God In Extremis

If you stand in Church after Liturgy, you know that Something has happened. Do we have any real cognizance of WHAT has happened? We are mere mortals, human beings, flawed, imperfect, weak, distracted, sinful. And yet we believe — sometimes even know — that Something has happened. Our faith tells us. We sing about it. We pray as if it were true. God Himself has come into our midst, we have given ourselves to Him, we have taken Him into ourselves. SOMETHING has happened. GOD has happened, the creator of the universe, God become man for salvation from death, God the beginning and end of all things, every last atom, organism, place, time, galaxy, and supernova. That God has Happened, to us.

We live in a spiritually perilous world, no different from any other historical age perhaps, and yet, very perilous, perilous not because of overt evil, not in our country, not usually. But because of distraction, lack of acknowledgment of God or of anything beyond our daily duties and interests. If would be one thing if God weren’t known. We could go along blithely. But He is. He’s done everything to make Himself known, without compromising Himself or our freedom to know Him fully as He is.

Mothers, Christian mothers especially, have the duty (some say privilege) of raising children and taking care of a husband and home. This is a good thing, clearly. It’s a hard thing in this perilous age, even to keep our families “decent” — maybe even to keep them alive! We don’t want our kids to end up on drugs or have abortions or raise babies outside of wedlock. We want them to grow up to attend church and “believe in something” (preferably our own creed). We want them to be “nice”. We want them to be financially secure (if not successful), have a good education, get a good job, make a nice family of their own, contribute something to society if they can. There are so many risks to the family today, is it not enough to aim to achieve these most basic, good goals?

No. I would argue no. Not only are these not “the goals,” they maybe aren’t even achievable in themselves without The Goal. If we really care, if we really don’t want our kids ending up on drugs or having abortions, maybe we need to look beyond trying to provide them with a “nice” life.

How many mothers (and fathers) — good Christian parents — end up giving their all to provide for all their children’s worldly needs: material needs (food, clothing, home, health) and immaterial needs (education, morals, emotional stability), and still in the process lose their own souls and thereby their children’s souls?

Now I don’t mean that God doesn’t want us to be good mothers and fathers. I don’t mean that He won’t “reward” us for so being. I don’t mean we shouldn’t sacrifice for our families. But we can do all that, and still not make it. It’s not necessarily enough.

No, there’s not some single standard (monkish) to which all people have to live up to, or else not be saved. God saves, we don’t. Thank God! We can’t judge the lives of others, what God calls them to or gives them to achieve. St. John Chrysostom is reputed to have said that it’s the struggle that counts, not where we start or where we end up. Everyone’s struggle is different. For some it may be turning to God IN their drug addiction. For some it may be giving up a wild life to make a barely stable family. And yet, there’s no clear end, no limit. There’s no single standard, even of domestic bliss. It doesn’t stop there. It never stops! The goal is God, God in extremis, God as far as we can stretch or fathom or hope. This God, this saving God in extremis, isn’t found in the “nice family” because the nice family stops at being “nice”. God goes beyond nice, and He is what we’re struggling for.

Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all else will be added unto you. Seek FIRST the Kingdom — the ultimate. Not seek first to get off drugs, then find a nice girl to marry, then raise your kids decently, then go to church, then maybe start thinking about God in old age. No, seek first the KINGDOM. What is this Kingdom? How big are we talking here? Isn’t it what happens in the Liturgy? Isn’t it that presence of God, multiplied a million-fold so as to conquer death itself, that we’re seeking? We’re supposed to start with our eyes on the furthest thing, on a God so good we can’t fathom. Seeking Him, we go through a life’s way that will include whatever other worldly goods God Himself chooses to give us. All else will be added…

If we don’t seek God in that way, then how are our kids going to seek Him? How will they even know He exists in that way? (We barely even know.) If God and His Kingdom are what really matter, then how are we loving our kids if we try merely to give them a “nice family”? It’s not enough to keep our kids off drugs and away from abortion! Yes, that’s already a hard goal, given our perilous times. But if we stop there, can we even succeed there? To be blunt, who cares if we do? What if our kids are meant to struggle further and harder? What if they are meant to know God in extremis, to become saints, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, become martyrs for Christ? What if they can’t get there because we are so worried about painting their bedrooms and getting them to soccer practice?

