One Bird Watching

Spiritual Warfare

2012-02-11T05:35:00.000-08:00

The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim. Moses said to Joshua, "Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands."

So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went to the top of the hill. As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalakites were winning. When Moses' hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up---one on one side, one on the other--so that his hands remained steady until sunset. So Joshua overcame the Amaleite army with the sword (Ex. 17: 8-13).

While we are engaged in "battle" on the physical plane, we often forget that there is a spiritual world swirling around us, and that there are forces within that world that can be overcome only by prayer, or "lifting up our hands." The Book of Ephesians could be seen, according to the great Watchman Nee, as the pattern of our spiritual lives. In his book Sit, Walk, and Stand, a great classic of spiritual writing, Nee demonstrates that our spiritual lives begin while we are still "helpless," with an outpouring of the grace of God, lavishing on us all spiritual riches through being "included in Christ."

At first, we are "sitting," as Paul says, "dead in your transgressions and sins, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature," (but then), "God made us alive in Christ....for we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

Because of what God has already done for us, "we are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by His Spirit." Thus, the second stage of our spiritual life (Walking) begins: "to live a life worthy of the calling we have received." Chapters 4 and 5 of Ephesians outlines what it means to live a life worthy of our calling and to live a life of love. Most of us grow up thinking that first, we must live a worthy live, and then we will receive the blessing of God. But the Book of Ephesians says just the opposite.

And if we look at Exodus, "where it all began," we see the Israelites "sitting" in slavery to the Egyptians, helpless to help themselves- but God sent Moses to deliver them from captivity and to lead them to the Promised Land. Since they had received all these blessing, they were to live a life worthy of their calling---not, like the people around them, oppressing others, but walking according to the laws of God as they entered the Land of Promise.

In the final chapter of Ephesians, Chapter 6, we find that "after you have done everything (you can), to put on the armor of God and to stand...for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

I like Watchman Nee's observations about the pattern of life, for only then do we see that we have the power to "walk" or to live the Christian life because God has already accepted us and given us everything we need to do so. And finally, that our wrestling with the forces of evil depends not on our own strength, but rather on our ability to "put on the armor" of God and to "lift up our hands" in prayer.

Open My Ears, Lord, to hear Your Voice

2012-02-10T05:10:00.000-08:00

During His earthly ministry, Jesus opened the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf. Today, He still continues to open the eyes and ears of our souls. It has always struck me that our souls have the same "parts" as our bodies: we have "ears to hear" and "eyes to see," in Biblical language; we "hunger and thirst for justice," (which means holiness, or "rightness within" as well as rightness externally). We are filled with good things spiritually, just as we are filled physically with the fruit of the land. We desire to be united with God, as man and woman desire to be united with one another.

Even more striking is that God Himself has the same "parts," though He is pure Spirit. His eyes roam the earth, seeking those who will hear His voice; He hears the cry of the poor and of those who cry out to Him. His voice thunders over the waters; He yearns for union with His friends, His beloved. He hungers and thirsts for our love and companionship. All these things we learn from Scripture.

The theme of "listening," or of "opening our ears" to hear God's voice runs throughout Scripture almost continually from the opening pages of Genesis to the closing pages of Revelation. When Jesus describes Himself as the Good Shepherd, He links His active guidance to the fact that His sheep "know His voice, but...they do not recognize a stranger's voice." He even says that He has "other sheep, not of this sheep pen." They also "listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd."

All of our efforts at unity seem to rest on this one event---those who listen to His voice are one flock, with one Shepherd.

Now listening is active, just as the "voice" is active, not passive. We "hear" a voice that is speaking --- and not only speaking, but speaking to us. Here and Now. In the present time.

In the Old Testament, the references to listening are so numerous that it is hard to know which to choose or how to begin. The Book of Sirach speaks in the voice of Wisdom personified:

Come aside to me, you untutored, and take up lodging in the house of instruction;

How long will you deprive yourself of wisdom's food, how long endure such bitter thirst?

I open my mouth and speak of her: gain wisdom for yourselves at no cost.

Take her yoke upon your neck; that your mind may receive her teaching.

For she is close to those who seek her, and the one who is in earnest finds her (51:23-26).

All of Proverbs 8 speaks of Wisdom and the gifts she bestows on those who "listen to me, watching daily at my doors/ For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord" (34-35).

Strikingly, Jesus also says in Chapter 10 of John, the Good Shepherd discourse, My sheep listen to my voice; I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can snatch them out of my hand...no one can snatch them from the Father's hand (28). His words echo those of Wisdom in the Old Testament.

How then, do we come to hear the voice of Wisdom, the voice of Jesus, the voice that speaks in the depths of our souls, the instruction that gives everlasting life that can never be taken away?

I think a great place to begin is with the prayer Open my ears, Lord, that I may hear Your voice, and not my own, nor the voice of another. I want to hear You speaking in my soul, and I want to know that it is You that speaks.

Proverbs Chapter 2 is another great place to begin, slowly, and with prayer:

...if you accept my words, and store up my commands within you,

turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding,

and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding,

and if you look for it as silver and search for it as for hidden treasure,

then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.

For the Lord gives wisdom and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding....

Then you will understand what is right and just and fair --- every good path.

For wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul (1-10) (emphasis mine).

Many people search for wisdom; how many know that truth and wisdom come from the "mouth" of the Lord, and that He is more than willing to open our ears to hear His voice speaking in our inner parts?

Wounded Healers

2012-02-09T06:03:00.000-08:00

Ten years ago, my husband was diagnosed with melanoma, and it was a scarey time for both of us. In the first few weeks afterwards, the future seemed uncertain, and I was anxious. Then I received a note from a colleague in the Nursing School, someone I had met and worked with only a few times and who I did not know well. But she had taken the time and thought to hand-write a card that touched me so much. Today, I found it again, and again I was touched by her kindness and thoughtfulness.

Because she herself had had cancer more than once, she was able to put our situation in a framework that no one else could do, with all their best wishes:

I was saddened to hear about your husband's melanoma and have been thinking about how I can succintly and gracefully capture some ideas to share with you. Cancer has touched my life again and again. If one lives long enough, (in this day and age), it's inevitable. But whether it's cancer or tragedy or injury or even menopause or whatever, I'm struck with the opportunity we have to re-create and remember who we are. My initial reaction when you told me about your husband was: What a journey you're on, an interesting and adventurous new chapter. We both know how important attitude and "reframing" is. I wondered how this is for you. My hope is that you can and will relax into it. Your wisdom and spiritedness will lead you exactly where you need to go. You have everything you need inside. Be still.

It is but life as we know it, with its winding roads and illusions. Cancer has a way of shattering our stability and returning us to our essence. It is the gift in the confusion. Fare thee well, Gayle Nolan and your husband. My thoughts of good will surround you.

I did not sign Barb's name because I have not received her permission to do so. In fact, I have lost track of this "wounded healer" since I retired. But her wisdom left a permanent presence with me. As I re-read her note this morning, I was struck by its similarity to what Jill Bolte Taylor described in her book My Stroke of Insight. She too was able to "re-frame" her tragedy into a blessing of wisdom and truth, not only for herself, but for all who read her book. Once again, we see a person "returning to her essence" in the midst of illness.

In the Second Book of Corinthians, Paul says that if he suffers, it is for the sake of the new Christians, because in his sufferings, he finds God's consolation, or encouragement -- a consolation or encouragement he is then able to pass on to them. In fact, at one point, Paul says he was so crushed as to believe that he would die---but in the midst of extremity, God restored and strengthened him.

Those who suffer with grace and trust find God. And they are able to pass on to those coming after them the very grace and strength they themselves have received. Maybe in the end, this is what it means to be wise -- to be a wounded healer.

The Back of the Wardrobe

2012-02-08T03:44:00.000-08:00

Recently, I watched The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe for the first time. Lewis' book, supposedly for children, is so much more for adults too---and for once, the movie-makers did an excellent job with the novel.

It occurred to me as I read My Stroke of Insight that Taylor's experience with the "death" of her critical left brain and entering into the life of her right brain was just like the youngest child's experience in The Lion.... She fell through the back of the wardrobe and experienced the Land of Narnia, with "fantasy" creatures who talked to her, but as she re-entered the "normal" world, no one could believe or understand her experience. It was not within their realm of experience, so she was considered as myth-making, fantasizing. But her experience was real, as the other children finally came to discover.

No one for whom the left-brain world is the only existence will ever believe in the truth and reality of Taylor's right-brain only existence. But her attachment to that world and that reality can never be un-done, even as she re-entered the "real" world of left-brain engagement. She knows what she has experienced, and she clings to its truth with every fiber of her existence.

So too all the early Christian martyrs who went to their death proclaiming the truth of Jesus Christ. Once having experienced the truth of the spiritual life He gave to them, they could never again deny that life and truth. It has been said that the man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.

As the experience of Peter the Apostle tells us, truth comes by revelation/ experience, not by explanation. And Jesus said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.

On the road to Damascus, Saul, the most learned and intellectual and educated Jew, had the same experience as did Peter, the unlearned and uneducated fisherman. He met Jesus by revelation, not by explanation. Later, after the experience, came the explanation, enlightened by the Spirit of Truth and revelation.

Once we have "fallen through the back of the wardrobe" or, like Taylor, encountered the world of spirit, it is possible to re-enter the world of flesh and somehow find the words to describe our experience; it is possible to study and to read the experience of others---even in Scripture---and to find our own story in theirs. It is possible for the left brain to begin to "make sense" of our experience.

But it is not always possible for those who have not experienced the right-brain, the spirit-world, the "resurrection," to grasp the "fantasy world" of which we speak. They have no point of reference for the mystical creatures or words. The left-brain categories are the only ones they know, so what we describe is nonsense to them, as it was originally to Saul of Tarsus. For him, Jesus could not have been the Jewish Messiah---he knew too much about the Scriptures for that to be true: until he had a face-to-face encounter with the living Christ.

God has no grandchildren; we cannot pass on our experience to others. We can pass on our stories, but they seem as fantasies to our children and others. Fortunately, however, in every generation in the Old Testament, the living God, Yahweh, encountered the children Himself: I am Yahweh, the God of your fathers Abraham, Isaac, Jacob---the One they told you about, the God of the ancient stories. Now, it is between you and Me. Will I be also your God?

Our stories are important, as were the spiritual stories of Taylor and of the youngest child in the Lion....
Once we encounter the Living God, we know then that THIS was the same God we heard about from times of old---the one the Scriptures have spoken about and our fathers told us about. And we worship the One Who is from old.

Until that time, we can only pray that we too can fall through the back of the wardrobe and encounter the Land of Narnia and at last have a face-to-face encounter with the Risen Christ, the Son of the Living God. All of our prayers, rituals, and the Scriptures, or stories and sermons we have heard are meant to lead us to that moment. All of nature and the arts is designed to lead us to that moment; they have hidden within themselves hints of eternal and everlasting joy!

My Stroke of Insight

2012-02-07T05:40:00.000-08:00

I recently read a book called My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, passed on to me by a friend. Jill Bolte Taylor, the author, was a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke at the age of 37, and in the introduction, she writes,

[This book] is a chronological documentation of the journey I took into the formless abyss of a silent mind, where the essence of my being became enfolded in a deep inner peace.

As a trained neuroanatomist, Taylor in a sense "watched" the entire left side of her brain shut down within a matter of hours, and she could recognize, but not prevent, what was happening to her. The book is an amazing chronicle of the eight years of stroke and full recovery from someone articulate and knowlegable enough to document the journey. As her "right brain" took over the functioning of her body and existence for the next few years, Taylor records a shift in perspective and understanding of who she really was as a person. Here are some excerpts from the book:

...it was clear that the 'I' whom I had grown up to be had not survived this neurological catastrophe. I understood that that Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor died that morning, and ....I felt no obligation to being her anymore....In my mind, in my new perspective, that Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor died that morning and no longer existed. Now that I didn't know her life---her relationships, successes and mistakes, I was no longer bound to her decisions or self-induced limitations.

Although I experienced enormous grief for the death of my left hemisphere consciousness---and the woman I had been, I concurrently felt tremendous relief. That Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor had grown up with lots of anger and a lifetime of emotional baggage that must have required a lot of energy to sustain....

I had spent a lifetime of 37 years being enthusiastically committed to "do-do-doing" lots of stuff at a very fast pace. On this special day, I learned the meaning of simply "being."....Like walking along the beach, or just hanging out in the beauty of nature, I shifted from the doing-consciousness of my left brain to the being-consciousness of my right brain.

The entire book, after the first few scientific explanations of the brain and its normal processes, goes on in this vein. I wanted to highlight and re-read so much of the book, but need to buy my own copy to do so. One night, I was reading the book before going to sleep, as is my custom. After reading just a few sentences, however, my own brain exploded with revelations, so much so that I could not sleep for hours---until I finally shut down all the ideas by doing logic puzzles to put me to sleep.

In one place, Taylor writes that it is a shame we cannot find a safe, non-invasive way to induce her experience of living in the right brain to others. For her, as she worked her way back to full-brain functioning, the difficulty was to regain left-brain function without giving up the peace, joy, love, and fluidity of the right-brain. She no longer had any desire to return to the "normal" world. Time after time she had to ask herself whether she wanted to regain the affect, emotion, or personality traits that were neurologically linked to her left-brain memories and abilities. Her "old" personality traits were no longer acceptable to the person she now wanted to be. The most fundamental traits of her right hemisphere personality were "deep inner peace and loving compassion."

Taylor now knows her tragic stroke to be the greatest gift of her entire life. She has fully returned to normal brain function, with a lot of work, but she is no longer the same person she was before. She was able to choose the values and brain circuitry she wanted as she recovered her personality.

Never before have I read anything that better explains the experience of being "born again" of water and the Holy Spirit that Jesus revealed to Nicodemus in John 3. Almost the first recorded words of Jesus were: The kingdom of God is within you. (Different translations may read: The kingdom of heaven is among you.) As a scientist, Taylor describes her experience in terms of left-brain, right-brain functioning, and of course, the more brain research that is done confirms her descriptions. For all of us non-scientists, everything in Scripture correlates exactly to what she describes: the death of the "old man/ the natural man/ Adam" and the birth of the "new man," the "spiritual man," risen with Christ from the dead,in the image of God, and in-breathed by the Spirit. Everything Taylor describes I have experienced, not from a stroke, but more gradually, as the Holy Spirit gradually put to death the person I was before and made me a "new creation in Christ Jesus."

The reason I could not sleep from excitement in reading this book is that I knew that what Taylor so desperately wished for---a way for people to experience the "right brain" ascendancy of our personalities, the part of us that is created like God---is truly available in the "born again" or "Baptism of the Holy Spirit" experience. Like John the Baptist in his mother's womb, I "leaped for joy," recognizing in her descriptions what I had experienced spiritually.

I think maybe Taylor, the brain anatomist, was allowed to experience and then to describe a path that is open to all of us. As I read her book, I was so impressed at how what I call her "spirit" and what she calls her "right brain" was able to guide her actions and choices to recovery and full health. I wanted to stand up and shout "Halleluiah!" just like they do in the Baptist church.

More tomorrow!

Simplicity2

2012-01-29T05:23:00.000-08:00

Give us, O Lord, a steadfast heart, which no unworthy affection may drag downwards; give us an unconquered heart, which no tribulation can wear out; give us an upright heart, which no unworthy purpose may tempt aside. Bestow upon us also, O Lord our God, understanding to know you, diligence to seek you, wisdom to find you, and a faithfulness that may finally embrace you; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” ~ St. Thomas Aquinas

Denice DeBlanc posted this prayer on FB this morning; I had never seen it before, but I love it. I had come upstairs to write about Simplicity, and I found this prayer, which resonated in my soul. It just seems so simple and true!

Many years ago, I was sitting in my office at the College, doing my work, when suddenly, without preamble, the Lord spoke to me---or, I will say it this way, because there was nothing dramatic or unusual about it at all ---- the thought went through my mind: Who are your favorite people in the Bible? If I had had time to reflect on that question, I might have become paralyzed by indecision, but as the question came to me in the midst of a workday, and as I was not sitting in meditation, I did not reflect at all, but just answered without thought: Enoch, Deborah, Abraham.

Then the Lord spoke again: Walk with Me; Sit with Me; Stand with Me!

I could not have made this up: it was too simple and too complex and fit together too perfectly, all at the same time. In fact, I had to puzzle it out later, away from work, and I even had to look up the story of Abraham once again to understand how that fit into the picture---but I did find something in the story I had never before seen:

...but Abraham remained standing before the Lord (Gen. 18:22).

Of course, I looked up the story some days later, as I was reflecting on that moment at work and decided to find out what it meant to "stand with God." But I remember being so arrested by that revelation at work that I went out and told my secretary what I had just heard. (She and I used to share moments like that.) I remember understanding what it meant at the time, but also knowing that I would need more time and reflection to build it into my heart and soul and body.

That is why I so love the prayer of Thomas Aquinas that I found this morning---and the timing of it. While I am still recalling an incident of so many years ago, and still reflecting on its implications for my life, this prayer suddenly appears: give us understanding to know you, diligence to seek you, wisdom to find you, and a faithfulness to finally embrace you..."

How simple! Just like Walk with Me (as did Enoch); Sit with Me (as did Deborah); and Stand with Me (as did Abraham). If I had no other directions or words for the rest of my life, it seems these words, faithfully followed, would lead me directly to heaven! Amen. Let it be so forever!

No more postings until Feb. 8.

If God is Not a Person

2012-01-28T03:43:00.000-08:00

During the time of Deitrich Bonhoeffer (in Hitler's Germany), the German theologians were debating whether God was truly a Person or just a "force," and "energy." The Greeks knew their gods to have different "personalities," and the Egyptians knew their gods would demand accountability for the kind of life we lived upon earth -- hence, The Book of the Dead, which stipulated the conditions under which the soul would be admitted to the afterlife.

Many people today cannot relate to a personal God, but I wonder then why He has given us His Name -- Yahweh -- in addition to His title, God. Only a Person has a Name, and obviously, He intended us to call on Him by Name, not just by title, as we call on "Mr. President." Barack Obama's children call him Daddy. And Jesus, not being content with mankind's stand-off relationship with the Father, told us to call Him Daddy/ Abba.

I read once about a man who was waiting in the Jerusalem airport for a plane, when suddenly, a small child who had momentarily lost sight of his daddy called out in panic: Abba! Abba! For the first time in his life, this grown man understood the implications of Jesus telling His disciples to call God Abba!

If God is not a Person, who are we, created in His Image and Likeness? Who is it that says, I will give you rest and Who wants us, His children, to say the same to our neighbor? Who is it that will defend us in battle and feed us in the wilderness? Who is it that will lead us to green pastures and give us respose? Who is it that strengthens the weary and the disappointed? Who gives music to the heart and joy to the soul? Who is the Shield of the defenseless and the Giver of Wisdom?

Flannery O'Connor once said, If the Eucharist is just a symbol, then to hell with it!" I don't have her boldness of expression; I cannot say, If God is just a force, an energy, then......

But I want to!

Covenant

2012-01-27T04:26:00.000-08:00

I will be your God,

and you shall be My People

When I made my Confirmation--in the sixth grade--we were told that meant that we were from that time forward, soldiers of Jesus Christ; we were to "stand up" for Jesus and defend our Catholic faith. The Bishop was supposed to "slap" us on the cheek as a symbol that would suffer and die if necessary for Jesus.

At that time, I felt the incongruity of the image of a "soldier" in my soul, which felt more like a small, weak seed just being put into the ground....not yet even beginning to grow. Now, I better understand the imagery being offered to us ---- but my Irish teachers, accustomed to the harsh life and to the concept of "Cowboy Up!", skipped a step in their explanations. Now, I understand "Con - firmation" (with strength) as more yielding to the process of allowing God to train us up, to make the weak strong, as He did with David against Goliath. David did not go out to meet Goliath clothed with armor and a sword, in his own strength. He went out with faith and confidence in the power and strength of the Lord of hosts/ armies. His hope was in the Lord, not in himself.

When we enter into a covenant with God, He does all the work. Isaiah gives the sign of the convenant:

Then will the eyes of the blind be opened

and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

Then will the lame leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the dumb shout for joy (35:5-6).

"Do not be afraid, O worm Jacob,

O little Israel,

for I myself will help you," declares the Lord,

your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.

"See, I will make you into a threshing sledge,

new and sharp, with many teeth...(41:14-15).

Entering into a covenant with God, allowing Him to be our God; saying "Yes" to being His child means allowing Him to make us strong, to pour His Strong Spirit into us, to raise us up from the "dung heap," in the words of Isaiah, to clothe us with splendor, to change our deserts into fertile fields, to give us peace, quietness, and confidence, peaceful dwelling places, secure homes, and undisturbed places of rest (Is. 32:15-18).

If we read Isaiah, we will know for a fact that, as some Christian song-writer put it years ago, "Inside this suit of armor is a child." Isaiah was sent to comfort God's people, telling them, "When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will put him to flight" (59:20) (although some translations read a little differently.)

When God "cut a covenant" with Abraham in Genesis 15, He followed the rituals of the land in doing so, asking Abraham to bring him the sacrificial animals. But then, He put Abraham into a deep sleep, and He Himself Alone passed through the split carcasses, allowing Abraham only to watch from a deep sleep/dream. He did not require the second party, Abraham, to walk through the ceremony, as was the custom of the land. God Himself took on the whole responsibility of fulfilling the covenant.

Our part in the covenant is allowing God to build up our ramparts, secure the walls of our personalities, and establish our foundations. Then, and only then, might it be said that we are "soldiers of Jesus Christ" and "confirmed"/ made strong in the Holy Spirit. Like Mary, we say "Yes, do what You have said You will do in me," and then we watch what God can make of a weak seed, just planted in good soil.

The Flame

2012-01-26T04:43:00.000-08:00

Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) was a mystic and later named as a "Doctor of the Church" because of her writings. In The Dialogue, she records conversations she had with Jesus, Who gave her understanding of spiritual truths.

In one of the conversations, Jesus gave her the image of a burning lamp that all the world would come to for light. He told her that the light of the lamp would never be diminished by sharing, no matter how many people came, and that each person who came would have the whole -- not just a part of the---light from the lamp.

However, the intensity of what each person carried away would depend on what sort of material was brought to receive the fire. If one person brings a tea candle (my example, of course, not His), the flame will soon burn out. If someone brings a one-pound candle to receive the flame, the light will last longer --- but "each candle, the smallest as well as the largest, would have the whole light, with all its heat and color and brightness."

The Lord went on to tell Catherine that our "candle" is love..."for I created your soul with a capacity for loving -- so much so that you cannot live without love. Indeed, love is your food."

The purpose of all religion, no matter its origin, is to cultivate faith, hope, and love within the souls of its practitioners. If any religion fails to achieve that aim, it has failed altogther. Culturally and emotionally, we will all respond to different forms and expressions of these three virtues, but ultimately, they must take root in the soul, if the soul is to live.

As one of my former students pointed out once, many people have lost faith, and they continue on, but in order to live, we must have hope. I think that is exactly right: hope is the reason we push forward, despite the darkness around us--- and what we hope for is that love is not lost to us entirely and forever. When we are finally able to light our candle with even a little love, our faith begins to grow.

We simply must find ways to keep lighting our candles so that the flame does not go out once and for all.

You Shall Be a Blessing

2012-01-25T03:57:00.000-08:00

I will bless you...

And you shall be a blessing (Gen. 12:2)

God called Abraham out of his native land (Ur of the Chaldees--modern-day Bosrah) to go to "a land I will show you," in order that Abraham, receiving the blessings that came with trusting God, could be a blessing to all nations.

It seems to me that God's call and Abraham's response is a summary for all of our lives. God Calling, a little daily-meditation book I've been using for over 30 years now, has this as part of its January 26 entry: Pass on everything, every blessing. Abide in Me. See how many you can bless each day. Dwell much in My Presence.

And in Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis has this to say: There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. Good things as well as bad are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm, you must stand by the fire; if you want to get wet, you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize that God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the center of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you; if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?

So there it is--what we were all made to do---to pass on the blessings we receive from standing close to, from walking daily with, from "getting into" God. Yesterday, someone said to me, "We were discussing the meaning of life." Later, I thought about my own answer to that question---and this morning, it came to me that the closest I could come to that answer was this: knowing our Source, we are meant to receive from Him with joy and to pass on what we receive with joy.

The writer of Ecclesiastes says this: Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening, let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.

Is this not our greatest joy---to know that somehow we have been a blessing to others, and that our children, too, are a blessing on the earth? What more could we desire?

Of What Use is the Bible--and Theology?

2012-01-24T08:05:00.000-08:00

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes about a man who once told him, "I've no use for all that stuff. I know there's a God. I've felt Him; out alone in the desert at night: a tremendous mystery. And that's why I don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who's met the real thing, they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!"

Lewis agreed with the man on one point: to those who have experienced God, all the formulas seem much less real than the experience. He compared the experience of God to someone walking along the edge of the ocean, as opposed to looking at a map of the ocean. On the other hand, said Lewis, the map is based not just on one man's experience of the ocean, but on the experience of hundreds and hundreds of people who have sailed the ocean. While yours is a single glimpse -- and much more real to you---, the map fits all of those other experiences (and yours) together into an overall picture. Lewis says that as long as we are content with walks along the beach, our own experience is far more fun than looking at a map. But if you want to get to America from England, no one would start out with just his own experience.

Theology and the Bible are based on the experiences of generations of people who have had experiences just like yours---they really were in touch with God, just as you were in the desert. He points out that just as we will not get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea, neither will we be very safe if we go to sea without a map.

Now, Lewis' explanation helps tremendously to explain my own experience of God. Before the moment of my experience with the Holy Spirit, I was very content to quietly walk along the shore, experiencing moments of great mystery and Presence, whenever I could find them. With the coming of the Holy Spirit, I became greatly thirsty to read the Bible, to discover how the experience of all those other generations matched up to my own---and I was so excited to find that their story was also my story!

Something in me resonated strongly to what I was reading there. For the first time in my life, I indeed felt as if I were sailing across the ocean to a new shore, instead of just walking along the old and familiar one---but I had a map that was based on the experience of generations of men and women before me! Since then, I have found hundreds of stories outside of the Bible also--of men and women who have truly experienced God and who have told their stories about Him. And all of those stories excite me even today, for it is the same God that I myself have come to know and love! My own experience has exploded and been multiplied and been even more greatly understood by all of their experience! What joy!

