Beloved

"Who are you?" I froze in the process of completing my homework - what a deceptively simple question. It stared at me from the page and drove a little needle of irritation and angst right between my eyes. This was undoubtedly my punishment for skipping the chapter I was supposed to read for my spiritual formation class and moving directly to the questions at the back. "Who am I?" I briefly asked myself, before writing a standard version of my cocktail-party self-definition: 'I am a wife and mother, daughter and sister. I am a student and an athlete and a writer.' The second sentence has been standard for twenty or so years (though sometimes I have left off the 'writer' tag due to lack of confidence, and added teacher, consultant, PR exec, etc. as appropriate). The first sentence has obviously been expanded over the past twelve or so years, but feels routine now.

Done, I thought, and realized that I actually had time to go back and do the reading. The assignment for last week was Henri Nouwen's Spiritual Direction, and it contains a treasure trove of new thoughts and directions to pursue. As I read I was stopped short by Nouwen's suggested answer to "Who are you?" He writes, "You are the Beloved." If you are a Christian you could add "... of Christ" or anyone could add "of God," or "of the Universe," but the basic message is that you and I are . . .beloved. That is enough, simply and completely. Nouwen suggests taking that on as a new self -definition.

Sister Mary Colleen echoed that line at our retreat last weekend. She suggested that we all had trouble conceiving of ourselves as 'beloveds' of anything. With a twinkle in her eye, she helped us envision a cocktail party setting where - when inevitably asked, "What do you do? What profession are you in?" we answer "Oh, I am the beloved of God, forgiven and embraced." She wondered what would happen next.

I put this situation to two friends last weekend and we had a good laugh over it.We variously envisioned people backing away in terror, whispering to friends that we are narcissistic and in need of psychiatric help, or calling for our keys as they noted that we had had FAR too much wine. One friend said, "If I ever said that at a cocktail party I WOULD have had way too much wine!" I agree, in part, though I really want to own that statement, and I grin everytime I think of using that as a public response to the inevitable labeling questions.

One more sentence for thought: when I discussed the whole "beloved" idea with my spiritual director last week he noted that while the reading had made a large impact on him, too, the biggest zinger was this thought: "You are the beloved, but so too is everyone else."