There is conflict, conflict with the world, even the good parts of it, even the Christian parts of it. Even for the sake of our families (not to mention our own souls and the world itself), what ought we to be doing??

The King's Face

OK, this is the *second time today* I came across something that helped me figure out one of my quandaries! (The first was from today’s Prologue in answer to a question I had about natural law.) This was also in the Young book, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. (See previous entry.) Here’s the question she asks:

“How was such a complex body of literature, even in translation, to be made accessible to aural recipients for whom this was foreign and unknown, who had no prior acquaintance with the plots, characters, heroes, contexts? [She’s speaking about early Christians coming from pagan or Jewish backgrounds understanding the Christian texts and Scriptures.] How would they ‘follow’ a text, presumably read piecemeal according to some kind of lectionary system? How would they retain a sense of direction and overview as each extract was heard?” (p. 17)

She goes on to say that Cyril of Jerusalem (Cat. Or. v.12) makes explicit the need to summarize scripture. St. Cyril talks about the Canon of Truth or Rule of Faith (the Creed). In a previous book, Young had “stressed the importance of the Rule of Faith or the Canon of Truth as providing the extra-canonical framework or ‘overarching story’ by which the scriptures were to be read and interpreted.” (She also mentions icons as “visual representation of biblical narrative in mural and mosaic, rivalling the traditional art of the Roman world which had communicated the heroes and tales of the ancient pagan culture.”) So to understand Scripture as read aloud from the lectionary, the people need to know the basic outline of the story.

She goes on to talk about St. Irenaeus, how he “appealed to this public tradition, authorised by the apostles, as the guaranteed deposit which ensured that the private esoteric interpretations of the heretics … could not be reliable.” Irenaeus uses his famous analogy of the mosiac of the beautiful king or the fox to show how there is a right way and a wrong way to put the big picture together from the (same) scriptural pieces (texts). The Rule of Faith tells you that you’re supposed to be making the picture of a king, not a fox! So not only does the Creed help you understand what you hear, it helps you not to have a false view of the whole constructed randomly from the pieces.

She concludes: “Thus it was that the notion of the Bible having a particular hypothesis [major message or story or claim], which Irenaeus here identified with the Canon of Truth or Rule of Faith, and characterised implicitly as ‘the king’s face’ or the Christological reference, emerged along with the doctrine of the unity of the Bible, both being quite specifically articulated in response to those who would reject or misread some of the books in the community’s library.” (p. 20)

And what, specifically, does this summary or hypothesis give you? It provides “the proper reading of the beginning and ending, the focus of the plot and the relations of the principle characters, so enabling the ‘middle’ to be heard in bits as meaningful… [It] articulated the essential hermeneutical key without which texts and community would disintegrate in incoherence.” Doesn’t the Creed give us exactly that?

So the Creed provides 1) beginning, 2) ending, 3) the focus of the plot, and 4) principle characters and their relations, enough so that all the middle of the story can be understood as it is read in pieces each week in the lectionary, and so it can be interpreted correctly!

Now when I read that, in addition to the Creed — and to icons — how else does the Church (obviously) help people to keep track of the “whole story” and what’s happening? By the liturgical year! So it goes a long way towards explaining how the Sunday Gospel texts are fit into a yearly cycle around Pascha — and to thinking about how our pastors preach on those texts each week, just as the early Fathers preached on the Gospel texts to their people.

Notebook Form

Here’s something I found very interesting in a new book I’m reading: Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture by Frances Young. I’m only in the first chapter, but already something new and interesting —

She’s discussing the physical manuscripts of books in the early centuries AD. “Real books” (literary classics, scriptures) were written on papyrus scrolls, but people would use wax tablets or codices/notebooks for making notes or doing schoolwork or for use in the business world. In the Jewish synagogues,

“it would be unthinkable that the ‘scriptures’ be inscribed on anything but rolls.

“It is therefore something of a shock to discover that Christians were producing copies of the Torah and Psalms in papyrus codices as early as the middle of the second century — sacred books in notebook format! … it must have seemed to the Jew an act of sacrilege…

“Why did Christians adopt the codex form for their books far in advance of it becoming the norm?” (p. 13-14)

Apparently Origen and Jerome would use a roll for their own literary works, but would use a notebook for Christian scriptures! She comments:

“The use of such a medium for the dissemination of ‘real books’, however, demands explanation. Is it any wonder that cultivated pagans regarded the Christian scriptures as crude and unworthy of attention, that Origen had to defend Christians from the charge of unlettered barbarity? Their books simply were not books in the proper sense at all.”