God does not leave us alone on the shore of our own experience, but joins us with all of His friends in time and eternity.

A New Heaven and a New Earth

2012-01-23T05:20:00.000-08:00

Our thinking is so ingrained with the concepts, categories, and divisions of the world we experience: light and dark; male and female, black and white; Jew, Christian, Muslim; third-world and first-world, east and west; your ideas and my ideas, and so on.

But if we could for a moment project ourselves into the next world, the world of eternity, what would we find there? In the Book of Revelation, we get some glimpse of the next world, and there, the divisions are much different:

The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ,

and he will reign forever and ever....

The time has come for judging the dead,

and for rewarding your servants the prophets

and your saints and those who reverence your name,

both small and great---

and for destroying those who destroy the earth (Rev. 11:15-18).

For the wedding of the Lamb has come,

and his bride has made herself ready.

Fine linen, bright and clean,

was given to her to wear.

(Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints)(19:7-8).

He said to me: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.

To him who is thirsty, I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life....

But the cowardly, the unbeliving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars---their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur (21:6-8).

Here, we find divisions much different from those we are used to thinking about. It is much like the world at the beginning of time----or the world we experienced in New Orleans and Mississippi during the days and weeks immediately following Hurricane Katrina. Then, there was no "male" or "female," "Jew or Christian or Muslim," "philosopher, theologian, or washer-woman." We were all under the same sentence of destruction; we were all rescued from the same flood; and we were all in the same shelters. Money could not buy rescue, nor could education or "right thinking." There, we experienced truly what heaven--or, in some cases, hell---was like.

There were those who helped their neighbors and shared what little food and drink they had---and there were those who found weapons to use against the helpless. There were those who swept and cleaned the shelters where we were trapped together, without food, light, or water. And there were those who looted, robbed, and shot others. There were those who built up; there were those who destroyed.

In the New Jerusalem, there will be no longer (artificial or natural) light and dark, for the Lamb Himself will be the Light. There will only be those who "reverence" the light; those who do not will be "thrown out into the everlasting darkness." There will be only those who sing the praises of God; those who cannot join the song will be in everlasting torment, in the lake of burning sulfer. There will be only those who have received the "fine linen" and clothed themselves in "righteous acts." The others --those who have destroyed the earth -- will burn forever.

If we can adopt these categories even in this life, I think it will help us to overcome the un-natural division of thought that separate us in this world. Ultimately, there is only one division: those who worship and acknowledge the Living God, and those who do not; those who receive and honor His Spirit, and those who are still saying, "We shall be as gods!" and who thereby worship the deceiver, the god of this world.

Apokalupsis

2012-01-22T03:48:00.000-08:00

In English, we call it "apocalypse:" the revelation of something previously hidden. And because it is hidden, it is not something we can guess at---it must be revealed to us. On Paul's journey to Damascus, he was sure he knew the right belief; he had studied under Gamaliel, the greatest living teacher in Israel. But when he met the Son of God on the road, all of his previous learning was shattered----or, better yet, collected finally into a framework that made sense of everything he had learned from experience.

In the Garden of Eden, there were two trees: The Tree of Life / Wisdom / Revelation, and the Tree of Knowledge, or Experience, of Good and Evil. Now most of us want to learn from experience---from what we can taste, see, hear, touch, and understand through our reason or reflection. But there is a much greater world beyond the senses. There is a world of spirit, a world we cannot touch, taste, see, or hear----except by revelation from above.

All of the saints entered this world and tried to bring it back to us---but the only avenue they had to explain what they had received by revelation was the world of sense. At the end of his life, Thomas Aquinas said that everything he had spent his life writing was "as straw," given the revelation he had received at the end. It has been said that God has no grandchildren----that is, that He reserves revelation to a moment directly between Himself and each one of us. In the Old Testament, He would appear to each generation, saying, "I am the God of your father Abraham," or "I am the God of your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob..." In other words, "I am the One they told you about---but now, I am here before YOU; now, it's between Me and you alone! Will you listen to Me, as did your fathers in faith?"

And how shall we come to that moment of Apocalypse, of revelation from God to us? For most of us, it comes at a moment of deliverance, as Psalm 116 indicates:

I love the Lord [Yahweh], for he has heard

my voice, my appeal;

for he has turned his ear to me whenever I call.

They surrounded me, the snares of death;

the anguish of the grave has found me;

anguish and sorrow I found.

I called on the name of the Lord:

"Deliver my soul, O Lord [Yahweh]!"

How gracious is the Lord [Yahweh], and just;

our God has compassion.

The Lord protects the simple;

I was brought low, and he saved me.

Turn back, my soul, to your rest,

for the Lord has been good to you;

he has kept my soul from death,

my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling.

I will walk in the presence of the Lord

in the land of the living.

At the moment we have cried out to the Lord with all our hearts and have experienced His saving grace, we come to know Him as The-One-Who-Hears-Us, The-One-Who-Sees-Us, as the servant-girl Hagar came to know Him in her desperation in the desert. The one who experiences the Living God this way- -i.e., spiritually -- will never again be at the mercy of someone whose argument about God is from reason and education, as was Paul's, originally.

God is a Person, and His greatest desire is that we know Him directly, Person-to-person, not through intermediaries, even though the Law and the Prophets are necessary to point us in the right direction until such time as we are ready to meet the Living God for ourselves.

If You Knew the Gift of God....

2012-01-21T04:18:00.000-08:00

"Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water" (Jn. 4:13-15).

It seems to me that asking for water is the easiest thing we can ever do; anyone can do it. It takes no moral righteousness or obedience or education to ask for water. Maybe that's why Jesus had to appear in the flesh---just to tell us that all we have to do is ask.

Left to ourselves, we have devised all sorts of systems and codes to earn God's blessing on our lives. I understand "rules," because every family, no matter how small, has to have some sort of regulation in order to live together in harmony and agreement. Nothing works when each one of us just does whatever he/she wants to do whenever we want to do it. So it makes sense that religions---extended and sometimes very large families---have rules also: if you want to belong to this family, this is how we have agreed to behave; if you don't like these rules, you can choose another family.

And part of formal religions is also the effort to remain faithful not only to one another, but to God. So if we believe that God has given us certain guidelines to follow, then we want to follow them. But when we fail, either through rebellion or human weakness---or when the rules become more important than the people---Jesus has a simple solution: Ask Me for living water.

Rules might scare us because we cannot live by them---or because we no longer believe they are God's directions for us. But water is something we all need and desire, both physically and spiritually. Who can be afraid of water? I love the dialog that follows Jesus' simple direction---Ask Me for living water! Immediately, the woman at the well begins to probe theological questions, not asking the religious leaders, but Jesus Himself to answer the questions that have been on her mind. And in response, she receives a direct revelation---one that most of the people in Israel had yet to learn--that Jesus is the Promised Messiah. And she already knows that "when He comes, He will explain everything to us."

Most of us have questions that no one can answer to our satisfaction. If we are content to ask simply for "living water," the dialog can begin.

A Living Word

2012-01-19T06:21:00.000-08:00

I saw this on Facebook this morning and began to think about the question. We seem to be okay with cultural and familiar expressions of faith, but not with individual and unfamiliar ones. When someone does the unexpected, it makes us squirm because we don't know what to do ourselves. We are embarrassed by a public acknowledgment of God----we ourselves don't have the inner freedom to do the same, so we don't want anyone else to do it either.

We are enchanted when a man declares his love for his girlfriend in a filled stadium, posting his "Will you marry me?" on an electronic billboard----but less enchanted when Tim Tebow bows his head to acknowledge his God. Nor do we want our students at graduation to give thanks to God in a public way for His strength and support -- because someone in the audience might not feel the same way.

There was a time when I too would not tell anyone how I felt about Jesus. I didn't want to "impose my beliefs" on them, or turn them off----I wanted to be liked; I did not want to be thought of as a fanatic.
Now, however, as I approach my own death, I have become a fanatic! I no longer care about the respect of other people; I only want them to know how wonderful, exciting, adventurous, satisfying, fulfilling, joyous it is to know the living God, Who is always and everywhere a part of our lives, Who longs to do good to us and for us, Who longs to spread His blessings throughout the earth through our words, our actions, our acknowledgment of His Name.

Under His banner is truth, protection, wisdom, love, joy, peace, mutual respect, patient endurance, hope, light, and life. Without Him, the Light of Life, is deception, foolishness, hatred, "human nature," darkness, and death. Why-would-I-not-be-a-fanatic, knowing / experiencing the living God in my life?

I want to say to everyone I meet and know, "Come, eat and be filled with good things!" "Taste for yourself and know for yourself that God is the One for Whom we were made!" Jeremiah has the Lord saying, "Is not my word like fire....and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" (23:29)

Before the arrival of the Holy Spirit in one's life, the word of God -- i.e.Scripture--- is "nice," "beautiful," "inspirational"----but it is not a "fire" and a "hammer." When the Holy Spirit comes, everything changes---we want to run, not walk, with the word of God. Granted, the Bible has been used throughout history and even today as a weapon to suppress others (slavery, for example) and as a "hammer" that beats them down with guilt. But the section of Jeremiah that contains these words is God's anger against "false prophets" who "have not stood in the council of the Lord to "see or to hear his word, to listen and hear his word (23:19). Instead, they "borrow words from one another" and say to the people, "Thus says the Lord...."

That is the difference between the word as written --- the "nice," and "beautiful" word---and that spoken by God in a man's heart. In fact, in the Greek, there is a distinction between the two: Logos is the written word; Rhema is the spoken. One we can read; the other is heard, as a living word. That is why God sent prophets to Israel---so they could hear the living word, spoken in this situation, in this time, to this generation. That is why God sent His Son and said, "LISTEN to Him."

It is one thing to read the Scripture; it is another to have the Spirit of God speaking it to you. I would hope that the day would come in America when we can respect not only cultural and formalized expressions of faith, but also realize that God speaks in different ways and different times in our hearts. Could we all not be "listeners," not to all and every prophet that comes along, but to the One Who longs to whisper His word in our hearts?

A Crumbling Wall 2

2012-01-17T05:36:00.000-08:00

Go now, write it on a tablet for them,

inscribe it on a scroll,

that for the days to come

it may be an everlasting witness.

These are rebellious people, deceitful children,

children unwilling to listen to the Lord's instruction.

They say to the seers,

"See no more visions!"

and to the prophets,

"Give us no more visions of what is right!

Tell us pleasant things,

prophesy illusions.

Leave this way, get off this path,

and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!"

(Is. 30:8-11)

Years ago, when I was still working, one of my office mates asked me this question one morning at 7:30 am, a half-hour before my first class: Why do the Jews suffer and Catholics feel guilty?

I paused for a moment to absorb the question, in the midst of gathering materials and my lesson plan for the 8:00 am class. "Do you want the answer in 25 words or less?" I asked her.

What a question! ---one that would take a lifetime to explore fully. Still today, 20 years later, I can only begin to probe at an answer to the first part of the question----and now, only because of all the questions on Facebook about Tim Tebow. People are asking why he has aroused so much venom in the sports world, just because he acknowledges God.

I think the answer to the Facebook questions can be found in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and every one of the prophets, including Moses and Jesus Himself. The Jews became prophets to the rest of the world; they inscribed the Law of God on a scroll, as a witness to the truth and justice of God. And the rest of the world reacts throughout history and even today just like they did in the time of Isaiah and Jeremiah and in the time of Jesus: Stop it! We don't want to hear it! We don't want to see it! Your words and actions are offensive to us!

The Jews suffer because, as the Scripture says, The blows who have hated You have fallen upon me! (Ps. 69:). Psalm 69---all of it---is a graphic portrayal of what happens to those who proclaim God to the world:

many are my enemies without cause
they hate me without reason
they seek to destroy me
I endure scorn for your sake
scorn has broken my heart and left me helpless
I looked for sympathy, but there was none, for comforters, but found none.
They put gall in my food and gave me vinegar for my thirst (written 1000 years before Jesus' death on the cross).

Jesus warned His disciples---His last words to them---that the world would hate them as it hated Him: if you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own....but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you....They will treat you this way because of My name, for they do not know the One who sent me....He who hates me hates my Father as well (Jn. 15: 18ff).

The Jews suffer today for the same reason that the Apostles were martyred and for the same reason that Tim Tebow is both respected and hated---because they have all testified to the Truth.

But for those who reject the message, Isaiah 30:12 says this:

Because you have rejected this message,

relied on oppression and depended on deceit,

this sin will become for you

like a high wall, cracked and bulging,

that collapses suddenly, in an instant.

Anyone who asks why the Jews suffer, why Jesus was crucified, why Tim Tebow is scorned for witnessing to his faith, has only to read Isaiah. The answer is there: Stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!

In Pursuit of Joy

2012-01-16T05:30:00.000-08:00

Joy is the one thing we all have in common. Our philosophies, our theologies, our ideas may differ--but I suppose that everyone has experienced a moment or two of JOY, that fleeting and indefinable moment of ecstasy that suddenly takes over us at the sight of a beautiful tree or sky, or at seeing the expression on a baby's face. That moment (or those moments) have created in us some inexpressible longing which we want to capture and hold onto.

Repressive governments throughout history have tried to make sure that their people do not experience joy, because that is the one thing they cannot control and manipulate. Enlightened governments have made it their aim to preserve the right of every citizen to experience joy, without interference from those who live in darkness and whose sole aim is to destroy the joy of others.

At the Last Supper, Jesus made two promises to His disciples: He promised them joy "that no one would take from them" and peace "not as the world gives."

In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, C.S.Lewis writes about those moments of joy that began for him at the age of six, as he gazed out the window of his nursery and saw something that he could not define but that later he was to call "the secret signature of each soul," the longing "not merely to see beauty...but to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it" (Transposition and Other Addressess, 1949).

I think it is fair to say that, unless we have become dead men through the use of drugs or alcohol or sex as control and manipulation, or power as control, or the pursuit of wealth that chokes out all other pleasures---unless we have stifled our "inner man," we have all pursued joy:

There are times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else...Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even at best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night by night, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?

You have never had it. All the things tht have ever deeply possessed your soul have been hints of it---tantalizing glimpses, promised never quite fulfilled, echoes that dies away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest---if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself---you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, "Here at last is the thing I was made for."

We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends, or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

(--from The Problem of Pain, Chapter 10)

Those who have lost the capacity for these fleeting moments of joy are dead men walking; those who are on the path to heaven find joy at every corner and in every moment. Above my desk, I have a landscape of trees by Isack Tarkey, and beneath it a card that reads The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything. This is the joy promised to us by Jesus, the "joy that no one can take from us." And it does seem to follow that moment of grief when we think that everything has been taken from us.

Maybe this is the ultimate meaning of the Resurrection---when everything we have cherished and loved is restored to us, and we are re-united with joy, never again to be removed from it, or it from us: if you want to steal my joy, come and get it in the hands of God!

With gratitude to John the Divine

2012-01-15T05:00:00.000-08:00

Remain in Me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me (Jn. 15:4).

Jesus is speaking to His disciples at the Last Supper, the Passover. He knew that the time of His death was at hand, and these were His last words. His last instruction was simply to "remain in Him," and they would bear fruit "that would remain."

Looking back now through 2000+ years of history, we can marvel at how the fruit of the disciples has "remained" to inspire all nations on earth. The words of Pythagorus and of Plato have dimmed with time and are studied now only by scholars and philosophers, but the words of unlettered and untaught fishermen who had no interest or background in philosophy have come down through all ages and cultures and still breathe life into each generation that follows.

We call the Apostle John, "John the Divine" because his Gospel soars above the other three. But we forget that brothers James and John were found by the Sea of Galilee, mending their nets with their father. They were called by Jesus "Sons of Thunder" because of their active and passionate natures---but John's Gospel speaks of things more sublime than the words of any Greek philosopher. His "fruit," like that of all the other disciples, still remains today.

Jesus told His disciples that He was the vine and that His Father was the gardener Who "cuts off every branch that bears no fruit...and trims clean every branch that does bear fruit." But He went on to tell them that they were "already clean because of the word I have spoken to you." In the Book of Ephesians, Paul was to advise husbands to love their wives just as Christ loved the church and "gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word...(Eph. 5:26).

In the beginning of his Gospel, John tells us that In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God----and to all who received Him, he gave the right to become children of God...born of God.

Just as at the beginning of time, the Word of God entered into the dark and formless abyss, bringing light, order, beauty, and harmony, bringing into existence all things ("fruit" that remained), so has the Word of God entered into our sinful and disordered, chaotic, lives to rearrange, wash, and cleanse us that we become children of light and truth. If we remain in the Word of Truth, we will bear much fruit, as did John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Paul, Stephen---and all those throughout history who were cleansed by the washing with water through the Word.

Jesus said both "remain in Me and I will remain in you," and 'if my words remain in you...." Knowing this, shouldn't we be at least as respectful, attentive and absorbing of the Word of God as we are to the Boston Symphony, or to the Broadway theater, or to a movie? These things, great as they are, will fade away, but the Word of God will stand forever. Those things may impress us for awhile, but the Word of God can cleanse our minds, heal our souls, and lead us into eternity.

The Instruction from God

2012-01-14T04:24:00.000-08:00

Don't be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them (Daniel 10:12)

**************************************

But you must return to your God;

maintain love and justice,

and wait for your God always (Hosea 12:6).

***************************************************

As you do not know the path of the wind,

or how the body is formed in a mother's womb,

so you cannot understand the work of God,

the Maker of all things.

Sow your seed in the morning,

and at evening let not your hands be idle,

for you do not know which will succeed,

whether this or that,

or whether both will do equally well (Ecc. 11:5-6).

We want to do the work of God---but it is difficult to know exactly what that means. Should we be volunteering in soup kitchens, handing out blankets to the homeless, or toiling in a mission field somewhere? When I was in high school, I remember thinking that I did not want to give my life to God, because I was sure that He would send me somewhere I didn't want to go, and that I would never get to do what I wanted to do. How little I understood about God at the time!

Looking back on my life now, I realize that God gives us certain desires in order that He might also fulfill the "desires of our hearts," in the words of Psalm 37: Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. He is not about dashing our desires to the ground, but wants to fill us with good things. He promised to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to "a land of milk and honey," which means fertile fields and growing crops.

So how do we get to the land of promise? What is the work that God wants from us? Someone asked Jesus this question, and His answer was this: The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent...for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world (Jn. 6: 29 & 33).

It seems to me that the very first thing God wants from us is exactly what Daniel did: to set our minds to gain understanding and to humble ourselves before the Most High. In response to Daniel, God sent the vision of "One like a man" to reveal to Daniel what must come. The prophet Hosea also received visions and understanding regarding what God was doing, but he was told simply to "maintain love and justice/ and to wait for your God always."

The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us to simply go about our daily work "with all our might," for we cannot understand the work of God, or whether whatever we do will succeed. Yesterday I wrote about praying that we might be given a part in the ministry of Jesus, who was all about doing the will of the Father. Since we cannot really know what God is doing in our lives, or where His work today lies, I think the advice given to Hosea and to the writer of Ecclesiates is the best: set our hand to the work of the day, humble ourselves before God, who is doing His work today, and believe that He will do His work somehow through us. Our part is to "maintain love and justice, and to wait for our God always."

Once the burden of (apparent) success is off our shoulders and onto God's, we are free to move through our days with humility and joy, trusting in the work of God. Many of us seem to have the idea that God is "sitting" "up there," waiting to see what we will do to please Him or to annoy Him. But years ago, I had a card that said, God, it seems to me, is a verb. As an English teacher, of course, I loved that saying, knowing that the definition of a "verb" is a word that expresses action or being. God is not "sitting;" He is still in motion, still creating a world that He sees as "good," still breathing life into mankind. Our work is to look, to see, to understand, and to believe in the work of God among us today!

Thy Kingdom Come 2

2012-01-12T05:13:00.000-08:00

Don't pray that God will bless your ministry;

Pray that you will be allowed a part in the ministry of Jesus

(Father Thomas Joseph; homily of Jan. 11).

I have been thinking about those words ever since I heard them yesterday. Jesus' ministry on earth was one of rescuing the poor, uplifting the downcast, healing the sick, bringing back the outcast, feeding the hungry---both physically and spiritually--, taking onto Himself the burdens of the discouraged, teaching and breathing meaning and inspiration into the Scriptures, and revealing the face of God to those who sought Him.

Surely God did not send His salvation and outstretched hand only to those who lived in the first century A.D. Surely, He intended the physical and spiritual ministry of Jesus to continue throughout all generations. Those we call "saints" and those unknown saints have continued the Divine Ministry by allowing Jesus to dwell in them and to continue in them His mission on earth---to heal, to teach, to reveal, to feed, to encourage, to lift up, to say to those who have lost hope: Take courage; the kingdom of God is here. God dwells with you.

I remember going to confession in Medjugore to a wonderful priest named "Peter." He said to me: What we do for God is very interesting---but what God does for us----that's the whole story.

Our "ministry" is simply to get out of the way and to allow God to continue His Ministry through us--through our interests, our (quirky) personalities, our talents. We are poor and inconsistent instruments, but a Master painter, chef, physician, teacher, etc. can use whatever tools are at His disposal to accomplish His purposes. When the earthquake hit Haiti, I was amazed at the news footage of doctors "operating" in hospitals with the most primitive of tools, working to save lives with whatever they could find at hand.

This was to me a lesson: God will use the most primitive and unsophisticated tool at hand to accomplish His work on earth. If we are available to Him, we will constantly be surprised at how He will use us. We don't need any special abilities or knowledge---often these will get in the way, as we will learn to put our faith in what we "can do," or in what we "know," instead of trusting completely in what God knows or in what He can do through us.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. To be poor in spirit is to know that we ourselves have no "ministry" at all---but to know that Jesus continues His mission on earth through the poorest and most unlikely of persons. Jesus Himself claimed that His own work was not His, but the Father's: The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in Me, who is doing his work.

When we say, "Thy kingdom come," we are praying that God will continue His work through us, however, and whenever, and to whomever, He chooses to do it.

The Role of the Holy Spirit

2012-01-09T05:07:00.000-08:00

After the Lord was baptized, the heavens were opened,

and the Spirit descended upon him like a dove,

and the voice of the Father thundered: This is my beloved Son,

with whom I am well pleased (Matt. 3:16-17).

The very first role of God's Spirit in us is to convince us that we are loved, that God cares for us, watches over us, protects us, defends us, runs interference for us against our enemies, directs our paths into good and safe places, and blesses the socks off us!

When God called Abraham out of Ur and led him on a journey to "a place I will show you," it was to convince Abraham of the watchful providence of the Most High in every and all circumstances. The day- to- day journey of Abraham was a jouney of faith, of learning every day that God was with him, caring for him, providing for him, defending him.

When Abraham entered the land of Egypt, and Sarah was taken by Pharoah's servants into the king's harem, Abraham said, "She is my sister." Critics have noted that Abraham was only partially truthful in this circumstance, but we are judging from our 20th-21st century perspective and values. We cannot know or judge Abraham from our standpoint. All we can truly see from where we are now is God's provision and protection in a time of danger. Abraham's truthfulness was not the issue: God had promised Abraham a son and many descendents; now that promise was in danger of not being fulfilled. Generations later, God would speak through Isaiah to say that He Himself watched over His Word to fulfill it, to accomplish it.

The deliverance of Sarah and the safe journey of Abraham were the work of God. Once again, Abraham was to experience the faithfulness of God on his behalf. His confidence grew with every event and circumstance of his journey. By the time he was settled in the land of promise, Abraham knew in his bones that he was loved, cared for, watched over, established in God's plan and provision. He could afford to be generous and loving towards others; he could afford to refuse the spoils of war because he knew God to be his "shield and very great reward."

Once the Holy Spirit has entered into our bones, our day to day experience; once we know that we, like Jesus, are the Beloved, and that God is "well pleased" with us, despite any confusion or mistakes on our part (like Abraham), then and only then, are we able to love freely and confidently, without counting the cost or feeling sorry for ourselves.

The "journey" is the first stage of learning, of learning deep down, God's care, provision, direction of our lives, of His leading us into all truth, into righteousness, into love, into establishment as a blessing on the earth. We don't always experience that we are being led, or cared for, or watched---but if we surrender our lives to God, daily "build an altar to the Most High," as did Abraham, and trust Him to do the rest, we will discover what Abraham knew, what Jesus knew----that we too are the Beloved, in whom God is well pleased.

Only then can we trust that, in the words of Jesus through Julian of Norwich, "all things will be well." Only then are we truly ready to begin our ministry on earth.

Simplicity and Trust

2012-01-08T07:13:00.000-08:00

There is no prudence so great as that which offers no resistence to enemies, and which opposes to them only a simple abandonment. This is to run before the wind, and as there is nothing else to be done, to keep quiet and peaceful. There is nothing that is more entirely opposed to worldly prudence than simplicity...

The soul in the state of abandonment can abstain from justifying itself by word or deed. The divine action justifies it....the divine action is nothing else than the action of divine love....it makes the soul understand by secret suggestions what it ought to say, or to do, according to circumstances....

Divine love then, is to those who give themselves up to it without reserve, the principle of all good. To acquire this inestimable treasure the only thing necessary is greatly to desire it. Yes, God only asks for love, and if you seek this treasure, this kingdom in which God reigns alone, you will find it....

To desire to love God is truly to love Him, and because we love Him, we wish to become instruments of His action in order that His love may be exercised in, and by us.

(--from Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean Claude de Caussade)

Both Mohandis Gandhi and Martin Luther King knew the secret of peaceful, passive, resistence to injustice---that of standing quietly before their accusers and of not fighting back, but trusting all outcomes---even their own death and suffering--to Divine Providence. Gandhi and King were not perfect people, but they were able to lead "armies" of passive resistence to unjust laws and cruel governments. Before they took a step in public, they had turned their very lives over to the Most High, trusting that He had given them the mission they were about to undertake. Neither of them sought their own glory or interests, but only the will of God and justice for their people--and they earnestly desired to be used as instruments of God's reign on earth. They did not need to justify their actions; justice was before them always, in their bones, in their scriptures, in their God.

Both men are great examples of yesterday's entry from Sirach: I sought to water my own little garden, and behold, this rivulet of mine became a river, then this stream of mine, a sea. Thus do I send my teachings forth shining like the dawn, to become known far off. Thus do I pour out instruction like prophecy and bestow it on generations to come.

On Water and Wisdom

2012-01-07T03:16:00.000-08:00

and this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us (I John 3:24).

Remain in Me, and I will remain in you (Jn. 15:4)

Jesus told the woman at the well: whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life (Jn. 4:13).

