to catch the Glory,
to offer the world,
and return the service
that shapes the City of God."

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excerpts from "The Romance of the Word" - Robert Capon.