On Not Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater
(3/16/23)
O Lover,
Of late I have noticed a new item in my consciousness. Teutonic in origin, this adage, a metaphorical one, proscribes the throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. Upon reflection it seems that this image has lodged with me because it illuminates aspects of my spiritual journey within and to You, O Lover. In this prayer post I hope to marshal some words for this illumination.
On the one hand, I confess to You once again that I am a Christian, a follower of Your Jesus, the Anointed One via whom You have and are Self-disclosing Your Sacred Heart, the engine of all heílsgeschichte (“salvation history”). The engendering deed rendering possible this confession is Your gift to me of desire, of longing for You. All else flags, but seemingly not this yearning. You are the Treasure hidden in a field, the Pearl for which all else is relinquished (Mt 13:45-6). As such, my core prayer is Tu Sólus (“You alone”). In terms of our adage, You Yourself are the Precious One not to be discarded along with bathwater of whatever sort.
On the other hand, I acknowledge that I have been throwing out more than a little bathwater, particularly across the last decade. The plummeting stock of institutional religiosity on myriad fronts has raised the stakes for distinguishing You who matter above all from sundry human accretions, whether doctrinal, moral, institutional, or ideological. Actually, I am no novice to such triaging. Across my lifespan I have jettisoned a series of such penultimate certitudes: first was evangelicalism’s reductionist formula for salvation; then a scripture, flat, literal, and inerrant; much later an infallible Latin magisterium and its guardians; more recently perhaps “minority report” mystics’ itinerária for the journey to You.
But rather than a wall-to-wall deconstructionizing which threatens to end but in ashes, I am viewing this sloughing off as serving precisely to elevate and focus on You, Tu Sólus. The distillate of my lifespan has indeed emerged as simple: to love You with all the capacities with which You have graced me (Mt 22:36-8). The bathwater, it seems, must be de-absolutized precisely in the interests of the baby! Rather than the sum total of human accretions, the spiritual pilgrimage to You is one of lonely subtracting, of downsizing, of “waxing lean,” even as this entails the removal of comfortable and reassuring scaffolding. Tu Sólus.
And yet, in the interests of honesty, a coda. Your are the Enfleshed and Enfleshing One (Jn 1:14; I Jn 1:1), the Creator characterized by creation-trafficking, by cosmos-entanglement. You have Self-inserted into the stuff of the cosmos whose messiness has not deterred You. You engage us via that messiness, whether at the cosmic, species, inter-relational, or intrapersonal level. This means that You have come to me via both my creaturely limitation and my human brokenness. Indeed, that messiness is nothing less than Your declared eternal abode (Apoc 21:1-3). The human “accretions” cited above, while never to be confused with You (idolatry), must nevertheless be viewed within this pan-sacramentality. While they must be de-absolutized, they are nonetheless Your venue, the sphere of Your M.O., in all but most rare cases Your means of intersecting Your finite beloveds.
So the tension continues for us humans, at least on this side: You, the Infinite Treasure, the Pearl beyond valuation, lovingly engage us via the finite, both that of Your making and of our own.
