Single Letters, Syllables Uncomposed

Someone once said that knowledge can be threatening to people. If this conjecture has any truth, perhaps it explains why people are threatened by an omniscient God: His knowledge is unbiased truth about everything and everyone.
But let's talk about what we humans can know,  for there is so much to know, learn and do in this great universe--and none of it is without its own value.
Still, it seems every one has been given an additional personal task: that of theology--spiritual training of the mind and heart--seriously.  In this aspect, theology is not a specialized task of a priest, pastor or preacher. No, they are helpful, but they cannot live your life for you, any more than a doctor can give you suggestions on living healthily and diagnosis and prescribe for illnesses. Once you acknowlege what your job is, it's time to take it in hand. At this point sometimes a person will short circuit his learning by making a once-for-all decision. This is making a judgment about your spiritual condition  or state (whether or not it's correct) in a manner that resembles stashing something in a safety deposit box: once there, you don't need to think about it again.
Life has a way of disobeying our desires. If you short circuit your spritual life, you'll find that as your soul-life gets lived out, and it gets expressed in the world around you, and because what you carry inside affects our attitudes, choices, judgments and opinions, it's not long before (if you're honest) that old question of what's your theology comes back, nagging at us. Over and over, life plunges us headlong into our thelogy and holds our heads under it until we either acknowledge it or extinguish it.
Richard Baxter was so excerised about the importance of knowing God, that he bluntly states that we actually see things differently when we see things from God's point of view (rather than our own):
"Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well-managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied. We know little of the creature, till we know it as it stands related to the Creator: single letters, and syllables uncomposed, are no better than nonsense.
He who overlooks Him who is the 'Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,' and sees not Him in all who is the All of all, then does see nothing at all. All creatures, as such, are broken syllables; they signify nothing as separated from God.” - Richard Baxter

Space, God and Illogic

The state, nature and origins of the universe have been posited as reasons for disbelief in religion. CS Lewis questions if the grounds for such reasoning is reasonable and responsible:
"When the doctor at a post-mortem diagnoses poison, pointing to the state of the dead man's organs, his argument is rational because he has a clear idea of that opposite state in which the organs would have been found if no poison were present.
In the same way, if we use the vastness of space and the smallness of earth to disprove the existence of God, we ought to have a clear idea of the sort of universe we should expect if God did exist.
But have we?
Whatever space may be in itself - and, of course, some moderns think it finite - we certainly perceive it as three-dimensional, and to three-dimensional space we can conceive no boundaries.
By the very forms of our perceptions, therefore, we must feel as if we lived somewhere in infinite space. If we discovered no objects in this infinite space except those which are of use to man (our own sun and moon), then this vast emptiness would certainly be used as a strong argument against the existence of God.
If we discover other bodies, they must be habitable or uninhabitable: and the odd thing is that both these hypotheses are used as grounds for rejecting Christianity.
If the universe is teeming with life, this, we are told, reduces to absurdity the Christian claim - or what is thought to be the Christian claim - that man is unique, and the Christian doctrine that to this one planet God came down and was incarnate for us men and for our salvation. If on the other hand, the earth is really unique, then that proves that life is only an accidental by-product in the universe, and so again disproves [the] religion.
Really, we are hard to please.
We treat God as the police treat a man when he is arrested, whatever He does will be used in evidence against Him.
I do not think this is due to...wickedness. I suspect that there is something in our very mode of thought which makes it inevitable that we should always be baffled by actual existence, whatever character actual existence may have."

• C.S. Lewis from: God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Ed. Walther Hooper) Originally published as Undeceptions: Essays on Theology and Ethics in the UK)