!!

Here’s her proposed answer:

“In these new Christian assemblies, it was not scrolls and reading which had primacy. The word written and read was testimony to something else, and the living and abiding voice of witness had the greater authority.” (p. 15) Read that: apostles and saints!

And later:

“Thus… the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not apparently a written Gospel but what people have called the ‘kerygma’, has become equivalent to sacred books, within which, in any case, whatever is to be believed is found written. As already for Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews, Christ has become the hermeneutical key which relativises the texts, even as they confirm the Christian testimony. (Corresponding to this, maybe, is the retention of their reading and interpretation in the liturgy, but subordinated to the eucharist.)

“The sacred glow on the scrolls consequently begins to fade while they remain important as proof of faith.” (p. 16)

————

What do you think “Bible Christians” would make of that!?

The texts exist to confirm the Christian witness, testimony, and kerygma. They are “proof of faith” and are read and interpreted as such in the Liturgy and are subordinated to the Eucharist. Christ is the hermeneutical key, and He **relativizes** the texts!

Maybe Christianity isn’t really a “religion of the Book” after all. It is a religion of the God-man, Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The books and texts testify to and support HIM.

I like it. =D

Later parts of this book deal with the role of education and culture on exegesis (and the formation of a Christian culture), a *sacramental* (!) understanding of the meaning of scripture (language and what it refers to), and the life of faith as the context of interpreting the Bible — i.e. the Fathers as homilists, catechists, polemicists, and liturgists. She says: “The Bible’s principal function in the patristic period was the generation of a way of life…” :)

She’s neck deep in all the latest scholarly debates, of course, but I think she’s going in the right direction. Apparently her book is hot stuff even in the academic world. Andrew Louth (Orthodox) says, “This is a book which could, and should, transform the study of patristic exegesis.” Obviously I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it might be a recommended read.

Flesh, Pride, and Fog Revisited

I’m almost convinced that pride, to a large extent, holds our world together. Did you ever read any Ayn Rand? I read her when I was fairly young. I wasn’t swept up in it or anything, but you could acknowledge some of the empirical truths she observed about how some people, the truly competent ones, “make the world go round.” Fr. Schmemann has a passage, I think in his journals, where he talks about all sin boiling down to three things: flesh, pride, and “fog”. All sins ultimately have to do with either 1) gratification of the flesh; 2) pride; or 3) self-deception, delusion (allowing ourselves to be in a fog about stuff). I thought it was very perceptive at the time, and I remember it in this context now.

One of the reasons the fall was so deadly was that at the same time it was the FALL (separation from God, a turn to our own flesh and our own prideful selves) it was also the world’s SOLUTION TO the fall. The world runs “well” (if you can call it that) largely because of all of our activities on behalf of our material interests, and because of our human competence, independence, knowledge, technology, etc. (all of which we “rightly” take “pride” in). And we are ignorant/deluded about God, either through forgetfulness, heresy, or downright atheism. Flesh, pride, and fog. They are the source of all sin, and they are the source of the “survival” (if you can call it that) of our entire world and civilization. They are the human means of holding it all together. Think about it. It’s a little scary. And it begins to make you see how, in the end, there will have to be a totally new creation and a new earth.

The Focus of Love

The newest Berzonsky Thought.

——————-

To a friend, both of us struggling with household difficulties and weakness —

The thing with Christian strength is that it is love. I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately.

