THE ADORED CHAINS

While sitting outside this morning enjoying the beautiful weather with my brother, his wife, and a couple friends, we got to talking about some ongoing situations with people we know...dysfunctional situations and even some of our own. I had so many things come to mind that have played a role in the destruction of the dysfunctional environment I myself had been living in. And I am not speaking of the environment that was made up by everyone in my life...I'm specifically speaking of my inner core...my head, my heart, and my soul...my shack.

These dysfunctional houses we build are very difficult to deconstruct and on our own more than likely impossible. The pain involved in the process can not be avoided and so often when faced with such pain people rebel and lash out at anyone that comes close to their shacks. They even rebel when the liberator that has come is God. Which brings me to something that came to mind during our conversation that speaks of this painful process of liberation. To be set free we must understand we are going to lose something/many things. What is so stunning is how the dysfunctional environment has become such a part of us...has become so familiar that we will fight God and others in order to hang onto it. Sometimes we have even convinced ourselves that the dysfunctional environment is God.

"Man is so much the prey of the powers, so closely associated with their work, enjoys himself so thoroughly to their profit, desires so much all that they offer, conceives his life to such a degree separated from God, that every approach of God, every positive work of God, appears to him as an unacceptable disturbance and finally an attack against him. When God comes to deliver him, he does not at all perceive his liberation; he protests against the breaking of those marvelous objects, which are his chains or the doors of his prison: the adored chains. This is clearly the situation of Man."

"And we must take account of the fact that every work of liberation (the process of freeing us) is in fact destructive of the evil environment. And that which assures his liberty is felt by Man as a frightful personal offense. "How can God who is good permit…?" In uttering this phrase so frequently, Man does not envisage for a minute, first of all, that the evil deed is most often the result of the liberty that God allows to Man and of the independence and autonomy that man has seized over against God. Man is responsible for what is done (and he has wished it), but he protests against God for what is done. In short, he would demand that God mechanize him and take his liberty from him."

"Next, that evil also takes place by the interplay of the spiritual powers who act in the world and in society. Finally, that which does ‘evil’ to him can very well be the act of God who liberates him. But this liberation causes suffering. I don not know anything better to compare this to than to an operation. The surgeon who takes out a cancer destroys the power of death to the profit of the living body. But he removes something of this body, which had become "flesh of his flesh’; he amputates something which had become the body itself. And the patient who does not know what has been done, from what he has been saved, could perfectly well interpret that as a frightful torture, as an illegitimate extraction, being aware only of the pain that remains after the operation is finished." Jacques Ellul