Later, at the Feast of Tabernacles, which lasted for a week, Jesus stood up on the "last and greatest day of the Feast and said in a loud voice:" If any man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him. By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive (Jn. 7:37).

The written accounts of Jesus' conversation with the woman at the well and His more public and "loud" announcement at the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem are separated in John by three chapters, but they are very closely related. The best way to see the connection is to study the Book of Sirach in the Catholic Bible (a book not included in other translations).

Chapter 24 of Sirach is the Praise of Wisdom, personified as a woman who "comes forth from the mouth of the Most High and mistlike covers the earth" (v.3). Although Wisdom "holds sway" over every people and nation, she seeks a "resting place" and an inheritance on the earth. The Jews have a legend that before God chose Israel, He went to every nation and asked whether He might dwell on earth among them. Every nation refused Him except Israel, the "smallest of all nations." Sirach 24 says he who formed me chose the spot for my tent, saying, "In Jacob make your dwelling, in Israel your inheritance."

In singing her own praises, Wisdom says this: He who eats of me will hunger still, he who drinks of me will thirst for more ...the first man never finished comprehending wisdom, nor will the last succeed in fathoming her/ for deeper than the sea are her thoughts; her counsels, than the great abyss (24: 20; 26-27).

In extolling Wisdom and her gifts, the writer says this:

All this is true of the Book of the Most High's covenant,

the law which Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the community of Jacob.

It overflows, like the Pishon, with wisdom...

It runs over, like the Euphrates, with understanding...

It sparkles like the Nile with knowledge (24: 22-25).

Now here is the connection between Jesus' conversation with the woman at the well and His public announcement at the Feast of Tabernacles, or as it is called today, "the Feast of Booths," which celebrates God's "tabernacling, or dwelling" among His people while they were in the desert, on their way to the Promised Land. The "last and greatest" day of the Feast was the Feast of Water, celebrating the event in the wilderness where Moses struck the rock and water ran out to satisfy the thirst of the Israelites encamped in the desert. Scientists and archeologists are still today attempting to explain the great miracle of Water in the Desert---enough water to satisfy the thirst of the entire encampment of twelve tribes of Israel. When Jesus stood up and said, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink," He was "blaspheming" in the very worst and most public way. He was saying that He Himself was the Rock out of which the water flowed.

To the woman at the well, He promised a "spring bubbling up to eternal life;" to the crowds in Jerusalem, He promised "streams of living water" flowing outward from the belly of those who came to Him. A spring is for individual use, bubbling up to satisfy the thirst within; streams of water, on the other hand, flow out of us toward the thirst of others. Sirach 24 makes clear the process:

Now I, like a rivulet from her stream,

channeling the waters into a garden,

Said to myself, "I will water my plants,

my flower beds I will drench;"

And suddenly this rivulet of mine became a river,

then this stream of mine, a sea.

Thus do I send my teachings forth shining like the dawn,

to become known far off.

Thus do I pour out instruction like prophecy

and bestow it on generations to come (Sirach 24: 28-31).

When we connect Jesus' invitation to ask Him for living water and to come to Him and drink with the words of Sirach concerning wisdom, we realize that as we drink to satisfy our own thirst and to water our own garden, this Spirit He pours out on us fills our inner man to the point of spilling out of us to others. As our own thirst is deeply satisfied with the Spirit and Wisdom of the Most High, streams of living water flow out from us to others also. As we begin to take sips from the well of Wisdom, we are both satisfied and desire more, and the more we are filled with living water, the greater our capacity to give what others need from us.

What is Truth?

2012-01-06T04:22:00.000-08:00

The question asked by Pilot reveals the attitude of those who have grown sceptical---those in political power, especially, who are so confronted day by day with the vested interests of others. They, above all others, grow sceptical that there exists anywhere pure, unadulterated, absolute value or Truth. Everyone has an angle on the truth, they say, but no one has "Truth."

But John tells us that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ---who promised us the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit sent by the Father. He --the Spirit of Truth---will not speak on His own, but only from what He receives from the Father (Jn. 14-15). That and only that is what He gives to us.

And we too, if we are to speak Truth, must speak not out of our own interest, but only from that we ourselves receive from the Spirit of Truth and holiness---the Spirit of Jesus, who came not to do His own will, but the will of the Father.

Holy Spirit, give us purity of heart, that we might speak your Truth and only your Truth. Give us understanding of the things of God, and wisdom of when and how and to whom You would have us speak.

Be Thou a Blessing

2012-01-05T05:34:00.000-08:00

What do all those stories in Genesis have to do with us today? A recent article by Ron Rolheiser outlines what he calls "The Three Stages of Our Spiritual Lives." According to Rolheiser, the first stage of our lives is the struggle to get our lives established. In this stage, we struggle to discover who we are, where we will live, what we will do, who will love us, etc. This stage could last for years.

Once we have passed through that stage and our lives are somewhat settled, we enter into the second stage---the quest to find how we will give ourselves away, what contribution we will make to our families, our communities, and to the world in general. For most of us, family and career or jobs and community involvement are ways of "giving ourselves away."

The final stage, in Rolheiser's view, is no longer occupied with giving ourselves away, but in figuring out how our death will be as much a blessing to our family and our world as our lives have been. In his opinion, too little attention has been paid to this stage. Although Rolheiser does not mention Jewish culture and traditions in his article, it may be that the Jews are the only culture where this last stage has been emphasized through their belief in the importance of family and descendents.

Rolheiser's article reminded me of the story of Abraham in Genesis. Out of the backdrop of a dark and evil world portrayed in Genesis 2-11, God selected one man, Abraham, saying to him in effect, "Let me establish you and make your name great; let me lead you to a land you do not know and plant you there; let me give you many descendents and make you the father of many peoples; through you all nations will be blessed: Be Thou a Blessing (upon the earth*) (*my addition).

Before Abraham, the early stories in Genesis deal with mankind's own efforts to establish themselves, to make a name for themselves, and to gain ascendency. Adam and Eve desired to "be as gods," according to the promise of the serpent; Cain slew Abel in his effort to establish himself as the favored one; Lamech asserted the law of revenge 7 times greater over anyone who wounded him; and the Tower of Babel was erected so that men could "make a name for themselves."

Out of this background of all the earth attempting to establish itself, God chooses Abraham and says to him, "let me establish you; let me make your name great; let me make you a blessing to all men and to all generations."

The fact that Abraham knew not where he was going means that he could not control his own destiny. Daily, he built an altar and worshipped God to discover whether he was still on the right path, to hear the voice within, to find peace on the way. And he was led, even when it seemed that he wound up in the wrong place--with Sarah in Pharoah's harem, for example. On the way to where-he-knew-not, he learned to trust the One Who led him, to go with God, and to obey the One Who directed him.

My point is this: every one of us faces the tasks that Rolheiser describes: the struggle to get our lives together, to make a contribution to our families and to the world, and finally to die as a blessing instead of a curse on the earth. Our choice is whether "we" will "do it ourselves," like two-year-old children trying to tie their own shoes, or whether we will allow God to make our names great, and to establish our lives as a blessing on the earth.

Relying on the Faithfulness of God

2012-01-04T04:36:00.000-08:00

In the beginning was the Word...

And the Word became flesh

and made his dwelling (literally, "pitched his tent") among us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) died in a German concentration camp, by direct order of Hitler, two weeks before the fall of Germany and the release of the German prisoners. He was considered one of the greatest threats of Hitler's rule because he opposed the German Reich in every way possible. He would not become part of the official Reichkirk (German Church), despite the danger of not doing so, and the urging of some of his closest friends; he founded an illegal and hidden seminary for young priests (non-Catholic), insisting on prayer and meditation as the foundation of seminary life. In his Sermons, we feel the strength of his own spirituality:

I am a sojourner on earth. By that I recognize that I canot abide here, that my time is short. Nor do I have rights here to possessions or a home. I must receive with gratitude all the good that befalls me, but I must suffer injustice and violence without anyone interceding for me.

I have no firm footing either among people or among things. As a guest I am subject to the laws of the place where I am staying. The earth which feeds me has a right to my labor and my strength.

But because I am nothing but a sojourner on earth, with no rights, no support and no security; because God himself has made me so weak and insignificant, he has given me one firm pledge of my goal: his Word. He will not take this one security from me; he will keep this Word with me, and by it he will allow me to feel my strength.

Where the Word is with me from the beginning, I can find my way in a strange land, my justice in injustice, my support in uncertainty, my strength in work, patience in suffering.

Bonhoeffer's sufferings under Hitler can be compared to the young David, who was relentlessly pursued by King Saul for years. David was forced into the wilderness, hiding and living in caves from Saul's army who searched for him with the intention of making an end to this young threat to Saul's rule. All the time he was in hiding, David learned / experienced the faithfulness of God to hide him, feed him, even provide water for him in the wilderness. Only those like Bonhoeffer and David, who have experienced the faithfulness of God in desperate circumstances can say, as David wrote: The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge...the cords of death entangled me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me. The cords of the grave coiled around me; the snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called to the Lord; I cried to God for my help...He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters. He rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes, who were too strong for me (Ps. 18).

Blessed are they---like Mary Magdalene, like Bonhoeffer, like David---who know the deliverance of God, whose refuge is the God of hosts, who trust in His faithfulness to deliver those who pass through the Valley of Baca (weeping, lamentation, soreness), and make it a place of springs...they go from strength to strength till each appears before God in Zion (Ps. 84).

Redemption

2012-01-03T06:26:00.000-08:00

Adrienne von Speyr was a Swiss medical doctor, wife, mother, and mystic who died in 1967. She is the author of over 60 books (dictated to her spiritual director) on theology, the spiritual life, and commentaries on Scripture. She was given the great gift of being able to commune with the saints and of seeing them at prayer during their lifetimes; indeed, she was able to enter into their prayer and understand it. Under obedience to her director, she dictated the visions and understandings she had, according to the mission revealed to her when she was six years old. Although she was raised as a Protestant, in her adult life, she converted to Catholicism. Her depths of understanding the spiritual gifts that are given to each one of us by God, with the same mathematical precision that He designed the stars and the universe, is amazing---we are each put in a certain place with a certain mission, not for ourselves but for the church as a whole, or for the world as a whole. The entry on Mary Magdalen is a good example:

She has sinned; the Lord has raised her up again; but he actually took her sins into himself. And this increases: the more she is liberated, the more he bears, and she is also aware of this. [My note: until I read this I had not seen that the censure given to Jesus by the Pharisees was the same condemnation they had reserved for this "woman." He aligned Himself with her as her ally and support in the face of their censure, and said in effect, "Condemn her; condemn Me."]

(continued) She grows into the Lord, as it were, because he has taken over everything she previously was, and he gives her everything she will be. Thus, a peculiar humility comes about in her; she can no longer meet the Lord without at the same time meeting her sin in him, and her sin in him has merged with the guilt of all people. For her, the Lord is now the one who bears her guilt, insofar as he at the same time bears the sin of the world. She confessed one time, repented one time. But there remains a fundamental confession in her: what belongs to her expands in love into something that concerns all people. She will no longer be able to encounter the Lord without praying for all sinners. Without being reminded that it is now her turn to forgive others. For he has shown her how one goes about bearing the sins of others.

And since everyone knows what the Lord has accomplished in her, she becomes a sort of apostle. She is a living parable, a memorial. She now truly has to lead the life the Lord demands of her and that he has made possible by forgiving her sins. The excess of grace has to be legible in her. And it will be, because she does not for a moment ascribe anything to herself: she wants only to show what he is, what he can do. Her inner attitude results from the fact that she is not asked whether she wants to follow the Lord. In the moment when she is liberated from her sins, every problem comes to an end: now she has to follow. What happened is so much a miracle that no other call is necessary. The call is included in the Lord's deed. Everyone in whom a miracle has been performed has received this sort of call.
from the Book of All Saints by von Speyr and von Balthasar

Baptism

2012-01-02T05:23:00.000-08:00

"I baptize with water," John replied, "but among you stands one you do not know....the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel...He who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God" (Jn. 1:26-34).

Baptism is not what we go through to join a church; it is more a soul-bath that prepares us to receive the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus in us. In the Acts of the Apostles, there is a small passage about a Jew named Apollos, who came to Ephesus from Alexandria: He was a learned man, with a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and he spoke with great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately, though he knew only the baptism of John....When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately (Acts 18: 24-26).

I wonder what difference it would make if "the way of God" were explained to us "more adequately"--that is, if we knew that the only aim of our baptism, our prayer, our good work, our study or meditation,or whatever we do, would be to receive the Holy Spirit from the Son of God. I wonder what difference it would make to our lives if we did receive the Holy Spirit from Jesus.

In the Letter to the Romans, Paul writes, A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and phyiscal. [We might read "baptism" here for "circumcision"]. No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code (Romans 2:28).

When Jesus said, "Many are called, but few are chosen," I wonder if he was thinking of all who are "called" by circumcision and/or baptism, but whose hearts have never been baptized/ circumcised by the Holy Spirit. Would that our churches contained more "Priscillas and Aquilas" who could more adequately explain to us "the way of God" when all we know is the baptism of John!

The Law of General Beneficience

2012-01-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I wrote about education, from the perspective of C.S. Lewis, as being as much about educating the heart as well as the mind of children, so that they will be sensitive to universally recognized truth and beauty---or to those things that make us "human."

Every culture has embodied certain universal principles from which its wise departed only in foolishness or error. Across all cultures and times, those principles remain consistent.

The first principle we find in every "civilized" culture is that of Universal Beneficience, or of doing good to other men:

I have not slain men (from the Confession of the Righteous Soul, Book of the Dead-Egyptian)
Do not murder (Jewish--Exodus 20:13)
Terrify not men or God will terrify thee (Ancient Egyptian Precepts)
In Nastrond (Hell), I saw murderers. (Old Norse)
I have not brought misery upon my fellows. I have not made the beginning of every day laborious in the sight of him who worked for me (see first ref. above)
I have not been grasping (ibid.)
Who mediates oppression, his dwelling is overturned (Babylonian)
He who is cruel and calumnious has the character of a cat (Hindu)
Slander not (Babylonian)
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor (Ancient Jewish--Exodus 20:16)
Utter not a word by which anyone could be wounded (Hindu)
Has he driven an honest man from his family? ..broken up a well-cemented clan? (Babylonian List of Sins)
I have not caused hunger. I have not caused weeping (Ancient Egyptian)
Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you (Ancient Chinese--Confucius)
Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart (Ancient Jewish--Leviticus)
He whose heart is in the smallest degree set upon goodness will dislike no one (Ancient Chinese--Confucius)

Obviously, just because a culture has embodied these principles as its highest values, it does not mean that either individuals or the culture as a whole has lived up to them. But at least up until the present time, the principles have been handed down from one generation to another. Today, it is up to parents alone to preserve these universal values. It is difficult in our western schools to educate the "heart" of children without being accused of being politically incorrect.

What is Education?

2011-12-31T06:32:00.000-08:00

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis maintains that we should be very careful about the education of children, because if we fail to educate their hearts as well as their minds, we risk raising what he calls "men without chests."

In his analogy, "man" is head, heart (chest), belly (the animal nature, the instincts). To be all head, without aknowledging the animal part of us, is to be cold, unfeeling, rational, all "philosophical" and abstract. To be all "belly" is to be but an animal, serving our most basic and base instincts, without regard to the needs and rights of other people. The "heart" (chest) of man is the part of us that balances the head and the belly so that we are truly human/ man.

To fail to be fully human is to be on our way to extermination as a race. Men without "chests" are those like Hitler who want to design a master race, and so must eliminate those who do not fit into his vision of uberman. Men whose god is their belly/ animal comfort/ convenience have no feeling or regard for those they trample in the dust as they grab the best for themselves: men abuse women for their sense of power or lust; greed and corruption fill the coffers of the those in power; and the rich ignore the hungry at their doorstep.

Proverbs 4:23 says: Above all else, guard your heart, for out of it flow all the issues of life.

Educating the heart of man means balancing science with sensitivity, history with reflection on its meaning, and mathematics with appreciation of the beauty of the universe. Technology without the limits of the Tao (the universal Law) becomes "technocracy" -- the rule of those in power over those without. In reflecting on "Our English Syllabus," Lewis said this:

Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisure activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end, and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means. That is why education seems to me so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man's prerogative. You have noticed, I hope, that man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals....The lion cannot stop hunting, nor the beaver making dams, nor the bee making honey. When God made the beasts dumb, He saved the world from infinite boredom, for if they could speak, they would all of them, all day, talk nothing but shop.

We have already cut recess from many of our schools, along with art, music, and religion. We are well on our way to developing men without chests---the abolition of man.

His Commands are Light and Truth

2011-12-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

...carry one another's burdens, and so you will fulfill the whole law of Christ (Gal. 6:2).

Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall

(I Jn. 2:10).

My command is this: love one another as I have loved you (Jn. 15:12).

Remain in me, and I will remain in you (Jn. 15:4).

Today I must quote at length from Madeleine Delbrel's book We, the Ordinary People of the Streets:

The Gospel's secret does not open itself to curiosity; it is not an intellectual initiation.

Rather, the Gospel's secret is essentially a life-giving mystery.

The light of the Gospel does not remain an extrinsic illumination--

rather, it is a fire that demands entry into us so that it may ravage and transform us.

The Gospel is not for minds seeking ideas, but for disciples who wish to obey.

It is not given to us to meet the Gospel's simple and ruthless commands with a "perhaps" or an "almost." No, the only alternatives are the "yes, yes" that opens us to life, or the "no, no" that locks us in death.

We should not thus be surprised at the sad, interminable journeys, the deep upheaveals that each of these words initiates within us. We should not try to hold back this sort of free-fall of the word into our depths. We need the passive courage that allows it to act within us---Let it be done to me according to your Word. [end of quote]

Here's the issue: In each one of us there is a limit to our ability to carry out the command of Jesus. We perhaps can love those who love us, or those who make it easy to love them---but what about those who oppose us, who hate us, or who just rub us the wrong way on a daily basis. What does it mean to love them as Christ has loved us? Jesus Himself gave us the answer when He pointed us to the Father, who lets his rain fall on the just and the unjust, who does not withhold good things from those who hate Him.

Our feelings have nothing to do with how we act toward those who hate and dismiss us. The reason I included the last Scripture from John is that our goal is to remain in Jesus and to allow Him to remain in us in our encounters with all others. We need to stand back, as it were, and to watch Jesus in us encounter our "enemies," or those with whom we have no natural sympathy---Jesus, who came to the end of His own natural inclinations during the 40 days He spent in the desert; Jesus, who allowed Himself to be abused by man and who prayed for them to the Father because they knew not what they did to Him or to themselves.

Last week, I quoted Paul in Galatians saying that those who are in Christ Jesus have crucified their own evil passions and desires. Knowing the rest of Paul's theology, I know that he would have meant not that we have in ourselves had the strength to "crucify" ourselves, but that we would have allowed Jesus to crucify the natural man in us who constantly wars against the Spirit of God: It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me to the glory of God.

We cannot really "love one another as Christ has loved us." All we can do is to allow Him in us to love our enemies and to do good to those who persecute us. And He will, and He does! We just need to ask Him to do what we cannot do for ourselves, and we must be willing to allow Him to do it. I had a friend who used to say, "I am willing to be made willing," because she recognized at times that she was not willing at the moment to allow Christ to live in a certain situation---she knew there was still work in her own soul to be done to get to that point.

His commands are Light and Truth, but we still walk in the dark until He lives entirely in us!

Gift of the Holy Spirit

2011-12-19T04:52:00.000-08:00

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. ...Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us be directed by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other...Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 5:22-6:2).

I think the greatest testimony of the reality of Jesus Christ is His effect in the lives of those who surrender to Him--love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,.....etc. If you say that you do not see those effects in life-long Christians, it may be that church-going and surrender to Jesus Christ are not the same thing. I can only look at my own life and the lives of those I saw changing right before my eyes.

During the Charismatic movement of the 70's, I saw lives and hearts change. Whenever I asked myself and others close to me, "Is this all true?" I would see real change taking place in myself and in the others around me, and I had to admit that something "true" was happening. Of course, the work of the Spirit may be a dramatic moment at first, but the changes are continuing and gradual over a lifetime---and they do not gradually 'go away,' as I feared they would at first.

I experienced my first 'baptism in the Spirit' in the hospital early in the morning of June 15, 1977, as I awaited surgery. I entered the hospital full of fear and anxiety not only about the surgery, but about almost everything in my life---including whether we would all starve to death, as Edgar Cayce was predicting a few years earlier. That morning, a young girl, my roommate, prayed for me to receive the Holy Spirit as she herself had received Him the year before. As she prayed over me, liquid love poured throughout my body from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. I had experienced moments of peace before, but this was something else----I was embraced with a kind of love that drove out all fear and anxiety; I was warmed from within; I knew true joy without reservation.

The anesthesiologists arrived shortly afterwards to tell me they had reviewed my records and had decided to try for the first time to do a spinal for this surgery instead of a general anesthesia, one of my many concerns about surgery. During the surgery, I was warm, despite the chilled operating room; I remained in peaceful prayer for someone I did not know but had heard about--someone who had cancer--and I was able to discuss options with my doctor. After the surgery, because I had not had a general, I was able to walk around without pain, nausea, and confusion---but more importantly, I had a deep love for people in the hospital with me, and I wanted to tell them about the love of God for them.

Now it is really important to understand that just the day before, I was so wrapped up in my own issues that I was not really aware of anyone else or their pain---and certainly, I had no desire to tell anyone that God loved them. That kind of behavior was typical in my mind of religious nuts; my religion was private, between me and God---and that's just the way I thought it should be for everyone. Now I found myself wandering into other patients' rooms and talking to them gently, loving them, and telling them that God was with them. Who was this person? What had happened to change me so dramatically in the space of 24 hours?

I reached for the Gideon Bible in the nightstand, and for some unknown reason, began reading the Acts of the Apostles----it was not a conscious, reasoned, choice---the Book opened, and I began reading at that spot. Suddenly, I knew what had happened to me! Pentecost! The same thing that had happened to the Apostles! I had received the promised "Gift of the Father!" Wow! What?! What did I have to do now to keep this going? Did anyone know? What?

I went home to recuperate, stayed in bed for six weeks and read the Bible from cover to cover---twice--something that would never have been possible before this. I could at best read only a few lines without getting bored and wanting to read a novel instead. During that time, my worries and anxieties receded into the background, as the Word of God began to take possession of me. Wow! How could this possibly be happening?!

The Holy Spirit, like the Word of God, is living and active today (Heb. 4:12) and intended for those "far off," as Peter said on the Day of Pentecost. Us! I don't know why I was chosen to receive so great and wonderful a gift; I can only hope to convince others that the Gift is for them also, now, today--and that what happened to the Apostles can still happen to us.

I'll be away until Dec. 29, but will continue then, God willing.

Revelation

2011-12-18T04:57:00.000-08:00

"Gayle, you cannot give yourself peace."

Until Sr. Geautreaux spoke those words to me at The Cenacle, a retreat house in Metairie, in 1977, I had not realized that peace is exactly what I had been searching for. All my life, I had sought God; I had attended Mass faithfully, and had often experienced peace both at Mass and during other times of quiet prayer. By 1977, however, with three small children, there was no time for prayer during the day or night, and Mass was not exactly a time for reflection either, as I often had to retrieve a child from under a pew or quiet a crying infant.

I had begun to search in other places for peace: in yoga, in reading Unitarian literature, in fellowship groups, etc. Again, all avenues "worked" for that moment that I could remain in them. But in my daily life, I felt like a failure as I constantly faced things I either couldn't or didn't accomplish. Beds were unmade, meals were uncooked, diapers were waiting to be washed, and I always felt that I was failing at being a good mother.

When I finally collapsed emotionally, my husband took the children for three days and sent me off to the Cenacle for R&R. There, I met Sr. Geautreaux, one of the counselors, who listened to me and then told me that I could not give myself peace. That was a moment of great grace and revelation for me! It seems obvious, but it wasn't to me at the time. I realized that if I were to have peace, it would have to be received, not manufactured, and I started to look up, rather than within, to find it.

I left the Cenacle with hope, for the first time in my life, not thinking that "I" had to solve my own problems, but believing/knowing that I could receive whatever I needed from above. Within that same year, I received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and began to experience the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, the Jesus promised to His disciples at the Last Supper. I began to receive the direction I needed for each day and the "peace that passes all understanding," the knowing that things were okay, even if I still seemed to not be very effective in my role as mother and wife.

Jesus said, Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid (Jn. 14:27).

We might find moments of peace "as the world gives," moments carved out of prayer or quiet listening, or vacation---but the peace given to us by Jesus surpasses all times and conditions, even when things are not going 'well' for us. It is the day-to-day fruit of His Spirit dwelling in us, as the Comforter, telling us in the words of Julian of Norwich: You shall see for yourselves that all things will be well, and all manner of things will be well. This is the peace announced to the shepherds of Bethlehem: Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth among men of good will. There is no other true peace but that which comes to us through the person of Jesus.

Lord, Liar, or Lunatic?

2011-12-17T03:40:00.000-08:00

"The Father and I are one."

Again the Jews picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus said to them, " I have shown you many great mircales from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?"

"We are not stoning you for any of these," replied the Jews, "but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God" (Jn. 10:30-33).

The Jews of his day heard and realized Christ's claim to be God. It is harder for us to hear and recognize what He was saying. But C.S. Lewis makes us hear the message of Jesus in his classic radio message, Lord, Liar, or Lunatic?

If Jesus was so clear as to shock his listeners about who He is, what are we to make of this? According to Flannery O'Conner, "If Jesus was not divine, then the crucifixion was justified." (She is nothing if not straightforward!)

Lewis says that either Jesus was speaking the truth, or He was deluded in the worst way, or He was lying, and He knew He was lying, in which case we should believe nothing He said.

Why is it so important that God became flesh and dwells among us---not dwelt, but dwells? It is because that even though every ancient and major religion and great teacher re-presents to us the great universal law handed down to men of good will, none of us is capable of keeping the Tao, (a Buddhist word for what the Jews called "Divine Instruction, or Law"). It is not that we are ignorant of the "Law," however it is called or framed by great teachers and religions; we know the law, but we are all "sinners," that is, incapable of embodying the Law in our own flesh. We are led astray by weakness, or pride, or confusion, or lust, or fear, or the damage done to us by others, or ......

