“God is your home.”

H,

We need to make the move from the singular to the plural and then to the singular again. This is the whole essence of the Church. It is not the end of individuality but the end of individualism. We must come to community as individuals but make our way as a Church. We may not all think the same thoughts, or hold the same sacraments as vital or agree on doctrine but we are going in the same direction and we share the same home.

There is no longer Jew or Gentile but there is also no longer poor or rich, sick or well, man or woman in the divisive sense. All come must come together and act in one heart: the heart of the creator.

This is not some utopian construct but the people we will forever be and how we will live in eternity. This is what God is doing. This is His Kingdom, the Holy light of all ages.

We are coming together not to be ruled by the whims and temperaments of “anointed” or charismatic men or women but by the love of God shed abroad in our hearts. We eat at the table of grace as equals, all in need of salvation, all being transformed, all connected into the singular by the vastness of our God. We sit at His right hand as one, like Christ and with Christ, the Holy adoption is to make all women and all men children of God in the most direct sense.

The world seems far from this grand picture, I know. This is why we are pilgrims and not earthlings. Things never feel quite right. We are not here to stay. We are on the road home. 

“God is your home.”

H,

What of all this joy we hear of? Where is this abundance? Where is this peace? How do we get into wholeness and holiness? How do we come alive like an unquenchable fire?

We seem to keep waiting for this moment when all these things will be true. The way the world seems none of it is true. We would need to build high walls and deaf ears to make it so. We would need to construct a community of believers who only see the good in things, who mistake fear for faith and who deny the worse side of the human experience. We would have to believe that God is playing dice with our tiny speck of the universe and some have it bad while others have it very, very good. We would have to agree that the latter group have learnt the wisdom of grovelling. We would have to get our praise on. The bulls are now the dance steps. The sweat is now the blood. The priest is now the Bishop. We will have an experience and then all will be well.

The problem is we have to stay in this false house for all our lives. We cannot reach over this wall of deception.

The whole of Christianity is summarized in this: receive love and then give love. If we are going to build a dam then we do not yet need this water that ends all thirst. We have to engage with a world in pain or we are not the light or the salt or anything at all.

Remember, that God himself came down and was put in chains by a tiny empire compared to the powerful nature of the whole universe. It is like a feather killing a bear or a pebbling bringing down Mount Everest. God humbled Him-self (and Her-self) to the pain of the world. This is your home. In this, you will find all joy and love and everything else thrown in. 

“God is your home.”

H,

There has always been this hint of a feeling that all is not well. I know you have felt it quite a bit throughout our decades-long trek on earth. I cannot even remember when it started. I used to think that it was tied to some material problem: a lack of something, a peculiar problem or the sting of one of my many weaknesses. After a while I realised that even on the best of days, even in the midst of joy and love and all the grand feelings of our age, an undercurrent will slowly show up in my head and heart. I would begin to leave the moment I was in and take this feeling of unease on a journey of discovery to find what was wrong.

It took my years to realise that it was the simplest of things really: I was not at ease with life on earth. I do not know how many people feel this way and how many have the great distractions that abate this feeling. I can only say that I feel it more and more as the years go by.

In the past we would call it the weight of the hours of living and give it some holy relevance. We would use it to justify the bottle and the philandering and the being wrong because there is some stupidity going around that makes poetry out of real pain as if that is the only solution it needs.

The solution is this: we are not at home and God is our home. 

“The strange feeling of success.”

H,

It is not doom and gloom. The good news is a portrait of joy not of repression or despair. We are not trying to get people to bow their heads in shame but to raise them up in hope.

There is no wrong direction in God. There are no quick fixes but also no fatal turns. We will all make our mistakes. This is not said as an excuse but as a fact. We are transforming from one kind of being into the other. We are learning to live in the light. Falling down is just part of the process. True love waits. True love forgives. True love does not give up. We will not fail to become the full expression of God’s nature upon the earth and beyond. We will live forever in the light.

Is this the part when I say: “but”? There is none of that. Only bad theology based on fear and not faith. To fear the lord is to acknowledge His place in your life. It does not mean you are afraid of Him. You should not be. That distance has been covered by Christ. There are many things we do not yet understand about the ultimate deity. It is a matter of time. We have all the time in the universe. We will get there.

The moment you look up to God you are already thriving, advancing, living in the true beauty of what the world really means. There is nothing like it. It is the strange feeling of success: that we are already there and we are here to remember all our steps into heaven and into the arms of our loving father.

“The strange feeling of success.”

