a feather on the breath of God

This morning, as I went about my pre-breakfast ritual of swirling green tea leaves in a quart jar full of hot-but-not-quite-boiling water, a line of an ancient lyric seemed to rise out of the steam and into my drowsy thoughts.  I do not know why, nor do I ever hope to understand how my auditory memory goes about selecting its earworms du jour.

The phrase it has chosen for today, apparently, is a potent little scrap of an ethereal song penned by the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen nine centuries before my time.  It's the part where she calls herself  “a feather on the breath of God.”

A feather on the breath of God... a feather on the breath of God...

I alone hear it in my silent kitchen; I watch the tea leaves fly wildly in the wake of my spoon and reckon with the fact that something in me does not really want to be called a feather.  It just draws attention to aspects of existence that I'd rather conceal, even from myself -- the fact that I am fragile, brittle even, that I am not very useful by myself, that I will someday be discarded and perhaps even trodden underfoot.

What are you and your silly feathers doing here in my kitchen a thousand years past your prime anyway, Hildegard?

And besides that, I think as I stir away the requisite ninety seconds, birdless feathers always make me feel a little embarrassed for the careless fowl.   It's just a rather public inordinance, somehow not unlike seeing the undeniable silliness of a burly neighbor’s underwear flapping on the clothesline. 

But seriously.  Surely it's in our nature to want to presume in our existence some measure of personal gravitas-- something akin to that mysterious austerity of presence which the Hudson River School artists sought to capture in the word sublimity.  We want our lives, our legacies, to have weight.  Wouldn't we all rather be likened unto a foothill in God's mountains, or an anchor in His ocean... even just an arrow in His quiver?  

But Hildegard insists.

I see tiny green feathers in my tea jar now, spinning wildly at my bidding, drawn into the wake of a spoon that flashes briefly, wildly, volting the waters and then rising from the tumult.  There I am in the roiling water, spinning and reeling, imparting myself to a vortex that I do not understand, even though the natural laws to which it submits are reasonable and even somewhat predictable.  But tell that to the leaves.  Tell that to me.

I watch the water alter the leaves, the leaves alter the water.  What emerges is neither and both.  Entirely irreversible, yet entirely impermanent.

I admit it.  I have been rather like a feather of late, only not in a weightless sort of way.   I’ve felt fragile, bent, bedraggled, whipped in this gale, snapping and shrieking from the relentless, unpredictable, sometimes nauseating twists and turns.  I clutch hard my heavy wing of flesh, still foolishly believing that I cannot soar without it.

If we are weightless as feathers, it is because Christ bears our weight.

I filter out the leaves.  What was water is now tea, golden and clear in the morning light.  I see old Hildegard's point, I think.  It's not about feathers at all.  It's about how we apprehend the wind. 


God is breathing.

Clod-bustin' with Hosea

Sow to yourselves in righteousness,

reap in mercy;

break up your fallow ground:

for it is time to seek the LORD,

till He come and rain righteousness upon you.

Hosea 10:12

Now, there's a January verse if there ever was one.  Sitting here in front of a crackling fire this evening, I worked for a while on narrating this passage back to myself in my own words, phrase by phrase, slowly.  

"Sow to yourselves... in righteousness..." 
Isn't that what all our resolutions are about?  Changing what we sow to ourselves?  Trying to sow... right?

But it's that bit about fallow ground that really smacks me upside the head.   Fallow ground?  Oh, heavens.  The Lord knows I've got acres of that in my life.  Maybe you do, too?  

Break it up, Hosea cries-- bust up those clods, kiddo.  The rain is coming, and you'll want to be ready to soak up every drop.

So this is January Verse #1 for me.  Think I'll fetch my red dry-erase marker and go scrawl it on my bathroom mirror now.


Every resolution kept is another clod busted.        

Thanksgiving!

Mercy me, it's in less than a week!

In the preceding post about Bunyan's pilgrim poem, I mentioned that at our family's Thanksgiving feast we all take turns reading a little something. This is one of our favorite family traditions. We take our time; each person eventually finds their own moment during natural lulls in conversation to read the little scroll tucked next to their plate. Nothing about this is forced or scheduled -- it always flows quite leisurely and naturally.

We have lots of wonderful memories of snaggle-toothed pilgrims slowly and carefully weading fwom their little scwolls over their pumpkin pie. Nowadays they can make the pie and everything else besides if necessary. But even so, the little scrolls are still ready and waiting at each place setting when we sit down to feast together. For us, Thanksgiving just wouldn't be the same without all these beautiful words and thoughts and praises.

As we take our turns, each person tells something they feel particularly thankful for over the year since we last sat around the Thanksgiving table together. This is always my favorite family mealtime of the whole year. Precious beyond words.

This simple tradition has always been a way for our family to come together at Thanksgiving not just in shared appetite, but also in a common spirit of gratitude. And that is what we remember-- so clearly-- even after our memories of all the food have long since faded.

Our collection of poems and Psalms is posted in our archives here, and I encourage you to enjoy them with us again-- and maybe even print them out for your own family feast.