In Chapter 7 of Romans, Paul says, "I do not understand myself at all....even though in my mind I know and agree with the Law of God, there is something in my flesh that is stronger than I am. The very thing I say I will not do, I end up doing, and the thing I say I will do, I do not do....so I discover in my flesh another law---the law of sin and death....unhappy man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?"

In Chapter 8, Paul rejoices that the Spirit of God has replaced the "law of sin and death at work in [his] flesh" with a "new law:" the law of the Spirit of life.....the mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace (Romans 8: 6).

As a priest once told me in confession: what we do for God is interesting, but what God does for us---that's the whole story! That sort of puts everything in perspective for me. What God did once in history in the womb of the virgin, He continues to do now on a daily basis: He sends His Spirit to incarnate in our own flesh His very Son, His image, His breath, His truth to dwell among us, if we can but receive the Word made flesh in us.

The captives are set free

2011-12-16T05:25:00.000-08:00

When I was living in Metairie, I was vaguely aware that one of my neighbors down the street raised small dogs, mostly in his garage. I rarely saw the people and saw the garage open only once---when I saw empty cages stacked on top of one another, maybe about 20 altogether. One day, one of the little dogs escaped and came down the street toward my house. But he could not walk in a straight line; he moved down the street only by continually walking in small circles, as though he were still in a small cage. Only gradually was he able to actually move "forward" in my direction.

These dogs evidentally were allowed out of their cages only once a day, when they were fed. The rest of the time, if they moved at all, they had to circle their cages. My heart broke when I realized what had been going on just down the street from me, and I wondered if I should call the Humane Society. I didn't, but to this day regret that I did not. I didn't want to cause problems for my neighbors---a very short-sighted approach, I now think.

The memory of that little dog walking in circles to me is now a graphic picture of what trauma does to us as children, or maybe even as adults. It cripples our freedom to grow and develop as we continually circle back to the traumatic events even while trying to walk forward in our lives. The little dog's brain had patterned itself to walking in a cage to the extent that even out of his cage, "walking" still meant walking in circles. In the same way, circus elephants are trained to remain "chained" to a stake in the ground so that even after the chains are removed, the elephants believe they are still tethered to the stake and will not move away on their own.

Jesus said that if someone were to give scandal to a little one, it would be better for that person to have a millstone tied around his neck and be thrown into the sea. I am beginning to see why---damaging a little one is permanent "brain damage;" something our society has only recently begun to understand and react to. No amount of punishment for the offender will undo the damage he/she has caused to a child.

To some extent, all of us have been damaged and to some extent, all of us "walk in circles," trying to move forward past trauma. The "release of captives" that Jesus proclaimed as part of His ministry had less to do with those in prison than with those of us permanently damaged and "captive" to sin, whether the sin of others or of ourselves. He is able to set free those who walk in darkness not by proclaiming or teaching the Great Tao/ the Universal Law, but by entering into those held captive and changing them from within. That is the great message of the Resurrection--that our "old man" has died, been buried, and that we have been "born again" as new creatures in Christ Jesus. It is His energy that works so powerfully in us as we continue to yield to Him and allow Him to work out our salvation in us.

"Behold, says the Lord God of hosts, "I am doing a new thing; do you not perceive it?" (Is. 43:19)

What does it mean to "be saved," except that we, by the power of Jesus' great energy in us, are continually set free from the damages of our and other's sin? In the Book of Genesis, Joseph tells the brothers who threw him down a well and sold him into slavery: What you intended for my harm, God turned to my good.

Only God is able to save us in this way; we are no more able to save ourselves than the little dog was able himself to undo the damage done to his brain. God told Jonah that the Ninevah was a city of "more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who [could] not tell their right hand from their left," and that He was concerned about them. I think that description might apply not only to the inhabitants of Ninevah, some of the most cruel people on earth, but to the whole world.

No wonder salvation is such good news!

The Voice

2011-12-15T04:55:00.000-08:00

John the Baptist was a voice crying in the desert: Make straight the paths of the Lord, for He comes! That would be a sobering message, if we thought it true in our own lives. Was John seen in his own day as a crazed maniac, or as a herald of the coming Messiah?

What if someone today told us that Jesus is coming back to this earth? I think I know what the reaction might be. None of us wants to be known as the disciple of a nutcase---but John's message is this: One is coming after me, whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.

He must increase; I must decrease.

If we listen to the message, we will know for sure who John is; he is not pointing to himself, as a Jim Jones, for example. He is not saying, "Follow me; do what I tell you." He is saying instead, "look for one coming after me. Prepare your heart to receive the Lord."

John defined himself as "a voice crying in the wilderness." He never claimed to have the word of truth, but only asked those who listened to him to cleanse their spirits to receive the Word coming after him. The fullness of truth was about to come, but John himself was not the Word---his role was to herald, or to point to the Word, which every man/woman had to receive in and for themselves.

But how shall we receive the Word of Truth coming from God Himself if we are not looking for, expecting, awaiting it? If we believe the world continues today as it did for thousands of years, and that nothing is different, we care nothing about turning our hearts, listening, waiting for, the Word of God to arrive in our own lives.

I think John's message is as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago----prepare ye the way of the Lord, for He comes. If we think of our lives as a time of preparing to receive the Gift of God that He is about to send us---maybe today--it's easier to get rid of the junk.

This Christmas season, I see so much less emphasis on gifts and more on the people in our lives. Maybe the Lord is about to arrive after all!

With God in a P.O.W. Camp

2011-12-13T05:31:00.000-08:00

This excerpt from the book named above, by Lt. Commander Ralph Gaither, appeared recently in our paper. I wanted to pass it on because I cannot get it out of my mind. Let us all remember those behind bars for any reason:

I wanted a Christmas tree (in my prison cell).
...That Christmas tree came to mean to me just the opposite of all I was experiencing. The green of it envisioned freedom, and light, and family, and America. And the season the tree represents spoke of God.

I dreamed of a Christmas tree, and the melancholy knowledge that I should be at home settled over me in a pall. I prayed.

Then one afternoon after washing my dishes, I turned to take the one step back into my cell. I looked down and on the threshold of my door was a tiny leaf blown by the wind. I picked it up with my toes and carried it inside...I carefully took the leaf from between my toes and looked at it for a long time. I held it to my nose. The perfume of freedom raced up my nostrils and infused my mind with its power. I fondled the leaf. It was real. I held it in my hand.

God had not forgotten me. I set the leaf on the little ledge by the window. Its greeness stood out in stark contrast to the dull, gray bars.

Tears rolled down my cheeks. God had given me a Christmas tree.

Thy Kingdom Come....

2011-12-12T04:35:00.000-08:00

Where? How about here? and here? and here----
that is, wherever we are right now, right here:

in my body,
in my mind,
in my spirit,
in my house,
in my friends,
in my relationships,
in my work,
in my prayer
in my hopes and dreams
in the words I speak
in what I do today....

Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done.

Mary and Martha; Peter and John

2011-12-11T05:20:00.000-08:00

Reading the story of the sisters Mary and Martha in the Gospels usually promotes an almost instinctive reaction, at least among the women I know---the reaction that Mary, indeed, "should have been" helping Martha get dinner on the table.

The problem with our human instinct/ reaction to this story is that it is just wrong, and when multiplied over and over throughout the ages, keeps causing the same kinds of angst that Martha voiced to Jesus: tell her to help me!

There is a classic book on the spiritual life called Abandonment to Divine Providence, written by Jean Pierre de Caussade in the 18th century. I was reminded of it recently by reading about Flannery O'Conner, who seemed to live out in her life the message of de Caussade. She did not really want to return home to live with her mother on a pig farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, the backwoods/redneck area of the country, but her lupus eventually gave her no choice, and she accepted her physical and geographical conditions with humor and grace. She gave herself entirely to her writing, editing and re-editing in order to present to God her very best, then leaving it up to Him what He chose to do with it. She once said, "I write because I do it well," accepting from God the gift He gave her and accepting the fact that the gift was hers to hone as well as she could.

Knowing that O'Conner had read de Caussade drove me to return to this book I had read about 40 years ago; I remembered loving it at the time. On beginning to re-read, I find myself once again loving its simple and almost "homely" approach to the spiritual life as abandoning oneself to the conditions of life just as it presents itself moment by moment.

I now realize that both Mary and Martha were doing in the moment what they had been inspired to do by the Presence of Jesus. "He must be hungry," thought Martha; "I can do something about that---and I can do it well!" She must have thought with pleasure about how satisfying it would be to feed Jesus and whoever was trailing along in His company. Her talent and inspiration moved her into the kitchen.

Mary, on the other hand, who had no talent or inspiration in the kitchen, probably welcomed the chance to become for the moment a listener, sitting at the feet of one she loved beyond all measure to soak up some wisdom and inspiration.

Martha's frustration came in the midst of the preparations, when she forgot her original inspiration and became burdened by Mary's seeming inactivity. She took her eyes off her own motivation and began to grumble that Mary was not motivated to be in the kitchen with her.

We all tend to make judgments about what other people are doing---we all think that others should be doing what we think is important at the moment. But de Caussade reminds us that the most important thing to do is only what God has given us in the circumstances of our lives. We cannot look at or control what others are doing; we can only joyfully attend to God's plan for us in this moment. Even in our own lives, we cannot wish to be doing something else right now, other than what we should be doing.

I always resented the time I had to spend in the kitchen as less important than my other, more creative, and therefore for me, more enjoyable, pursuits---reading, thinking, gardening, painting, etc. Slowly, gradually, I am learning that if it is time to put a meal on the table and if I am the only one in the house to do it, that that is the most important thing for me to do at that moment. I cannot grumble about it; in submitting to "the will of God," I will (and am) find(ing) joy in the moment.

In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers says this: We have to keep letting go, and slowly and surely the great full life of God will invade us in every part, and men will take knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus. I think that at the end of the day, if Martha had been able to "let go" of what her sister was doing, the glow on both of their faces might have told "men" that both of the women had "been with Jesus" that day.

After the Resurrection, Jesus appeared to the disciples on the shore of Galilee and revealed to Peter at that time the kind of death he was to undergo for the sake of his Lord. Immediately, Peter looked over at John and said, "but what about him, Lord?" Jesus' answer to Peter was, "If I want [John] to stay here until I come back, what business is that of yours?" In his Gospel, John is quick to point out that Jesus did not say that John would remain here until the Lord returns, but only if I want him to remain here....

In other words, what other people are doing is not our concern if only we ourselves are doing what we are "told" to do by the will of God in our lives and in our inspirations. Mary said to the servants at Cana: Do whatever He tells you. And what He told them to do was not what He was later to tell His disciples to do---go into the whole world, baptizing.....and teaching....

deCaussade points out that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph all had objectively different roles to fulfill, and that each one "achieved sanctity" by perfectly fulfilling the role he/she had been given by the providence of God. That's probably worth thinking about.

Flannery O'Conner: The Realist

2011-12-10T04:00:00.000-08:00

I have recently re-discovered Flannery O'Conner, the Southern novelist who died in 1964, just as Vatican II was making its way into the modern world. As a long time fan of her novels, I have just begun reading her letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald, in A Habit of Being.

O'Conner makes me laugh out loud, think deeply, and groan at the truth of her insight into our culture, particularly the culture of the South, in which she was so deeply immersed and which she portrays so well in her short stories and novels.

In O'Conner, the deepest truth is enfleshed in the coarsest realities of life; the heroes are often the villians and the crazies. The "normal" people are those most in need of salvation. She turns the world upside down, with a purpose. I think she is a modern saint, although she would (and did) bristle at the very idea.

Here is a sample of her letters, as delicious as any novel I've read:

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband....She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife....Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversaton turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

You see what I mean.

Wisdom Sets Her Table

2011-12-09T05:25:00.000-08:00

The Spirit of Wisdom, in the Book of Proverbs portrayed as the Feminine Face of the Divine Presence, is subtle, gracious, welcoming, warm, and true.

She "delights in mankind," builds a house, prepares her meat and mixes her wine, sends out her maids and calls from the "highest point of the city:"

Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed...

For through me your days will be many,

and years added to your life.

Folly is also portrayed as a woman who sits at the door of her house and cries out: Let all who are simple come in here! she says to those who lack judgment. Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious! But little do they know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of the grave.

In the parable of the Wedding Banquet, Jesus portrays the king as setting the table and preparing a feast and sending out his servants to "those who had been invited," but they refused to come. So he sends his servants to the street corners to invite "anyone you find,...both good and bad." The only requirement for those who attend is that they allow themselves to be clothed with the "wedding garments" provided by the king himself. Those who attend in their own clothes are thrown out into the darkness.

"But these are good clothes," I can just hear the thrown-out ones saying; "I got them from L.L.Bean/ Macy's/Goldman Sacs," little realizing how many of the dead have been buried in similar garments.

The Book of Sirach (found only in Catholic Bibles) is a study in the kind of food provided by Wisdom; if it is true that we are what we eat, then what we have eaten all our lives will become incarnate---made flesh in our bodies. I love that the Book of Genesis portrays sin as "eating" from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil----that is, taking into our flesh, making incarnate in our own bodies---the fruit of experience.

Wisdom, on the other hand, is a "tree of life to those who find her." In cultivating her, you labor but little, and soon you will eat of her fruits (Sirach 6:20). And those who eat of her fruits will wear "gladness and a festive crown;" they will be clothed from on high with "knowledge and full understanding." For the Lord ... has poured her forth upon all his works, upon every living thing according to his bound; he has lavished her upon his friends (Sirach 1:8-9).

St. Seraphim said that everything we do in the spiritual life, whether prayer, fasting, good works, etc---all have the same aim and only that---to be clothed from above with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom and Truth. That sort of cuts through all recommended religious practice to the core of the spiritual life; we will all have different paths to obtaining wisdom, but to be clothed with wisdom, to eat from her table, is at the end to enjoy a feast and to be clothed with joy.

The Good Shepherd II

2011-12-06T02:39:00.000-08:00

When Jesus said, I am the Good Shepherd (Jn. 10), the Jews hearing his words knew that he was referring to Ezekiel 34; they had studied the Scriptures since childhood and knew them intimately---Scripture was (and is) to them LIFE itself. We are not as fortunate, so Jesus' words tend to fall into a vacuum for us; we have no context---even for the image of sheep and shepherd, much less any historical background to hear what Jesus is saying to us today.

If we read Ez. 34, our hearts should break at its truthfulness, even today:

Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: This is what the Sovereign [Yahweh] says:

Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals...They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them....

For this is what the Sovereign [Yahweh] says:

I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness....I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements of the land. I will tend them....there they will lie down in good grazing land, and there they will feed in a rich pasture...I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign [Yahweh]. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak....

If we do not know these words from Ezekiel, it is hard to know the heart of God, the Good Shepherd, who Himself will take on the task of "binding up" and "strengthening" the flock of Israel, His people--and not only of Israel, of course, but of all who belong to Him.

Last week, I met a young woman from Japan aboard a cruise ship. She was very wise in the ancient healing arts of acupuncture and Oriental medicine/ herbs. I sought out her wisdom about balance in my own body, since I had experienced cancer and was interested in whatever inbalance might be going on as a result. In our conversation, she determined circulation problems, which I have known about all my life---but she also seemed to think I might suffer from stress and anxiety as a result.

When I told her that I spent time in prayer and meditation daily, her eyes opened wide. She was amazed that I am not taking any medicine at all, given my medical history, and she was ready to attribute that to my habit of meditation, as well as to the fact that I spend a great deal of time gardening. However, she told me that in Japan, there is no God. "We believe in the spirit," she told me, "but not in God." She believed that my practice of meditation strengthened the spirit in me, which in turn strengthened the body.

I do not discredit her belief in any way; I have a great deal of respect for Oriental wisdom and discernment, believing that our Western world still has much to learn from the East. However, after I left her, I began to grieve in my spirit for all those who may never know/ experience the tender care of the Good Shepherd. I, too, believe in the spirit she was talking about----and of course, the teaching of Buddhism is that we must all care for our "inner man." But so many people will never get there----I know, because there was a time when I tried with everything in me to nourish the spirit in me: I tried yoga, meditation, Unitarianism, questioning and listening to yogis, thinking positive thoughts, etc. I have to say that all these efforts were in vain the moment I left that quiet space and deep breathing practice. Unlike Buddhist monks and practioners, I did not have the luxury of remaining in nirvana, of shutting out the rest of the world. I needed to be attentive to a household, a husband, and young children---though God knows I did not do a very good job of that either. However, God Himself saw my search and sent someone to give me what I was looking for---a young 20-year old girl who was willing to share with me her own search and the answer she found.

It was only when she prayed for me to receive the Holy Spirit, the Spirit flowing from the heart of God through the ministry of His only Son, that I found the joy and peace that I could not give myself, but that only God could give to me. At last, I began to learn that everything is "received," not "achieved." He Himself is the Shepherd of the sheep; only He can make us lie down in green pastures.

Sheep are dumb, even when it comes to finding their own food, and defending themselves against enemies. In A Shepherd Looks at the 23rd Psalm, the author (now forgotten) applies every line of that psalm to the reality of sheep and shepherding; what a revelation of how much care we need and how little equipped we are to do for ourselves what needs to be done!

My heart breaks for those who do not know the Good Shepherd, not because I think they will not "go to heaven" or "be saved," not because I think they are evil or "lost," but only because I know from experience that everything they do for themselves must come from their own efforts---and I know how hard it is to maintain those efforts. We are all weak, and in a sense, dumb, when it comes to knowing how to take care of our own spirits. It is so good to be able to "cast your cares upon the Lord, for He cares for [us]." It is so good to be able to truly say with Jehoshaphat, ...we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you (2 Chronicles 20: 12).

I have heard many times, "God helps those who help themselves," and I grant that saying is practical---we might even say "country"---wisdom. However, it is not Biblical wisdom. Biblical wisdom says that God helps those who cannot help themselves, those who seek, those who ask, those who knock---to them, the door is opened.

Blackmail!

2011-11-26T04:02:00.000-08:00

Watching Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids last night, a sure way to put me to sleep. One young bride had 3 bridesmaids, all close friends she really wanted in her wedding. One of the bridesmaids held her friend and the other 2 bridesmaids hostage to her selfishness. She did not like long dresses, so no one could wear a long dress. If she did not like the selection, she made it clear that she would not be in the wedding. Because of their long friendship, the bride really wanted her friend in the wedding and it was clear that the wedding would not be the same without her friend.

Unfortunately, the selfish girl did not like any dress she tried on. As the day wore on, she became more and more adamant that she would not be in the wedding: "I do not like this dress" was her constant refrain. "I'm doing ____ a favor, and she knows that I won't do it unless I like the dress."

The young bride was beside herself with worry. Finally, a dress that "looked good" on the selfish girl. That was the dress that everyone else had to wear, and everyone was happy in the end. The bride had absolutely no say about color, length, or style---it was all about what the bridesmaid wanted.

C.S. Lewis points out that there are loveless and self-imprisoned people who attempt to blackmail the universe: until they consent to be happy (on their own terms), no one else will taste joy; theirs is the final power---that hell should veto heaven.

In The Great Divorce, Lewis says that the day will come when joy prevails and the miserable will no longer be able to infect it, when the makers of misery can no longer destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. The weapon used by the selfish against those who have pity on them will eventually be broken. The weapon of the good will change darkness into light and evil into good in the end--but it will not impose on the good the tyranny of evil. It will not transform the garden of the world into a pile of stinking refuse for the sake of those who cannot abide the smell of roses.

Clearly, the young bride on Say Yes cherished her friendship above all material concerns, and I salute her for the values she exhibited. But it was hard to see how long the friendship would endure when the bridesmaid herself did not hold the same values, and seemingly cared nothing at all about the wishes and concerns of the other two bridesmaids. I think the day will come that the selfish bridesmaid will find herself standing all alone in the dress she has chosen above all else.

Christian or non-Christian?

2011-11-23T06:04:00.000-08:00

The one principle of hell is---"I am my own." (George MacDonald)

In C. S. Lewis' autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he traces his long and very gradual conversion from atheism to belief, at one point commenting, And so the great Angler played His fish, and I never dreamed the hook was in my tongue.

Later, in writing Mere Christianity, he was to say this, based on his own experience:

The world does not consist of 100% Christians and 100% non-Christians. There are people who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name; some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There ae people in other religions who are being led by God's secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it....Many of the good pagans long before Christ's birth may have been in this position. And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together. Consequently, it is not much use trying to make judgents about Christians and non-Christians in the mass.

It is some use comparing cats and dogs, or even men and women, in the mass, because there one knows definitely which is which. Also, an animal does not turn (either slowly or suddenly) from a dog into a cat. But when we are comparing Christians in general with non-Christians in general, we are usually not thinking about real people whom we know at all, but only about two vague ideas which we have got from novels and newspapers.

Lewis' experience and concept is a good reminder to anchor our ideas in the concrete. As Flannery O'Connor reminds us, if we fail to grasp the details rightly, the principle will always elude us.

The Service of God

2011-11-22T04:34:00.000-08:00

The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Matt. 20:28)

He is the exact image of the invisible God....For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things...(Col. 1:15, 19).

Jesus, the Servant of man, is the Mirror reflecting on earth what is already in heaven---that is, that God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, is the servant of mankind, ministering daily to the sons of men out of His glorious riches in heaven.

The ancient Babylonian creation myths portrayed the gods creating mankind to act as servants to the gods. Pagan religions, from the beginning, held that the gods wanted to be fed---with grain, with wine, with the sacrifice of our bodies and of our children. When visiting the Aztec ruins of Mexico, we discover that blood sacrifice from both priests and priestesses was demanded: a sacrifice of blood from their own bodies, too horrible to contemplate.

Even in the Old Testament, the God of Israel asked for animal and grain and oil sacrifice---probably as a way to feed the priests and to keep people from manufacturing their own ideas of what He wanted as sacrifice. Indeed, when they began to sacrifice their own children to Molech, in imitation of their pagan neighbors, He was enraged.

But gradually, through the prophets, Yahweh began to wean His people away from sacrifice and to teach them that He Himself would feed them, instead of the other way around. Jesus was able to teach His disciples to ask the Father for their daily bread and to deliver us from evil---in other words, to depend on the Father for our daily lives. Even by the time of David, God had already revealed Himself as Minister and Caretaker---a Good Shepherd to the needs of men. Psalm after psalm cries out testimony to the One Who Serves man:

But I call to God, and the Lord saves me.

Evening, morning, and noon

I cry out in distress,

and he hears my voice.

He ransoms me unharmed from the battle waged against me....

Cast your cares upon the Lord, and he will sustain you (Ps. 55).

Praise be to the Lord, to God our Savior,

who daily bears our burdens (Ps. 68).

We all recognize that eating once in awhile is not enough to sustain our lives; we must be fed constantly in order to live. God's ministry to us is constant and on-going; He bends low to hear our cry and to meet our daily need. And if He asks us to serve Him, it is that we may imitate Him by serving his "sheep." Jesus asked Simon Peter to "feed [His] sheep."

Jesus called Himself The Good Shepherd, One who came to tend the flock that could not tend themselves---sheep have no claws, no sharp teeth, with which to defend themselves. They are not even able to find food for themselves unless they are led to a tableland. Without the Shepherd, they are totally defenseless and cannot survive.

It is easy to think of Jesus this way, because we have learned this image from childhood. It is harder to realize that He is the exact Image of the invisible God, His Father. He does exactly what He sees the Father doing. He said that He came to do the work of God. By studying who He is, we finally begin to believe in the daily ministry of God to us.

"Something else"

2011-11-21T05:15:00.000-08:00

We will never save civilization as long as civilization is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.

--C.S.Lewis: Mere Christianity

A few days ago, I wrote about Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary of the United Nations until his death in 1961. I said that he, as a shy mystic, was an unlikely candidate for politics. His aim was not to change the world or to reform mankind, but only to live out his life in the integrity of his soul and to answer the summons of his God, no matter where it led.

God can use such a man as this at the highest levels of earth's endeavors.

The ancient poet Rumi said it this way: The lovers of God have no religion but God alone. And Oswald Chambers: There is a difference between devotion to a Person and devotion to principles or to a cause. Our Lord never proclaimed a cause: He proclaimed personal devotion to Himself.

As long as our hearts are set on pilgrimage, we have no idea where we may be led. It is when we stop to build permanent dwellings, towers of Babel wherein "we may make a name for ourselves," that we forget what we are about and begin to concentrate on kingdom-building. The story of Abraham's call follows immediately upon the story of Babel and is meant to be a contrast in every respect to the former story.

The men of Babel had discovered a new "technology" for making and hardening bricks. With this new technology, they discovered they could build higher structures: Come, they said, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and so make a name for ourselves.

Abraham, by contrast, was called out of a great city with even a library (we now know) of ancient wisdom to "a land I will show you." If he would respond and go to a place he did not know, God promised to make of you a great nation....and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing...and all the communities of the earth shall find a blessing in you (Gen 12:2).

Our aim cannot be to reform the world, but only to "do whatever he tells you." For God alone is the builder and the destroyer of kingdoms: unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Jesus said, "Without Me, you can do nothing." And Paul would later say, "I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me."

In trying to convert the Greeks, "the lovers of disputation," Paul became discouraged and "resolved to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified." Paul discovered that the weakness/helplessness of God was greater than the strength of mankind.

Psalm 37:11 says The meek shall inherit the earth. Now the definition of "meek" is not "weak;" it is more like the idea of a thoroughbred race horse with tremendous energy that can be controlled by the jockey; it is directed and submissive energy, not dissipated, but directed toward the goal of a higher intelligence.

Psalm 37 is too long to quote here, but the entire psalm is a beautiful meditation on meekness and trust, on "being still" and "waiting on God." It could form the prayer of a lifetime reflection if we let its words form our inner being. If our aim is to change ourselves, and to become meek, God can use us to change the world.

God's Delight

2011-11-20T05:51:00.000-08:00

In the end, that Face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised. I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it is related to how He thinks of us. It is written that we shall "stand before" Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God...to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness...to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son---it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

--from The Weight of Glory by C.S.Lewis

How is it that we can "delight" God? When I think of the mother of children, I can see it. Her face turns daily on the child who delights her heart. Her delight is not diminished by the exhaustion of getting up all night, nor by the mess that needs to be cleaned up almost hourly. I see her concern as the children grow and tend to choose unwise paths, leading them almost to destruction at times, and I see the terrible expression on her face at those who threaten harm to her beloved children. I see her anger when the children are threatening to destroy themselves---because they are destroying that which she sees as precious, valuable and irreplaceable, that which she loves more than words can tell.