First is the difference between natural (or worldly or earthly) love and perfect love, the greatest love, as in John 15:13. The former is the love we have even if we’re not Christian, for spouse, children, friends, family, work, and other affections and worthy causes. Fundamentally I think what perfect love is, and how it transcends earthly love (which can be very strong, even self-sacrificial to a high degree), is that it is concerned with the salvation of another. Yes, it is concerned with his material welfare (and emotional, cultural, intellectual, social welfare) but more directly with his salvation. It is concerned with his soul and where he is going spiritually — even if that means some degree of material, emotional, intellectual, cultural, or social discomfort or hardship. Also, it means laying down one’s life for the sake of another’s salvation. This is what Christ does. What does it mean? It doesn’t mean "material" sacrifice necessarily, although it could. It means always pointing to Christ, to God, to the truth about salvation. We can’t save others. Only God can. So that means that the way we lay down our lives for others is to give our whole lives to God, so that God can save. Christ, for the salvation of the world, lays down his life, and He gives His life to God. He takes up all of humanity — through his whole earthly life, but culminating on the Cross — and takes all of humanity into divinity, and takes divinity into hell and conquers, then raises humanity from death, and takes it to the Father (ascends). It is a total and complete salvation of human life. Then He sends divinity (following on His taking the totality of human life into God) into the world, so that we in the Church, we Christians, who try to follow the way He leads, can do the exact same thing He has done. We take on divinity through the Spirit as He took on humanity through the flesh. If we do this, it IS to bring the salvation of God into the world. It is to lay down our lives for others, and to take them up and to find salvation ourselves. Is this not a strong Orthodoxy? Is this not the greatest love?

Second, I’ve been thinking of our problem of late with kids, house, etc. and the tendency to get distracted and preoccupied with the complexity of too many problems. I laid awake last night worrying about what to do with the cat, the carpets, the kids, cleaning, my own failures to be a "homemaker", and on and on. I tried to pray and no solutions presented themselves. Finally I realized that my focus is all wrong. It’s all about focus. I kept looking for "solutions" to my earthly problems. What happens is that we focus on the world, and we take oblique glances at Christ. He is in the periphery. We call on Him when we think of it or when we need help. It’s not nearly enough, because our focus is still on all our problems. They are what is most present to us, here, now, important, all-consuming. But such a preoccupation is fundamentally wrong. Here is the meaning of the command to pray ceaselessly. Where our focus needs to be is on Christ. He should be all-here, all-now, all-present, all-consuming. If we put Him in front of us, and let everything else (kids, houses, cats, carpets, chores, tasks, and even work and marriages, all earthly loves) take the periphery, to be seen in and through Him, then whatever happens, for good or ill (from a worldly standpoint), it will all be right. It will be salvific. It will be the best we can do. It will be enough. There will be peace. Last night, as I realized this and tried to re-focus, I didn’t have solutions to my pet-kid-house problems, but I did have peace. :)

St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Second Paschal Oration

Here is a thematic outline of this important sermon.

Fruits Offered to God

one’s personal participation and offering - these paragraphs provide a general framework for the speech

• par. 2
  
• par. 23-25
• par. 30 (concluding paragraph)
  

History of Salvation

• par. 3-9 (identical to St. Gregory’s Oration on Theophany par. 7-13)
• par. 28-29 ("to sum up")

Passover Allegory

• par. 10-12 - intro: definition of the word Pascha, principle of allegory, we need the allegory
  
• par. 13-16 - several major aspects: sacrifices/victim, the month, the sacred night, the first born, consuming the Lamb (par. 16)
  
• par. 17-19 - manner of eating: in haste, with bitter herbs, gird your loins, shoes on, leaning on a staff (ready to go out)
  
• par. 20-21 - going forth: plundering silver/gold and stealing idols 
• also par. 30 - conclusion: Christ our Pascha

Other Paragraphs

• par. 1 - Habakkuk on the watch, opening paragraph
  
• par. 22 - to whom the blood is offered
• par. 26-27 - against cavillers and heretics 

Perfect Love

The following is in response to a friend who struggles with the passivity of not loving actively. Active love risks sin, risks being overtaken by the passions, but at least it does something. It tries. It does not succumb to an opposite passion of laziness or "apathy". To do nothing because of fear of sin is just as bad, if not worse, than to love boldly and risk a fall.

Yes, that active vs. passive thing. Well, it always occurs to me that passive and passion have the same root meaning. :)

The key, I think, is in what you said about love. Yes, perfect love casts out fear. The key is love. My big revelation lately is that I have to relearn how to love. All my old loves are highly imperfect loves. Christ’s love is perfect. His love is the kind I need.

