Marilu Thomas, “Reunion”
I have a prediction for everyone in this room based on a trip I took a few weeks ago. You will one day walk into a room full of people you only recognize by their eyes. And your nametag reading eyes won’t be so great either! I’m talking about my 50th High School Reunion in Atlanta. Those people were old! No band or wild bar, lots of sitting and the whole thing wrapped up by 9:30 pm. Yes- you too will get older. You and everyone around you are aging as we speak. You’re Welcome.
Anne Lamott can make anything funny, even old. In her book, A User’s Guide to Aging, she wrote, “Anyone who survived eighth-grade gym class believes the worst is over, that it will be all downhill from that peak of vulnerability and mortification. And then you get old. For decades, the focused attention on raising families and/or yourself, all the competitive hustle, striving and fixation with appearances, provides a kind of hard shell. You were always as vulnerable as kittens, but you ignore it in your big-girl-in-charge years. Then, one day, you wake up and find yourself simultaneously invisible and exposed again. Maybe you’re not standing there in the locker room in your underpants, but you’re equally revealed to the world’s harsh, arrogant eyes.”
We don’t want to be old. Old is passé, not hip, over some sort of hill, not new. We may want to be New and Improved in our bodies, but is that true for our opinions? Don’t we rather like our old ideas? I began my career in advertising at Coca-Cola around the time New Coke was introduced. The research showed people wanted Coke to be sweeter, so they changed the formula. It was a colossal failure. Old ‘Classic Coke’ beat out the New and it was scrapped. People did not want to change their minds or their opinions. Coca-Cola had done their job so well that no one wanted to change. This is the strategy behind brands: to dig a deep emotional hole and plant a seed that becomes an immoveable opinion. I perceive the world through the lens of my desires and opinions but I believe I am seeing pure reality.
This is built on a concept called perception; the information we perceive through our senses constructs our story of self. As Lamott puts it, “I ache for the world, naturally, but mostly I’m watching the Me Movie.” In simple and generalized terms, we have an experience, and our brain concocts a story that makes sense of that experience through the filters of our values, family history, prejudices, desires, etc. What is memorialized and what is left out are matters of individual perception. We therapists are story editors. We help people hear the story they are telling themselves and challenge their perceptions.
For example, I knew a Marine pilot named Richard who had a drinking problem, and, after a bad night, he was sure the rest of his squadron thought he was a pain, an idiot, an embarrassment. He asked to be transferred immediately, and he left. Twenty years later, he ran into someone from that squad who shared, “Did you know how popular you were? How depressed we were that you were transferred so quickly without a goodbye? We loved you, man!” Richard’s perception of how other people thought of him was based on how he thought of himself. And he was wrong.
We tell ourselves a story—rotten childhood, mean parents, terrible siblings—and we believe it because it is based on our singular perception. The original Make-Believe. You make it, you believe it. We lock in our view through the lens of ourselves. But there are others involved in our lives, and their perspectives differ from ours about the same reality. Memories and anticipations—all made up to a degree based on our self-focused story.
David Brooks, in his book How to Know a Person, wrote that, “The great conductor Leonard Bernstein once told an interviewer, ‘My childhood was one of complete poverty." He said his high school offered ‘absolutely no music at all.’ In fact, Bernstein grew up wealthy, with maids, at times a chauffeur and a second home. He was the piano soloist in his school's orchestra and sang in the glee club.” Bernstein believed his story of poverty and it affected his perception of the world and himself.
Let’s take God. Based on an experience that hurt you or seemed incomprehensible, you make up a story that there is no God, and you believe it. I’m not saying it didn’t hurt or wasn’t incomprehensible, but your story became there must not be a God. You said to yourself, “If there is no God, then I will have to handle everything. I am alone. I won’t ask for help. I will do it on my own.” Your perceptions are skewed by fears, hurts, defenses, anger, shame and guilt. But does it mean there is no God?
Revelation means to be made aware of. Revelation is finding out more about us.
God’s Revelation changes our perceptions.
The book of Revelation, written by St. John, is not about the world going up in flames and being destroyed, as you may have been told. Our passage today describes the old departing and the new heaven coming down to us. Theologian Anna Bowden comments that, “We are not heaven-bound. Heaven is bound for us. This scene from Revelation images heaven coming down to earth. Despite popular depictions of heaven. God comes to us. God chooses to join us. It is the other way around.” Jesus as the Emmanuel- God with us.
Barbara Bossing uses C.S. Lewis’s image of “New Narnia,” in The Last Battle, to help us see into the Revelation of John. “New Narnia was not an escape from the old Narnia, but rather an entry more deeply into the very same place. Everything is more radiant. It is a ‘deeper country.’ New Narnia is a world within a world, where ‘no good thing is destroyed.’”
Christ, says “See I am making all things new.” As in Isaiah 43: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Is there a better definition of being saved? Your thinking will be changed. Do not consider your old ideas as sacrosanct. In the wilderness and deserts of your life, you will perceive saving water. You are in deeper country, the world within a world. You are the savee—not the saver.
Last story: one I read on my morning news feed and couldn’t forget. It’s about a guy named Ted and his brother, David. Ted was a mathematics prodigy who went to Harvard at 16, got a doctorate at the University of Michigan, and taught at the University of California at Berkeley. Ted also killed 3 people and injured 23 with homemade bombs and became known as the Unabomber. David Kaczynski turned his brother in to the FBI and then spent 27 guilty years trying to take it back, to which Ted replied, “The real reason you informed on me is that you hate me.” Ted’s perception of David skewed his perception of himself as he wrote, “I have had to glimpse my own cruelty, and it is, as you say, a kind of hell. I do love you. I’m so, so sorry for what I’ve done and for how it hurts you.” Ted died in prison in 2023. Until the end, Ted had a brother who loved him and wanted to be with him. Through accidents of grace, however, David became close with one of Ted’s victims, Gary Wright, who told him as they met, “David, you have nothing to apologize for. You did the right thing.”
I believe David and Gary’s friendship is evidence of Christ doing a new thing. Coming to you anew while you are stuck in your old thing. When we realize that God is not punishing us and just wants to be with us, we can feel tears of relief. He gently wipes the tear from your eye so you can see Him more clearly. The tear is the revelation that your perception is off. Yes- Sin has had you stuck alone in your Me Movie AND you are loved and lovable as you are. God came as the Christ to save us from our disease of perception, breaking open God’s own heart and body to change the world’s perception of what power looks like and does. The strongest power is perceived as the weakest. The love underneath and through all things is thrumming below the surface of your life, coming to you as a revelation of who God is and, therefore, who you are.
Back to my reunion. An old friend brought a picture of me from our middle school safety patrol trip. I am 12 years old and sitting on a park bench. Mary had kept this picture for 55 years and thought to bring it that night. As I looked at that child, whom I believed was ugly, uncool, timid, and stupid, I saw that I was at the peak of my own vulnerability and mortification, but I was fine. My self-perception had been wrong. It took a revelation that I did not ask for or seek out to show me. I received a dose of grace that night.
Christ didn’t die so you could judge yourself and others. Christ died so you could enjoy your forgiveness and live free from the bondage of Self. My prayer today is that you see yourself through the eyes of Christ in your own reunion with love.
Amen.