In Chapter 8 of the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom [i.e., the Sprit of God] speaks out as a Mother and Teacher:

...when He established the heavens I was there,....

when he set for the sea its limit...

Then was I beside him as his craftsman,

and I was his delight day by day,

Playing before him all the while,

playing on the surface of his earth;

and I found delight in the sons of men.

So now, O children, listen to me;

instruction and wisdom, do not reject!

Happy the man who obeys me,

and happy those who keep my ways,

Happy the man watching daily at my gates,

waiting at my doorposts;

For he who finds me finds life,

and wins favor from the Lord;

But he who misses me harms himself;

all who hate me love death.

God has asked only one thing of us---to make time and space for Him in our lives, to listen "at His doorposts," to "watch daily at [Her] (Wisdom's) doorposts" to learn from her, to "win favor from the Lord." If we do this, we will be instructed by Wisdom and thus delight the Lord. Those who hate Wisdom and instruction "love death" and those who love death will see the Face of God which is 'the terror of the Universe," in the words of C.S.Lewis.

It is not the children who fall seven times a day who need fear God, for Scripture says that the 'just' man falls seven times a day, but out of them all, the Lord helps him. It is rather those who spurn instruction, who cannot or will not learn from their falls that the Lord despises. From the story of the Prodigal Son, we know how the father delighted in the return of his son, never minding what transpired in the meantime, but rejoicing instead to throw a big party and to re-clothe the boy in the garments of ownership. The son reflected on the state he was in and recognized that he was worse off in rebellion than he had been in obedience. He learned instruction and wisdom. He thought his father would be angry with him and make him undergo a time of testing to be received back into favor. How surprised and humbled he must have been at the father's "delight" at his return, with no questions asked!

What will God think of us in the end? Which will be the Face of God turned upon us? I think it will not depend on how many times we fell, but on how willing we were to listen and to learn. In that way, He will be able to delight in us as an artist delights in his work, or a father his son, because as we sit at His feet, he is able to pour Wisdom into our very souls.

God Meets Our Deepest Needs

2011-11-17T06:01:00.000-08:00

Beyond our most basic needs on the physical level, each one of us has three very basic psychological needs---every human being has the need for (1) acceptance, (2) a sense of competence, and (3) confidence. Once those needs are confirmed, we are ready to assume our role in the universe. Until we have a deep-down assurance in these three areas, we cannot step forward with any strength to change or to improve our world. God has sent His Spirit of Truth into the world, into our hearts, to convict us, to convince us, to meet our deepest psychological needs so that we can then become His gift to other people:

When Jesus entered into His public ministry, He was openly inaugurated by John the Baptist, who proclaimed Him "the Lamb of God," the One John was sent to testify for, "the One Who existed before me." John said, Now I have seen and testified that He is the Son of God.

At the baptism of Jesus, the heavens opened, the Spirit of God descended, and a Voice from heaven proclaimed, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

Before we ourselves can take up a public ministry, whether it is teaching, the realm of politics, or caring for infants, it is important that we have received within ourselves the approval, the affirmation from God that we ourselves are beloved, that we are His gift to others, that we are "sent" by Him to heal, to teach, to repair, to raise up, to tear down (see the call of Jeremiah, Chapter 1: 4-10). Jeremiah knew that from his mother's womb, he had been appointed a prophet to the nations.

Once we know that God has accepted us, has appointed us, has sent us for a certain reason, we are not likely to be persuaded by the flattery or deceptions of men. We know what we have to do; it is the Spirit in us that drives us forth. We do not need or crave the approval of men; whether they criticize us or whether they flatter us, it makes little difference to our course of action. I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing is our deepest feeling. We know we could probably be earning more money, or pursuing fame, or whatever, but none of that appeals to us when we know we are on the appointed course for our lives. We may not have put it in so many words, but we know deep down that God is pleased; we are about our Father's business.

Such a man was Dag Hammarskjold, Secreatry-General to the United Nations from his election in 1953 to the time of his death in 1961. An unlikely candidate to be in the public eye, H. was shy, retiring, and deeply spiritual. His journal, published posthumously, revealed his deep commitment to God who summoned him to public ministry, and the integrity of his soul. Knowing that he was beloved by God, and sent by God, he responded with every fiber of his being to the task he was given---to bring peace among nations. He knew he would die fulfilling his mission, but he abandoned himself to the God who loved him beyond all measure.

This man was a saint, though not a canonized one. His life shows the power of one who has accepted God's acceptance of his life, and who moves forward knowing that he is competent because God has made him so. His confidence was in the power of God who sent him to the nations. He knew that he would be given everything necessary to accomplish the task he had been given.

Without this sense that we are the Beloved, the Sent, the Prophet---in our own small ways, we are likely to be blown about by every wind of deceit and foolishness, swayed by the arguments and persuasions of man, open to bribes and flattery, and in the end, completly ineffective in our mission. We may have confidence in our own abilities, but our confidence will be shattered and undermined by the betrayal of other men. If God Himself is not our confidence, we cannot stand.

Water and Spirit

2011-11-16T04:20:00.000-08:00

In teaching a Confirmation class, I often ask the students to describe themselves in terms of water---what kind of water would they be? I get wonderful answers from them: ocean, open sea, river with rocks, quiet stream, estuary with baby fish, different forms of rain---and one student described himself as "a light coming through the mist."

The reason I ask them to do this is to try moving beyond physical appearance, beyond intellectual gifts and strengths, into the realm of spirit. As a painter, I know when painting water that it must reflect what is immediately above it. In open waters, we see the condition of the sky above, clear or overcast. In more secluded bodies of water, we see trees or the color of birds reflected. In that respect, water is a wonderful analogy for the spirit God has placed in us.

No one has ever described him/herself to me in terms of stagnation, dirty pond scum that reflects nothing above, but only contamination below. Like ponds with no outlet, however, people that live only for and to themselves tend to grow stagnant, without life. Eventually, very little can live in stagnant, non-moving water, and the water can no longer reflect what is above and around it; it is closed in on itself.

If we open ourselves to gaze at the visible world with love and attention, it has much to teach us about the invisible and spiritual world. Psalm 19 says it directly:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or langauge

where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.

Again, St. Ignatius of Loyola, echoes the thought of Psalm 19 and carries it one step further:

Consider that God, your benefactor, is present in all creatures and in yourself.

If you look at every step of the visible creation, in all you will meet God.

God is in you; and, collecting all these degrees of being scattered through the rest of creation,

God unites them in you.

There is a reason that mankind is called "Homo sapiens---wise creature, or wise man." Alone among all the creatures, mankind has the ability to gaze with love on the created world, to appreciate its lessons and beauty, and to see meaning in it. God unites all of creation in the soul of man; He uses creation, if we care to observe, to teach wisdom to man. If we want to understand the spiritual world that we cannot see, we must learn to look deeply into the visible world before us. If we want to assume our role as co-creators with God, we must become contemplative beings.

The more we "look with love," the more we see, and the more we are able to see. Out of our awareness and understanding emerges the ability to see even more, and to make wise choices for ourselves and our world. God can use each one of us as a "base of operation" to bless the entire world---but first, the deep waters within us must begin to as clearly as possible reflect the world above us.

The Promise of a Reward

2011-11-15T05:01:00.000-08:00

While I do not believe in bribing children to do the right thing, I do believe in rewarding them for behaviors we want to become habit. Giving children something they desire in exchange for good grades probably does not really influence moment-by-moment behaviors too much, but it serves to recognize that they have made consistent effort that "pays off" in the end. And eventually, the reward of studying for its own sake replaces the dangling carrot that may have begun the process.

It has been said that Virtue is its own reward, but few of us are astute enough to understand that truth before we acquire virtue, just as children cannot see at first the inherent rewards of good behavior and good manners. Something must motivate us to turn from the easy path that leads to destruction and to enter onto the more difficult way of 'perfection.' Usually, it is only when we begin to experience the pain caused by our own selfish or foolish choices that we finally determine to change the way we are doing things.

For some people, the promise of an eternal reward---or the threat of eternal suffering---may be enough to motivate good behavior, but for most of us, "pie in the sky" is a bit too remote to restrain us from the immediate gratification that's right in front of us now. When Jesus came to "call sinners" and heal the sick, He came first to the down-trodden and the suffering. The "reward" He offered was immediate: He offered a 'way out' of their current mess. He did not say, Be good, and you will be rewarded in heaven, although He did promise that for those who followed Him, their reward would be very great.

In the Book of Genesis, God tells Abraham: Do not be afraid, Abram; I am your shield, your very great reward (Gen. 15:1). Would that God be able to say to each one of us, I am your very great reward, and that we would grasp the truth of His words to us! But we are still children in the spiritual life; somehow, the idea of God Himself being our reward does not appeal so much. We are still clinging to the dangling carrots of this life. We still need a way out of our current suffering; we need healing from our immediate pain; we need a promise of something-better-than-this ____ [fill in the blank]. Someone once said that God comes to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.

To those who are hurting, God shows compassion and healing. To the disciples, God shows "what they must suffer" for Him (Acts 9:16). Oswald Chambers put it this way: The disciple is one in whom self-interest and pride and self-sufficiency have been completely erased. The disciple is someone who has learned gradually that God Himself is the great reward, someone who does not care about the 'golden streets of heaven' as much as he cares about entering into the 'joy of his master,' a reward that begins even now, in this life.

Receiving Truth

2011-11-14T04:58:00.000-08:00

You, Lord, are near to all who call upon you,

to all who call upon you in truth (Ps. 145:18).

The time is coming, and is now here, when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem...but true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth;

and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him.

God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth (Jn. 4:21-24).

for John baptized with water, but in a few days, you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:5).

"It will come to pass in the last days," God says, " that I will pour out a portion of my spirit upon all flesh...and it shall be that everyone shall be saved who calls on the name of the Lord" (Acts. 2: 17-21).

Anyone who calls on the name of the Lord in truth will receive the Spirit of truth and of revelation.

From the beginning of time, it was said that "men began to invoke the Lord [in Hebrew, Yahweh] by name" (Gen. 4:26). Later, in the Book of Exodus, we find that God revealed His Name to Moses, and Moses passed on the Name of the Lord to the Israelites, in a formal and permanent way. That event evidently does not preclude the fact that generations before Moses also knew the Name of the Lord and were able to call upon Him, but now the nation as a whole knows and calls upon the Name Yahweh.

When Job's friends accused him of blasheming God for his cries, he answered them: How can that be when I feel the Spirit of God in my nostrils? (Job 27:3). Job may not have understood the theology of what was happening to him, but he did know and recognize the Spirit of the Lord in his life, and he knew in his heart that God had not abandoned him.

Here is my point> those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and holiness will receive the Spirit of truth; God still breathes His Spirit and His truth into the nostrils of those who seek Him. When we are not attentive to God, we will not recognize the truth, but those who seek him, whether Christian or pagan, will receive revelation. We know that those who heard the Apostles' testimony on the day of Pentecost were from all nations and tongues, all customs and practices---but they were "cut to the heart" and asked what they needed to do, and they all received the same answer: Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will receive the promised Holy Spirit. In other words, revelation came to those who sought the truth.

In the same way, the Roman Centurian Cornelius, not a member of the Jewish community, but a true seeker of God, received a vision from God telling him to send for Peter---and through Peter, whom God was preparing to go to Joppa, Cornelius would receive the revelation of truth about Jesus Christ.

If we truly seek God, we will never be disappointed. We will receive that which we seek. People sometimes bristle at the Scriptures which say there is no other name by which men will be saved---but what about those who have not heard the Name? God sends the Spirit of Truth to those who seek Him.

It is good to have heard the Gospel, as Paul says about the Jews: theirs are the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises (Romans (9:4). But God's revelation is not limited to those who have inherited all these things, for Paul goes on to point out the words of the prophet Hosea:

those who were not my people I will call 'my people,'

and her who was not beloved I will call 'beloved.'

and in the very place where it was said to them, 'You are not my people,'

there they shall be called children of the living God (Rom. 9: 25).

If we / anyone will but make time and space in our lives to seek God, God will do everything else. He is no respecter of persons, but gives equally to all who seek Him. The Book of Hebrews tells us that God rewards those who seek Him (11:6). In some ways, it's so simple: the reason the poor, the meek, and the lame will enter first into the kingdom is that they are the first to seek God--He is their only resource. James says, "Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you" (4:8). And I John says this: But his annointing teaches you about everything and is true and not false (2:27).

Those who seek God will find Him, and He in turn will pour out His Spirit of truth into their hearts.

Spiritual energy

2011-11-13T05:20:00.000-08:00

Finally, draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power.

Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil.

For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens (Ephesians 6:10-12).

Our modern and scientific age congratulates itself on no longer being subject to fear and superstition about heavenly powers----the gods are angry when volcanoes erupt or lightening strikes, for example. Unfortunately, with our enlightenment also came disbelief, or at least discredit to, spiritual powers and energies.

Now, however, even science is beginning to discover that the physical world is dominated by unexplained energy---things that we cannot explain. For example, some years ago, scientists began to notice while experimenting with light waves/particles that different results would be obtained from the experiment depending on whether there were observers in the room during the experiment or not. The presence of observers who did nothing but "be there," not moving, but just watching, seemed to affect the outcome of the experiment.

Einstein, for one, just could not believe that the universe did not operate according to strict and unchanging laws of physics. Baffled by what science eventually came to call "chaos theory," that is, that physical phenomena is not always predictable, but change with circumstances, Einstein for years resisted his observations. At one point, he actually changed his mathematical data because he could not accept his own findings. His "error" was caught by other scientists replicating his formulae and experiments, leading finally to Einstein's classic E=mc2 formula.

Now we are slowly beginning to accept that our own spiritual energy affects not only those around us, but physical phenomena. Experiments in Russia over 3 decades ago revealed even that crops growing in the field responded more to the experimental team than to any 'fertilizer' applied.

Jesus said, For them do I sanctify myself. He spoke a "scientific" as well as a spiritual truth. Our own spiritual energy radiates, or fails to radiate, to those around us. Our own spiritual energy commands and controls more than we ever imagined what happens in the physical realm. Star Wars tapped into this reality with its powerful "May the Force be with you!"

But our own energy is not manufactured by us; the best we can do is to receive it from the Source. The sun radiates its own energy without fail to the earth, providing it constantly with light and warmth and renewal. If we fail to "soak up" the healing rays of the sun, it is because we are soaking up something else---television, video games, bars and lounges, drugs, etc. One of the reasons the casinos create a universe of their own--without windows, with constant noise and clatter, with artifical flashing lights--is to keep its inhabitants captive and away from the natural world of sunrise, sunset, light, waves, birds, etc. Nature is a sacrament of the Presence and Action of God, of spiritual renewal, wisdom, and energy---just what the casinos do not want people to experience!

The "world rulers of this present darkness" know that if they can keep people from "drawing [their] strength from the Lord and from his mighty power," they can command and control the physical realm with the powers of darkness, "with the evil spirits in the heavens." It's too bad we no longer believe in these evil spirits, for by rejecting belief in them, we have also rejected our belief in the power and strength of the Holy Spirit to command and control---through us---the rest of existence.

Those who walk in the light, who renew their spirits by observation of the natural world and by prayer, who open their hearts to receive the Spirit of God, will inherit the earth---and that's no longer just poetry; it's now science too.

Living Goodness

2011-11-11T04:20:00.000-08:00

God does not love us because we are good;

God's love makes us good (Source unknown).

We do not have to be good before God loves us; we do not have to try to be good before God forgives us; we do not have to repent before we are absolved by God.

It is all the other way around---if we are good, it is because God's love has made us so.

If we want to try to be good, it is because God is loving us.

If we want to be forgiven, it is because God has forgiven us.

God's love can do terrible things to us; it may make us kind and considerate and loving.

---Fr. Herbert McCabe, God, Christ, and Us

If we want to see living examples of McCabe's words, we need only look around us---or at the Gospels. Matthew was a tax-collector, a sinner against the entire Jewish nation, his own people, but the love-glance of Jesus was all it took for him to abandon his table in the market-place and become a disciple, an apostle, a Gospel-writer.

Zacchaeus was a scoundrel and a cheat, but the love of Jesus for him made him give back four-fold all that he had taken unjustly. Mary Magdalene saw the face of her Lord and wept profusely at her sins, wiping his feet with her hair.

How many of us were going our own way, determined to have our own way, until the love of God caught us and changed our minds and hearts? How many people have tried to reform their lives without success until they were set free by the love of God given to us in Jesus Christ?

St. Martin of Tours, who died in 397, was an officer in the Roman army, serving in France, when he saw a shivering beggar dressed in rags. Martin cut his warm cloak in half and gave half to the beggar. That night, he had a dream---Jesus was wearing the other half of his cloak.

His encounter with the love of God in the poor convinced him that the way of love was the way of non-violence. He asked for discharge from the army and was accused of cowardice. He then volunteered to go into battle at the front of the line, unarmed. Instead, he was imprisoned, but not executed.

Upon his release, he became a monk and eventually a bishop, during the time when it was thought that heretics should be tortured and executed. His mission against violence continued in peace-making, intervening for heretics until he himself was accused of heresy.

Those who have truly encountered the Risen Jesus in His Love will know from their hearts the words of Is. 58:6-7:

Is this not, rather, the fast that I choose:

releasing those bound unjustly,

untying the thongs of the yoke;

setting free the oppressed,

breaking off every yoke?

Is it not sharing your bread with the hungry,

bringing the afflicted and the homeless into your house;

clothing the naked when you see them,

and not turning your back on your own flesh?

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer,

you shall cry for help, and he will say: "Here I am!"

Receiving Light

2011-11-10T04:10:00.000-08:00

God holds in His hands every good thing. The “vocation,” or “call” of every human being is simply to walk toward God, to walk in the Light, to receive from Him the gifts of life and holiness (2 Peter, 1:3).

It is a biblical principal that when we turn from the Light to the Darkness, the earth mourns, and everything in it dries up. The movie The Lion King is a beautiful illustration of this principle. Under the just, the earth prospers; under the rule of the evil, the earth shrivels and shrinks; famine prevails throughout the land, and the peoples prey on one another.

Light is essential to life, both on the physical and the spiritual levels. The physical dimension that we can touch, see, and hear mirrors the spiritual and invisible, but no less powerful, dimension of the spiritual life.

Einstein discovered on the physical level that Life equals Energy. Today, scientists are trying to convert matter back into energy, but the primary maxim is that all life emerged from energy in the beginning. In fact, with the discoveries of “dark matter” and “dark energy”--- neither of which can be seen, we now know that what we do see around us comprises only 5 percent of the entire universe. What holds together that 5% is something we cannot see, feel, taste, or hear----energy.

Anyone who reads Ann Landers on a regular basis will recognize that there are those whose energy has become so depleted that they have become “black holes” on the spiritual level, sucking into themselves the energy, goodness, and light of all those around them. We know from space exploration that anything that draws close to a black hole will be consumed; there is no escape from its power and strength. The only solution is to avoid the magnetic fields around the black holes.

Fortunately, the Book of John tells us that Light has come into the world, and that the darkness has never overcome it. Anyone who walks in the Light cannot be drawn in by darkness, but will himself radiate the Light of the World. Jesus said, “I am the Light of the World. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (Jn. 8:12). In other places, Jesus tells his disciples that they are the 'light of the world,' and cannot be hidden. He also calls them "children of light" (Jn. 12:36).

As Jesus emerges from the wilderness at the start of His public ministry, Matthew’s gospel proclaims: the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light; on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death, light has arisen (Matt 4:16).

Since we cannot hope to manufacture the Light ourselves, it seems to me that we have only one choice in life: either we walk towards the Light, or we grovel in the dark. If we have become trapped by the magnetism of darkness, which draws in and destroys everything it its path, there is still hope---the Light of the World that has never been overcome; the Energy of Life and Goodness, the Source of everything that is---Jesus Christ, the Gift of God and the Life of Mankind!

No more posts until Nov. 7

2011-10-18T03:16:00.000-07:00

I will be "out of the office" until Nov. 7, but will continue pondering the mysteries of the universe until I return:)

The Greatest Distance

2011-10-17T03:30:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the greatest distance any of us has to travel is that long trek betwen the head and the heart (Katherine Marshall, The Helper)

Knowing of the love of God from teaching or from Scripture is head knowledge. Yet, before it warms our hearts and touches our emotions, something else has to happen. The love of God given to us in Jesus Christ is something that we have to experience--and only the Holy Spirit can give us that experience.

A few days after the Resurrection, Jesus sought out Peter, James, and John as they were fishing at the seashore. He prepared a meal for them, as they had been fishing all night. And when they had finished eating, Jesus said to Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you," replied Peter. Three times, Jesus asked, each time saying, "Feed my sheep."

After his Thursday night denial of Jesus before the crucifixion, Peter's feelings must have been those of guilt and inner turmoil----how could he ever again say that he loved Jesus, after what he had done?

But Jesus forced the words out of him, saying "feed my sheep" in response. I think what Jesus was doing was replacing the negative emotions carved so deeply into Peter's heart with another, even deeper experience. It has been said that we do not always say what we believe, but we always believe what we say. If we say it, from that time on, we tend to believe and to defend what we have said. Peter had said, in effect, that he did not love the Lord---but now he is saying that he does.

And Jesus give him a way to demonstrate his love from that moment forward---feed my sheep. "As I have fed you, you feed them," if I can paraphrase. It is easy to say that we love God; it is much harder to demonstrate it. But Jesus identified himself with the sheep; if we feed them, we feed Him; if we love them, we love Him.

This is something we don't have to over-think, rationalize, theorize about. The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. If we love our neighbor, we love God. If we don't love our neighbor, we don't love God. End of story. So we don't really need to examine our philosophy too much if we continue to examine our hearts and our actions toward those around us.

Kindle in us the fire of your love, O Lord!

more on Faith

2011-10-16T04:51:00.000-07:00

If faith is simply our give-and-take relationship with God through the action of the Holy Spirit, then seeking faith simply means that we go to Jesus and say, "Lord, speak to me about this situation. What do you want to tell me about this? Pull aside the veil of flesh and give me a look into the world of spirit. Let me see this situation through your eyes. What is your viewpoint? I wait for your insight on this."

At this point, according to Katherine Marshall's The Helper, we are not asking for a change in circumstances, just for inward revelation. Then we wait and listen and watch.

When that insight is given---Jesus' very personal word to me----then faith automatically follows. And in the wake of that quiet knowing, external events change.

I love, love, love this approach to prayer and faith. So many of us "try to believe," try to hope, try to trust----but what we are trying to believe, hope, and trust in is our own understanding of the situation, our own pronouncement, or judgment, of the way things should work. Once the Holy Spirit begins to quietly impress on our minds and hearts the understanding and the will of God, we no longer have to try to believe or trust----having God's judgment of the situation in our hearts brings a quiet peace and trust.

Proverbs 3: 5 says, Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
                                and lean not on your own understanding;
                                in all your ways, acknowledge Him,
                                and He will direct your paths.

Faith, then, means waiting, listening, trusting, until we receive the Word of the Lord for this situation. It is based on our on-going conversation with the Most High; it means hearing His voice and trusting that He cannot lead us astray. Abraham did not walk in his own understanding of where he should be going, but waited daily to hear the direction of God. His own understanding often led him astray, but in each case, God gently brought him back, not leaving him to his own viewpoint.

It is hard to follow in Abraham's footsteps, as we are impatient to "do" something to remedy the situation---but our doing often makes things worse because we "do" in our own understanding. Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest) says this: Our degree of panic is the degree of our lack of personal spiritual experience. Put another way, we might say that our degree of panic is the measure of our lack of faith, or listening, for God's understanding of our situation.

The Friends of God

2011-10-15T02:56:00.000-07:00

Without faith, it is impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6).

In reflecting on the story of Abraham, Paul came to the conclusion that Abraham received the promises of God not by works nor by obeying the law, but by faith, and therefore he is the father of those who trust God---our 'father in faith.' I remember hearing about faith for years and wondering how one "gets' faith, as though it were something to be obtained by some kind of effort on our part.

Looking back now, I begin to realize that faith is simply relationship with God who loves us. We "get" it in the same way we "get" all of our relationships---simply by spending time with God. That is why Abraham believed God---he spent a lot of time in the Presence of God. He walked with God, sat with God, stood with God. In fact, when God determined to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, He said to Himself, " Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, now that he is to become a great and populous nation, and all the nations of the earth are to find blessing in him?

In another place in the Bible, God says, "I do nothing without telling my prophets ahead of time." (I don't recall the reference.) And in the New Testament, Jesus says, "I no longer call you servants, but friends, because a servant does not know what his master is doing." We tend to keep up with our friends; if we do not know what they are doing, even though we may not have spoken in awhile, the friendship tends to dissolve. Obviously, God honors His relationship with us as friends. He confides in His friends; He continues to walk with His friends and does not leave or abandon them -- and He tells them what He is doing.

So now we know that faith-- or relationship with God--- is the one thing in our lives capable of bridging the chasm between the visible and the invisible worlds. Faith is the eyes and ears of the spirit, that see and hear what is not accessible to those without faith, or relationship, with God.

Faith is real; more "real" than the things we actually see around us, because those things are passing away, but God's reality stands forever. Revelation of what God sees and hears comes through the Spirit of Jesus still present in this world. He did not go back to heaven to watch from afar---He still walks with us, talks with us, breathes in us, loves in us, and reveals the Father to us:

No one comes to the Father but by me (Jn.6:65).

No one has ever seen God, but God, the only Son, who is at the Father's side, has revealed Him (Jn. 1: 18).

For the one whom God sent speaks the words of God; He does not ration his gift of the Spirit (Jn.3:34).

The father who sent me has testified on my behalf. But you have never heard his voice or seen his form, and you do not have his word remaining in you, because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent (Jn.5:37).

The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life (Jn. 6:63).

So faith is not "trying to believe," but it is simply hearing, seeing, receiving into our hearts the very words of God, given to us in THE WORD of God, Jesus Christ. Isaiah says, If they do not speak according to this word, what kind of wisdom will they have? If we do not spend time with God, we will not hear the words of God; we will not "see" what He is doing; we will not have faith, no matter what other words or wisdom we obtain.

If Jesus had not come in the flesh, we would think it impossible to be friends with God, but since He sat down to eat with His friends, since He slept in their boat, since He healed their mothers, sisters, and uncles, and since He taught them in the flesh, we have to believe that He wanted friendship with the rest of us too.

At Home With God

2011-10-13T04:16:00.000-07:00

Is there anywhere where you are not at home with God?

