What Will You Do?

from Waking The Dead

So, let me ask again: How would you live differently, if you believed your heart was the treasure of the kingdom?

What does your heart need? In some sense it’s a personal question, unique to our make-up, and what brings us life. For some its music, for others its reading, for others they must garden. Our friend Lori loves the city; I can’t wait to get out of one. Bart reads articles on flying; Cherie loves a good novel. Bethann loves horses and Gary needs time working in the woodshop. You know what makes your heart refreshed, the things that make you come alive. I don’t get the thing with women and baths, but I know that Stasi loves them and finds a little retreat in a fifteen minute tub. “He leads me to soak in still, bubbly waters.” For me and the boys its the dirtier, the happier.

Yet there are some things all hearts need in common. We need beauty; that’s clear enough from the fact that God has filled the world with it, as he has given us sun and rain,

Wine that gladdens the heart of man,
Oil to make his face shine,
And bread that sustains his heart. (Psalm 104:15)

We need to drink in beauty wherever we can get it – in music, in nature, in art, in a great meal shared. These are all gifts to us from God’s generous heart. Friends, those things are not decorations to a life; they are what brings us life.

The skies of blue
The fields of green
Are all for you

The silver moon
The shining sea
All for you

For you, the wind blows
For you, the river flows

And everything you dream about
Even the love you dream of, too,
Is all for you. (John Smith & Lisa Aschman, “All for You”)

I don’t think I could have finished this book if it weren’t for the walks I take each day in the woods. My soul is tired, bone tired. The battle has been long and hard. Last night it began to snow. It is still snowing now. It, too, is a gift to my heart.

(from Waking The Dead, 214, 215 )

 

Coming To a Close

One month left.  Three long, exciting, difficult, intense years in a graduate counseling/marriage and family therapy program has come down to one month.  Hard to believe.

I find it ironic somehow that I’m sitting in the same seat as I was four years ago.  Not much external has changed over the past three years.  My job, certainly.  The work I do during the day.  But the shift, the movement, has been largely an inward one.  As I thought of that, I got the picture of William Wallace coming back home to the place of his youth early in the Braveheart film.  Same homestead.  Same people around him.  He was the same person… sort of.  But a different man, a different kind of man than he had been a boy.  Had he stayed, the trajectory of his life would have led him to a different spot.  He’d been disciplined.  Trained.  Honed.  He had been primed as a warrior.  His desire was still for peace, a reflection that his heart had not become hard or wicked; rather, he had developed skill and cunning for battle.

And battle it is, each day where I work.  My office is Stirling, and every counseling session is a taking of the field.  A movement either more toward freedom from tyranny — if only a single step — or a retreat toward it.  I don’t battle alone; I can’t.  I don’t mean only that the Lord God goes before more, for surely He does, and I don’t mean in this case that, like Wallace, I am a part of a band that knows their place in the story, for certainly I am.  What I mean here is that the war we’re fighting is for “the sons and daughters of Scotland,” for the freedom and life of all these precious ones sitting on my couch.  They must advance.  I spend much of my time preparing the advance, or instilling hope and courage into their hearts to pursue the vision of victory in the dreaded battle they find themselves facing, as much as I “go to pick a fight.”

But, unlike for Wallace’s  men, this is where the battle lines are drawn — is it not? — right through the hearts of us all.  It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said that “the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not even between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts… [through] the heart of every man.”  This is where the Enemy has set up camp.  And this is where we are called to fight, if we are to fight at all.  And fight we must.  This is where we experience either the joy of ground retaken, or the bondage of captivity and allegiance to the false king in our midst, to the wicked prince of a foreign territory.

I have come to see that my life, though not only about battle, must be about the battle for truth and life.  If only we had those given to us on silver platters.  We don’t.  Instead, we are in a war where it is just as often our own heads that find their way onto silver platters.  But we are given the strength and resources to fight that these things advance within us and among us.  And we have a kind and quality of life guaranteed us if we are willing to give our lives up to have it.