God Would Bring Us To His Knee

What is it about prayer? It is a Life Question that we can’t shake. From the time a child first learns about it (whether formally taught or not) until to his final years, prayer is a recycled Life Theme. Granted, some seek to be rid of it but typically it rears its head again, usually unbidden.
Why do we pray?- I am not speaking of the “transactional” prayers in which types of prayers and sacrifices function as part of the economy of “bargaining” for a divine favor or good fortune from some spirit-god, as shamans, witchdoctors and other “spirit-guides” do.
I am speaking of the appeal that we, finite, mortal and flawed people make to all-powerful and all-knowing, creator and sustainer God.
Back to the question: what is our unspoken or assumed expectation of prayer? I believe it is not only our petition we seek but also by means of the prayer interaction, we wish to experience His immanence in our (little) lives. Yes, we may pray because we seek help, but we also wish for contact with the transcendent—
I have found that the thing most people least understand about prayer is the part about RESULTS. Prayer is efficacious (having the desired result), but beware, in every other pursuit we have a way to measure the desired result. The problem with the efficaciousness of prayer is that God has the measuring stick. If we're using ours (my will, my desired outcome), then the results will appear to be flawed. That should be more than okay with us if God is who He is and we are who we are.
I have had many former church-goers and “universalists” tell me they do not pray because they do not need to. They have a reason: "God is both beneficent and all-knowing, I do not need to pray-without me breathing a prayer, God has read my thoughts and desires and answered them." Theologically this is belief has no legs. But, at its root it’s a problem of pride and laziness (I suspect some people cringe at the humility of prayer). A simple analogy will do to illustrate: both my teenager (and I) know that he needs and wants breakfast before school. Shouldn’t he come to the kitchen for it? If the parent has provided but the child is too lazy to make a move, he’s cutting himself off from the source and will be famihed by lunchtime.
George MacDonald addresses it further in: "Why Should It Be Necessary?”
“But if God is so good as you represent Him [to be], and if He knows all that we need, and far better than we do ourselves, why [is] it necessary to ask Him for anything?”
I answer,
“What if He knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer [is] the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of Himself?
Hunger may drive the runaway child [back] home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner.
Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need:
prayer is the beginning of that communion, [there is] some need that is the motive of that prayer.
So begins a communion, a taking up with God, a coming-to-one with Him. [This] is the sole end of prayer, [even] of existence itself in its infinite phases.
We must ask that we may receive:[however] it is not God’s end in having us pray to receive with respect to our lower needs [since] He could give us everything without that. [God would] bring us to His knee… [He] withholds [so] that we may ask."

• from George MacDonald, 365 Readings, edited by CS Lewis (language updated) Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York.

You Cannot Find God in This Box

If God does exist, He is related to the universe more as an author is related to a play than as one object in the universe is related to another.
If God created the universe, He created space-time, which is to the universe as the metre is to a poem or the key is to music.
To look for Him as one item within the framework which He Himself invented is nonsensical.

• CS Lewis,  from "The Seeing Eye”

God's Odd Math of Love

Agape, the sacrificial kind of love from God given to mankind, which is lived out in action is the only common ground between the genders, across the tribes, and nations and cultures. It is what enables a person to be selfless but not pitiful; to be forgiving and yet strong; to be humble but not cowardly; to be a crusader but not a conqueror and overtaker. A person who loves with agape love has more love the more he gives it away.
It is what makes life for the Christian one “Great Giveaway.”

• Charity Johnson

“Even friendship finds rocks to founder on, for though its sea is immense, it has shores. [Yet, the apostle] Paul announces the exception when he tells us: ‘Love [agape] never ends.’ (I Corinthians 13). …One day everything will be made of agape. All those things that we made of agape in this world will last… But nothing else. The only thing that will not be burned up in the final fire is the one thing that is stronger than the fire of destruction: the fire of creation. For agape is the fire of creation.

God created out of agape. Just as the only way to conquer a passion is by a stronger passion, just as the only way to conquer an evil love is by a stronger good love, the only way to endure the final fire is not by any water that tries to put it out, but by the only fire that is stronger still: agape. This is the very fire of God’s essential being. Only love is stronger than death. (p 91)
….
[Eventually] lovers of God [will] become one with the fire of their Beloved. …British poet Stephen Spender wrote their epitaph: ‘Born of the sun, they traveled a brief while toward the sun and left the vivid air tinged with their honor.’

That is what a Christian is. Not to be one is life’s only real tragedy.” (p.93)

• Peter Kreeft, from The God Who Loves You

A Prayer for Deliverance

“Deliver me from self-trustfulness.

In the frequent days in which I must do battle with my self for foe,

arm me with a constant trust in Thee.”

→ From Hebridean Altars: The Spirit of an Island Race by Alistair Maclean , 1937.

Daily "Stay-cations"

There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute;

for feeling, except in the infinite;

for the soul, except in the divine.

• Henri Frédéric Amiel, Journal

We Are All Hopeless Cases

We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard.

• Karl Barth

Back And Forth

Referring to comprehending the Scriptures in their context,


Martin Luther said, "...we read the Bible forward, but..we understand it backwards."



In a parallel statement, regarding interpreting our life in light of its eternity,


Kierkegaard said: "Life ...(is) understood backwards; but... lived forward. "


This leads me to believe there is a lot I have yet to sort out!


Excelsior!

Benefits of Meditation and Objects of Meditation

♥ But, you may ask, is meditation really worth the time commitment?" “What benefits can I expect, since there are no tangible material gain in it?” Again, William Bridge has a response to that question:

"It is a help to knowledge, thereby your knowledge is raised.

♥ Thereby your memory is strengthened;

♥ thereby your heart is warmed.

♥ Thereby you will be freed from sinful thoughts,

♥ thereby your heart will be tuned to every duty.

♥ Thereby you will grow in grace.

♥ Thereby you will fill up all the chinks and crevices of your life,

♥ and know how to spend your spare time, and improve that for God.

♥ Thereby you will draw good out of evil.

♥ And thereby you will converse with God,

♥ have communion with God,

♥ and enjoy God.

