Climbing Everest in Crocs

The wrong tool for a big job

God is love; his people are called to share that love and be known for it. When they don’t, as leaders, our move may be to guilt, shame, or challenge them, but what if the issue runs deeper than what those actions lead to? Shame is demotivating, so it’s hardly the right tool to lead people into the enormous challenge of loving an unloving world. Imagine trying to climb Everest in Crocs. It’s that.

What if when Christians aren’t showing and growing in love, they are actually struggling, unwell, and not fully living the truth of their inherent worth? What if we start by embracing our worth and loved nature and, from there, find we can love the world with all its hard-to-love edges?

Cole Arthur Riley begins her book This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us with a chapter entitled Dignity. In it, she seems to say that evil (or life) tricks us into believing we are anything other than glorious. And that our glory is achieved in our usefulness and ability. This has effects that reach into much of our life. For example, she writes, “when we believe love is a scarcity, we are less prone to give it away freely.” As a result, loving the unlovely feels less like we’re freely giving and more like we’re being stolen from. So, you can imagine how undoable Christian love becomes if we don’t begin with a deep reservoir of goodness in ourselves.

She makes the point that Adam and Eve bore the image of God before they did anything. This correlates well with Jesus hearing God’s love and approval of Him before his ministry started.

Life and life in an “earn it” culture like America can press inherent worth out of our minds. The cycle of being only as good as your last performance and having a bigger quarter than the last can reframe our worth as a thing we achieve anew every day instead of a possession with which we begin each day.

Cole writes:

From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive, I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning.

Self-worth isn’t self-centered

We won’t begin here because we’re afraid we’ll become self-centered. Self-centered people are telling us they don’t believe the truth of their worth and are forever on the hunt for what’s already theirs.

When we fail, what we find with God is a readiness to resolve the failure, to make us right. Cole writes:

On the day the world began to die, God became a seamstress. This is the moment in the Bible that I wish we talked about more often. When Eve and Adam eat from the tree, and decay and despair begin to creep in, when they learn to hide from their bodies, when they learn to hide from each other—no one ever told me the story of a God who kneels and makes clothes out of animal skin for them. I remember many conversations about the doom and consequence imparted by God after humans ate from that tree. I learned of the curses, too, and could maybe even recite them. But no one ever told me of the tenderness of this moment. It makes me question the tone of everything that surrounds it.

Cole covers some beautiful ground outside the garden, and while there are some challenging ideas I don’t always agree with, I’m leading an in-person book club, but you can participate here. Below you’ll find some discussion questions for the first chapter. Feel free to reply here.

Be well, Feral Souls.

Discussion Questions

What things made inherent dignity hard for Cole to accept freely?

What things have make inherent dignity hard for you to accept freely?

She refers to God as' she’ and' they’ and makes a case for rending whiteness from God. What are your feelings? How might a more expansive view of God help everyone?

When she struggled with her dignity, rather than trying to convince or argue Cole into her dignity, her father did something else. How does his act mirror God’s approach?

She writes: “We cannot help but entwine our concept of dignity with how much a person can do.” Society’s markers for significance and dignity (production, earning) can become our own. How important is it that they were made in God's image before Adam and Eve did anything? What does that mean for you and me?

She calls people who live outside society’s markers of value “sacred guides” that can lead us out of the bondage of productivity. Does the sabbath call us to a similar path? If so, how?

Cole writes, “glory can’t be unborn”. How important is this reminder as we age, falter, or fail? What was to remind yourself of this? In what ways might it help?

(Chapter 1 Dignity) The rub:

She seems to say that evil (or life) tricks us into believing we are anything other than glorious. This has effects that reach into much of our life. For example, she writes, “when we believe love is a scarcity, we are less prone to give it away freely.” What’s the implication of that for us?