Let God press through in that particular circumstance until you gain Him,

and life becomes the simple life of a child.

(--Oswald Chambers: My Utmost For His Highest)

Jesus took on our flesh that we might take on His divinity. He took up our human nature that we could be "naked and unashamed" before God. If there is anything in us that is not comfortable in the Presence of God, that is the "sticking point" in our relationship with Him.

God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of sound mind (2 Tim. 1:7).

For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back again into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry "Abba, Father!" (Romans 8:15).

If we read the writings of all the saints, we find them entirely and confidently "at home" with God. They speak of Him and to Him with great confidence and no fear, only a holy reverence and awe. John the Apostle, who was probably about 17 when he met Jesus, always wrote about himself as "the disciple whom Jesus loved"----a kind of awe-some reverence and unbelief that he had been the object of such great love. Because of his youth, John, of all the Apostles, probably had the least "agenda" and the least life-experience. He was a sponge, soaking up the words of the Master.

The other Apostles had great love for the Lord, but had also been somewhat formed by their previous experiences. Jesus had to teach them to "become as little children" in His Presence, learning, learning, learning. Peter was a "man," zealous to defend his Lord---little realizing how little strength he really had in his own power.

We, too, because of our life experiences, tend to fashion our own worlds---but those worlds are not always compatible with the simple life of a child, who receives everything from its parents in perfect trust and confidence. We want to walk in our own strength---until we discover how little strength we actually do have.

Everything in us must come to feel at home with God. If there is any area where we believe we can "go it alone," in our own strength, we need to allow God to penetrate that area until He softens and gentles it. We need to give Him permission to work out those areas within us that hide from Him and resist His influence. We need to become simple children---learning, learning, learning from Him always.

fragmentation/de-fragmentation

2011-10-11T05:16:00.000-07:00

I understand almost nothing about computers----I just want them to work and get frustrated when they do not. Nor do I have the vaguest clue as to what I should do when they do not work.

For months, I have been getting a message from someone in cyber-space, telling me that I was using an outdated server that g-mail no longer supports and therefore, that some features of g-mail might not work. I had successfully ignored the message for some time, and suffered no consequences, except that I was not allowed to comment on the blogs of my friends, nor even respond to comments on my own blog---a small price to pay.

Finally, however, the persistent message began to make me wonder what I was missing by not "updating" my server to the latest technology, the biggest, and the best, that Explorer 8 had to offer, and I ultimately caved in to the offer to bring me into the 21st century. (In high school, my favorite teacher, Mr. Ryan, used to say, "If you throw enough mud against the side of the barn, some of it is bound to stick." Now I understand his home-spun wisdom.)

You probably already know the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to say: I pushed all the buttons that would convert my computer to something bigger and better----and as a result, my computer now runs more slowly, balks at my simple commands, and occasionally shuts itself down altogether in the middle of something important. To my knowledge, I have gained no advantage in exchange for the inconvenience. There is nothing greater I can do now than what I could do before; it's just more slow and more cumbersome and more frustrating now to complete the same tasks.

I know that now my computer probably needs to be "de-fragmented," whatever that means, and that I will probably have to take it to an expert to have it serviced. From the term "de-fragmented," I have to assume that whatever just happened "fragmented" my computer, making it less efficient than it was before the "update."

All of which has made me reflect on how sin operates on our spirits---we are moving along with the joy and innocence of childhood, when we begin to receive messages that tempt us to "update," to "become more relevant," to experiment with "something better" than we now have---we can have the whole world of technology, fun, pleasure, power at our fingertips; we can be "in control;" we can be "like gods!"

At first, we are hesitant; we wonder, "What's the cost?" "Can this harm me?" "Is it dangerous?"

"Of course not," says the hidden voice from beyond; everyone is doing it---no harm; no problem. It's just an "upgrade." And when we eventually yield, against our better judgment, we find ourselves fragmented, less efficient, less able to focus, to perform the usual tasks. Our energy is going to repair the damage instead of going forward. We are fragmented.

"Blessed are the pure of heart," said Jesus, "for they shall see God."

But sin fragments us; we are no longer pure of heart; we can no longer see God.
Our souls need de-fragmenting; we need cleansing from the impurities that have entered with our permission; we need a Technician whose clear vision and understanding can restore proper functioning to our lives.

Blessed be God; it has been given to us in Christ Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

The Promise of Joy

2011-10-10T03:57:00.000-07:00

I have told you these things that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete (Jn. 15:11)

St. Dominic Savio, the young boy, said to his friends: Joy is the unmistakable sign of the presence of God in us. I used to keep a picture of an old peasant Russian woman whose face was radiant with joy. The caption on the picture was this: If you want to steal my joy, come and get it in the hands of God.

Joy is known as one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, because we cannot manufacture it for ourselves; it is the result of the Spirit of God dwelling in us. Joy is not the circumstance of life flowing smoothly for us; it is the result of Christ's promise: In this world, you will have trouble, but be of good heart---I have overcome the world. The Holy Spirit gives us joy in whatever circumstances we have.

The Acts of the Apostles is full of two reports--the multiple problems faced by the early church and the overflowing joy of the early church. Peter and John were arrested after Peter's second sermon; a group of apostles were jailed and flogged; Stephen was stoned to death; Christians were hunted down and driven from their homes; James was beheaded; Peter was imprisoned by Herod.....

Yet, we find statements such as these: They partook of their food with gladness; they were constantly praising God; and the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

No wonder Jesus had warned them before His ascension into heaven not to leave Jerusalem until they were endued with power from on high! Man's determination can never produce the joy that overcomes persecution.

Jesus said that the reason He came was to destroy the work of Satan, the thief who comes to maim and destroy. While on earth, he continually released men and women from the bondage of Satan. The Lord of Life obviously did not delight in pain, sickness, insanity----he went about healing "all those who were in the grip of the devil." Imagine the joy He left in His wake!

Katherine Marshall's Prayer: Lord, you and I know that I am facing some difficult circumstances in my life, especially my concern about __________. As I ask for your perspective and Your thought on this problem, I begin to see that worry and fretting and thinking about all the negatives is not being the realistic pragmatist I had thought. In fact, You are telling me that when I wallow in "what-ifs" and discouragement and self-pity, I am ignoring You altogether.

As I turn to you, Lord, at this moment and spread this grief-problem out before You, I hear You say, "There's nothing here I can't handle. Why are you so troubled?" Your joy shines through these words, Lord. Let your joy be mine, too. I open my heart to it. Amen.

Controlled by the flesh/ Controlled by the Spirit.

2011-10-09T04:56:00.000-07:00

Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires;

but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.

The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace (Rom. 8:5).

The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritally discerned (I Cor. 2: 14).

The entire New Testament---after the death and resurrection of Christ----seems to revolve around the concept of the "natural man," the first-born, the one descended from Adam, vs. the "spiritual man," the second-born, the one descended from Jesus. When Jesus told Nicodemus that it was necessary for a man to be "born again," He was speaking about the birth of the second man:

If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. .... the spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that, the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man, from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so let us bear the likeness of the man from heaven. I declare to you...that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (I Cor. 44-50).

So how are we "born again" of water and the Holy Spirit? Genesis tells us that God fashioned the first man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and "man became a living being." In speaking to Nicodemus, Jesus likens being 'born of the Spirit' to the wind/ the breath of God. Nicodemus could not comprehend, even though he was a "teacher in Israel."

Later, John the Baptist's disciples complained to John that "everyone [was] going to [Jesus]" on the other side of the Jordan. John's answer was this: the one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony....the one God has sent speaks the words of God; to him God gives the Spirit without limit (John 3: 31-34).

Jesus took on the natural man, the first-born, the one whose mind was set (from the beginning) on the flesh, on what was hostile to God. This is the man (Adam) who died on the cross, who died as we do, slowly and painfully, in order that the second man, the spiritual man might rise from the earth.

In the desert at the outset of His ministry, Jesus died to Himself and to what the flesh craved---food, the easy way out, the ability to control---in order to receive from the Father what the Spirit desired---obedience, trust, helplessness/ reliance on God. He continued to walk for three years in the Spirit until the final moment of obedience, trust, helplessness. Descending into the earth, He was able to overcome the last enemy---death itself---and rise with the power of the Spirit. Now, breathing on the Apostles, He continues to breathe His very own life into us.

We walk no longer according to what the sinful flesh/mind desires, but by receiving from Him the breath of God, are empowered to live according to what the Spirit desires. Receiving from God the "Spirit without limit," He is now able to bring to new birth all who come to Him, those who trust Him to deliver us from the desires of the flesh, those of the natural man---the one who blames Eve, the one who kills Able, the one who seeks to make a name for himself (Tower of Babel).

Christ confers on those who come to Him the new birth, the Spirit of God.

Spirit of Truth

2011-10-07T05:19:00.000-07:00

Many people have rejected God the Father as the God of the Old Testament---although He came in the Person of Jesus Christ to reveal Who He Is in truth---the One who heals the leper, the outcast; Who lifts up from the dust the adulterous woman; who condemns those who condemned her; the One Who brings back into society the woman married 5 times and now living outside of societal norms; the One Who washes the feet of His friends on a daily basis; the One Who seeks out the sinner, the lame, the downcast, the tax-collecters, the simple.....

Jesus came primarily to embody the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of His Father in heaven. He was no longer satisfied that men would worship---and create--a God of their imaginations and fantasies. He wanted an I-thou, a face-to-face, encounter with mankind. Here I am, He calls out. You see Me; you touch Me; you do not draw back in fear of Me; you laugh with Me and cry with Me; you ask Me questions and receive true answers. No longer do you come by "rule upon rule," but with simplicity and truth, just as you are.

"He who sees Me sees the Father," says Jesus. Dare we believe that? Jesus is the Spirit and the exact Image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15 & 19, 2:9).

The revelation of the face of God did not stop with the death and resurrection of Jesus, but continues today through the Spirit of Truth. Jesus promised that if anyone loved Him, He would send to them the Spirit of Truth, who would teach us all things. The world cannot accept Him, according to Jesus, because it "neither sees him nor knows him," but "you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.....and you will see me, and....I will show myself to [you]" (Jn. 14:15-25).

Wow! on-going and continuous revelation of the Face of God through the Spirit of Truth. We may not now know the true God, but who would not want the Spirit of Truth who will reveal Him to us?

Jeremiah, seeing this day in the future, proclaimed it:

This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," says the Lord.

"I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God and they will be my people.

No longer will a man teach his neighbor,

or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,'

because they will all know me,

from the least to the greatest," declares the Lord (31:33).

This is the "New Covenant" that Jesus came to bring----the outpouring of the Spirit of Truth into each man's heart, the knowledge of the Face of God inside, rather than from the outside. And who will receive the Spirit of Truth?

In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll,

and out of gloom and darkness,

the eyes of the blind will see (Is. 29:18).

We are all blind and deaf when it comes to knowing God, but we do not have to continue in this state. Jesus promised the Spirit of Truth to all who would love Him, and He cannot lie or deceive. Our cry is to Him to send the promised Holy Spirit into our hearts, that we might know the truth and in knowing the truth, be set free from the lies of this world.

Lazarus, Come Forth!

2011-10-06T04:35:00.000-07:00

Our inner man is deadened by sin, both our own and those of others who have so wounded us that we have retreated into nothingness. But the Dynamo, the Energy, of the Universe calls us forth from the tomb, just as He called Lazarus who had been dead 4 days.

His Divine Voice does not rebuke us for having been buried so long, any more than God rebuked the original chaos of the world----He simply said, "Light, Be!" And it was so. He did not rebuke the blind man for his lack of sight, but simply touched his eyes, saying, "See!" And it was so.

The day we wake up from our sleep and "see" the Lord standing there beside us, we leap forth spiritually, forgetting how long we have been dead. Our spirits have eyes and ears to hear and see; we are waiting only for the Divine Voice to call us forth.

Jesus said this: I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself.

We spend a lot of our days rebuking ourselves for being blind and dead, when all the time we need to be listening for the Voice of Eternal Life to call us forth from the tomb. Lord, I await your call and I am ready to hear!

How Does God Love Us?

2011-10-05T03:01:00.000-07:00

God does not love us because we are good;

God's love makes us good

(unknown source).

C. S. Lewis points out in The Problem of Pain that a dog who has learned to love his master might wish that the master would tolerate the dog "just as he is," with his 'snapping, verminous, polluting' ways of the wild pack. The person who truly loves his dog will bathe the dog, brush him, feed him, and train him into an acceptable behavior----into someone who could live in the same house with the man, that is, and whose behavior would not repel others in the house. The dog who willingly submits to his master's wishes is a happy dog. The one who rebels does not even understand why he is so unhappy.

Like wild dogs, mankind has become adept through sin at hurting one another, either through carelessness or deliberate evil. God did not invent instruments of torture; man did. God gave us the freedom to be cruel, but He also told Cain that his brother's blood cried out to God from the ground. He cannot go on tolerating the cruelty of man. He must work at making us more loving and lovable.

Sometimes, when we have grown insensitive to others, it is only the experience of pain that will awaken our souls to the suffering of other people. God must allow us to be wounded in order to heal us, to make us sensitive to others. Prosperity is not enough to make us a blessing to others--when we have all we want (not including God), we tend to find God an interruption to our busy lives. We do not have time to listen to Him, to receive from Him.

Lewis quotes a friend of his who said, "We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies, but he hopes he'll never have to use it." But the truth is that, as human beings, we are at our creative best only when the Spirit of God is flowing freely through us to the world. Just as a dog is at his best when disciplined by man to express man's goodness, so we are at our best when we have been taught by God to express His love and creativity to those around us. This condition means that we are paying attention, that we are in communion with God so that He can express to us His will. Sometimes, in the midst of all our distractions, He has to get our attention so that He can give us the gifts He has to offer through us to others.

Integration and Disintegration

2011-10-04T05:37:00.000-07:00

According to Ronald Rolheiser, one of my favorite authors and thinkers, everyone has a spirituality, or a spiritual component---either a healthy or a destructive spirit. The function of a healthy spirit is two-fold: (1) it energizes us, and (2) it integrates all the parts of us into a whole.

(1) Energy: the word "enthusiasm" comes from the Latin roots "en"/ inside + "theos" (God)----literally God within. Genesis 2:7 says it this way: The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.

We live, or have energy, literally by the breath / (Hebrew-ruah) of God within us---and His breath/ ruah is not static, but moving. Other translations of ruah are "breeze, wind, zepher." When we are connected to the living God, we have LIFE, energy, breath. His breath, energy, life in us integrates our bodies, minds, emotions, and spirits so that we do not pull apart from the center, but work as a whole unit, as He designed us to work.

When sin/ disobedience enters the picture, as Genesis 2:17 tells us, when you eat of it, you will surely die, disintegration begins pulling us apart from our center.

The old King James translation "you will surely die" is an attempt to render into English what the Hebrew actually says: on the day you eat of it, dying, you will die. Because our translation into English is faulty, people for centuries have been trying to puzzle out what God meant---or if He lied----when He said, "on the day you eat of it, you will....die." What He said was "dying, you will die." Now it begins to make some sense.

When we fail to receive within ourselves the breath, energy, spirit of God, we begin to disintegrate and lose our energy---we begin to die by degrees. Genesis portrays sin as eating---taking some poison into our bodies so that we begin to disintegrate, not all at once, but little by little---passing on our disintegration to the next generation, where it disintegrates even more, and so on to the next generation. Finally, we get to Genesis 4, where Lamach says to his wives:

I will kill (or have killed) a man for wounding me,

a young man for injuring me.

If Cain is avenged seven times,

then Lamech seventy-seven times.

Genesis pictures sin as pulling apart from the center---lack of communion, harmony, with God, with our fellow man, and with nature. Lack of harmony in the first generation becomes hatred and murder in the second. Nature refuses its yield altogether by the time of Cain; he has to build a city because the ground is hardened against him, and "everyone who sees me will want to kill me."

Into this universe of hatred, misunderstanding, lack of harmony, God sends one man---Abraham--who will begin to re-integrate and bless and restore fruitfulness to the earth. By obedience, Abraham continued to walk with God to restore the earth and to unite all peoples.

It starts with one person, and then with a family, and then with a tribe, and then with a nation---under God---finally extending to the whole world. Sin is disintegration within ourselves, within the world. It takes a man/woman connected to the Spirit of God to re-integrate and unite all things, restoring them to their original harmony with God and with one another.

Friendship With God 3

2011-10-03T05:27:00.000-07:00

How is it that we have friendships? It is not only shared experience, although that is usually the beginning of a friendship. But we often share common experience with many people that does not grow into friendship. Growing up in the same household, experiencing the same events, often leads to bitterness and emnity instead of friendship. When two people enjoy, delight in, the same experience, friendship grows.

C.S. Lewis says that the basis of friendship is a common interest---two people looking not at each other, but at a third event or object which draws both people with the same interest or passion. "You, too?" says one. "I had no idea that you loved......[x].... also! Isn't it wonderful! Show me what you love about [x], and I'll share my joy of discovery with you!" The friendship grows in the mutual joy of exploration in the 3rd interest.

Unlike other kinds of love, friendship welcomes the entrance of a 3rd, 4th, 5th, and even 6th person, for it welcomes and enjoys the enhancement of other perspectives on the object at hand. When people have a passion for antique cars, they love to "see through" the eyes and minds of others who have the same passion; they love to look together at what they love; they love to share information, history, and stories about the great cars they have known or heard about. One might say that these people share the same spirit of enthusiasm for antique cars, though their experiences might all be unique. As they come together to share their experiences, their spirit is renewed and invigorated.

When I talk to another gardener, I love to hear his/ her knowledge and experience with gardening---how she began, what he learned and discovered along the way---and how the garden is now developing. There is no end to new discoveries and new combinations, new beauties, new joys.

Those who walk with God have the same experience---"You too? How did you first experience God's love? What have you learned? How has He revealed Himself to you? What fruit has God's Spirit produced in you? "

As a drop of water is enhanced and strengthened by being surrounded by other drops in a vast lake or body of water, so our friendship with God is strengthened, invigorated, and renewed by hearing the experience of others who also know and love God. Our spirits are renewed and encouraged when we hear stories about how God has acted in the lives of others, how He saved, healed, delivered, developed, and encouraged others who were in the same situation we found ourselves.

Friendship with God never leaves us alone in a cloister, so to speak, but always brings us into contact with others who have experienced and loved what we have experienced and loved. Together we sing, we celebrate, we eat and drink and laugh---when the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men dreaming. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, "The Lord has done great things for them." The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy ( Ps. 126).

The stories of the Old Testament and those of the New give the people of God a common experience of delivery from captivity, of conquest of threats to their survival and existence, of settling in a common land, just as in America, we have a common experience and a common story that binds us together. Blacks in America have their own experience and story that bind them together also in a way that others cannot enter. Many of the experiences are painful, but overcoming those experiences together is joyful. Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, Indians---all have ethnic experiences that bind them to one another in special ways. Over all that could separate us from one another is the love of God that binds us back together in friendship with Him. Those who have no love of God in their hearts are condemned to be forever outside the experience of those who do.

Hey, You!

2011-10-01T05:02:00.000-07:00

Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a Person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. (Pope Benedict XVI)

It is not we who seek the Way, but the Way which seeks us. (Dag Hammarskjold: Markings)

The lovers of God have no religion but God alone. (Rumi)

We seem to forget that all the major religions of the world today had their origin in one man---Abraham----who had no religion at first but paganism, worship of the sun, stars, and moon.

But He had an encounter with the living God, Who called him out of darkness into His marvelous light, Who accompanied him on a journey to a place Abraham did not know, but where he was willing to discover because of the One Who called him. Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness (Romans).

God continued to reveal Who He Is/ I Am to Abraham every step of the journey, never leaving or abandoning him along the way, until Abraham's trust was perfect. Only then could God use Abraham to teach others --- I do not desire child sacrifice, only love and obedience.

Abraham Heschel's most wonderful book on the philosophy of Judiasm is called God in Search of Man. What a great title---and how accurate! If we read the Bible, we cannot help but notice the "Hey, You!" factor. Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Peter, the nation of Israel---all nobodies minding their own business---when God said to them, "Hey, you! Yeah, you! I have a mission for you. Come with Me!" And all of them replied, "Please, Lord, not me! I can't do this! Send someone else!"

Religion is only supposed to lead us to the point of that encounter; it cannot be the end in itself. It has been said that the reason Moses (representing the Law) could not enter the Promised Land is that the Law / religion can take us only to the threshhold of the Promised Land; it takes Joshua/ Jesus to take us in. (The name in Hebrew for both Joshua and Jesus is Yeshua.)

The Gospel of John puts it this way: The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the only Son, who is at the Father's side, has made Him known (1:17-18).

The Book of Sirach says, "Great peace have they who love your law/ instruction."

Now we know that the Law cannot give peace on its own to its adherents---peace and joy are the fruits of the Spirit of God dwelling within us. But listening to the law/ instruction is the beginning of listening to the Spirit of God who wants to communicate with us and teach us all things, "hidden from the foundation of the world."

Sooner or later, those who seek God in religion or in the Law will be found by Him. And that encounter with the real and living Person behind the Law is always a life-changing surprise, giving us like Abraham a new direction and a new purpose. Then we will know Him even as we are known by Him!

Question

2011-09-30T03:59:00.000-07:00

The question is, "Is God waiting in heaven, at the top of the mountain, for us to finish the journey the best we can, and then He will reward or punish us for the way we traveled along the way?"

Or, on the other hand, is He so moved with compassion and pity that He Himself descends to lift our burdens and to carry us to His eternal dwelling place?

Are we "companioned" along the way by God Himself? Is He the guide, the Comforter, and the teacher--or are we left to our own devices, to figure it out the best we can? (But we had better get it right!)

I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes (Matt. 11:25).

I just finished reading The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. What a story!

The Eternal God

2011-09-29T04:01:00.000-07:00

We tend to think of the story of Jesus washing the feet of His apostles as something that happened one time 2000 years ago. We tend to think of His action as symbolic, something that didn't really need to be done, but as more of a ritual, a ceremonial act---a demonstration to show His followers what they needed to do in the future, like the demonstrations of CPR, to show us what we need to do in an emergency.

Before I come into the house after working in the yard, even though I wash my own feet with the hose outside, I still have dirt clinging to me, dirt that really needs to be washed off--with soap and scrubbing. And until that happens, I continue to feel unclean and unready to do anything else. Jesus' Apostles really needed to have their feet washed before reclining at the table.

The Passover was not just grabbing a bite over the sink to satisfy their hunger. The Passover was a sacred reminder of the meal that purchased their forever freedom from slavery and oppression, the meal that made them a people preserved from death by the blood of the sacrificial lamb, the meal that strengthened them for the journey into the desert---together, one helping another. It was a meal to be eaten together, in remembrance of God's eternal actions on their behalf, of His eternal preservation of the people of Israel, of His eternal "hovering" over them to watch their ways and journeys. Who could participate in such an event with dirty feet, as if it did not matter?

Not only did Jesus wash their feet out of love and humble service to them, but He was also doing what He saw the Father doing every day of our lives---cleansing us from the stains of our journey, from the wounds of the past, from the dirt that clings to our very souls. Not only did Jesus wash the feet of His disciples 2000 years ago, but TODAY, right now, He is bending over OUR feet with His basin and towel. He is the eternal, everlasting God, sent by the Father to minister to us every moment of our lives. He is here not to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom. He is here right now to wash our feet, to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Which one of us does not bear an almost unbearable burden of guilt? Who can grow old without looking back on what we failed to do, or on what we have done? We continue to walk through life with the stains of living, even though we have already washed off what we could wash. There is One who is able to completely cleanse our souls, to purify us, to make us whole. Yes, we have damaged others and continue to do so, even though we intend not to. But the sacrificial lamb of God took those blows unto His own body, absorbing the pain Himself. And turning around, He prayed for our forgiveness from the Father for hurting Him.

He is still washing our feet today, still cleansing us from the almost indelible stains on our souls, still healing those we have hurt so badly on our journey. We hang our heads in shame, but He says, "Come on; we have yet more to do, and I have equipped you to do it. You shall no longer be instruments of destruction but of hope and renewal. I am with you always, and will never leave or abandon you. I will watch your coming and your going and lead in sure paths for the sake of my Name. I have chosen you that you [now] should bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain. Believe. Trust. Hope. I/ you will not fail again. But if you do not allow me to wash your feet, you will have no part in Me."

We cannot wash our own "feet;" we cannot prepare ourselves for the future; we can only allow the Eternal and Everlasting God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

The Voice of Hagar

2011-09-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

God is close to the broken-hearted, and those bowed down in spirit He saves (Psalm 34:18).

Chapter 16 of Genesis describes the dynamics of Abram's household: Sarai, the wealthy wife of a powerful man, and Hagar, the Egyptian slave-girl, whose name in Hebrew could mean something like "the foreign girl." She is essentially a nameless piece of property.

For ten years, Abram has been living in the Promised Land with no sign of an heir. He and Sarai are growing beyond the child-bearing years, and he needs a son to inherit his wealth. Frustrated and childless, Sarai gives "her," the nameless one, to Abraham to bear a son.

When Hagar conceives, she begins to flaunt her fertility before Sarai, who cannot bear the burden of her own infertility. Sarai deals with Hagar harshly, so the slave girl flees into the desert. [Many years afterwards, Israel will be expressly forbidden by God to "deal harshly" with the foreigner: You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry (Ex. 22:21-23).]

But for now, Hagar, a pregnant woman is in the desert when "the angel of the Lord" finds her beside a spring. He calls her by name and by station: Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?

The woman and her son, the son of Abram, though not by God's design, are not abandoned by Yahweh. He could not leave her to die in the desert with her unborn child. He sends her back to the protected tents of Abram (presumably having somewhat softened Sarai's heart), where she can safely give birth to her child.

Hagar, having been given hope and a future by Yahweh, names Him: You are a God of seeing. No one up to this point has ever really seen her; the text refers to her as "the foreign woman," the "slave girl." She has not been a person with a hope and a future. She said, I have seen the One who sees me, and she named the well Beer Lahai Roi, meaning Well of the Living One who sees me.

The angel, speaking in the voice of Yahweh, tells Hagar that she will have a son and name him Ishmael---God hears.

Paradoxically, in this chapter, in what appears to be the story of Abraham and Sarai, Hagar is the principal character. God is the only one who "saw" her. Like Abraham, she too receives the promise of many descendents. Like Israel later on, she too goes on an Exodus towards freedom because of harsh treatment and in the desert encounters Yahweh. Like Moses, she sees God.

