Sacred Stillness

…work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness—the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. – George MacDonald

The cultivation of sacred idleness. Do we know what that means? What use is it? We probably have a low view of the value silence and stillness (especially in December!).
I imagine that the strategic value of “fallow ground” not understood by many people. When you cultivate a garden and produce crops, you need to let the ground “rest.” The method adopted varies, depending on the location: whether you live where winter forces you to stop cultivation, or in the tropics (where a different method is adopted.)
With our brains, when we allow ourselves a long stretch of time not given over to problem-solving, information-gathering, working and producing, gaining new information and skills may seem like a waste. But, when you take time to be silent, and use the quiet time to listen, to ponder what one has already taken in, you may be surprised at the results. Besides deeper contentment, you may find strength, courage, new understandings, ideas, and alternative solutions to sticky problems. Artists and musicians have long known that stillness is the well from which robust production springs.
Try to take time…

The World is Too Much with Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not–

“The World is too Much with Us” partial – by William Wordsworth

Just because I am happy doesn't mean I don't have problems…or…being human.

When I was about 11, my parents brought me to the newly released film, A Man for All Seasons. The film was largely about the conflict between King Henry VIII of England and his right-hand man, Thomas Moore (who was beheaded for not agreeing with the King.)  At the time,  I knew quite a lot for a young American of Henry VIII, but little about the figures who surrounded him. I was continually perplexed by the film’s story--I wanted it to be simpler. It seemed as though Sir Thomas Moore’s biggest problem (Moore had gone from being the king’s opponent to a  friend to, well, being killed by his friend) was not Henry VIII but himself-- his own conscience. Till then most movies I sat through presented a difficulty (or several), solved problems, and presented triumph at the end in true Disney-esque style. But this bore no resemblance to those stories at all. It was an uncomfortable movie to view because it was  more like real life than like pure escape! (How dare they?)

Well, that was umpteen million years ago and since (in real life), I have seen the problem-and-solution played out over and over again in more settings than I could count.  I have been in churches and work environments and even friendships where we must find  the “culprit” in our quest to hunt down the source of our problems, and then an investigation is rolled out to determine what it is we need to avoid in order to cleanse ourselves and have a “happy” or peaceful setting. And, I have lived through the mid 1960s-1970s wherein Someone (the “Man”) must be blamed and society needs to be ‘taken back.”  Past and present, friends ask me to jump on band-wagons all the time to “restore” things, right society’s wrongs, and do good things to make the world ” a better place for our children.”
Yet my life tells me a different tale–I think it tells me the truth: I  was a middle child, I have been married for 35 plus years, raised children and dealt/deal  in-laws. My experiences have given me the thought that our typical approach to many life-issues, work, religion, family, money, friends, has been (frequently) one-dimensional and too often merely transactional. Granted, our objective is good, and one to be cherished: a desire for perfection, but the reality of a  fallen (AKA messed up) world, will never leave us. 

In my experiences I have not seen easy, simple solutions, but messy situations and half-resolved, partly messy results. I have had a lifetime of conflicts and messy problems, and the result has not been merely “growth” for me, but strangely but life-giving, as well. How do I account for that?  Dorothy Sayers suggests that it is in tight situations that we can enter into a creative process we have been endowed with by our Creator, somehow out of the labor pains of problems comes a new baby.
Dorothy Sayers says that the ordinary man is an “artist” (like a writer) in his own life, and that he needs to approach life more like an artist does: in this way–there is no final, predictable, complete solution nor might there be only one solution. Sayers asserts that we reflect our Creator by being creative people in the midst of tragedies, and in times of troubles by looking for a creative way to redeem the mess in which we will perpetually find ourselves living through.
She says: “If the common man asks the artist for help in producing moral judgments or practical solutions, the only answer he can get is something like this: You must learn to handle practical situations as I handle the material of my book: you must take them and use them to make a new thing. As A.D. Lindsay puts it:
….we say “Yes” or “No.” “I will” or “I will not” [At these times] we choose between obeying or disobeying a given command.
[In contrast, we may find ourselves] in the morality of challenge or grace, the situation says, “Here is a mess, a crying evil, a need! What can you do about it?” We are not asked to say “Yes” or “No” or “I will” or “I will not,” but to be inventive, to create, to discover something new.
->The difference between ordinary people and saints is not that saints fulfil the plain duties which ordinary men neglect. The things saints do have not usually occurred to ordinary people at all…
“Gracious” conduct is somehow the work of an artist.  It needs imagination and spontaneity. It is not a choice between presented alternatives but the creation of something new.”
[Sayers continues:]
The distinction between the artist and the man who is not an artist thus lies in the fact that the artist is living in the “way of grace,” so far as his vocation is concerned.
He is not necessarily an artist in handling his personal life, but (since life is the material of his work) has has at least got thus far, that he is using life to make something new.   Because of this, the pains and life of this troublesome world can never, for him, be wholly meaningless and useless, as they are to the man who [stoically] endures them…
If, therefore, we are to deal with our “problems” in “a creative way,” we must deal with them along the artist’s lines: not expecting to “solve” them by a detective trick, but to “make something of them,” even when they are, strictly speaking, insoluble.”

• Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

What Has God Got To Do With Creative Acts?

