Square Watermelons

Like many of you, I begin most of my days in quiet, trying to find that place beneath the Silence where there is Stillness. I am a better human being and can better face the day when I dwell in that Center and Loving Presence.

One of the disciplines I regularly practice includes reading and reflecting on Romans 12:1-2. I have done this for several years and have retranslated it into my own words—a version that I call Colin’s Unique Language Translation (or the CULT version). My friends in marketing tell me I may want to rethink that name. I’m not sure why?!? But it goes like this:

Therefore, I plead with you, beloved, in view of God’s overwhelming mercy—
Take your ordinary life, the one you live every day,
and give it as a gift to God, all you do and say.
This is THE highest act of worship.
So do not conform and adjust to the pressure of the world around you
or the fear and anxiety within you,
which only keeps you immature and misshapen.
Instead, be transformed by fixing your attention on God.
Then you will know and follow God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will. (CULT Version)

When I take time with this—and am honest before God—I remember the mercy I have come to know in my life. I find myself being re-membered within Christ’s Spirit and the community of Friends who have so profoundly influenced me. In an often-confusing world where I am sometimes left wondering how I am supposed to best spend my time and energy and best use the resources and gifts entrusted to me, this practice has been beneficial and freeing.

These words from Paul come at a transition point in the larger book of Romans. For eleven chapters, he has rambled on about God’s involvement in history and how grace is available to those who will receive it. In chapter 12, he now says “therefore” or “in light of all I have said,” this is what I want you to do. It is the “so what” or the action step we are invited into that arises from our experience of God.

And so, in response to God’s overwhelming mercy, we open ourselves—fully and unreservedly to the Spirit. Hold nothing back. Receive every ounce of God’s goodness, kindness, grace, and love into your life so that you are set free to be the people God intends. Free from nagging fears, demanding selfishness, and paralyzing anxieties. Free from the false expectations of others and a culture of death turns so many good creations into harmful and destructive obsessions and practices.

Through this ongoing act of worship, in which we yield ourselves and fix our attention on Christ, we learn to know ourselves, know whom we are meant to be, and become more ready to walk in the way of Christ. In mercy—this Centering Presence—helps us live transformed rather than conformed lives. As Irenaeus, one of the early church fathers, put it, “The glory of God is a person fully alive.” I believe the abiding power of mercy is essential to becoming one who is truly alive.

I don’t know if you have ever seen a square watermelon—but they do exist. The little research I’ve done suggests they started showing up in Japan about 40 years ago. Initially, they were grown this way because they easily fit into small refrigerators and stack well. Nowadays, they are mostly grown as decorative or novelty items. I’m told they taste rather bland, partly because they are harvested long before they are ripe. And, of course, they are now sold at outrageous prices in another example of how we value form over substance.

How do you grow a square watermelon? Well, you raise them in glass boxes, restricting their shape and size. Through the glass, light can get in to make them grow—but the mold forms them unnaturally rather than allowing them to develop and flourish as intended.

I hope in your minds—you already imagine the applications of this to the human condition.

Quakers have long differed in our understanding of humanity. Rarely do you run across a Friend who would assert that humans are totally depraved. Especially in recent times, we have tended to be very optimistic about the human condition. In fact, there is often a sense of anticipation or confidence that we will naturally evolve toward the good—because there is that of God—that Seed, that Spark, the Divine imprint alive and growing in each of us. Others, like me, might say this reality exists as a possibility rather than an inevitability. It is a gift that must be received and acted upon.

Early Friends believed in our need to be transformed and convinced in a way that radically alters our lives. In her Letter to Convinced but not yet Crucified Friends, Margaret Fell calls us to a very serious and profound personal and communal renovation of life–in ways that are unsettling nowadays. Her severe language of dying to self, sacrifice, and utter submission to God feels foreign in a world that asserts personal agency, human potential, and individual diversity are to be honored above all. Why all of this talk about dying and self-denial if, in fact, one is on the way to being fully formed, flowering, and fruiting? Isn’t this just religion’s way of restricting individuals and groups from becoming whatever they wish to be?

But are we all flourishing? Am I genuinely experiencing the freedom and fullness of God in my life when I am happily (and sometimes unhappily) doing my own thing? Can we say our lives and life together reflect God’s good will when we are divided? Is humanity so wonderfully evolved and life-affirming when violence, inequity, hopelessness, injustice, depression, and isolation are so prevalent? Maybe we are hemmed in by a culture of death, misshapen and immature, more than we wish to believe or admit.

What I find most interesting about this image of an encaged, square watermelon is that it is so easy to see how it is true for others—but very hard to see it as being accurate about me or relevant to my life. It is plain how warped and weird you are! But my life and my worldview feel so natural, so at home. I can’t imagine being twisted and trapped in the way you (yes, you!) are. But maybe I am not so completely different. Perhaps my distorted self has become so familiar to me that I can’t see that the air I breathe is more limiting than I want to admit, and my life is still more bent out of shape than I imagine.

As I read them, Early Quakers affirm the centrality of God’s good creation and Presence in our lives. The Imago Dei–the image of God–marks us far more powerfully than sin mars us. And yet, they are also aware that we’ve been twisted and tamed by the external pressures of the world and by our internal selfishness, arrogance, independence, and sin. While we may not be entirely broken, we are indeed bent, bruised, and badly in need of repair.

Some of it is simply a result of our ignorance and lack of understanding. We are only human, after all. And so while they were, and I am, hopeful about humanity’s capacity to change—that confidence is born less out of our innate goodness, wisdom, and ability to change ourselves and much more out of God’s ability and desire to transform each of us and all of us into people more lovely and good than we could ever be on our own. It is a transformation that is not accidental but comes through a deep convincement as we encounter God and are immersed in the life of the Spirit within the Beloved community, working out our faith in action over time.

I believe part of mercy’s work in our lives and the life of our community is to help remind us that we all need a bit of liberation. We need that transforming power to shatter the glass and the shackles that otherwise may limit and bind us. We need not remain captive to the world’s image or live down to the status quo. We do not need to remain held in place within a system and structure that is flawed and broken. In mercy, God reminds us that conformity and acquiescing to the safety and security of the Empire harms us and others. The warped nature of injustice, violence, materialism, and narcissism can be overcome. And so, instead of giving up ourselves, our souls, or our integrity to fit in—there is something that can free us. And it is more potent than sheer willpower, rage, anger, hurt, pride, or despair.  It is mercy–the overwhelming, unrelenting kindness of God–that can be powerfully at work in our lives as we yield to it. And so I receive and yield to this invitation daily:

Therefore, I plead with you, beloved, in view of God’s overwhelming mercy—
Take your ordinary life, the one you live every day,
and give it as a gift to God, all you do and say.
This is THE highest act of worship.
So do not conform and adjust to the pressure of the world around you
or the fear and anxiety within you,
which only keeps you immature and misshapen.
Instead, be transformed by fixing your attention on God.
Then you will know and follow God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will.