The naming of the well and its exact location roots this story in the real world, not the world of fantasy. Even today, Muslims hold sacred the spot where Hagar encountered the living God who sees and hears. In Genesis 21, when once again, she and her son are cast out into the desert, God "hears the boy crying," as Hagai is also "sobbing." The angel says, "God has heard the boy crying as he lies there."

In this story of Abraham and Sarai, power and abuse occur but are not central. Central to the story is the hearing and seeing of God toward the poor and needy, a lesson that Abraham will only gradually come to learn as he walks with God. In the meantime, Hagar is the one who encounters "the living God who sees me" and who is told to name her son God hears. Later in the story, Sarai too will encounter the living God who sees and hears the cry of the poor; she will be given "laughter" (Isaac) for all her years of sorrow.

Many years earlier, God had heard the "blood of Abel" crying from the gound, and now he hears the cry of a slave-woman, whom he lifts up from the ground. Psalm 34 is full of verses about God hearing the cry of the poor; in the New Testament, Jesus will say Blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

Once we have encountered the "Living One who sees / knows" us, we are convinced, like Hagar, that He does indeed incline his ears to our cry, and that our future is in His hands. We have courage, not because we are strong, but because we are seen and heard.

Thanks be to the Jews for preserving this (minor) story of Hagar within the major story of their own journey and history! Someone must have been impressed by the story of a nameless slave girl!

Going Into Seclusion

2011-09-27T02:55:00.000-07:00

Immediately after being baptized by John at the River Jordan, Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days, where He was tempted by the devil---but where he was also taught by God, coming to the end of his own strength and relying on that which would be given him.

In the same way, St. Paul, after seeing the living Jesus on his way to Damascus, went to Arabia for 2-3 years, where he received revelation from the Lord. During that time "in the wilderness," he was not preaching and teaching, but listening and learning from the Holy Spirit. Even after he began his ministry, he was imprisoned many times and "shut down." But the Spirit of God in him could not be contained by prison bars.

In the Old Testament, Moses too at first spent 40 years in the desert before he received a direct revelation from God and the annointing for his great ministry of leading the Israelites out of Egypt.

Most of those who have been touched by the Spirit of God are anxious to convert others, sometimes with disastrous results. Part of the ministry is learning to hear and follow the directions of the Spirit---the listening part,---coming to the end of our own passions and strength. Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts (Zach. 4).

People may be surprised to learn that someone as strong and fiery as Paul or as Moses were not immediately sent by God to convert the world----but unless our own passions cool, we are likely to do more harm than good. We need to be overtaken and guided and completely under the control of the Holy Spirit if we are to be channels of God's love and grace. If even Jesus needed 40 days in the wilderness before beginning His public ministry, how can we hope to do anything unless we too have been hidden from view and powerless for a period of time?

Therese of Liseux died at 24, after spending 9 years as a cloistered Carmelite. Her burning desire was to be a missionary, yet few people ever saw her face or heard her voice. What she learned during her time with the Lord was this: My vocation is love! I will be love! She learned to allow the Lord to transform her into a channel of love. Now, she has been named "A Doctor of the Church" and the Patroness of Missionaries. If ever there was an example of "Not by power, not by might, but by My Spirit," she is it.

Ghandi, Deitrich Bonhoffer, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu all had to learn the "power" of non-violent resistance; they had to learn from God himself, as our flesh always wants to drive the mission in its own strength. All remained submissive and trusting in the strength of God rather than in themselves---and all achieved even beyond their dreams. Bonhoffer died in a concentration camp, hanged by order of Hitler as a threat to the German nation---and today is regarded as one of the most powerful voices of the modern age.

When the annointing comes to "set my people free," we should not be surprised if at first we are hidden and powerless, imprisoned and mute. This is a sure indication that the Spirit Himself is beginning to exert control. Jesus said, Unless the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains but a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it produces much fruit.

Prayer: I want so much to sit at the Helper's feet in the School of Prayer and to be taught by Him. Show me how to ....be a good pupil. Amen. (Prayer of Katherine Marshall in The Helper.)

Great Teachers and Masters

2011-09-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

I am one of those people who cannot carry a tune in a bucket. As a child, I used to think of heaven as the place where I would be able to sing and no one would laugh. Yesterday in church, I happened to sit in front of someone who has a strong and beautiful voice. With her behind me, I ventured to try my own voice and found that I could sing if I forgot everything in my own head and just let her voice carry me along. I actually for a moment thought I was singing quite well. Then she stopped singing for a moment, and I heard my own weak, wavering, out-of-tune voice. There was certainly no joy there, but the moment she began singing again, I joyfully joined in, convinced that I too could sing!

In the same way, in taking oil painting, I am under the guidance of a wonderful teacher, one who actually makes my work look good. I leave every class carrying a canvas of which I am very proud---even though I know what no one else does--- that I could never have done it without his watchful eye and sure hand: No, you're dabbing it; just push it and pull it gently; make it like a cloud. Make that shadow darker; here, let me show you. With him, I am an artist. Without him, I can do nothing---but I am gradually learning "how it's done."

A good teacher makes the student look competent and imparts confidence. If I could sit in front of the singer every Sunday, the day might arrive when I could sing without her---although I doubt it. Still, each day, I would surely grow more confident that it could be done.

The same is true in the spiritual life. What is not possible to us now---Love one another as I have loved you---becomes possible as we allow ourselves to be lived in and loved in by the Master, the one whose strength carries us beyond our own limited capabilities. We don't actually have to "do" the loving right now; we don't know how. We just have to surrender to the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus dwelling in us, who alone can love as God loves. We have to allow ourselves to be carried on His strength, until the day comes that we are confident and competent---not that we will ever be able to love without Him, but that we will be confident that He will love in us and through us, and our own inadequacies will no longer be the bottom line and the definitive answer.

I can sing; I can paint; I can love----all through the energy, the talent, the wisdom, and the love of the Great Masters!

The New Birth and The Kingdom of Heaven

2011-09-25T03:28:00.000-07:00

"...first clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside will also be clean" (Matt. 23:26).

Regeneration, rebirth, revitalization, renewal---all begin on the inside of man, not on the exterior.

How happy was the blind man whose eyes were opened! How exalted was the paralyzed who could take up his mat and walk! How rejoicing were those set free from the demons that terrorized them and threw them to the ground! This is the New Birth of which Jesus spoke--being set free from what has held us bound all these years!

The Spirit of God comes like a mighty wind in our souls! No one can tell whence it will come or what it will do when it arrives. While we are "tithing our mint and cumin," hoping to fulfill the demands of the law, the Spirit of God is setting us free from the wounds of the past, bringing to birth new sons and daughters of the kingdom---the poor, the outcast, the lonely, the helpless, the forgotten, the lame, the hopeless. They leap with joy at the good news that has set them free! They are no longer bound by the expectations and condemnation of men! They are alive in a way they never dreamed possible! Now they are free to live, to breathe, to laugh, to cry---no one has any hold over them.

These are all signs of the kingdom of heaven and of the Messiah of Yahweh. What mankind could not do on its own, despite its best efforts, has been done before our very eyes. "We were like men dreaming!" "Blessed is he who comes in the name of our God!" "Hosannah to the Son of David!"

Jesus said that if the children did not cry out, even the very stones would rejoice at His coming. The earth is full of the glory of God, and men do not see it!

Listening to God

2011-09-24T04:44:00.000-07:00

From the very beginning, God has desired friendship with us. He wants to walk with us, talk with us and share the daily events of our lives. He wants to lead us, guide us, teach us, pour out in us His own wisdom, love, and truth.

What's the problem? We are busy about many things---there is no time or place to cultivate a friendship; we don't know how to listen, to receive what God wants to give us. Jesus said, Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone will open to me, I will come in and sup with him and he with me (Rev. 3:20).

We tend to take His words as poetry instead of as reality---He wants to sit at our table and share in our daily bread, the small and large events that make up our lives. He also wants us to sit at His table and listen to His concerns, His laughter, His life and love, His words.

So where and how can this beautiful exchange happen? I learned a long time ago that nothing happens until there is time and space for it to happen. I always thought I would like to play the piano, but there was no space for a piano in my house and no time to learn to play. I am now learning to paint, another "wish," but I have not yet found a place to set up a studio space. Fortunately, I do meet a 3-hour class once a week, and with that time and space carved out, I am finally learning a little and "producing a crop" of canvasses.

Most of us have not found a time and space in our lives to cultivate friendship with God. I used to think little of my mother's "altar," a small niche in the wall where she kept statues of the saints, a crucifix, and a rosary. Now I know that she had found a space in her house where God could enter. When she sat in the lounge chair next to the altar, she could pray.

For many people, Sunday service is the one time in their lives set aside only for God---not for golf, for preparing dinner, for weeding the garden--only to hear what God might be saying and to "say back" our own thoughts. The problem, of course, with that time and space is that we are distracted by other people---what they are wearing, what they are doing---as well as by our own preoccupations and lack of belief that God is really present and wanting to talk to us personally.

We don't read Scripture, reflect on it, pray it through at home. So our spiritual life is not fed on a regular basis. Our spirits are starving to death, so anemic as to be barely surviving.

In the Parable of the Sower [Luke 8] , Jesus addressed this human condition with the different types of soil when the Sower went out to his field; some seed (the Word of God) fell along the path and was trampled on, and the birds ate it up.

Some fell on the rock and had no moisture, so could not grow. Some fell among thorns and was choked to death. Only the seed that fell on good soil produced a crop. Our task is only to prepare the soil---to carve out of our busy lives a time and space where we can meet God and listen to Him. He will do everything else.

The Book of James says, Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. What a comfort! To know that all we have to do is draw near, that He will meet us on the way and take us home with Him!

God never ceases to amaze me!

The Spirit Helps us in our Prayer

2011-09-23T03:50:00.000-07:00

One of the signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit is the desire to pray. So set is our flesh against praying that the Helper's first task is to create in us even the basic desire to pray. The Bible tells us that we do not know how to pray, but the Spirit helps us in our weakness. Strangely, we really don't even know what to pray about until the Spirit begins to create a concern within us, spotlighting a need.

The Helper has to uncover for us the essence or kernel or what it is we really want. Usually, the real issue is buried under emotional debris so that we cannot see it at first. As the real issue begins to emerge in our (continued) prayer, we also begin to see the blockages---a desire to control, resentment, anger, etc.

It's like going to a Counselor over a period of time and slowly allowing our deepest issues to emerge in a safe place. The difference is that when God allows the veil to be pulled back and we see clearly, He is standing there beside us -- The Paraclete*---to help us let go of those issues, to help us forgive, to set us free from the things that tie us in knots.

[* The word Paraclete, from the Greek, means One who is called beside---para/ caleo]

All around us are people caught in bondage, imprisoned in fear, hampered by illness. Jesus longs to still be the Healer, as He was on earth; now, however, He chooses to wait on our prayers. He desires that we be a part of His ministry. As Mother Teresa said, Jesus has no hands but yours, no feet but yours.

When we begin to pray, if we are open and ask for the leading of the Holy Spirit in our prayer, He will often surprise us with the direction our prayer will take. If we can imagine ourselves praying alongside and with Jesus ("in His Name'), we might be surprised at the difference in the way we pray. We might be surprised also at the cleansing that takes place in our hearts and minds.

Prayer changes us and re-orders our priorities. Psalm 37: 4 says, Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. When our heart has been wounded, it is hard to know its deepest desire---it has been long buried. But as we begin to spend time "delighting ourselves in the Lord," our hearts begin to soften and the real desires begin to emerge. Only then can He grant our prayer.

On Religion and Spirituality

2011-09-21T04:34:00.000-07:00

Religion: an organized system of beliefs that are expressed by and within a community with a structure that includes authority, rituals, rules, and a tradition that is both oral and written.

Spirituality: harder to define, but may include one or more of the following:

personal beliefs and practices
the transcendent dimension of life and existence; the "other," the sacred
one's ultimate values
a sense of wholeness
a sense of meaning and purpose
whatever gives hope or brings peace
faith/ trust in something beyond oneself
a sense of belonging or connection with something beyond oneself
blessing, goodness, how we treat ourselves and others
reverence and respect for life, one's own and that of others
an inner life

(taken from Wrestling with Our Inner Angels by Nancy Kehoe)

A person's religion may shape his/her spirituality and help give a form and expression, along with support and strength, to it, but religion can never be a substitute for spirituality. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the Israelites, The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendents, so that you may love him with all your heart and all your soul, and live (Deut. 30:6).

The ritual and rule of circumcision was supposed to be the starting place, the "graphic example" of what it meant to "circumcise one's heart to the Lord." If some Jews took the ceremony to be both the beginning and the end of their religious experience, then circumcision had no meaning other than inclusion in the community. The same is true of baptism for Christians; if being baptized fulfilled the law and that took care of religious obligation, then baptism did not really achieve its purpose.

Moses also told the people: Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.....No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it (30:11).

If the word is "in our mouth and in our heart," then regardless of religious beliefs or forms of expressions, those whose hearts have been circumcised will be drawn together by the Holy Spirit. Paul said, For He Himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility....His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility ...for through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit (Eph. 2: 14-18).

As children, we seem to know how to express our spiritual natures through song and art, through dance and hugs. As we develop our more rational (and inhibited) nature, however, we tend to bury expressions of our spiritual nature. Church or religion is the one window where we can find ways to express our deepest selves, with the support of a community---and the one place where God Himself can express His deepest love and wisdom and guidance for us.

Of course, there is always nature, but few people really stop and reflect on what nature is telling us about God's nature and love---those who do are those whose hearts have been circumcised. In the Book of Romans, however, we find that since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities---his eternal power and divine nature---have been clearly seen...so that men are without excuse...for they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to Him....

We seem to require a time, a place, and a way to stop and "glorify God and give thanks to Him." Religion/ church is a training ground for our souls, as school is for our minds---in order to form our spirits and strenthen and develop our relationship with God.

Of course, there are always corruptions and people who get in the way of the pure exchange of Spirit to spirit, but that does not mean that religion itself is bad. We will always need some way, some "ritual," if you will, to express our spirituality.
Even a sharing group has rituals, has some authority and some rules. Without these, there is no safety in expressing ourselves and really no way to do it.

The Jews followed halakah, the Way, prescribed patterns for reverencing God and developing a living relationship with Him, just as today Christians and Muslims do. When Jesus came, he said, I am the Way.

Our spirituality develops and unfolds fully in relationship with and in response to a Divine Presence, a Person, who has joined Himself to us in an indissoluble union ("flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone); a Person who will never leave us or abandon us, a Person who will bring us into union with others who share our deepest values; a Person who creates in His own body the "church," the place where we can both be blessed by others and be a blessing to them. In Greek, the word ecclesia, which we translate as "church," means those who are called out---

it has more to do with our spiritual life than our religious life, crossing all man-made boundaries and divisions. Blessed are they who have ears to hear the call of the Holy Spirit deep within themselves!

Mother and Father Love

2011-09-20T03:15:00.000-07:00

As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you...Is.66:13

He has taken me to the banquet hall, and his banner over me is love (Songs 2:4)

God longs to comfort His people; Jesus longed to comfort Jerusalem "as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings"---but they would not. Jesus sent The Comforter, that he might abide [with us] forever (Jn. 14:16).

All of Scripture resounds with God's longing to hold us, to comfort us. Is this just wishful thinking on the part of the writers and prophets?

When David was in the wilderness for so many years, under threat of his life from the wrath of Saul, he experienced both the comfort and protection of God. That is why the Psalms are hymns of thanksgiving and praise to what he experienced during a time of great stress.

A year or so ago, before I knew I had cancer, the comfort of God descended on me like a cloud of peace and strength. I was standing in my back yard looking at the winter damage and thinking about the work needing to be done, when suddenly I knew I would not be doing it. I thought that meant I was going to die, and I had no fear, only great peace and resolve. "I'm ready," I said; "only give me time to clear the clutter out of my house so the kids don't have to do it when I'm gone." I immediately went inside and started cleaning out the attic.

That was in late January. In February, I went to the doctor for the "allergy" that was causing constant coughing. Tests proved that I had lung cancer. Since I already knew I was going to die, the verdict was no surprise or shock to me. I was being carried by the strength and comfort of the Holy Spirit, who continued to sustain me with peace and absolutely no fear through surgery and recovery. In addition, He sent family and friends to take care of all my needs, above and beyond all that could have been hoped for.

If God's comfort were limited to pity or commiserating with us, as is human sympathy, it would lead to self-pity, which is not strength. But the comfort that God gives is related to the Latin fortis, meaning strength. It is not a feather cushion, but steel in the backbone.

Many years ago, Hannah Smith, a Quaker wrote this:

Who can imagine a mother with a lost child ever having a ray of comfort until the child is found? Is God then more indifferent than a mother? In fact I believe that all the problems of our spiritual life...would vanish like mist before the rising sun, if the full blaze of the mother-heart of God could be turned upon them....

The Comforter sent to us by Jesus (so that he will abide with [us] forever) is the perfect balance of Mother and Father love---infinite tenderness and grieving on one side, infinite strength on the other. He comes with strength and with tenderness.

It has been said that a man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument. Those who have experienced the mother-father love of God given to us in times of great stress can never be convinced that the Holy Spirit is not real or eternally present to us. And, ultimately, it is our experience that brings us into the comforting arms of God.

The Gift of Tears

2011-09-19T05:04:00.000-07:00

And I will give them...a new heart---and I will put a new spirit within them; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh [sensitive and responsive to the touch of their God] (Ez. 11:19, amplified).

One of the first signs of the Spirit at work in us is what is called "the gift of tears." One writer has said that tears are the pearls of God's kingdom. Men, more than women, tend to be suspicious of any emotional display when it comes to faith and religion, but even women will hold back for fear of making a fool of themselves in public. But Scripture warns us that a "hard heart" is the sign of major trouble between us and God.

Jesus told us that hardness of heart is the major cause of divorce.
The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years because of "hardness of heart"
Ephesians 4:17 tells us that "hardening of our hearts" leads to futile thinking and darkened understanding. (Romans 2: 1-5 and Mark 8:17 also)
Hebrews 3:13 says that sin's deceitfulness leads to hardening of our hearts.

When the Holy Spirit begins to work in us, one of His signs is a softening of our hearts, taking away our hearts of stone and replacing them with hearts of flesh. Jesus wept over Jerusalem because it was a city filled with hatred and violence, not recognizing the time of its visitation. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus because of the sorrow of his friends.

Admittedly, there are tears of rage and frustration, tears of self-pity or bids for attention---none of which are the "gift of tears" that signify the action of the Holy Spirit. But when He is present and at work, we often do not even know why we are crying. He is giving us a release from long-held-in-and stuffed-down paralysis of heart.

I once heard a priest whose heart had been touched by the Holy Spirit tell of his experience in a very small town in North Louisiana. The small town had 4 churches, all different denominations. The pastors decided that they would take turns preaching at all the different churches once a year. When it came time for Sam (the priest) to preach at the Pentecostal church, he was prompted during his sermon to make an altar call. Now, Sam had never in his life made an altar call; he was not really sure what that was. But the Holy Spirit kept telling him to "make an altar call."

At the end of his sermon, Sam said to the congregation: The Holy Spirit keeps telling me to make an altar call, whatever that is. So I'm making an altar call right now. With that, members of the congregation started coming to the altar and lining up. The Pentecostal pastor explained that the two of them would now begin to pray over those who were lining up. They each started at opposite ends of the line and began to pray. One lady who Sam was praying for began to cry, almost uncontrollably. Sam, who knew only controlled Catholic services where people did not show emotion, was disgusted by this display of what he considered "emotionalism." He went to sit on the altar, leaving the other pastor to finish praying for people.

While sitting there, Sam was apologizing to God for getting himself into this mess, where religion dissolved into emotional displays, which he considered unseemly and undignified. The Spirit said to him, Ask her who Jesus is to her.

After the service, Sam found the lady and asked why she had cried when he prayed over her. "I don't know;" she said. "Something just came over me." Unsatisfied, he said, "Never mind. Just tell me who Jesus is to you."

He told us that her face lit up and she began to talk about Jesus in a way he had never heard any Catholic express themselves. To her, Jesus was a real and living Presence, a dear Person in her life.

Sam left that church completely different---he now had a God-given mission to bring the Holy Spirit to the Catholic church, the Spirit who would make Jesus a real Person, a living Presence; the Spirit who would soften hard hearts and bring the gift of tears. He began to pray intensely for that same action in his own life, and he became a great evangelist and preacher to Catholic audiences in Louisiana.

Anyone who ever heard Sam Jacobs preach knew that he himself had been touched by the Holy Spirit. He was truly "on fire" to make Jesus known through the power of the Holy Spirit. Thankfully, Sam went on to become a bishop in North Louisiana. God had prepared him to reach the Catholic church through the tears of a humble woman for whom he prayed in the Pentecostal church.

Total Freedom

2011-09-18T05:41:00.000-07:00

Satan despises our individuality; he wants to suck all freedom of will from us, completely controling us as his instruments of evil and destruction. God also wants us as His instruments of good on earth, and He also wants to "control" us, but only by our free and utter surrender into His hands. He so respects our freedom and personhood that He will never come crashing into our lives. Even when the Lord appeared to Saul on his way to Damascus, though it was a dramatic entrance, it was also the beginning of a two-way conversation:

Who are you, Lord?
I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.

Jesus gave Saul directions which Saul was free to follow or not, in total freedom of will. Of course, he was blind and helpless, but that gave him time to think and pray for three days. We know that after his time of prayer, Saul/Paul became a willing "prisoner" of Jesus Christ. The reason Jesus came in the flesh was in order to "make himself of no reputation, taking upon himself the form of a servant," in order to draw men by their own freedom to God.

The Holy Spirit, valuing our freedom, awaits our assent and, even after we welcome His Presence into our lives, He waits to see how open we are to His help. As humble as Jesus, He puts Himself at our disposal in order to help others through us. According to Katherine Marshall,

The startling truth is that [The Helper] will come to us and fill us only to the degree that we are willing to be filled. He insists on being a welcome guest in our hearts and beings, never a trespasser or an interloper or a squatter (p. 127).

Paul says, "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit in whom you were sealed unto the day of redemption" (Eph. 4:30). Our holding onto bitterness, anger, and rage grieves the Holy Spirit, but he will not violate our right to do so in total freedom.

Jesus says, Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone will open to me, I will come in and sup with him and he with me (Rev. 3:20). It will always be our choice to open the door or to keep it closed. The Spirit of God will never enter where He is not wanted or welcomed. But if we choose to allow Him entrance into our lives, we cannot even imagine what He will do there. Special and continued outpourings and filling will be given for ministry and tough situations, which we could never handle alone. This has been the experience for many people for centuries---and it can be ours, if we are willing.

A Crumbling Wall

2011-09-17T05:36:00.000-07:00

We think of sin as breaking laws, whereas Jesus thinks of sin as being bound. As He began His ministry on earth, He repeatedly spoke of setting men free. He came not to condemn the sinner, but to set us free from sin.

If we do not believe that Jesus can free us from whatever areas that bind us, then we just see him as Santa Claus, the bringer of gifts. And we remain bound to our weakness and helplessness.

When we talk of sin, we mean lying, cheating, greed, abuse, temper, cruelty, etc. But Jesus said this: When he [the Helper] comes, he will convince the world concerning sin....because they do not believe in me (Jn. 16:7-9).

One of my confirmation students remarked that this seemed harsh, that we would be considered sinners because we do not believe in Jesus. It takes some reflection on these words to dig out the meaning; if we stop at the surface, we tend to walk away not being able to accept what we think He was saying.

I remember when we moved into our first neighborhood---from an apartment. How surprised I was to meet door-to-door evangelists for the first time, people who were presenting "The Four Spiritual Laws." The first law was this: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. "Do you believe this?" they asked me. Of course I did, so we went on the other laws. Finally, they asked if I wanted to say the sinner's prayer with them. I did not, for a number of reasons. First, I had never prayed with anyone other than in church, and it felt strange to me. I prayed in private and that was that!

But later, on reflection, I realized that even though I assented to the four spiritual laws they presented and knew that I did commit sin, I did not consider myself a "sinner." I was "trying" to do the right things, and I wasn't as "bad" as other people. Ha! Looking back on it now, I can see why I couldn't say the sinner's prayer---I was thinking of sin as what we do, not as what we place our trust. I was trusting in myself, not in Jesus, to free me from sin. God had to allow me to experience my total helplessness to do anything, even to get through the day, before I was willing to turn over my life to Him, even in the little things.

He sent the Spirit to me in my darkest hour, and lifted me up when I was helpless to help myself. And once I had begun to rely on the Spirit instead of myself, one evening at a prayer meeting, I saw a huge, crumbling, stone wall---higher than my head--with giant letters carved into the stones: YOUR SINS ARE FORGIVEN!

Up until that moment, though I knew I was far from perfect, I had not thought of myself as a "sinner." Suddenly, I knew myself to be unable to ever do anything except for the grace and action of God Himself in me. I knew myself to be a Sinner, and it was the most freeing moment of my entire life. I no longer had to bear the burden of doing good---I could trust God with all the burdens of my life. What a great relief! I was set free!

I told the group that night that previously I was rejoicing to have been in the company of the saints, but tonight, I was overjoyed to know that I was in the company of sinners who had been set free. Of course, they all thought I was crazy, but for me it was a great revelation!

Why would the Spirit's first priority be to convict us of sin? That sounds anything but "comforting," and He is supposed to be The Comforter. Relying on ourselves, our own strength, to save us is the fountainhead of all sin. Undoubtedly, if we are strong, we will go further than others---but what of those who have no strength, who are so trod down and helpless, that they have little or no strength left? If there is no Savior, they will perish. Actually, we are all in need of a Savior, no matter how "strong and sleek" we appear to ourselves and others. The sooner we realize it, the better off we are. The Pharisees had no need of a "savior;" they could save themselves by knowing and being observant of the law.

None of us can save ourselves; we need a Savior. Once we recognize that truth, we can see our "strength" to be a crumbling wall and ourselves as defenseless behind it. A few weeks ago, I happened to find a passage in Isaiah 30 that I had never before seen. I was actually shocked to find this passage:

This is what the Holy One of Israel says:

"Because you have rejected this message,

relied on oppression,

and depended on deceit,

this sin will become for you

like a high wall, cracked and bulging,

that collapses suddenly, in an instant.

