Gentle Strength
One of my favorite aspects of the Catholic faith is the way that it’s able to reconcile paradoxes – the faith enables opposites that should never go together to coalesce and, in their synergy, make the transcendence of Heaven more apparent on earth. Think: a Savior who is fully God and fully man. The King of Heaven and Earth sleeping in a stable. Christ opening up Heaven by way of a gruesome earthly death.
The paradox that’s been on my mind a lot lately is gentle strength.
In a world that sees recognition as the ultimate good, gentleness can be seen as weakness. We’re told that, when we don’t feel that we’re being heard, we should demand to be understood – to be recognized just as we recognize ourselves. Anything less is an insult to ourselves.
This demand to be seen as we are, quite simply, cannot be met for the Christian. The world, in many ways, prefers not to be tuned in to Christ’s workings among us. How, then, could I expect to be universally recognized as a daughter of God above all else?
It’s the Christian goal to be a people of “other Christs,” vessels for Christ’s love in the world. However, my spreading that love does not mean that it will be recognized or received as such, as Christ Himself knew better than anyone. Through His ministry and teaching, and especially through His suffering, Christ communicates to us that, as His followers, we will not be understood. Our beliefs will be challenged and diminished and opposed.
We know that encountering such misunderstanding and opposition will not be easy, but Christ also teaches us how to respond . . . which brings me back to the paradox I began by discussing.
Christ is the ultimate practitioner of gentle strength. Whether He was beaten, ridiculed, ignored or misunderstood, He responded with simultaneous firmness and gentleness. He absorbed the negativity that was directed toward Him, understanding that hatred often comes from a place of doubt or longing, and He reflected back a purified love for the challenger before Him. If He corrected, He did so without softening the consequences of hatred, but He maintained His tenderness.
When my own beliefs are challenged, I’m called to cultivate and exhibit this same Divine mixture of strength and tenderness, all governed by love for the person before me and, even more importantly, by love for the God Who taught me what it means to love. Thus, I am not called to indignantly pontificate or staunchly demand to be understood (a useless exercise: see above). Yet, I’m also not called to feebly smile and nod – something of which, as perhaps the World’s Most Non-Confrontational Human, I am much more frequently guilty.
Gentle strength, thankfully, is not a matter of personality. Like all Christ-reconciled paradoxes, it both encompasses and transcends the spectrum of human dispositions. Instead, it is a matter of understanding the universal necessity of both firmly upholding our faith and treating the people who challenge it with the utmost tenderness and love.
Advent is a great time for us to think about the value of this paradox. Even before Christ’s birth, the prophets recognized that Christ would be the much-needed source and teacher of gentle strength – a combination not before seen so powerfully. Thus, its manifestation, as articulated by Isaiah, sounds a bit bizarre:
“Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them” (Isaiah 11:6).
This landscape is saturated with peace that seems unreal, yet immensely sacred and desirable. When we exhibit gentle strength, we’re allowing Christ to reconcile what seems incongruous in us and, through us, to continue His work of conveying and spreading His Father’s love.