I am so looking forward to Thanksgiving this year! I hope you are, too.

Happy Birthday, Miss Mahalia

"When you sing gospel you have a feeling there is a cure for what's wrong. But when you are through with the blues, you've got nothing to rest on."

~ Mahalia Jackson, born this day in 1911, who steadfastly refused all offers to get rich singing the blues, because she knew she was born to sing for Jesus Christ.

My mother played Mahalia Jackson's records while she cleaned house when I was a small child.   It was a time when I still felt too small for the oversized world around me, but when the stunning power behind that big, warm, smiling voice vibrated the air in our old wood farmhouse, I felt enlarged inside, and strong.  Her voice buzzed like a wild honeycomb in the center of my chest, and made me want to sing to the Lord in a big, warm, smiling voice, too.

Do watch these to the end -- she gets more and more warmed up as she goes!

Here she sings the gospel tune she sang in Washington, DC right before Martin Luther King rose to deliver his historic "I Have A Dream" speech.




The visual quality of this one is not great, but goodness, her voice is just amazing.  Imagine how she would sound on modern recording equipment!



Thank you, Mother, for giving me ample doses of Mahalia when my ears were still learning what the world should sound like!

On Leisure, Learning, and Large Rooms

Little did I know when I turned a page and came upon this passage well over a decade ago that my children's lives would be immeasurably changed by it:

Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life.–– We begin to see what we want. Children make large demands upon us. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room,’ should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking––the strain would be too great––but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?”  (Charlotte Mason, Vol. 3, pp. 170-1; emphasis mine.)

Mason's writings are humbling to me because of the way scripture flows so naturally and organically into her ideas and phrasings.  In the quote above, she pays homage to Psalm 31, and in so doing she loads it with a layer of meaning that we'll miss if we're in too big a hurry (or if we never read the KJV!):

"I will rejoice and be glad in Thy mercy:

for Thou hast considered my trouble;

Thou hast known my soul in adversities;

and hast not shut me up into the hand of the enemy:

Thou hast set my feet in a large room."

David exults here in a God of magnanimity -- a God who not only delivers him out of the darkness of adversity, but goes far beyond mere rescue to establish David in a space of remarkable expanse and liberality.  God gave David exactly what he needed, and then far more.

Mason, then, by alluding to this Psalm, is drawing upon David's exultation of God's abundant nature, to assist her in giving Him glory for what that large room represents in the context of her own life:  education.  This is fitting, because education is also a deliverance.  And this deliverance, like David's, is not limited to merely being rescued from the grip of darkness, because with all that God has provided for us to learn and know, education can and should be a transcendent deliverance into a large room -- a magnanimously appointed life of the mind.  

In an earlier post, I echoed a borrowed thought that education is a form of repentance.  We all view education as a necessity, but do we apprehend that it was necessitated by the Fall?  Before sin entered into the world, man strolled in the garden with the Fount of all wisdom and knowledge.  The curse that demotes us from our created state of ease to a life of toiling for our food and livelihood, fighting diseases, and suffering pain and heartache, is the same curse that distanced us from wisdom, that causes us to suffer from ignorance, nonsense, and foolishness.  Education is to ignorance what aspirin is to pain -- both are equally weapons of our warfare against the effects of the Fall.

Mason, by asking 'how large is the room in which he finds his feet set' as a means of measuring the viability of an education, is clearly drawing God into the matter, for clearly God is the one who 'sets our feet.'  And the greatest gift God gives to His people other than salvation is knowledge.  When the Psalmist sang, "The Lord is my light and my salvation," he was proclaiming that both were vital to his welfare.  In fact, we need knowledge from God to even know about our salvation!

Which brings me to Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which I am reading with the Ordo Amoris book group.  (My thoughts on an earlier chapter are here.)  Author Josef Pieper points out that our word for school comes from the Greek word schola.  No surprise there.  The shocker is this: schola, it turns out, is the Greek word for leisure. 

(What?  School = leisure?  On what planet?  Yeah, I can almost hear you out there.)

It is important here to clarify that leisure does not equal laziness in Pieper's context.  Nor does it mean pursuing mindless, passive amusements.  It means, to my mind, ceasing from anxiety and from merely utilitarian preoccupations so that one can contemplate higher things.  Leisure encompasses those pursuits without which we cannot be fully human.

Why have we not acknowledged by now that the human mind, by its nature, does not learn in a state of anxiety?  (Irony alert:  Maybe we can't learn that because the implications make us more anxious?) We all know this from our own experience, do we not?  So we should be willing to at least consider the converse -- that our minds are actually wired to learn, to receive knowledge, in a state of leisure. 

Here's where it gets interesting:  Pieper expands on the connection between leisure (a state of non-work) and the commandment for sabbath rest.  He muses that it is in this state of sabbath leisure that the body of Christ convenes in worship and becomes the bodily visible bride.  This state of worship-leisure, then, is incarnational in nature:  the bride of Christ becomes visible not in a state of exertion and work, but rather in a state of leisure.  This is a beautiful thing to think about.

