Embracing Restlessness
Michiel Peeters - “Neither does circumcision mean anything, nor does uncircumcision, but only a new creation.” Elsewhere, St Paul writes: With Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female.” Those were the significant social classifications of the time: free or slave, man or woman, Jew or non-Jew. Anyone can fill in the categories that divide humanity today. But, Paul says, with Christ, none of that matters. “Whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.” What matters is the “new creation.”
To understand what that “new creation” means, we must first sense the notion of creation. “Creation” means that the things are given. We don’t make them. We don’t make ourselves. “You cannot make a single hair white or black,” says Jesus. We are made, in this moment. Perceiving it, realizing it, lets us possess the things in their truth, and what is more, puts us in the relationship for which we are made, in which we can breathe: the relationship with the infinite. This is the new creation: to be put back in the relationship for which we are made and in which we can breathe.
Jesus has come to re-create us, which means to awaken us to that relationship, to reintroduce us to it, and to educate us in it. In today’s Gospel, we see how he does that. “The seventy-two [disciples] returned [from the mission on which Jesus had sent them] rejoicing, and said, ‘Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.’ [But] Jesus said, ‘…Behold, I have given you the power to ‘tread upon serpents’ and scorpions and … nothing will harm you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.” Rejoice not because of what you manage to do, even with the power I give you; but rejoice because of what you are, because of what I remind you that you are: that “your names are written in heaven,” that you are a relationship with the infinite. All the rest, even the most tremendous success in the world, would be too little, because it cannot stand the test of time.
As always, we are called not to copy but to verify. How? First of all, by taking seriously our humanity. On 14 June, Pope Leo XIV said in an “address to the young people of Chicago and the whole world”: “We all live with many questions in our hearts. Saint Augustine speaks so often of our ‘restless’ hearts and says: ‘our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God’ (Confessions 1.1.1). That restlessness is not a bad thing [said the Pope], and we shouldn’t look for ways to put out the fire, to eliminate or even numb ourselves to the tensions that we feel, the difficulties that we experience. We should rather get in touch with our own hearts and recognize that God can work in our lives, through our lives, and through us reach out to other people.” We should get in touch with our own hearts, with our restlessness. With this restlessness, with this fire we have inside, with the “tensions” that we feel, the “difficulties that we experience,” we can verify if acknowledging that “our names are written in heaven” rather than rejoicing in anything else, re-creates us, making us perceive the things, including ourselves, in their truth, that is in their newness, in their being given to us now; in their being signs, reminders of the relationship for which we are made and in which we can breathe.