My own training is far from over; in some ways, I’ve only just begun to recognize the meaning and need of it.  And Jesus always seems to be about growing us more into His image as men and women pursuing hard after His kind of life, and willing to fight through hell and back for others to enjoy it with us.  (What else could God have meant by telling husbands to “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church” [Eph. 5:25]  How does He love the church?  By “giving Himself up for her” on the field of battle.)  But I’m nearing the end of one phase of my journey, entering more fully into the next.  I long for peace for these friends whom I meet — in their homes, in their marriages, in their work.  But, in the words again of Wallace, “it’s all for nothing if you don’t have freedom.”  And freedom is hard-won.  Maybe that’s the only way we come to appreciate it for what it is.

 

An Enemy Among Us

I realize lately that when I write, I am consistently harping on the reality of busyness and its role in our lives.  This blog is as much journal as anything, a locale I come to occasionally to offer what’s on my heart and mind, and this topic is apparently a consistently weighty one for me.

In a sociology class I teach, I asked the students to comment on a portion of Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy I had given them.  It was an intro, a prologue, to the book, and there was very little in this portion that was what I would call particularly spiritual or religious, except that Willard was addressing our contemporary confusion over morality and meaning.  He termed it flying upside down, that in our present age we cannot tell what is up and what is down, and we are headed in a dangerous direction and don’t even know it.  Among several realities he referenced was the plague of busyness, the way we dash back and forth and in and out like rats in a cage, trying to find — or else thinking we have found — some sense of trascendent meaning and existential purpose.

In reading the responses of the students, I realized that I am not alone in seeing the problem with our living “in the matrix,” to borrow from the movie’s idea of a small, cramped, and unreal arena in which we act out our lives.  The comments from the students’ papers were consistent in labeling this as a problem they have come to recognize as well.  I was blown away at their perception.  The understanding of this thought of “flying upside down” is well-known, I suspect, something that we each recognize on some level.

I think it was Richard Foster that said busyness wasn’t a device of the Enemy; it is the Enemy.  Maybe so.  Maybe the Evil One masquerading as an angel of light.

Think about our culture for a second.  What is the typical response of someone you meet up with when you ask them how they are?  There are those few exceptions, but generally the reply goes along the lines of, “Oh, so busy” or, “Lots of things going on” or, “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve got on my plate” or something of the like.  Even in church circles — or, in my experience, especially in church circles.

Why is that?  What’s the story there?

Sometimes it may be a sincere gesture to try to catch you up on good things happening in life, especially for someone you haven’t seen in awhile.  Sometimes.  But not typically.  More often, it is a substitution for meaning, something nearly lost to us in our society.  But we desperately need meaning. This is not an option for us.  So we create it ourselves, replace it from something else we are familiar with.

And we are certainly familiar with busyness.

The other night I was listening to a Podcast of some theological discussion (honestly, I can’t remember what the discussion was really about), and was struck by some off-handed comment that the Bible is primarily about God, not about man, and that, in fact, man was only a minor blip on the screen of God’s live and story.  That is certainly not a common view of reality by Christians I know and read about.  We have become the center of everything going on.

I’m not good with that description either, by the way, the thought that we are minor players on the stage.  I happen to believe that God has given us a very prominent role in His cosmic script, but I do agree that we are not the central object around which the universe revolves.  I think most of us would agree that the Lord God is, of course, our gravitational center and around whom all things move.  Picture the planets encircling the sun.  ”In Him we live,” I think is how Paul put it, “and move.”  Even here, the sense is not so much that we live around Him, but within Him somehow, as if we are not so much planets around a sun, but rather the corona itself, prominences, solar flares.