And it occurs to me that this state of worship-leisure also means that we bring no work, not even the spirit of work, before the Lord in His house... because He has finished the work.  It is only because of this that we can come before Him in a state of sabbath rest.

Sabbath rest means coming before the Lord in stillness, in a turning away from exertion and anxiety, so we can consecrate a space in time "to rejoice and be glad in Thy mercy."  It makes sense to me, in this context, that worship is the only true source of leisure -- for if we do not cast our cares upon Him, if we do not trust in His finished work, we can never be truly at rest.  Worship is indeed what allows us to have leisure in our souls, for the purpose of glorifying and enjoying fellowship with God.

Which brings us full circle... 

Worship, Pieper contends, is the basis of all leisure.

And leisure = schola.

::pause::

Can we concur, then, that worship is the basis for... school?

And can we then concur that school, to be based in worship, should happen in the absence of anxiety and fear, and in an atmosphere of rest and delight?

(I warn you that if you think about this very much it might change how you go about things as early as tomorrow morning.)

Would you say your education happened in an atmosphere defined more by leisure, or by hurry, stress and anxiety?  

What would your children say about their educational atmosphere?


"For God hath not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."

 
_______________________________________

Addendum:  While I was battling cancer, that passage from Psalm 31 was written across my bathroom mirror in big letters for over a year, and I chanted it aloud to the Lord every day for many months.  It was immensely calming -- every day, without fail, these words restored me from a spirit of fear to a peaceful, sound mind.  In fact, I can truly say that in these words, I found leisure for my soul in a very anxious time.  

the space butterfly

Behold beauty unspeakable.

New image released today from the Hubble Space Telescope,

from the first photos taken with its newly repaired and improved mirrors.

Have you ever seen a more breathtakingly beautiful photo?

I want it blown up mural size for my bedroom ceiling.

We are the first generation to see these things,

"yea, the deep things of God."*

That's astonishing to think about.

The things God sees that we do not....

*I Corinthians 2


(Click on the image to see it HUGE.) 
(Or visit the Hubble site, where they are so incredibly magnanimous
with their gorgeous images that they give you all sorts of download options for free.)

on bonus time

Two years ago today, I was cured of breast cancer.

While singing in the shower this morning, standing in the exact spot where I first felt that deadly butterbean under my skin, I had a mind-bending thought:   "I have now lived past the time when I would have died without the mastectomy, without the miracle." 

"From here on," I thought, "I'm living on bonus time."  

Then it hit me:  What am I thinking?  I've been on bonus time from the moment I was born.


I pause now to marvel at the stillness of cataclysms.

Sometimes an ordinary and unremarkable moment turns out to be an axis whack that re-tilts the world.  You smile at a stranger, you hand someone a cup of coffee, you turn left instead of right, and silently the tectonic plates beneath your life slide and lock, forever rearranging all your future calendars like geologic columns churning in a tremor.  Nothing will ever be the same, but you don't know that yet.  The world moved, and there you are just whistling away, raking leaves, brewing tea, turning a page. 

By my doctors' reckonings, there was a moment over a decade ago when a single cell in my breast quietly went haywire.  Whatever I saw happening in my life that day was nothing at all like what God saw happening in my life that day.  But He did see.  And He saw what I did not.  Which is just as well since the cells of my body fall under His sovereignty, not mine.  Thank goodness for that. 

We see through a glass darkly: there is not one moment of our lives that is exactly what it seems.

But God, who is omniscient in every moment of time, omnipowerful in every moment of time, omnipresent in every moment of time, the God who consecrated both space and time, is Lord over moments. 

All time is a consecrated gift. 

Which means that all of us are living on bonus time.


I find this terribly exhilirating.  Do you?

the dark night

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Quotes from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas

Chapter 10 ~ Spiritual Gluttony: Spiritual Feelings

The previous chapter explored many difficulties in the Christian life, but this chapter will focus on the internal spiritual challenge known as "the dark night of the soul," or a desert experience.

Thomas a Kempis: "It is very expedient for thy welfare, that thou be left sometimes without taste of spiritual sweetness, and in a dry condition, lest perhaps thou shouldest be vain about thy prosperous estate, and shouldest be willing to please thyself in that which thou art not."

The wise spiritual adviser will eventually need to tell the new believer, ever so gently, that maturity will one day demand that the euphoric feelings on which he or she is becoming dependent must come to an end. Feelings, even spiritual feelings, can become a roadblock to further spiritual growth; sooner or later, God in His mercy will begin the weaning process to mature the believer's faith.

"Spiritual caressing," if left unabated, would eventually cause us to lose focus. Thus we could begin to enjoy the fruits of worshiping God (our feelings) more than we enjoyed the God we worship.

Gluttony for spiritual feelings opens a wide door to the other appetites, including greed, overeating, sexual lusts, the hunger for power, and other sins. When feelings become the focus of our faith, religion becomes not a friend but an enemy, concealing the true state of our heart. We wonder why we fall into sin so soon after a seemingly powerful encounter with God. What we fail to realize is that our hearts were stolen by spiritual gluttony, not real reverence.