On the Creator & the Creative Act:
"...the image of the Trinity was made in man,
[so] that in this way man should be the image of the one true God."
- Augustine: On The Trinity
"...God, as Godhead [Trinitarian], appertain neither will, nor knowledge, nor manifestation, nor anything we can name,
or say, or conceive.
But to God,as [He is] God, ...express[es] Himself; 
 without any creature...And without the creature, this would lie in His own Self
as a Substance or well-spring,
but [it] would not be manifested or wrought out into deeds.
***[But if] God will have it to be exercised and clothed in a form......it cannot come to pass...without a creature."
- Theologia Germanica  
In an analogical fashion, any creative act of the human mind has this characteristic:
"In thought, the sense of the setting and ones knowledge of the characters are  all present simultaneously. In [the act of] writing, something of these elements has to be conveyed in sequence."
- J. D. Beresford: Writing Aloud

Brackets [ ] inserted to help clarify.

Simple Steps to an Exciting Life

God never wrought a miracle to convince atheism, because His ordinary works convince it. - Lord Bacon


The apostle Paul wrote to young Timothy, in the first century of the Christian church, giving him some simple instructions that are key in “taking ownership” of one’s spiritual life. Unless Christian individuals pay attention to the condition of their own self-care (spiritually-speaking), the Christian church (the body of believers) will become run-down.


“Let no one despise your youth, but be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in spirit, in faith, in purity.
… give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine.
Do not neglect the gift that is in you…
Meditate on these things; give yourself entirely to them, that your progress may be evident to all.
Take heed to yourself and to the doctrine. Continue in them, for in doing this you will save both yourself and those who hear you.” (I Timothy 4:12-16)


While this may seem overwhelming, it’s less onerous than it looks if it is contextualized within the framework of the living Spirit of God. That Spirit is continually at work, as long as we keep maintain our part of the bargain. 
According to the promise of Christ before his crucifixion and resurrection, the Spirit (or Helper) would be with us to help us become the kind of people who God had always sought for—people with a heart of flesh, and not stone. God cannot manufacture our will to conform to His, but He can send extraordinary, even miraculous, help by the Spirit when our wills are bent towards Him.


“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments. I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.” (John 14:15-17)
(“But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” – John 7:39
"When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me.” – John 15:26)


Imagine this, that Christ, the Son of the Living God and Father, Creator of the universe and beyond, has sent us what He was when He was physically walking the Earth: the Spirit. And imagine, also, that this Spirit is not here to confuse, confound or mystify, but to clarify, and to settle.
Once the Christian understands that Life in the Spirit is ongoing and continual, then, the Christian should come to expect a gradual unfolding of his own originality within a life of being a disciple (not a monk). Indeed, the Christian is to become so intimate with the Spirit, that he will see that there is infinite originality when God made humans-and it crops up over and over in his life.

“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.
Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast.”

• G K Chesterton in Orthodoxy

"Did You Hear The One About A..."

Of the many topics which can be addressed in a blog relating to religion and specifically, Christianity, one of the most important topics is that of creativity. 

The ability to create through word, music, the fine arts, dance, or any of the variety of abilities God has endowed humankind with is one of the greatest gifts He has blessed us with. Creativity is at work in businesses, massages our fatigues, keeps our spirits buoyed, inspires the listless, energizes the tired, brings novelty to the tedious chores, and spreads wealth like no devised spreadsheet could. God, illustrating the point before man was ever created, did so by how He first organized the human: nothing is more creative or beautiful than the human being. The animals and all of the rest of the natural world, visible to the eye, is merely a punctuation mark when compared to the beauty of man and woman. 

He went the next step, not content to have all these powers resting in Himself. He spread the wealth and gave humans the power of creation-not restricting it to procreation or tending gardens or simply creating foods which taste good. He gave us creative powers that add flourishes to our lives: through the unlimited creativity of simple language and multi-faceted categories of the arts as well as the entertainment of human interaction. 

But one of the most wonderful gifts He gave us was the ability to laugh and to make others laugh. Paul Johnson, in his book “Creators: From Chaucer to Walt Disney,” addresses the blessing of having the ability to make others laugh-and what a gift it is from the God of Creation. “Some forms of creativity, no less important are immaterial as well as transient. One of the most important is to make people laugh. We live in a vale of tears, which begins with the crying of a babe and does not become any less doleful as we age. Humour, which lifts our spirits for a spell, is one of the most valuable of human solaces, and the gift of inciting it rare and inestimable. Whoever makes a new joke, which circulates, translates, globalizes itself and lives on through generations, perhaps millennia, is a creative genius, and a benefactor of humankind almost without compare. But the name of the man or woman remains unknown. I say “or woman” because women, whose lives are harder, need jokes more than men and make them more often. .. 

…I once found myself sitting near [an old comic named Frankie Howerd] and said… ‘You comics, who create laughter from what nature has given you, are among the most valuable people on earth. Statesmen may come, and generals may go, and both exercise enormous power. But the true benefactors of the human race are people like you, who enable us to drown our inevitable sorrows in laughter.’ ”

I have a strong sense from the Scriptures that God laughs a lot, not to mention the circumstantial evidence in my own life-it seems to me He’s certainly played a bunch of fun tricks thus far. Judging from the gospels, Jesus had such a sharp wit, that his serious disciples continually misunderstood his comments. 


There is a time to laugh.

• Charity Johnson