But somehow we end up zipping off from our Center and shooting out into an endless and cold void, trying our hardest to find something larger than ourselves to clutch to so as to give us at least a small taste of our rightful place with God, so that we can feel even a subtle feeling of being held in place.  And these objects and events and ideologies we busily define ourselves by, they are so tempting exactly because they can make us feel connected and purposeful.  They do draw upon our need for transcendence.  Otherwise, they would not be so alluring.

Have you noticed how it can be anything?  We’ll take our hearts to the smallest and most insignificant moment or memory or habit or object or idea and begin building our lives around it.  A fragment or debris from some far-roaming object.  And before long, that’s all we can cling to.  How could we ever find our way back again, and so we cling desperately and tenaciously to what we must know is not great enough for us, not worthy of our devotion and worship.

School.  A person, even a romatic relationship.  A band.  Going to concerts or shows.  Sophistication.  Money.  A social cause.  An identity as a “good person.”  Reading.  Video games.  TV shows or movies.  Church attendance.  That new car we’ve got our eyes on.  The economic “crisis.”  Reputation.  

The list is literally endless.  I’ll give us this — we are pretty creative when it comes to our busyness.  Our godless worship.  Our idolatry. 

And let’s face it.  We are, all of us, guilty of this.  We’ve got to come there first if we are ever to break free from them and find our way back home again.  Step one is to recognize we are far away.  

Step two?  Own the fact that we are made for more, that we are made to encircle and have our being in God, and that only that will satisfy our longings that threaten to destroy us.

And the third step?  Only this: crying out to the only One who can save us from these things we cling to and that cling to us.  

I know this because I am here.  It seems sometimes like a daily experience for me to wake up, recognize that even through the night I have wondered from my place in Him, embrace my desire and longing for Life – which is to say, check my compass and recall that I am headed somewhere, and that this isn’t it.  And then cry out for God to rescue me.  This is why the Psalms are full of that very thing — cries for rescue and deliverance from their enemies.  To be restored and refreshed in this Life that is Him, to be reconnected to the true Vine of that Life.

My friends, the enemy of our day — not the only one, perhaps, but certainly one of the greatest and most effective tactics the Evil One uses — is “busyness” as a replacement for true meaning.  It’s a stow-away, a double-agent, an angel of darkness masquerading as one of us.  We’re made for more.  So much more.  Let’s find what that is.  Let’s remember what that is.  Let’s  be done with things that we know in our hearts will never be good enough.  And let’s ask our Creator and Lover to bring us back into the source of that Life.

 

This World: Battleground

A. W. Tozer has given one of his books a great title, “This World: Playground or Battleground?“  It’s an insightful book, and Tozer spends page after page unpacking that one question he asks with the title.  We’ve heard not to judge a book by its cover.  I think this one judges me, waiting for my response to that question.  What do I think the world is?

In my life, I’ve come to see it as a battleground.  Now, seeing clients as a part of my counseling training, I come face-to-face yet again with the question.  How do I see the lives of these folks that come to see me?  How do they see it?  More, how do I see what I am doing alongside them?  What is counseling like?

It is a battleground.

It’s an amazing gift, this ability to step into someone’s journey and walk with them awhile.  There are, of course, as many reasons for someone coming to counseling as there are people who do, but all of them have one common, central theme: battle.  In a sense, what we think about our lives is not as important as what really is. Of course, a important goal is to begin to see things as they really are, to align our perception of things with reality.  That’s a good definition of sanity, and a prerequisite to living well.  But, bottom line, we live in the midst of a life-and-death struggle between powers infinitely stronger than we, and we truly are caught in the middle.  In fact, we are the reason for it, and our lives are often the context in which this battle plays out.

Back to counseling.  It is a grave mistake to believe that our only difficulties as people are depression or anxiety or relationship struggles.  Yes, these are problems.  Yes, we need relief from them.  But we must see them in context of the battle we face every day of our lives, because we need healing.  And to join someone even for a moment on their journey is to join in the battle with them.  It is a great joy and honor to do so; it is also a weighty thing, an invitation fraught with peril if we are not well-prepared.