We must avoid the trap of equating "good worship" with "good feeling." The two are unrelated.

When we love Christ only for what He brings us, including spiritual feelings, we are loving ourselves, not loving Him, regardless of the sacrifice we think we are offering. The dark night of the soul purifies our motivation and keeps us from becoming like the crowds in the New Testament who followed Jesus, not for His teaching, but for the miraculously supplied bread.

When we live by faith and not feelings, when we persevere no matter how dry we feel, Teresa of Avila said, we show we are among those souls who "would want the Lord to see that they do not serve Him for pay." That is, we want the Lord to see that we will serve Him regardless of whether it gives us pleasure or pain. We will serve Him because He is God and Lord and because He has captured our hearts and our wills.

Chapters 11 & 12 are compelling and useful chapters which focus on personal application --bringing the spiritual disciplines into a practical realm. I will not be journalling quotes from those chapters, so this will be my final post of quotes from this book.

I am glad so many of you have paused to contemplate the quotes I've shared from this rich, provocative book. Thank you for your comments. And thank you to Dr. George Grant for recommending it.


To see all of my posts of quotes from chapters of this book, either click the tag "reading journal" below this post, or simply type "Thomas Seeking" in the blog search box in the header.
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a crushing mercy

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Quotes from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas

Chapter 9 - A Difficult Road: The Christian Life

Those who have gone before us have left a clear witness: We may seek God or we may seek ease, but we cannot seek both.

Our surgical and medical advancements lull into false security, causing us to forget that we are one missed heartbeat away from heaven... The physical and social luxuries of our world also make it more difficult for us to face the hard internal issues because we don't have to -- there are plenty of escapes... We can literally hide from the truth of the Gospel and our responsibility to serve God by filling our lives with noise.

Former saints had nowhere to turn but to God; we can take our pick.

How do we talk about the cross to a generation that finds unfluffed pillows intolerable?

Scripture says the disciples "strengthened" or "encouraged" each other with the words, "we must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God." (Acts 14:22) Notice Scripture doesn't say they "threatened" each other with the possibility of suffering. No, they encouraged and strengthened each other.

It is not a coincidence that Jesus chose twelve disciples who would naturally have problems with the beliefs, attitudes, or dispositions of the others. If I were seeking peace and harmony, I certainly wouldn't put a tax collector with a zealot -- two natural enemies. But Jesus knew that real spirituality is proven in our relationships with others and He was willing to call people into relationships that would put them beyond their comfort level.

How many of us have used a gift God has given us to serve Satan's ends rather than build God's kingdom? How many of us have been given the gift of making money and then let that money waste away on selfish pursuits? How many of us have been gifted with serving, but perverted that gift of service by trying to make others feel indebted to us? How many of us have been given the gift of leadership and then turned that gift into a tool of manipulation and control? If we forget the law of sin in our lives, if we forget how very difficult it is to obtain mastery over it, Satan will have a field day with our self-righteous carelessness. Even our strengths can become weaknesses if we're not careful.

The most dangerous Christians are those who have forgotten their tendency to sin -- and Satan's agenda to capitalize on that tendency.

Difficulty teaches us to be pastoral people, something that does not come naturally to us. If we deny our own pain, we must also blind ourselves to the pain of others. We also need difficulty because without it we become proud, self-centered, and uncaring monsters who are full of ourselves.

I used to be a vicious discipler. I never missed a quiet time, and if someone I was working with did, I questioned the sincerity of his or her faith. Then God in His mercy crushed me for eight long years. Sins I had never faced before came roaring to life. Prayer became difficult. Ministry felt strained and awkward; there was no sense of God's power coursing through me. At the end of this period a door flew open, the darkness was lifted, and I was changed. I realized God didn't need someone who could preach better than anyone else or who could fast longer, pray more or evangelize more. He wanted somebody who would love His people. I knew a lot about discipline and commitment, but I knew nothing about love.

The sweetness of pain can woo us from the world if we are determined to learn from it rather than complain about it. Teresa of Avila wrote, "The soul is left with greater contempt for the world than before because it sees that nothing in the world was any help to it in that torment and it is much more detached from creatures because it now sees that only the Creator can console and satisfy it."

Chapter 8 quotes
(You can follow the link trail to prior chapter notes from there. Or you can go to our November 2008 archives and start with the first post on Chapter 1.)

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sentenced

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Quotes from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas

Chapter 8 -- Living in a Dying World: The Remembrance of Death

Fenelon believed we avoid the thought of death so we are not saddened by it. But this, he said, is shortsighted. "It will only be sad for those who have not thought about it."

Young people have a distorted view of life. We forget that funerals are waiting on the other end of weddings and baby showers. When we segregate ourselves -- when we don't know anyone who is suffering from arthritis -- we can be lulled to sleep.

The ancients found great spiritual benefit in looking death in the face, seizing its reality, and making it their servant. They used death to teach themselves how to live.

Remembering death acts like a filter, helping us to hold on to the essential and let go of the trivial. Climacus pointed out that "a man who has heard himself sentenced to death will not worry about the way theaters are run." His point, of course, is that all of us have been sentenced to death; it's just a matter of time, so shouldn't we live our lives accordingly?