H,

We have a deep fear of failure. There is a nodding, snivelling, massive monster on our shoulder always asking us to prove our worth and telling us we cannot prove it because we have none, at the same time. We have doubts fostered by the insecurities of others, cutting us down with words and glances that make us feel like a small, repugnant extra wheel in the great grind of life. We have, more deeply, our own experience with failure. We have all reached the limits of our competence and felt the overwhelming crush of defeat as we attempted to do something worthwhile.

The world teaches us to hide what we are bad at and to only speak, only declare, only live in and only promote the things we are good at. This way we can be intelligent (even though it is only about a few topics), we can be competent (even though it is only wrought through aptitude and the experience of learning specific things) and we can be considered successful at something (regardless of its value to anyone else). We construct this mirage of success as a cover for the fear of failure and thus create a world of faces and face value.

The Kingdom, the real one and not the alchemy spun gag or self-help manual peddled as wisdom nowadays and suffixed with “principles”, runs on something more eternal than fear. It is not a quick fix. It will take your whole life. There is no public barometer for progress and there are no milestones you can put in a book and sell to others. It is the knife that cuts to the bone of our humanity. It is the truth that puts an end to all the lies we might tell. It is powerful enough to change every life but gentle enough that it will not break in. It will come in at the pace of the believer. It will take the space granted but keep expanding. Success in the kingdom is learning to be the sort of person who lives forever in the light. Success is learning to be like the Christ. 

“The strange feeling of success.”

H,

We are constantly battling the voice inside that tells us we are worthless. Outside events might add to that horrid chorus. We might take a few wrong steps or have moral failures or fail to live up to some imagined potential forced on us by the opinions of others and our desperate need to be seen. Then we acquire this feeling of failure. We begin to flounder down this rabbit hole of self-recrimination and shame. We hide, we fall back, our voice falls to low pitched growl and we are constantly crouching toward some version of new hope.

We have not given up, yet, on the fallacy of success. We are not humble only humbled. All it will take is a sweet turn of fortune and we will re-emerge into the light clutching on to old ideas of our own greatness and counting the wilderness as a learning curve. Then, we will show the doubting crowd what it means to survive a few years living off the grid and pulse of real life. Then we will silence these “enemies” that have spat in our face with words that cut so deep only advancement can truly heal the wounds.

Of course, God wants no part in any of this. A self-help class or two is probably more useful than a visit to the bible or any community of believers seeking truth. Self-belief is a powerful tool in this limited world. We can rise to new heights believing that we have operated under some vague principle that is really hit and miss. This has nothing to do with God. The life He wants in us is not one that is from the crowd or to the crowd. It does not require proof in any physical sense because “those who have eyes, they will see.” He is trying to bring back to earth the spiritual life and not promote any affirmation of what a fallen earth calls progress. It is far too easy to make material progress a sign of spiritual depth. We can cover a lot in tinted glasses and well-worn clichés about “purpose”. The life in God is much too intimate for that. There is no hiding place afforded from the things that are really wrong with us. Wealth may be a defence on limited earth but it is not a cure for what truly ails the human heart and soul.

“The strange feeling of success.”

H,

I keep thinking of the old scorn with which any kind of material success was held in our Christian circle. It was branded as wrong to make progress on earth because it meant you had taken your eye off the great ball of making heaven. It also meant that you had made some compromise with the fallen world, you had taken one of the devil’s offers and now you had the world but only that. Add to that the odd story of the man who met Jesus knowing who He was and declaring same but failing to make that truth more important than property and you have a real picture of how strong the pull of the things we own can be.

We do not even have to go that far. A brief glance into our own forays into owning stuff and we can see tales of making the thing more important than the reason for the thing. We know how a few notes in the pocket can make us defensive against the real suffering in the world. Wealth has this side note to it. It aims to protect itself. It is always telling you how much you need to protect. It tells you to avoid waste at the price of sharing. It tells you to multiply it with ‘wisdom’ with the stinging memory of lack hanging in the ominous background. It tells you that you are special, that you have somehow scaled the impossible wall and so you are a leader amongst your peers. It tells you poverty is a curse and prosperity is a blessing so the sinner-saint dynamic is in place on some level. Tithing, giving, serving, following and believing are tricks of the trade. Wealth gives reason to the anarchic state of modern life. Tragedy becomes a failure to follow kingdom principles.

The strange feeling of success cannot be measured by the temporal wave of the present state of things. We aspire to live on the higher plane of things. Success, in the general sense, is not enough for the Christian and it is certainly not required for the Christian life. It has no advantages and is no sign of favour. It might be a sign of purpose but not much more. The point Christ was making to the rich man who had much was this: everything material is subject to the spiritual purposes of love in God.