Wholeness in Exile

Isaiah 40:21-31

How do we pass wholeness to the next generation when we ourselves have been torn apart? How do we teach and live into the wisdom that calls us, and live into the covenant that we belong to still when we struggle to remember and disentangle our fears and learning from trauma? When our memories falter, how do we live faithfully?

The prophet Isaiah, sending a message of consolation to the people who have endured captivity for a generation, is speaking to people who struggle with feeling forgotten, abandoned, and, often, condemned. Isaiah speaks to the generation growing up in and born in captivity, the ones without the sense memories of home, that most beloved of places, where we meet the Holy in joy (Psalm 84). Isaiah speaks to the ones whose lives are formed by exile and slavery rather than the responsibilities of freedom. Tired ourselves, we can fear that the Holy is tired of us (Isaiah 40:27).

Exile and alienation remain a common experience, spiritually and psychologically, as so many of us grow up displaced, or with the place we would call home desecrated and difficult to thrive in.  How do we grow faithfully and find healing and hope? How do we meet the Beloved right where we are?

Isaiah reminds us in our separation and exile that the Holy is everywhere, bigger than our prisons and our walls, bigger than any border we might throw up and any chasm that separates us from others. Not only that, but we are cared for by the Beloved, one who cannot grow tired, one whose wisdom is bigger than our knowing, one who bears us up even in the middle of our troubles.

We are ever meeting the Beloved right where we are, whether we are at home or in exile. Part of the work of faithing is knowing who we are and whose we are, which we do singing the songs of reassurance and thanksgiving, remembering the good history and the difficult times that came before, in being wholly present with the Holy Presence.