Eternity turns everything around. I'm reminded of this every year when I figure my taxes. During the year, I rejoice at the paychecks and extra income, and sometimes I wince when I write out the tithe and offering... At the end of the year, however, all of that changes. As I'm figuring my tax liability, I wince at every source of income and rejoice with every tithe and offering check -- more income means more taxes, but every offering and tithe means fewer taxes. Everything is turned upside down, or perhaps more appropriately, rightside up... I suspect Judgment Day will be like that.

Death not only filters our priorities, it also filters our passions. Pascal wrote, "To render passion harmless let us behave as though we had only a week to live."

What person would risk entering eternity in a drunken stupor? What fool would ignore his loved ones and his God for one last night so he could make another quick ten thousand dollars just before he died?

It is only the denial of death that allows us to continue rebelling against God. It is only because we are presuming on some future time to set things right that we ever even consider letting them go wrong.

I want to enter death tired. I want to have spent what energy God has apportioned me... An eternal rest awaits all who know Christ, so why are we preoccupied with rest now?

The supreme way for a Christian to keep the thought of death alive is to remember the crucifixion of our Lord. Every time we take Communion we should do so with the awareness that, just as Christ's work on earth had a beginning and an end (as He ministered in a human body), so the mission He has given us has a beginning and an end.

"It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart." Eccl 7:2


Chapter 7 quotes
(You can follow the link trail to prior chapter notes from there.)

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adventicipations

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Mary's Song

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest . . .
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.

His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves' voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes,
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended,
I must see him torn.

by Luci Shaw
from Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation
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adventicipations

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Open

John 20:19, 26


Doubt padlocked one door and
Memory put her back to the other.
Still the damp draught seeped in, though
Fear chinked all the cracks and
Blindness boarded up the window.
In the darkness that was left
Defeat crouched, shivering,
in his cold corner.

Then Jesus came
(all the doors being shut)
and stood among them.


~Luci Shaw
from Accompanied by Angels - Poems of the Incarnation

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a child squinting

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Quotes from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas

Chapter 7 - The High and the Low: A Double-Sided Humility

"Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because He shows us both God and our own wretchedness." - Blaise Pascal

"There was a time in my life when I feared sin so much that I focused almost exclusively on not sinning. Now sin is a very disturbing thing and you might well ask what could be wrong with fearing it. The answer is that my fear was so separated from God's grace that I was afraid to take an honest look into my own heart. I thus lost touch with my weaknesses, and the result was pride. I lived in an illusory and self-deceiving "holiness" based on discipline and works while my heart was full of evil attitudes and judgments. God used a period of dryness to reveal the true state of my heart."

"In the dryness and emptiness of this night of the appetite, a person also procures spiritual humility, that virtue opposed to the first capital vice, spiritual pride. Through this humility acquired by means of self-knowledge, individuals are purged of all those imperfections of the vice of pride into which they fell in the time of their prosperity. Aware of their own dryness and wretchedness, the thought of their being more advanced than others does not even occur in its first movements, as it did before; on the contrary, they realize that others are better. From this humility stems love of neighbor, for they will esteem them and not judge them as they did before when they were aware that they enjoyed an intense fervor while others did not. These persons will know only their own misery and keep it so much in sight that they will have no opportunity to watch anyone else's conduct." ~John of the Cross

"Ironically, if our self-understanding is truly born in heaven it will actually encourage us rather than discourage us... Once our self-view is no longer tied to our own worth but to the worth ascribed to us in God, we can readily admit our shortcomings and begin working on them while we are encouraged that we are not left alone in our failings."

"When we are ashamed about where we are spiritually, we have two choices: We can create a false front and a glittering image, or we can be honest before God, ourselves and others about our weakness and allow transformation to occur. We will not have the energy or resources to do both; we must choose one or the other."

"Humility is at root a celebration of our freedom in Christ; we are freed from having to make a certain impression or create a false front."

"Humility is simply admitting what is true."

"...God is supreme truth; and to be humble is to walk in truth, for it is a very deep truth that of ourselves we have nothing good but only misery and nothingness. Whoever does not understand this walks in falsehood." ~Teresa of Avila

"A peasant shut up in his village only partially knows his wretchedness, but let him see rich palaces, a superb court, and he will realize all the poverty of his village. He cannot endure its hovels after a sight of so much magnificence. It is thus that we see our ugliness and worthlessness in the beauty and infinite grandeur of God." ~Fenelon

"It's easy for a man or woman to be proud until he or she gains a glimpse of the God of the universe. Once we see what could be, humility is as natural a reaction as a child squinting his or her eyes to block out the glare of the sun."

"I need to be in awe of God today... If I ever lose that profound reverence that leaves me standing silent in fascination and wonder, pride and sin will be waiting to claim my soul."

"Keeping sight of God is vital to humility, just as keeping in touch with humility is vital to seeing God. We cannot maintain one without the other."

"Christian communities, including families and churches, break down in proportion to the loss of humility of their members."

