Faith Engages Head & Heart: Watching The Chosen
Like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, I’m late to the party. This in contrast to my past professional life of mastering the discipline of punctuality and pursuing an on-time arrival for all my appointments. Ensuring I was never tardy for my party of meeting after meeting; flight after flight. My life was all about chasing stuff and then chasing more stuff.
Like all prodigal children, I would finally humble my heart and find my way out of the darkness. Guided by God’s everlasting light of unconditional love for all his children. My heart glad; my whole being rejoicing. An adult born again.
With this metamorphosis, I’m trying to be purposeful with the substance I digest. The stuff I read, watch and listen too. Cultivating content that bears good fruit as I tend to my spiritual garden.
Returning to the well spring of Western wisdom literature; the Bible. The ultimate guidebook on how to live a Love centered life. Reading and listening to the Word with fresh eyes and new ears. Understanding that wisdom begins with a humbled heart and faith is not only a cerebral exercise.
My past intellectual snobbery surrendered, I’m trying to find a balance between mind and heart. Gifts from God that set us apart from other creatures; gifts susceptible to their own corruption when we disconnect parts of our body from one another. God seeks our whole being, not pieces.
Recently, my friend Jess recommended the TV series The Chosen. An adaptation and depiction of the life of Jesus based on the Gospels. A program I would have ridiculed in my past life. Not only because of my non-existent belief in God, but because my heart was closed to feeling anything outside of itself.
Now understanding that faith runs through our hearts, not our heads. Cognizant that our emotions and experiences are inseparable from our experience as humans. Expressive language that shapes all our stories and our relationship with God and with one another.
This insight has helped me to be more compassionate, more empathic, and more like the person God intends me to be. Honoring God not only with my lips but with my heart. Loving God and neighbor.
Watching The Chosen has helped me reconnect with the Gospels as a human experience, not a purely intellectual exercise. Remembering that these are real people. People who inhaled and exhaled on the same earth we breath on. No longer one-dimensional characters whose sole purpose is to teach us about God, they’ve been resurrected as multi-dimensional human beings, like you and me.
Struggling to understand and live Jesus’s challenging messages of love your neighbor and love your enemy. While living under a brutal occupying power, abject poverty and a religious establishment that in many ways hasn’t changed.
Everyone portrayed in The Chosen is consistent with the Gospel narratives. Children of God who have their own blind spots, temptations, moral failings, and everyday struggles. People who God loves unconditionally; People just like us.
People very much like his first followers who worry about the future. Wondering aloud how we’ll feed and shelter ourselves and our families. Wrapped up in the political drama of our day that’s represented by another corrupt passing kingdom that’s anti-Love.
We find ourselves among people who demand that God should act in a way that conforms to their understanding and expectations on how the world should be like Job and Jonah demanded. People who judge the flaws of others, but are blind to their own faults. Believing they have some moral authority even when Jesus is unmistakably clear we have all fallen short and that God alone is judge, not you or me or anyone else.
Its far easier to post “Christ is King” as opposed to living a life of love, humble humility, and generous grace. Christ is King by my words AND actions. When I love my neighbor, including those who hate me like Jesus was hated. An upside-down kingdom that begins in the beginning and runs through the grave until we find ourselves eternally alive in Love.
The Chosen reminding me that parables employ powerful visuals; egalitarian wisdom. The Chosen reiterating that we and other humans create barriers that only impede faith with intellectual pretentiousness or holier than thou elitism. The Chosen recalling that you can know and recite every verse in the Bible and still no nothing about the message of Jesus. A deceit of the Devil in the wilderness and the Evil in our hearts to justify the crucifixion of other humans.
Faith engages both head and heart. It’s alive when we live a life in service to Love. A life I’m trying to lead. A struggle that’s easier when I’m reminded that even those who personally knew Jesus struggled as well.
A struggle that is the only path if we truly seek a kingdom of Love. A kingdom God wants all people to participate in because God loves all people. So much so, that God gave His only begotten Son.