26/06/2016

Isaiah 61:4-7

H,

Well, perhaps we can put that down to the feeling we have that if we do not get what we truly want we will be unhappy. We are always making these sort of shady deals with God. His reply is absolute silence. We still have to reach the end of ourselves.

The deal we want to make is something like this: “I will respect your rule over my life and plans up until a point but I reserve to right to be like myself. I do not want to be an imitation of anything. I want to be real”.

This is stupid on two main levels. The first is easily a C.S. Lewis quote:

-there are no real selves outside God.

The second is that we are called to be an imitation of the person who is all of our best selves combined. That person is Christ. There is no illumination in trying to be like anyone else. There is a sense in which we mean we do not want to imitate jerry curled pastors and shady looking predator priests. We do not want to be anything fake or oblique, we want to be rounded and sure. Well, we are not as original as we think we are. We are blindsided by our human nature. The best of us, walk humbly through the grace of turning from horrible to whole. The worst of us, you and I included, find the things that are bright but fake and let them shine. We construct a wall between ourselves and what is true. We fake it but we have become so good at it that even our bouts of authenticity are just another level of control. We know we are fake. Deep down inside us, in those places where we do not dare go, we know we are not humble and we are not whole.

We are blessed that these are the crypts in us God still wants to painfully pry open. We are blessed that He loves us.

24/06/2016

Isaiah 61:4-7

H,

You have raised the point of all points. How do we know that the thing that makes us happy is the thing that God wants us to do? What is the balance between the hard side of God’s will and the gentle centre of his leading?  There are a lot of simplistic answers to this question. Let us avoid all of them. The real one, as far as we can see from this side, is about the discipline of God. It is easy to talk about the things you know and the fields in which you have acquired some skill. If you keep talking only about the things you know and only roll in circles that celebrate such finery, then you will always be called brilliant and you will only hear yourself praised. But that is not all of life.

What if His plan was to make us more rounded than we possibly could imagine? What if it is not only competence that matters but character? Now both terms are interchangeable in this context and I do not mean morality when I mention character. A person can be competent at following a certain moral code. Goodness may be his gift. That does not mean he will not brag about being upright or make others feel dirtier next to his filthy rags of self, dressed up as right doing. He is morally competent but has no character. See what I mean?

It is not enough to be good at your gift. God demands more. He demands a certain way of looking at the world and engaging it. He demands that we be lights. There is only one light in the universe that lights up the inner place of things. He wants us to be bearers of that light. This will require we leave the things we know. It may even mean that when we are learning these things we will be uncomfortable. It may go against the grain of our own feelings on the matter. In fact this is not merely a “may”, it is a conclusive “will”. We will go into deserts and have dry spells. We will find things we are abrasive towards on the narrow path. We will die daily. This is not a pointer that we have taken a wrong turn. It will not have the moral weight of a contest that we recognise as test and trial. It will be the dark night of the soul and we will feel nothing like ourselves. All balance will leave us, all hope and all safety.

When this happens, it will not be trouble ahead but a new found peace inside. We will connect with the things about God that scare us and from which we keep attempting to run. Remember that it is not punishment but love. You will not suffer for nothing. You are a disciple.

23/06/2016

Isaiah 61:4-7

H,

There is always that feeling that puts us up as something less than what we are. We think we are propping ourselves up but we are putting ourselves below the water and the truth. When we ascribe to ourselves the role of the hero we are living in a certain conceit. And that is never a good thing.

It is not that we are below the great longings of our own heart. It is that those longings really go up and not down. It is that they lead us to the sublime and not the merely bright. There is such a thing as a false light. There are false starts, false hopes, false loves and a false sense of self. There are false prophets and false interpretations of truth and the false calling of a man to be next to deity and set apart from the rest of the crowd he purports to serve. There is no such thing as a divide between the shepherd and the sheep. It is false to say that if you lead you must be esoteric and aloof. These are paradigms that God shifted eternally out of place with His Christ-form. He was embedded in humanity and never aloof from man and woman and child and all of creation. These paper thin gods have nothing to offer. These false leaders are not of the light. And they can never be.

We must be careful though. These things are insidious. They are presumptuous sins. We may begin to see in ourselves something more than the hallmarks of being saved. We may begin to see ourselves as the man or woman apart. We may think we need to be above and beyond the ordinary contact with what is human and imperfect. This is a grave mistake. We must all be in the mud together. There is no telling who will be pulled out of the mire first, any particular mud pool and any particular pool of quicksand. There is no telling how that hand will connect with another hand to all are saved. We serve God by being equal to each other and then submitted in love to both. Anything else is the rumblings of a personality cult that is good for no one.