To prepare means a few things: First, that we recognize the battleground we are walking onto; Second, that we recognize the Warrior who is come to rescue us and with whom we fight alongside in this person’s life; Third, that we know the enemy we are facing, even if our brother or sister does not; Fourth, that we enter in the battle with armor well-fitted and well trained in the use of our weapons; And finally, that we walk closely shoulder-to-shoulder with others who are seasoned in battle.

We enter into the battleground as warriors.  To do any less is a perilous venture.

 

After the Fray

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill paints a picture of ancient Irish culture by discussing Tain Bo Cuailnge, an Irish prose epic. In the story, the hero-warriors Cuchulainn (pronounced koo-hool-n) and Ferdia are foster brothers who love and fight for one another. They trained together under the same master and fight beside one another through epic battles in the dense forests “in foreign lands after the fray.” Cuchulainn refers to their friendship as “fast friends, forest-companions… pupils, two together we’d set forth to comb the forest” of their enemies.

Concerning the hero’s virtue, Cahill writes, “What we can rely on are the comeliness and iron virtue of the short-lived hero: his loyalty to cause and comrades, his bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, the gargantuan generosity with which he scatters his possessions and his person and with which he spills his blood.”

Patricius, who later became known as Saint Patrick (the same Patrick whose life is commemorated each year on the celebrated day named in his honor), was able to evangelize an entire country by addressing these qualities found in their ancient literature. It is Jesus, he explained, who was the one who most epitomizes these virtues, and it was, in fact, the eternity set within their hearts that spurred on such literature, an eternity these men and women knew must by characterized, if by anything at all, by men as alive as Cuchulainn. In their literary heroes their hunger for Christ was given a voice. When Patrick came to bring them the “Godspell,” or Gospel, they listened only because Patrick himself, dead to himself and baptized in the fire of the Spirit of God, was the most loyal, courageous, and generous man they had ever met.

What Cahill writes of Ireland’s ancient fictional heroes is an apt pronouncement on the life of any Christian, that is, the life of Christ lived fully within us. When we allow Him to live through us, imagine what faith (loyalty), hope (courage), and love (generosity) is set loose on the world. We would have a second wave of revival not unlike in style to that of those wild and willing Celts.

The way to save our own civilization, as Cahill says, is not to think about saving our civilization at all. It is to become saints. Then shall we each be saved, not by government, nor technology, nor new (and age-old) ideologies, but by the Kingdom coming through us as we pursue and battle with fierce intention, a Kingdom not of this world, unshakable, peopled by “citizens of heaven” who run fast after the Living God “in foreign lands after the fray.”

(see Matthew 11:12; Philippians 3:20; Matthew 5:14-16; Hebrews 12:28-29; Luke 17:20-21; Mark 1:15; Acts 14; Romans 14:17-18; Hebrews 12:10; Ephesians 4:22-24; 2 Corinthians 7:1)

 

A Few Precious Words

Todd Nettleton, a friend and author of Justice For All, wrote on his blog this week, “If you choose carefully the right words, you don’t need nearly so many.” He was highlighting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which every junior high student studies and often memorizes in history class some 150 years after it was first delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Pennsylvania four months after the infamous Battle of Gettysburg.

Edward Everett took the stage before Lincoln and addressed the crowd for more than two hours. His oration was 13,607 words long. Lincoln followed him, speaking for somewhere between two and three minutes a speech consisting of 272 words. Tradition has it that he threw together those words on the train ride to the cemetery. But how powerful those words became.

Who remembers Everett? Who remembers anything he said? Perhaps a few history books have some of the transcript recorded. But who can ever forget the iconic beginning of Lincoln’s address, “Four score and seven years ago.” To this day, the world remembers his passion.

I love what Todd says to this. He points out that you don’t need many words when you choose them carefully, when they are packed full of the power and passion of truth and beauty. When they are compelling and stir the soul. When they give vision toward a freedom to fight for. When they are transcendent.

