Alienation

You can run from love

And if it's really love it will find you
Catch you by the heel
But you can't be numb for love
The only pain is to feel nothing at all
How can I hurt when I'm holding you?

I could never take a chance
Of losing love to find romance
In the mysterious distance
Between a man and a woman

U2, A Man and a Woman

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve. 1528.

At the wonderfully free Norton Simon museum yesterday I was wondering around the Renaissance art and this one did not particularly leave an impression at first. I remember the sly look on eve's face (which is somehow not apparent in this smaller picture), and my feminist indignation. Poor Eve.

Later, after a tearful conversation with my family, my sister said, "Why are people all so different!" We all knew what she meant. I remembered this painting and one detail I had forgotten, Adam and Eve were painted on separate panels. They now exist in their own world. Since Adam and Eve people experience separation between one another in a very profound way. One of the deepest relationships we can have with another person is that of a marriage relationship, but this separation applies to all of our contacts with others. We crave relationship with friends and family but at the same time are afraid to let people to know who we are. In a story, it is not the popular cheerleader but the nerd to whom we are supposed to relate. It is the quirky Amilie, the "Godmother of Outcasts, the Madonna of the Unloved" who captures our sympathy because we too, have felt distant from the rest of humanity.

In George MacDonald's Lilith, Mr Vane as he wonders around in some sort of magical purgetory/limbo watches a group of skeletons with only eyes and bits of flesh on their skulls dancing with each other. He wonders "Had they used their faces, not for communication, not to utter thought and feeling, not to share existence with their neighbours, but to appear what they wished to appear, and conceal what they were? And, having made their faces masks, were they therefore deprived of those masks, and condemned to go without faces until they repented?" I am guilty as the next of having used my face for a mask.

There is hope of beginning to break down this separation, but it is not easy. Being vulnerable, letting people in to see us how we are, flaws and all is painful. When my sister said, "Why are people all so different?" we looked at each other with tearful smiles, it was hard being vulnerable but there is no other way to love each other. I believe it would take more than a life time of sometimes painful relationship to understand these beautiful differences God has made in a person.

The greatest hope we have for restored relationships is the fact that God has restored his relationship with us. He looked at mankind just as it is and still loved us fully and unconditionally, not for something we have to offer or will ever have to offer. All he asks of us is relationship. Now we are free to do the same to others.