To relate perfect vs. imperfect love to the passions… what I have found is that imperfect love means I have to struggle, to fight. A "passion" is basically an imperfect love, a "passionate" love, one that, while it IS love and good because it is love, is slightly disorderly or disproportionate. In and of itself it is not sin. Take my love for my husband, for example, or my kids — my existing love for them, as it is right now, which I have even apart from Christ. It’s human love. It’s good! It IS love. However, it is a "passionate" love in that it causes me to have to struggle. Because it is not PERFECT love, there is fear also, and that means I can be tempted. There can be jealousy, insecurity, anger, selfishness, impatience, all these "things" (off-kilter emotions, goals that aren’t quite right, personality conflicts, etc). The door is ajar, and the devil can enter in. It doesn’t mean the devil wins, but it means I have to fight him. And of course I’ll lose sometimes.

I have asked God to help me learn perfect love, esp. for all the people and things, including my studies and interests and so forth, that I love now imperfectly. I ask so that I am not swayed so completely by my passions, so that I can learn not to fear, so that I won’t have to struggle so hard against sin — and lose so badly sometimes, and hurt the people that I love! That is what is so painful.

There is no fear in perfect love because there is no room for the devil to work. It is not a fight. It is pure. One can see how it casts out fear. It operates with the love of God, in complete trust. This kind of love is not "passionate" in the sense that it is not disorderly, disproportionate, off-kilter, prone to emotions that cause me to have to struggle. It is "passive" in the sense that it is GOD’s love. It is totally open and unafraid. You see and love Christ in the other person, and you become Christ (Christ-like) to that person. Or… maybe it is totally and completely active love. If it is the love we have through participation in God’s energies, this is His "action," His dynamis, His energeia, His "activities".

It’s funny you should quote that particular verse. I hadn’t remembered it, but it speaks volumes.

So, to get back to your point…. I would say that yes, one can be "passionate" and love. And one then fights against sin. And this is acceptable. To give up the fight when one loves imperfectly is highly, highly dangerous. I’m not sure a person ever reaches perfect love in this lifetime, so that means there will always be that fight. But in the ideal, there can be dispassion and perfect love which is fearless and victorious and sinless. I think Christ does want to teach us this kind of love.

I would say that Christ Himself had both kinds of love, including the "passionate" kind, because that is part of fallen human nature, which He takes up. He is tempted by the devil. He feels things. He can get angry or afraid. He feels weakness. He hungers and thirsts. He is human! So He fights, but He does WIN. Unlike us, He doesn’t sin. He can be tempted, but He is without sin.

Christ also has perfect love, the kind that casts out fear. This is the love He has from His Father. He gets this from prayer, and from His own divine nature. He uses this to heal and to show who He really is. Perfect love is divine. God IS love.

So Christ is both. He has both kinds of love — by nature. We, by nature, have passionate love. And so we struggle not to sin. But we are also called to live in Christ. And there is the call to purity, to perfect love, to theosis, to sharing in God’s love.

Practically speaking, I think the perfect kind is always a gift from God. He decides how much we’ll have to fight. Basically we have to fight until He gives us perfect love — that is, Himself. We love passionately, and we fight against sin. We fight until we are so tired that we can’t fight any more. And then God has compassion (<— there’s another word with the same root <g>) on us and raises us up.

Creation

From Fr. Schmemann:

Lazarus, the friend of Jesus, personifies the whole of mankind and also each man, as Bethany — the home of Lazarus, — stands for the whole world — the home of man. For each man was created as a friend of God and was called to this friendship: the knowledge of God, the communion with Him, the sharing of life with Him: "in Him was Life and the Life was the light of men" (John 1:4). And yet this Friend, whom Jesus loves, whom He has created in love, is destroyed, annihilated by a power which God has not created: death. In His own world, the fruit of His love, wisdom and beauty, God encounters a power that destroys His work and annihilates His design. The world is but lamentation and sorrow, complaint and revolt. How is this possible? How did this happen? These are the questions implied in John’s slow and detailed narrative of Jesus’ progression towards the grave of His friend. And once there, Jesus wept, says the Gospel (John 11:35). Why did He weep if He knew that moments later He would call Lazarus back to life? Byzantine hymnographers fail to grasp the true meaning of these tears. "As man Thou weepest, and as God Thou raisest the one in the grave…" They arrange the actions of Christ according to His two natures: the Divine and the human. But the Orthodox Church teaches that all the actions of Christ are both Divine and human, are actions of the one and same person, the Incarnate Son of God. He who weeps is not only man but also God, and He who calls Lazarus out of the grave is not God alone but also man. And He weeps because He contemplates the miserable state of the world, created by God, and the miserable state of man, the king of creation… "It stinketh," say the Jews trying to prevent Jesus from approaching the corps, and this "it stinketh" can be applied to the whole of creation. God is Life and He called the man into this Divine reality of life and "he stinketh." At the grave of Lazarus Jesus encounters Death — the power of sin and destruction, of hatred and despair. He meets the enemy of God. And we who follow Him are now introduced into the very heart of this hour of Jesus, the hour, which He so often mentioned. The forthcoming darkness of the Cross, its necessity, its universal meaning, all this is given in the shortest verse of the Gospel — "and Jesus wept."

