In my first year of college, a few simple but profound words poured light into my world. The words came to me thanks to an old friend of my dad’s who also happens to be a leader in a ministry I was beginning to dip my toes in. His name is Rob Crocker, but he goes by “Crock”—“Crock spelled with a K,” he once reminded me, “I am not a low-fashion shoe”—and he has a knack for, quite simply, people. He loves to joke around and tell stories, but he also knows when people need encouragement or the space and courage to just cry.
Sensing the at-times unbearable weight of competitive, performance-driven undergraduate culture—one, which, unfortunately even seeps into college ministries at times—Crock shared with me and a group of freshmen one night at a ministry retreat: “Don’t forget that you are human beings, not human doings. God doesn’t need you to do more for Him; it is enough for you to just be.”
Well, I definitely didn’t forget. I have thought about these words on a weekly basis for three years since. But, I have asked myself, what do these words really mean? What does it mean to “just be” or to embody the core of what it means to be a human being in light of the Gospel?
In my first few weeks in Raleigh, I’ve found myself pondering this question once more. In this new place, I’ve been fighting the performance mentality of faith yet again. It is difficult to not believe that the more I can do for God, the more satisfied He will be with me, with who I am. This approach always fails, and usually drains and discourages me along the way. Fortunately, two Mary’s have helped me reach new breakthrough in my answer to the question of what it means to “just be” since coming here: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver and our Spiritual Formation teacher, Mary Vandel Young.
If you’ve read Oliver you’ll likely know that she has a keen eye for the natural world. She describes the quiet happenings in nature that, if we aren’t careful, we just might miss: the grasshopper washing her face, the “hungry mice, cold rabbits, / lean owls hunkering with their lamp-eyes / in the leafless lanes in the needled dark” (“Wolf Moon”). She writes about love, loss, and the beauty of a childlike faith, about seeing God’s hands in the elegance of nature and wondering at the mystery of God.
One of my favorites of her poems, “Wild Geese,” starts with the simple and jarring line: “You do not have to be good.” My chest loosens, and I release the breath I didn’t know I was holding. I don’t have to be good? Well, thank goodness, because most days, I can’t seem to figure out how to do that. The poem continues:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
It seems that Oliver’s poem dared to take Crock’s sentiment one step further. Not only is it not about doing good for God, it’s not even about being good. Bold, huh? But if you try to find an instruction from the Bible to “be good,” you’ll be searching in vain. In fact, as Jesus once informs a rich young man, “No one is good--except God alone” (Mark 10:18). Okay, so it is not about “being good.” So if I’m not told to “be good” by God, what does he tell me to be? Last Monday, in our first class Spiritual Formation class, our teacher Mary Vandel Young helped me get to that answer.
She told us that the core of her class was to “be still and know that I am God.” She prayed over us before we headed off to spend time with the Lord. Her prayer was powerful, and her words resounded in my ears long after:
“Be still and know that I am God
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.”
There was that word again: be. The word hit me forcefully but gently. The permission to “just be” brings at once a calm and a confusion. Be what? As I sat by the fire outside watching the smoke drift toward the clouds I knew: be loved. It seemed so obvious, and yet in all my pondering of the question, my mind had never landed at that thought.
Ever since I read Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved a couple of years ago, I have cherished the notion that I am the beloved of God. I have known myself to be God’s beloved. And suddenly, sitting there by the fire, it occured to me to break down the word: to be beloved is to be loved. I had begun to embrace the title, and now I can embrace the command. That is what God instructs me to be: loved. How amazing is that?
The most true thing about me is that I am God’s beloved child, beloved even in—not despite of—my sin (Romans 5:8). He loves me not because I’ve done or been good, but simply by the virtue that He created me. The terrible and wonderful truth of the Gospel is that I am utterly incapable of earning God’s love or making Him love me any more—or any less.
In another one of her poems about Jesus’ multiplying the loaves and fishes, “Logos” (2004), Oliver instructs us to “accept the miracle.” But even in the context of this specific Gospel miracle, it is clear that Oliver is telling us to accept more than just the miracle of the loaves and fishes. It is not about doing or even being good; it’s about accepting the miracle.
And what is the miracle? The miracle is that, despite all efforts of the world to tell me otherwise, despite my sin and imperfections, despite my inability to do good things and be good all the time, God says that I am enough, that I am beloved. So I will look up at the “wild geese, high in the clear blue air” and breathe easy. Ah, the miracle of Grace.
-Sarah Woodard