"Community is essential for humility because how we treat others is a better test of our humility than how we treat ourselves."

"If you were in this happy [humbled] state, far from impatiently enduring those who are not, the immense stretch of your heart would make you indulgent and compassionate toward all the weaknesses which shrink selfish hearts. The more perfect we are, the more we get along with imperfection. The Pharisees could not bear the publicans and the women sinners, whom Jesus Christ treated with such gentleness and kindness." ~Fenelon

"When Jesus faced self-righteous hypocrisy He was brutal and unyielding in His confrontation, but when He faced those caught in the misery of sin He often showed a softer face, becoming a Savior who would not break a bruised read or blow out a smoldering wick (Isaiah 42:3).

"The enemy often suggests a great desire of things that are absent, and which shall never occur, so that he may divert our mind from present objects, from which, however trivial they may be, we might obtain considerable profit to ourselves." ~Francis de Sales

"The King of Glory does not recompense his servants according to the dignity of the offices they hold, but according to the measure of love and humility with which they exercise them. Saul, seeking the asses of his father, found the kingdom of Israel. Rebecca, watering the camels of Abraham, became the spouse of his son. Ruth, gleaning after the reapers of Boaz, and laying down at his feet, was advanced to his side and made his wife..." ~Francis de Sales

"The proud man, who trusts in himself, has just reason not to attempt anything; but he that is humble is so much the more courageous, by how much the more he acknowledges his own inability; and the more wretched he esteems himself the more confident he becomes; because he places his whole trust in God, who delights to display his omnipotence in our weakness and to elevate his mercy upon our misery." ~Francis de Sales

Chapter 6 quotes
(You can follow the link trail to prior chapter notes from there.)

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adventicipations

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Say to them

that are of a fearful heart,

Be strong,

Fear not

behold, your God will come with vengeance,

even God with a recompense;

He will come and save you.

.

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the LORD came unto Abram in a vision, saying,

Fear not,

Abram

.

.

And the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven and said unto her...

Fear not

,

,

And the LORD appeared unto Isaac, and said...

Fear not

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Thus saith the LORD that made thee,

and formed thee from the womb, which will help thee

Fear not,

O Jacob

.

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Then said he unto me,

Fear not,

Daniel

.

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But the angel said unto him,

Fear not,

Zacharias

.

.

behold,

the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying,

Joseph, thou son of David,

Fear not

.

.

..

and the angel said unto her

Fear not,

Mary

.

.

.

..

adventicipations

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I wait for the LORD
my soul doth wait
and in His Word

do I hope
My soul

waiteth

for

the

LORD
more

than they that watch

for the morning
I say

more than they

that watch for the morning

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Psalm 130:5&6

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a heart full of noise

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Quotes from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas

Chapter 6 - Cultivating the Quiet: Simplicity

"The sin many of us fall into is not that we shake our fists at God and defy Him to His face; that is the sin of unbelievers. Our sin is that we passively rebel against God, filling our lives with so much noise and busyness that God's voice cannot, or will not, penetrate."

"Cultivating the quiet is a painful experience when we are addicted to noise, excitement, and occupation. Opening the door to spiritual quiet can also open the door to spiritual fear and loneliness. It takes a great amount of courage to face God."

"[Blaise] Pascal believed that many young people live in a fundamentally dishonest existence, pretending they're having a good time while they live in constant terror of the truth of their hearts. Their "lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future. But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it...""

[He cites Augustine as saying that adults do the same thing, but often cover their idleness by calling it "business." Ironic - and convicting.]

"Pascal said the boredom that drives us to diversion could be the catalyst that calls us to change -- if only we were not afraid to do the necessary work. But Satan offers us his narcotics* as alternatives..."

"The difficulty of simplicity is that it will, at times (especially in the early stages as we break our addiction to diversion), lead us into soul boredom, gloom, depression, and possibly even to despair... I would be less than honest if I suggested that one day our lives are filled with diversions and the next day we walk hand-in-hand with God in glorious rapture... We who have been drugged by diversions cannot expect to enter the quiet without a struggle. Our souls will roar for diversion, the fix that saves us from God's presence."

"God calls us into the quiet (Isaiah 30:15**), not to chastise us, but to draw us into a deeper communion with Him. If we are to quit hiding from God, we need to know why we hide."

"...alone before God, we stand naked and vulnerable. We won't be able to pretend anymore; before God, we will have the choice to obey or to disobey, but pretending will no longer be an option. If we are miserable, we will have to face our misery. If we are sad, we will have to face our sadness. When we dwell in God's presence we must dwell in truth; we cannot control the outcome."

"...I realized that if I insisted on becoming consumed by every major sporting event or political race, every move of the stock market, or even every worry of parenting, if I let these things seize my heart, I simply could not enter into a true celebration of the Sabbath or the joy of a baptism, or the Lord's Supper, or Christmas and Easter, or any other true and significant celebration."

"I have learned the necessity of "guarding my heart" (Proverbs 4:23***) because my heart does not have an infinite capacity to rejoice or be alarmed. By becoming preoccupied with passing things, I exhaust my heart's ability to care about the things that really do matter."