It will break in pieces like pottery,

shattered so mercilessly

that among its pieces not a fragment will be found

for taking coals from a hearth

or scooping water out of a cistern."

This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says:

In repentance and rest is your salvation

in quietness and trust is your strength,

but you would have none of it.

You said, 'No, we will flee on horses,'

Therefore, you will flee!

You said, 'We will ride off on swift horses.'

Therefore your pursuers will be swift!

The entire chapter of Isaiah is well worth reading for its great message. In a time of great national stress, Israel was looking for its help/deliverance from Egypt, one of the world powers at the time. But it was the Lord who was longing to give them quiet pastures---and they just could not believe that He was strong enough to save them!

Thirty-five years ago, God gave me a clear vision of my sin/trust in my own strenth as a "crumbling wall." It took me all these years to find the image in Isaiah---but thank goodness, I got the message anyway. The greatest "sin," what makes us "sinners" is failing to trust in God's strength instead of our own----ye shall be as gods, said the deceiver!

And when the Holy Spirit arrives, His first task is to convict us of trusting in ourselves, instead of in The Savior He has provided. Once we let go of our own strength, His strength becomes our salvation! And that, for most of us, is the greatest leap of all. Jesus trusted totally in the Father's goodness, mercy, and power to save Him, even in the face of a horrible death. We need to allow Him to bring us to the same place of complete trust.

When the Spirit is at Work in Us

2011-09-16T04:33:00.000-07:00

The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him (Luke 2:40).

As the child Jesus grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, so too is our path/ growth in the spiritual life. As the Spirit of God enters us and begins to re-shape our desires from the inside, we find that what once appealed to us has now lost its appeal and we are more drawn to the things of God. The process is not an overnight change, but one that lasts a lifetime.

The "thou shalt nots" of the Old Testament were, like parental rules, intended to keep the "children of God" safe from harm and danger until they were old enough to take upon themselves a personal relationship with the Almighty. The problem with "thou shalt not" is that there is a stronger "law" in our human nature that is determined to break the rules, or at least to bend them. Every teacher knows that no child breaks the rule exactly the way it is written, but figures out instead how to get around it without breaking it. That is why the Jews had to write more and more "laws" to "build a fence around the law."

[In fact, now that I think about it, we should have forbidden our children from the start ever to eat fruits and vegetables. We should have had "Do not touch" signs all over the apples and bananas, over the spinach and squash. Then they would have been sneaking fruit into their bedrooms and hiding under the covers to eat it.]

We love to get away with forbidden fruit, not realizing that we are harming only ourselves along the way. In changing our desires, the Holy Spirit deals with each one of us differently. Only He knows where change truly needs to begin; even we ourselves, looking at symptomatic behavior, do not know where we need to begin. What we believe to be the problem in our personalities may be only the symptoms of more deeply-rooted problems.

We try to improve our nature when the plan of God is to scrap it, to bury it, "crucified with Christ," and to give us a whole new nature created in the image of God. When the Holy Spirit enters into us and is welcomed in us, He begins to "tabernacle" with us, as God dwelt in the midst of the Israelites in the desert. Then we begin to experience the "newness of life" of which Paul spoke so often.

Even in the Old Testament, the prophets were looking forward to a new covenant:

But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts...no longer will they have need to teach their friends and kinsmen how to know the Lord. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the Lord (Jer. 31: 31).

I think Romans 7-8 are among the greatest chapters in the Bible for explaining the gracious plan of God to deal with our human nature. Paul says that he does not understand himself at all, for in his mind, he agrees with the law of God, but in his human nature, he always ends up doing the very thing he determined not to do and failing to do the very thing he intended to do. ( I love this because I can so relate to it.) Then he says, Unhappy man that I am! Who will release me from this law of sin and death at work in my members?

In Chapter 8, he goes on to say, Thanks be to God; it has already been done, for the [new] law [new covenant] of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed me from the law of sin and death.

The Spirit of God dwelling within us gradually fills us with new desires to walk in new ways. In total freedom, God does not seek to force us to change, but instead puts new desires into our hearts. Jesus says, "My burden is light and my yoke is sweet;" He means of course that it is no burden to live with the Spirit, for we actually want to do the right thing. So as we open ourselves to the Spirit and give him permission to change us, we find ourselves going from "glory to glory, reflecting as in a mirror the face of the Lord" (2 Cor. 3:18).

I love this!

From glory to glory

2011-09-14T04:01:00.000-07:00

And all of us...are constantly being transformed into His very own image in ever increasing splendor and from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord [Who is] the Spirit ( 2 Cor. 3:18).

The Holy Spirit can change our desires, our tastes, and our habits---but He works so gently and gradually that we ourselves might not even notice that we are changing at first.

One of the universal characteristics of people who fall in love is that they begin to "see" and appreciate nature all of a sudden, even if they had not noticed it previously: "Has the moon always been that bright?" "What a beautiful day!" "Did you see that cardinal?" Love has a way of softening and slowing people down to take in the wonders of the earth. In the same way, once the Spirit begins working on our personalities, we "slow down" and "grow" more from the inside.

It is the job of the Holy Spirit to form in us the character of Jesus, without destroying-but enhancing- our own personalities. It is more that Jesus takes on our flesh and lives through our particular lives. When the Holy Spirit is at work in us, there are two processes going on simultaneously: first, He is forming our character (the inner man) and second, He is producing gifts in us to be of service to others (the outer man). The gifts (wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, power, reverence, fear of the Lord) would be of no value without the character of Jesus; gifts --- useful for the church and for others-- can make us haughty if we are not careful. Even the Apostles were arguing among themselves about who was the greatest, and in the Book of 1 Corinthians, Paul warns us of being "puffed up" about the gifts.

Galatians 5:22 shows us what the Spirit first produces in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are called the fruits of the Holy Spirit because they are result of the work of the Holy Spirit in us; we cannot give ourselves peace or joy. We can "work on" patience and kindness, but that does not mean we actually feel those things, only that we are controlling ourselves. The person who is being controlled by the Spirit of God does not need to "work on" these qualities---the Holy Spirit gradually changes us from the natural man to the image of Jesus, from glory to glory.

The Book of Ephesians outlines what Watchman Nee called The Normal Christian Life. His first book, Sit, Walk, and Stand is an absolutely beautiful exposition of Ephesians as a whole book. The first 3 chapters of Ephesians presents what God has already done for us while we were "sitting"---that is, helpless to help ourselves, much as the Israelites in Egypt. God poured out on us all grace and every spiritual blessing, even while we were "dead in sin" and raised us up to sit with Christ in heavenly places.

Since God took the initiative on our behalf, then, Paul urges us in Chapter 4 to "walk in the newness of faith," to "live a life worthy of the Lord," and to be "imitators of God." Chapters 4 and 5 outline the way we are to walk in the "new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness."

And Chapter 6 gives us the image of what we are to do when we can do no more--to put on the armor of God and to "stand," for we are wrestling against powers too strong for us.

It is worth reading and re-reading Ephesians with Watchman Nee's outline in mind---Sit, Walk, and Stand. Once we see the pattern of how the Holy Spirit works, we can see it throughout the Old and New Testaments---in Genesis, in Exodus, in Psalm 23, in the Gospels and in the Book of Revelation---from glory to glory, we are being transformed!

Unless the Lord Himself first ministers to us, we are unable to minister to anyone else.

Prayer of Catherine Marshall

2011-09-13T04:46:00.000-07:00

Blessed be the Lord, Who bears our burdens and carries us day by day,

even the God Who is our salvation! (Ps. 68:19)

Prayer: Lord, I confess that have been reluctant to admit You into my daily life in relation to small, intimate needs. I had not thought that the Lord of the universe, high and lifted up, should be bothered about my little problems. Yet here You are making it clear to us that the Helper will be as close to us as our own thoughts, supplying even needed information and reminding us in a critical moment of Your words of promise and blessing.

Thank You too for putting Your finger so incisively on a deeper reason for my reluctance to admit You to the minutiae of my life. I have been afraid of the fair exchange You are asking of me; the Helper will supply everything--even those small needs--in exchange for my whole life. Not only does He want to use me, He wants an exuberance of giving on both sides.

Lord, melt away any pockets of resistance left. Don't let me hug any part of my life to myself.

Show me today how to take at least one definite step of trusting the Helper. Thank You, Lord. Amen.

Is God With Us or Not?

2011-09-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

We tend to think that God is concerned only for the welfare of our "eternal souls," but that our daily, minute-to-minute lives are up to us---that, somehow, He's too busy to care about the little things, or that He is "above it all."

I have heard people say that God does not care whether we find a parking place or not, that we should not pray about such things. That hurts me so much because I have experienced the God-Who-Cares-and Who-Is-Here in each moment of our lives. The Holy Spirit is attentive to whatever is of present, practical importance to us. If it's important to us, it's important to God.

I was first baptized in the Spirit through the prayer of a 22-year-old girl who had just had a baby and who continued to hemmorage for a number of days. Her baby went home with her grandmother, while she stayed in the hospital. I was her roommate, and she ended up praying that I would receive the Gift of the Holy Spirit, as she had done some years previously.

The prayer of that young girl changed my life forever: from fearful to growing confidence, from lack of faith to growing faith, from feeling alone to growing knowledge that God was with me!

After she prayed for me, her bleeding stopped, and she went home that day. I was in the hospital for a few more days following surgery. The first night I was home, I was praying after everyone else was asleep---around 9:30 pm. Something kept telling me to call Dinette. Now, I still do not call anyone at 9:30 at night, least of all a mother with a new baby! Besides, I had nothing to say to her. Why call? But there was an insistent voice telling me to call her. (This was my very first experience with the gentle but insistent nudging of the Spirit, so I was very resistent, thinking I was making it up myself.)

Finally, because I could do nothing else, I hesitantly called her number. When she answered the phone, she said, "Wait a minute." When she came back, she told me that her husband was out of town and that she had just gotten the baby to sleep and then put the nipples on the stove in a pan of water to sterilize. Then she got in the shower and forgot about the pan on the stove. The water had all but evaporated when she went into the kitchen to answer the phone.

Now, God knew what a disaster it would have been for this young mother to have melted all the nipples for her baby's nighttime feedings. When I told her that I didn't have anything to say, but that something kept telling me to call her, we were both intensely grateful for the insistent Voice of a God-Who-Cares. That was my first, and perhaps most important lesson in listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus said that after He went back to the Father, He would send The Helper. In His earthly sojourn, He was one man in the flesh. When He sent the Holy Spirit, His spirit filled the earth at first in the 120 disciples who were filled with the same Spirit that filled Jesus on earth. Then the Spirit entered the 3000 observant Jews who were in Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost---the harvest feast. They went back to their towns and villages, probably like Dinette, telling of what had happened to them and praying for their friends and neighbors.

God has no hands and feet but ours to do His work, as Mother Teresa reminded us. But the Spirit in us prompts us to take care of the little things that make up our every-day life. When we learn to become sensitive to the promptings of the Spirit, God can work through us. The Spirit speaks in many ways: urges, promptings, uneasiness, stopping us from doing something we are about to do. We have all known these things, but have not always paid attention to the results. Later, we say, "Thank God I did.... or did not....."

It is important to realize that the Spirit will never tell us to do anything dishonest, unloving, selfish, etc....nor anything contrary to Scripture. It helps when we can check our promptings with someone in the church that we trust, because God will give discernment to a fellow Christian if necessary to guide us. However, when there is not time to check, and when the urging of the Spirit does not seem to violate love or to hurt someone, it is worth experimenting to find out if the Spirit is truly directing us or not.

Nothing will so strengthen our faith and convince us of the tender presence of God and of His concern for the small moments of our lives as paying attention to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

Connecting to the spirit within

2011-09-11T05:29:00.000-07:00

A healthy spirit is that aspect of our personality that allows us to connect to our deepest self and to other people; it is the source of our energy, courage, resilience, and hope.

For many people, the question is how we find the healthy spirit within us--that spark of hope and courage. Jesus said, The thief comes to maim and destroy; I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.

There is something that seems determined to enslave and diminish the spirit in us crying out to be recognized and acknowledged. The world, the devil, evil---who knows exactly what it is that seems to want to destroy the good, the energy, the life that is in us?

Poetry, art, music, nature, good friends, and religion all seem to have the power to engage the spirit buried so deeply within us. All touch us in ways that we cannot express. I recall being in Sicily once for ten days. I did not know how to process the combination of beauty, the quality of light on the water and in the sky, and history---the lives of ages past. On the last day, as we drove for hours across rolling fields of growing crops, having just visiting an ancient Roman villa preserved all these years by an earthquake which had buried the house and art, I wept silently. Something had touched my soul, but I did not know what it was or how to deal with the movement within.

Evil wounds us along our paths, and the soul defends itself against the wounding by covering up so that it can no longer connect with God, the Source of Life; as we cannot connect with God, we can no longer connect with our deepest selves---and as we lose ourselves, we cannot connect with other people. Jesus said, What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?

Hell must be the total loss of connection to God, to the center of our own personhood, and to others; it must be a loss of connection to beauty, to the earth, to the lessons of history, to art and to music and poetry.

So how do we keep ourselves alive, creative, energetic, whole? How do we nourish the spirit within us?

I am currently taking an art class, but discovering that what touches my soul is not the painting I am doing but the teacher leading the class---a wounded healer. This man tried to drop out of school in the 11th grade because he felt like a failure. The beautiful spirit within him was crushed because he could not read. He did not recognize the sounds connected to the letters and lived in fear every day of derision from teachers and the other students. Fortunately, when he applied for the army, the recruiter told him it would be best if he first finished high school. As he exited the recruiting office, his school principal "happened" to be passing by and saw him. On discovering the situation, the principal promised to speak to all of the teachers. From that day on, no teacher called on him to read out loud, and much to his surprise at a reunion many years later, he found out that none of his classmates had ever realized that he could not read.

Surviving high school, he went on to work and later on in life "happened" to run into a man teaching art. He became a disciple, watching every movement of the brush and listening to every word of the teacher. As the teacher became too old to continue teaching, he asked this student to take over the class. Now, this man who could not read in high school paints, does beautiful sculptures in bronze, woodcarvings, and who knows what else? He teaches scores of beginners like me without making us feel inferior for the simple works we produce---indeed, his encouragement makes us believe we are doing well, no matter what.

More importantly, his own suffering has led him to connect with a high school boy who is failing and who is discouraged by failure. This man takes him fishing on a regular basis, helping the young boy to connect with beauty and life rather than with demands and expectations.

To paint, to play music, to sing, to write poetry or prose, to be able to find comfort and solace in nature, to find and touch the energy of one's own soul---and thereby to connect with those who are searching to do the same---this is life!

Someone who spent much of her life in mental institutions wrote this:

Our true natures are bled out of us by some religious teachings, by terrifying family experiences, and the pain of mental illness. [But] we are not just pieces of damaged psyches. When you get rid of the toxic material many of us have carried from our early experiences, the majestic spirit can emerge.

Rainer Marie Rilke wrote a poem called "God Speaks to Each One of Us," in which he said

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don't let yourself lose me.

Where is the "me" in each one of us? Where is the alive, strong, resilient, spiritual, energy? How can we find and nourish that part of us? How can we live and not die every day of our lives? Where is the place of safety that allows our majestic spirits to emerge?

A Sense of Safety

2011-09-10T04:18:00.000-07:00

God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in distress (Ps. 46:1)

Our help is in the Lord,

Who made heaven and earth (Ps. 124).

As the mountains surround Jerusalem,

so the Lord surrounds his people

both now and forevermore (Ps. 125).

Unless the Lord watches over the city,

the watchmen stand guard in vain (Ps. 127).

As we approach the 10th anniversary of 9-11, more and more we realize the truth of Abraham Mazlow's "Heirarchy of Needs." In 1943, Mazlow introduced his theory of human motivation based on a pyramid of needs that must be satisfied before moving on to the next level. Of course, the most basic needs at the bottom of the pyramid were those of basic survival: food , water, sleep, and warmth. Once those needs have been met, people can move on to the next level, which are for safety and security.

As we so terrifyingly learned ten years ago on Sept. 11 and then six years ago in Hurricane Katrina, if we don't feel safe and protected, we cannot do anything else. All life and growth come to a halt until we feel safe once again.

When God promised Abraham "a land I will show you," the promise was to establish him and his descendents in a place of safety, where they could flourish and grow, a place of refuge from their enemies. Because of Israel's location as the crossroads of the civilized world, they were always surrounded by very strong and powerful enemies---Egypt on the south border, Assyria and Babylon on the north. Even within their own territory, the Philistines on the coast were a constant threat to their safety. However, once they were settled in the Promised Land, whenever they were attacked, God would raise up a strong leader to defend the land and to repel the enemy.

David became great in Israel because he, with God's guidance and strength, defeated Goliath, the leader of the Philistine army encamped around Jerusalem, "the city of peace." Later, as king, David was able to establish the borders and the peace of Israel. Under his leadership, culture and literature began to flourish because the people at last felt safe. From his time in the desert, hiding from the threat of death at the hands of Saul, David learned "by heart" and by experience that God was his "help and his strength, an ever-present help in distress" (Ps. 46:1). That is why the Psalms, most of which were written by David, resound with phrases like the ones above.

In America, we have accomplished so much and grown so much because for so many years, we have enjoyed a wonderful sense of safety. We have natural geographical borders for the most part; we have had a strong military protection, and fairly good relationships with our neighbors---all of which have allowed us to pursue development instead of defense. Now, however, our protections are eroding. We are back to the base of Mazlow's heirarchy of needs; we are being forced to concentrate on the basic needs of survival and on protection and safety.

As David learned in the desert, as Israel was forced to learn by its very location, we are slowly coming to learn that "unless the Lord guards the city, in vain do the guards keep vigil." The prophet Isaiah wrote centuries ago in the Lord's name:

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you,

and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;

when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned or scorched,

the flames shall not set you ablaze (Is. 43:2).

As a nation, we may have forgotten wherein lies our true safety, as Moses warned the Israelites just before they entered the Promised Land:

When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands...that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat are are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, the land of slavery.... You may say to yourself, "My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me."....

If you ever forget the Lord your God and follow other gods and worship and bow down to them, I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed. Like the nations the Lord destroyed before you, so you will be destroyed for not obeying the Lord your God (Deut. 8: 11-19).

I pray that we as a nation can regain our sense of safety as one nation under God.

Expecting the Spirit

2011-09-09T03:01:00.000-07:00

The Holy Spirit is a Person. With a personality, with His own gifts and ways of doing things, with His own words.

So when we invite Him into our lives, He will choose Himself how He will arrive and how He will begin to reveal Himself, and the work He wants to do first in us. Jesus told Nicodemus that just as he could not tell where the wind came from or where it would go, so would be the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We cannot control, manipulate, or predict what He will do.

It helps to have our eyes open, to be awake and aware and still, to be waiting and expectant---not of certain results, but of the fact that if we have asked, the Spirit of God will come to us. As with any person, we probably should recognize His Personhood and approach Him as we would a friend, requesting His Presence.

As we study the lives of great people of God---C.S.Lewis, Deitrich Bonhoffer, Watchman Nee, John Wesley, the Catholic Saints----we find the arrival of the Spirit in their lives in manifold ways, not always dramatic, but nevertheless real and progressive. God does not announce the dawn with trumpets, nor the unfolding of a rose with orchestral strings. But each arrives in its own time, we know not how. We see the result of slow progression, and we know something has happened.

Quietly, but surely, the Holy Spirit will make His Presence and action known to us---if we continue to welcome Him. Sometimes, He will begin speaking to us at odd moments through the day, directing our actions. Sometimes, he will stop us on the verge of saying something critical or harsh or sarcastic. Sometimes, He will give us "inspiration" in ways of doing things that save us time or extra effort. Or He will remind us of something important we are about to forget.

Methodically and gradually, He will begin to bring one area of life after another under His control---health, finances, relationships, work, etc. He is all about healing, reconciliation, balance, harmony, and peace. Some aspects of our lives and personalities will take longer than others to heal; it is a life-time process.

Jesus told the Apostles that He would love them and manifest Himself to them. His words were also for us, not just for them. He manifests Himself to us through the Holy Spirit. If we ask for this manifestation, we will surely begin to experience it.

Repentance is "letting go"

2011-09-08T06:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, during a visit from my daughter-in-law, she happened to see some of my nice glassware stashed away in an upper cabinet. "Why are you hiding these and not using them every day?" she asked me. I looked at what I had been using every day--an odd, mis-matched assortment of old glassware that I had had for years. The "good" stuff had belonged to my mother, so I was storing it, not using it. I was used to the old, scratched, glassware, so it had not occurred to me that I should get rid of it.

With my daughter-in-law's help, I cleaned out all the old, non-attractive glassware and brought out the prettier glasses for everyday use. Now, everytime I open the cabinet, I am grateful for her artist's eye for the everyday things.

It's hard for us to let go of what we have been used to relying on in our "old" natures---the anger, the rebellion, the selfishness---even if it's not very attractive or useful anymore. Those are the tools that we have used so long that they seem to us 'normal.' It takes a fresh eye to see what might be hidden possibilities in our personalities: why don't you try this?

When we finally allow the Spirit of God to enter our personalites, He begins to point out areas that need to go. Of course, these are our old security blankets; without them we are going to feel defenseless. How will we ever face dangerous situations without them? And, like the semi-fragile glassware in the upper cabinets, we may be afraid that we will break if we don't defend ourselves with the old familiar patterns.

What God is saying to us is this: If you throw out the old familiar securities, I will give you my own inner life. You will not be afraid of the "terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day" (Ps. 91:5).

We tend to use the patterns we learned as children to defend ourselves, to keep ourselves from being broken, just as I used the old glassware to protect those I had hidden from sight and use. But God is all about bringing out what is hidden and protected from our inner selves---the beauty, the fragility, the valuable! He is not satisfied with our defended and protected personalities, because all of our energy is going to protecting ourselves and not blossoming outwards.

Meditating, slowly re-reading and digesting Ps. 91, is a wonderful way to begin letting go of our own defenses, of bringing out the hidden treasures of our souls and putting away the scratched shields that are keeping us safe from harm. Why hold onto our anger, when it accomplishes nothing? Why not surrender it into the hands of One who knows how to protect the fragile glassware hidden in our personalities?

Conviction of sin

2011-09-06T04:07:00.000-07:00

When he comes, he will convict the world of ...sin ... because they do not believe in me (Jn. 16:8).

One of the tasks of the Holy Spirit, and one sign of His presence and action in us, is the conviction of sin. We don't really see sin in ourselves until He arrives---then we are not condemned, but convicted. There is a huge difference.

We spend a great deal of time in self-defense, justifying ourselves to ourselves and to others---until the Spirit of God gently begins to open our eyes. When we finally begin to see ourselves as God sees us, under the action of the Spirit, it is not to condemn us, but to heal us. We become sorrowful and subdued, resolving not to continue acting that way anymore. Other people may condemn us; we may condemn ourselves---but condemnation is not repentance; it is not healing.

An alcoholic in sober moments condemns himself but keeps on drinking to mask the pain. He is not healed and set on a different path. One in recovery is so convicted that he/she is determined never again to inflict that kind of pain on himself or on others. Sinners in recovery are so aware of their weakness and tendency to inflict pain that they do not trust themselves at all. They know that unless Jesus Himself sustains them, they will certainly fail. They do not rely on their own resources or strength, but His.

When Jesus says, "He will convict the world of sin because they do not believe in me," He means that as long as we do not cast all of our hope / trust on Him to save us, we will continue to sin. If we believe/ trust Him as our "higher power," in the words of AA, we will not continue to sin---He can keep us when we cannot keep ourselves. Strong resolutions are not the answer, but knowing ourselves in our weakness (conviction of sin), and knowing that we can not help ourselves, is.

Blaise Paschal (1600's) wrote this:

[People] revile the Christian religion, because they misunderstand it. They imagine that it consists simply in the worship of a God considered as great, powerful, and eternal; which is strictly deism, almost as far removed from the Christian religion as atheism....And thence they conclude that this religion is not true...

But let them conclude what they will against deism, they will conclude nothing against the Christian religion, which properly consists in the mystery of the Redeemer, who, uniting in Himself the two natures, human and divine, has redeemed men from the corruption of sin in order to reconcile them in His divine person to God.

The Christian religion teaches men these two truths: that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. It is equally important to men to know both of these points; and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can free him from it.

The conviction brought to us by the Holy Spirit lets us see both truths---we are not "good;" we are weak and helpless---but there is One who is good and who has taken upon Himself our weakness to redeem us. If He is allowed to begin living His life in us, He can continue to bury the man of sin and raise the man of God in us. Until we come to that realization, we are just Deists and still dying in our sins.

Receiving the Spirit

2011-09-04T04:05:00.000-07:00

I begin to see that without the Spirit my personal life and my church's life are as inert and dead as lifeless clay.

(Prayer of Katherine Marshall: The Helper)

Jesus Himself is the One Who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist said, "I baptize you with water, but one comes after me, whose sandals I am not worthy to untie, who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire."

After His resurrection, Jesus met the Apostles in a locked room, breathed on them, and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit."

The Comforter...Whom I [Jesus] will send to you.....(Jn. 15:26)

To think that we can receive power / energy/ effectiveness for ministry without Jesus' sending the Spirit to us and in us is foolish. Without Him, we can do nothing. As the Father has sent Me, so also I send you.

I have chosen you that you might bear fruit, and that your fruit might remain.

In the Book of Exodus, Moses "went" to save one of the Jews from the harsh treatment of the Egyptian----but compassionate though he was, he had not been "sent" yet for that mission. The result was his exile from Egypt for 40 years.

Every one of us has a "mission" in our hearts; we are burdened with sorrow over someone or some situation, but helpless to change the circumstances. We need the breath of God to blow through us and others if we are to see a change. The Spirit of God is connected to the life/ breath of Jesus Christ.

If we desire the Spirit, we need to ask the Baptizer, the Bestower of the Spirit, to breathe on us, on others that we love, on situations and circumstances.

I was caught by Katherine Marshall's prayer above because in my own church, we need to replace a catechist and cannot find one person willing to take his place. Reflecting on this situation, I realized how much we need the Holy Spirit to fill our congregation. Those who are filled with the Spirit cannot wait to tell others the good news---even to the point sometimes of being obnoxious, before they learn gentleness and trust in God to relay the message.

I'm asking Jesus, the Baptizer, to send His Spirit of truth into the hearts of all those I meet in Church today. Maybe they should be warned ahead of time!