I thought of Jesus’ last words, his recorded conversations with his friends and his last, dying utterances from the cross. Everything from “I go to prepare a place for you” in John 14 to his prayers for us in John 17 to, perhaps most poingnantly, his declaration from Golgotha that “it is finished” (John 19:30).

Some — not all, but some — of what Jesus meant by “it” being finished was the very thing that Lincoln tried to speak of in his Address. It is what the Nez Perce Chief Joseph fainted in longing for in his famous “from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” Eisenhower had it when he said that “freedom has its life in the hearts… of men.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted it when he asked, “For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?” Poets and politicians, warriors and lovers since the beginning have longed and fought for this it that Jesus simply declared was then, at the cross, finally done with.

In that declaration, something, perhaps everything, of the old world started dying, and the New started coming on. All of the freedom, the true freedom, that we long for was given us by His act on our behalf.

 

The (Bloody) Way of Love

God has brought something really affirming to me this morning. I can at times come so close to being taken out by the brokenness around me. I feel it like a tremor in my bones sometimes, particularly with those closest to me. I hold to redemption — I’m alive by way of that great work of Jesus and for the sake of it for others is why I’m in counseling school now. I battle for others that the Kingdom may be won in their lives. But it still threatens me, the hurt of others. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve felt overwhelmed and exhausted. I’m not trying to “fix” anybody; I’m just desiring life in the deepest and most glorious sense for those I know (and for myself). But what Jesus brought to me is that I feel these quakes in my heart because of love. It is proof that my heart has been made and redeemed to love. It is the same suffering that Jesus experiences (Philippians 3:10).

But what I need to do with that now is to learn to stand in the face of it, to stand as a warrior even as I kneel as a servant. To desire life and freedom for others but continue to walk with Jesus wherever it is He’s taking me. The offer and invitaiton for others is the same. “The direct experience of God is grace, indeed,” said Ignatius of Loyola, “and basically, there is no one to whom it is refused.” But the responsibility of following after Jesus rests on the shoulders of each person individually. I am to “seek life in the spirit of furious indifference to it,” in the words of G.K. Chesterton, even for others. We each must “desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.”

I have a close friend that’s going through a profound change in his life — or the possibility of change, at least. He is in a desperate place, a frightening one. Rock bottom, really. But, I don’t think he’s in such a foreign place as I would like him to be. I’d be comfortable if the seeming waste and debris of his life were because of a sin or God’s wrath or Satan’s strongholds. But I rather think he’s where he is because of God’s love, that the fierce love of God refuses to leave him where he is, and that He is even now unwraveling him from the thorns and brambles that he’s got himself caught in. It’s painful, and it’s bloody, but it’s also redemptive.

God waits to be wanted by us all. Having Him and having his Kingdom come through our lives and the ones we love will require all the violence of our “Viking” hearts in full-throttle (Matthew 11:12). To borrow from Robert Service in his poem The Law of the Yukon,

I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,
but by men with the hearts of Vikings, and the simple faith of a child.

Maybe the disillusioned ex-literary professor vagrant Harry Sagan in The Fisher King said it best in relating the story of the Fool and the Fisher King: “…One day, a fool wandered into the castle and found the king alone. Being a fool, he was simple-minded, he didn’t see a king, he saw a man alone and in pain. And he asked the king: ‘What ails you, friend?’ The king replied: ‘I’m thirsty. I need some water to cool my throat.’ So the fool took a cup from beside the bed, filled it with water, handed it to the king. As the king began to drink he realized that his wound was healed. He looked at his hands, and there was the Holy Grail that which he sought all his life! And he turned to the fool and said in amazement: ‘How could you find that which what my brightest and bravest could not?’ And the fool replied: ‘I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty.”

May we find our hearts and follow the bloody and “foolish” Way of Love.