So The Whole World Falls In

Evangelism as embodied by Jesus… implies the all-embracing love evident in Mother Teresa’s prayer:

May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.

Not just her fellow nuns, Catholics, Calcuttans, potential converts. The whole world.

It gives me pause to realize that, were such a prayer said by me and answered by God, I would afterward possess a heart so open that even hate-driven zealots would fall inside. There is a self-righteous knot in me that finds zealotry so repugnant it wants to sit on the sidelines with the like-minded, plaster my car with bumper stickers that say MEAN PEOPLE SUCK and WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB? and leave it at that.

But I can’t.

My sense of this life as pure gift—my sense of a grace operative in this world despite, and even amid, its hurts and terrors—propels me to allow life to open my heart still wider, even if this openness comes by breaking.

For I have seen the whole world fall into a few hearts, and nothing has ever struck me as more beautiful.

To put the call in Christian terms: it is this world, not the next, that God loved so much that He bequeathed it His Son. In response to the Armageddon fantasies of His day, the Son said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation… For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

—from David James Duncan’s book God Laughs & Plays