"Just as someone who is allergic to cats learns the beginning symptoms of a reaction and makes haste to get away, so we often unknowingly begin to learn the sensation of God breaking into our hearts and we rush into some activity or diversion to avoid His presence."

"Simplicity frees us from being tabloid Christians."

"Our instant information age pounds us with up-to-the-second details about many things we simply don't need to know. These incessant bulletins can weigh us down and root our thinking in transitory matters."

"The spiritual life is impossible in a heart full of noise and occupation. God will not fill a heart that has no room."

"I seek simplicity only because God is so great I want to strip away the clutter that keeps me from Him."

*By "narcotics" Thomas refers to all manner of diversions and self-focusing distractions -- TV, computers, sports, shopping, gossip, etc.

**Isaiah 30:15-16 - For thus saith the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not. But ye said, No; for we will flee upon horses; therefore shall ye flee: and, We will ride upon the swift; therefore shall they that pursue you be swift.

***Proverbs 4:23 - Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.


Chapter 5 quotes
(You can follow the link trail to prior chapter notes from there.)
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on being thankful for what came to pass

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The second greatest benefit of blogging is that if you keep at it long enough, one day you will realize that you've inadvertently given yourself an unexpected blessing: archives.

We didn't even consider this lovely side benefit of blogging back when we decided to start The Beehive. But I have to say that those archives tucked away over there on your left are absolutely priceless to me now. As I thumb through the 625 missives we've pecked out over the past four years, I realize that all our fiddling and piddling here have somehow created an accidental journal of a golden time.

When I realized what a treasure our archives had become to me, I renamed them "What Came To Pass." There's a little story behind that -- a true story. My father once told me about a small-town ministers' breakfast where all the preachers were asked to share a verse in the Bible that they were particularly fond of and tell why. As they went around the room, one preacher after another cited some well-known verse, the type of verse you would expect to hear at such a time, if you know what I mean. But then they got to an elderly and much-beloved black preacher. He said, "Here's the Bible phrase I lean on every day, my friends: "And it came to pass..." Because everything that comes upon us on this hard old earth, no matter how bad it may be, it doesn't come to stay. Eternity with Jesus Christ is the only thing that will ever come to stay! All the rest just comes to pass."

Isn't that wonderful?

So it was that tonight after supper, I spent a happy half-hour fossicking about in the Beehive archives for posts from Thanksgivings that came to pass. As long as I have them gathered in hand, I figure I might as well pass them by you all again. So here are a few that our readers particularly enjoyed.


Beatrice's Feast (2007)
Might ought to fetch a hanky first. More than a few Beehive readers have told me this one made them cry. Beatrice felt so blessed by preparing this feast that she's doing it again this year. We love our Beatrice!

Thanksgiving Poems, Prayers & Psalms (2006)
The lovely words we take turns reading aloud during our Thanksgiving feasts -- one of our favorite family traditions.

Providing and Preventing (2006)
On being thankful for invisible blessings

Random Thoughts of Gratitude (2006)
What I remember about writing this post is how it buoyed my soul into a state of joy that lingered for days. I should write posts like this more often. Maybe I will resolve to do that in the coming months. Maybe you would do it with me? I like being in a state of joy, don't you?

Thanksgiving Books for Families (2006)
And I should post this one earlier next year!

And one more... head over to my cooking blog for my grandmother's legendary and much-requested recipe for Cornbread Dressing. You know you want it.

Say what? Oh, you're still wondering what the firstest greatest benefit of blogging is? I'll give you three guesses one guess.

thanksgiving snowballs

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Quotes from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas

Chapter 5 - Joyful Surrender: Christian Submission

The Two Essential Questions:
Is God good?
Is God Lord?

"Both the goodness and providence of God are well established in Scripture, but both are questioned today: "If God is so good, why does He allow evil things to happen?" and "If God is in control, why is the world such a mess?" Until we resolve these two questions in our own minds, we will find ourselves at virtual war with God."

"...maturity will eventually require that we come to this conclusion: "Yes, God is good, and yes, God is Lord." Until we have done that, the intimacy of surrender simply will not be possible."

"Many of us carry wounds that need to be healed before we can embrace these two truths... Whatever the case, we should do what we must do so we can resolve these two fundamental questions without delay. The scrapper in each of us must be retired."

"There will likely be a time in our Christian journeys when, like Jacob, we will wrestle with God all night long. That night may last for months or even years. But there must eventually come a dawn when we say, "OK, God, You win. You've broken me and I'm Yours. No more fighting. No more complaining. Lead me where You will. Not my will but Thine be done."

"The biggest block to our surrender is not our appetites and wayward desires, but our addiction to running our own lives."

"Thomas a Kempis said, "The love of thyself doth hurt thee more than anything in the world.""

"We need to understand the seriousness of rebellion. When we refuse God in the big things, He will move to the small. When we refuse to give God even these, what else can He ask? We have then approached the land of apostasy, and all the spiritual disciplines in the world, all the beautiful songs we sing, and all the money we give away won't excuse the fact that our hearts are in rebellion."

