To Know and be Known
Fuster Cluck post #2
We are created in the image of God. God, in his very essence is in constant relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The Triune God is the greatest example of relationship. Because of this, we are created to be in relationship with God and with others.
We are created to fully know and to be fully known by others. We were made to share our lives completely with one another; failures, sins, hopes, and dreams.
But we have lost this concept of knowing and being known. As individuals, we have learned to hide our true selves from one another, and from God. We fear being fully know. We do not allow ourselves to be real with others or with God.
One would think that the “church” would be the very place where people could go and be fully known. In general, this is not the truth. People are messy and chaotic. Feelings are messy and chaotic. Lament is messy and chaotic. Churches have lost their ability to hold space for the messiness and chaos that comes with being human.
All of us, in our group, were taught, by our churches, that feelings, including lament was bad, disrespectful, and that God did not want to hear our complaining. We learned to hide ourselves from those around us and from God. This hiding has caused us to be disconnected from both God and from others.
One of the questions we asked in our group was how do we see the concept of being fully known played out in churches? How do we make church a safe place for everyone to bring their whole selves? How do we create a space where people are allowed, even celebrated, to be angry, frustrated, sad, full of sin?
For so many of us church has become a place of shame because we feel like we have to hide our true selves. We have lost the art of individual lament and therefore, we have lost the ability to lament with and in community. Our churches are no longer the place that the Psalms speak of instead our churches are filled with “happy” agendas and “happy” people.
One of the places that each of us has found, in the past, to be a safe space where we are allowed to bring our full selves was to Celebrate Recovery. Celebrate Recovery is a Christ centered program that invites people to bring their hurts, habits, and hang-ups. It has been our experience that in Celebrate Recovery we were able to be more ourselves, which allowed us to be more fully known.
For each of us, Celebrate Recover was a place where we could go and be our real selves. It was a place where would could be honest about our feelings and our relationship with God. It was a place where we were allowed to lament freely. For each of us, Celebrate Recovery is the closest thing to what we feel God intends the church to be.
