A video turned up in my feed last night.
A boy, maybe twelve years old, with a guitar that's a bit too big for him.
He plays it. Not prettily. Not diligently. He plays as if the instrument has always lived in his hands, and both his teacher behind him and you listening - everyone in the room - knows it. The camera knows it. The comment thread knows it. No one needs it explained, because the body recognizes it before the thought arrives -
He has been handed something.
Notice the word we ourselves use about such a boy.
Gifted.
Gift-ed.
There is a gift in the word, and a gift has a sender. Language still remembers what we have forgotten.
And this is where it goes wrong in our time, and it goes wrong at a very precise place.
We say "all people are equal", and the sentence is true - but only as long as it stands where it was born.
It was born vertically. Spiritually. Man is created in God's image. Holy. Inviolable. Free. Deeply meaningful simply by being.
THERE we are equal - in worth, in dignity, in the gaze that rests on us. The king and the beggar, the boy with the guitar and the boy who never gets a note to sit right.
Same worth. Same image.
But we are not created the same.
The gifts are distributed, as gifts are always distributed - and distributed in nature - freely, unevenly, without asking us first. It has been that way since the beginning, and no culture before ours has thought to call it a mistake.
We only did that once we removed the sender.
Because when equality lost its vertical address, it moved horizontally in between us - worldly and as something that must be leveled out - and horizontally it is false.
So now we stand with a promise reality cannot fulfill, and instead of abandoning the promise we have gone to war with reality.
Difference became injustice. Gift became privilege. And envy got permission to dress up as justice and demand that the tall be sawed down, so no one has to feel the distance.
But the distance was never the problem.
The boy with the guitar takes nothing from anyone. His gift doesn't make yours smaller - it just points to the fact that gifts are being given.
That there IS one who gives.
We are equal before God.
Not before each other.
And only the first of those two can no one take from you.
Enjoy him.
❤️🔥🪽
Good Thursday, friends ☀️