I (ask)...is not here profit enough to sweeten the voyage of your thoughts in meditation?"

• William Bridge (punctuation changed)

What are some things that the scriptures say is worthy of meditation? A few are:

1) God's Word

2) God's creation

3) God's providence

4) God's character

"Make the world go away..." or Why Mediate?

It has been said that you eventually become what you think about continually.
If, for example, you dwell on how to make more money, that eventually is the target of every waking (and sleeping) dream of your life.
Naturally, when you lose your money, then, you lose everything that makes you what you are-and so often, you lose those things which cannot buy money: health, peace of mind, happiness and friendships.
Likewise, if you think about what people's opinion of you is, your job, your appearance, your prestige, and so on.
The question we need to consider is what is worthy of my continual and deep consideration, if not myself? I would submit that navel-gazing is the fastest route to neurosis.
Mental health is most quickly achieved and held if one’s life focus is on God, the Father, who created you, and Who loves you eternally. But,you wonder, how do we “think” about Him properly?
The primary revealed source for that is the scriptures. This is a repulsive conclusion for some people who have been abused or mishandled by those who claim to believe the Bible. Yet where does the problem lie? Do we blame the Bible for others' abuse? Since emotions have been involved, this kind of thinking is not at all straight, but certainly understandable for anger and hurt repel them from the Bible. Yet they are confused because they are mixing up the people who purported to know the information in the scripture with the actual scriptures. There is nothing wrong with the scriptures-only with the “reporter” in this case.
It is similar to me adding figures incorrectly and passing the incorrect sum along to you: my inaccuracy handling the operation does not invalidate the entire mathematical operation of addition.

God remains, no matter what, the only one worthy of our focus and, specifically, the one to desire to be pleasing to above all others.

Once our resistance to the scriptures is overcome and we understand what we are reading, we have another hurdle to get over: we wish to hold on to the beautiful truths, those which reveal God's compassion and faithfulness. We need them to penetrate through the noise within our heads. The answer is that we need to meditate on God. A certain writer responded to this (language is a bit antiquated):

"(but)...I have no time for this work (of meditating on the scriptures). (If) you would meditate on God and the things of God, then take heed that your heart, and your hands be not too full of the world and the employment thereof.
Friends, there is an art, a divine skill of meditation which none can teach but God alone. (If)...you would have it, then go and beg of God (for) these things."

• William Bridge

From "The Man Who Was Thursday"

“We will eat and drink later," he said.
"Let us remain together a little, we who have loved each other so sadly, 
and have fought so long. 
I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always heroes -- 
epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in arms. 
Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the beginning of the world, 
I sent you out to war.

I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and unnatural virtue.
You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. (Still) the sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it…
But you acted like men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you.
I knew how near you were to hell.
I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without hope."
"I am the Sabbath," (he) said. "I am the peace of God."

• G.K. Chesterton, from The Man Who Was Thursday
  

Heaven Will NOT Be Nothing

Our notion of Heaven involves perpetual negations: no food, no drink, no sex, no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art. Against all these…we set one positive: the visions and enjoyment of God. And since this is an infinite good, we hold (rightly) that it outweighs them all. That is, the reality of the Beatific Vision would or will outweigh, would infinitely outweigh, the reality of the negations. But can our present notion of it outweigh our present notion of them? That is quite a different question. And for most of us at most times the answer is No. How it may be for great saints and mystics I cannot tell. But for others the conception of that Vision is a difficult, precarious, and fugitive extrapolation from a very few and ambiguous moments in our earthly experience, while our idea of the negated natural goods is vivid and persistent, loaded with memories of a lifetime, built into our nerves and muscles and therefore into our imaginations.
Thus the negatives have, so to speak, an unfair advantage in every competition with the positive. What is worse, their presence – and most when we resolutely try to suppress or ignore them- vitiates even such a faint and ghostlike notion of the positive as we might have had. The exclusion of the lower goods begins to seem the essential characteristic of the higher good. We feel, if we do not say, that the vision of God will come not to fulfill but to destroy our nature, this bleak fantasy often underlies our very use of such words as “holy” or “pure” or “spiritual.”


We must not allow this to happen if we can possibly prevent it. We must believe – and therefore in some degree imagine-that every negation will be only the reverse side of a fulfilling. And we must mean by that the fulfilling, precisely, of our humanity, not our transformation into angels or our absorption into Deity. For though we shall be [in certain ways] “like angels” and made “like unto” our Master, I think “like with the likeness proper to men:” as different instruments that play the same air [song] but each in its own fashion.

How far the life of the risen man will be sensory, we do not know. But I surmise that it will differ from the sensory life we know here, not as emptiness differs from water or water from wine but as a flower differs from a [flower] bulb or a cathedral from an architect’s drawing.

• C.S. Lewis in “Transposition”

Earth Crammed with Heaven

(The author is referring to Moses:)

... Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more from the first similitude.

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) - from "Aurora Leigh"