"Christian surrender means the death of complaining."

"I learned that faith isn't tested by how often God answers my prayers with a yes, but by my willingness to continue serving Him and thanking Him, even when I don't have a clue as to what He is doing."

"Thanksgiving became my doorway to a more mature surrender. When I began to fight my sin of complaining with thanksgiving, the opposing virtue, this was a struggle for me. But God in His mercy placed gratitude in my heart, and like a snowball rolling down a hill, that gift of gratitude grew until the complaining was wiped out."

"When God birthed thanksgiving in my heart, my purest cry was simply, "God, I want to be on your side." My only request was to be wherever God was. If God was in riches or poverty, sickness or health, at home or far away, I wanted to be there. Whatever God was doing, that's what I wanted to be doing. Nothing else mattered."

"Rebellion means war, so it is no surprise that surrender means peace."

Chapter 4 quotes here and here.
(You can follow the link trail to prior chapter notes from there.)

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soul sadness

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This brief passage from Chapter 4* is rich and stunning and has been whirling in my thoughts for a couple of days now. I've re-read these seven sequential paragraphs slowly a half dozen times and they're still talking to me.

I'm posting the passage uncut in the hopes that some of you might think aloud on these things with me. I'd love some company here in the whirlwind.

Soul Sadness

A Pharisee who does nothing but focus on avoiding sin is still concentrating on sin, which makes him or her little different from the person who voraciously lives in sin. Both are consumed by sin -- one to avoid it, the other to live in it.

Undue fretting leads to "soul sadness," or despondency or "inquietude," as Francis de Sales* put it. Soul sadness is the result of a performance-based holiness and it often plagues those who most want to serve God.

De Sales wrote that true holiness is cultivated with "patience, meekness, humility, and tranquillity, expecting it more from the providence of God than from [our] own industry or diligence." If, however, we seek deliverance from sin out of performance (which is merely a form of self-love and self-exaltation), we will fatigue ourselves and fall into a soul sadness that, "instead of removing, aggravates the evil, and involves [the soul] in such anguish and distress, with so great loss of courage and strength," that we imagine ourselves "incurable."

Thus de Sales asserted that soul sadness, resulting from self-love and self-effort, "is the greatest evil that can befall the soul, sin only excepted." Soul sadness saps our strength, which is needed to resist the temptation. This is how it keeps us in the maze of "performance."

It is possible for us to desire holiness for the wrong reasons; perhaps we simply want to use holiness for fame, as others might use a beautiful voice or eloquent speech. Or perhaps we are steeped in pride and simply unwilling to count ourselves among the truly sinful. This unholy desire for holiness produces a soul sadness that Satan exploits to further defeat us, with the intent of driving us off the cliff of despair.

Soul sadness "proceeds from an inordinate desire of being delivered from the evil which we feel, or of acquiring the good which we desire: and yet there is nothing which tends more to increase evil, and to prevent the enjoyment of good, than an unquiet mind."

The essence of the Christian life is a love relationship with God. Our standing in the Christian life rests with Christ; when the virtues take on too much importance, that is, when acquiring virtues and avoiding sin become the primary focus of our walk, we have elevated the (admittedly important) secondary over the primary. Another way of putting it is that we have made an idol out of our own piety.

Comments?


*from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas. Search this month's archives for my reading journal quotes from Chapters 1-4.

**Francis de Sales was a Christian who wrote at the beginning of the 1600's.
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the absurdity of sin

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Quotes from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas

Chapter 4 - Holiness of the Heart: Avoiding Sin and Temptation

"Our quest to understand holiness begins with understanding the absurdity of sin."

"Sin creates massive disturbances in our lives; holiness brings peace."

"A performance-based Christian says, "I want to do this, but I know I shouldn't. I must either find a way to not do this or to not get caught." The relation-based Christian asks, "Who do I want to be in love with? My Lord or this sin?""

"Christianity, with its moral calling, may seem repressive to the world, but when we see sin as it really is (slow suicide), the moral calling of Christianity takes on a whole new light. "

"Sin is not inviting but debilitating; holiness is not burdensome but liberating."

"We feel God's redeeming love and grace when we get together with some believers. Their holiness is a warm hearth, a shelter that invites us to come in from the cold. Even though we sense an underlying strength that tells us sin and manipulation are not acceptable in their presence -- and this can be somewhat fearful -- we still find ourselves drawn to them.

"There are others whose holiness seems to be a prison. It is forced, uncomfortable, and ragged at the edges. The biting edge of accusation and judgment pushes us away from them. When they talk about sin, their voices seem marked by fear, not understanding or wisdom."

"We cease from sin not just because we are disciplined, but because we have found something better."

"Focusing on sin, either by committing it or by being consumed with fighting it, keeps us from practicing God's presence. God forbid that we should ever define ourselves or our days solely by what we didn't do. Let us instead be people who define ourselves by practicing God's presence."

Chapter 1 quotes
Chapter 2 quotes
Chapter 3 quotes
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