As creatures, we cannot escape creation. As a good friend of mine says, "There is no pie in the sky." We don’t get to escape to some other existence through religion, or death. Creation is one, and we are here. God has placed us here. He has made us here. He gives us life here.

But what is this creation we inhabit? What is it really? That ought to be a simple question to answer, but it is not.

First off, God made this world. He made creation orderly and beautiful and good — full of potential. It was a Garden in which man and God could walk together. One imagines God and Adam having long, intimate conversations as they walked in the Garden. How ought Adam to till and keep the Garden? What should the animals be called? How are things going with Eve? (God would ask Eve, when He walked with her, how things were going with Adam.) God and Adam knew each other well, and they kept getting to know each other better. This is the way things ought to have been. This is the way they were meant to be. The Garden is Nature. Adam conversing and growing with God is natural. To walk with God is in Adam’s essential human nature.

Then something happened. Sin entered the Garden. Death entered. The serpent entered. Adam and Eve fell, and a pall descended on everything. God could not find Adam anywhere to walk with him and talk with him. Adam, where are you? God made Adam and Eve garments of skin to cover their nakedness. He told them they would return to the earth. They would succumb to diseases, and their bodies would corrupt. As with Lazarus, creation began to stink. God wept.

But not everything was lost, because God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden and made them work and suffer. He made them beget children to keep the race alive, so that the memories of Adam and Eve would not be forgotten, and so that in time a New Adam and a New Eve might try again. He allowed all creation to fall with them so that it might become for them food. Adam and Eve would need a comfort, a temporary sustenance to survive, even if only for a brief span of years, even if their earthly lives were only as grass.

The world became a comfort, an enticement, something to take the place of the lost Walk with God in the Garden. Adam still carried his essential human nature with him. He still needed something to fulfill himself. God was no longer there, not in the same way, the same intimate way. Adam had become separated from Him and from the Life He offered. So Adam turned to the world. Soon he began worshipping the creature over the Creator. It seemed to him that his life had to come from the world, but the world was reluctant to give it. The life of the world itself grew paltry. God was no longer in it, either. So the world needed to be appeased to give up its meager life to Adam. Adam began to worship it and to appease it, the Sun, the Mountains, the Rivers, the god of rain, the god of harvest, the gods of death and of generation, of fire and of war. Give me life, cried Adam.

Thus the world became what Eve and Adam had chosen for it to be: "pleasing to the eye, and good for food," but at the same time disobedience, and separation from God, and death. "You shall surely die." This world of our choosing is with us even today, even after Christ.

Finally, though, in the fullness of time, the New Adam did come. God sent His Son to bring back fallen Adam and Eve, to comfort them and walk again with them. The world became His Kingdom, a place where Christ can reign again, will one day reign again. Even now it bears the first fruits of His Coming. The Vineyard has at last been visited by its Owner. The wicked Tenants have been given notice. Branches have been grafted back into the vine. They have been pruned and cultivated and given time to bear fruit. Man has again walked with God, and God with man. The Garden returns.

The great challenge of Christian life is to keep straight all four of these worlds: to know and appreciate the beautiful world that God made in the beginning; to see that there is sin and death, that despite its primordial beauty, all creation now "stinketh" because of the fall — and with God to weep over it; to acknowledge the temptation of a world that is "pleasing to the eye" but not good for real food, a world whose appeal is temporary and whose life is meager; finally, above all, to keep one’s eye on the Kingdom, the world as it will become — has already become — once again, creation as restored by Christ, a Paradise in which there is eternal Life, ever-flowing water, burdens cast off, and union with God once again, even as Adam himself never knew. 

What Guarantee?

    Being The Greatest, God supremely is the greatest among all who
claim to speak the truth and ask us to take them at their word (vss.
13,18).  Notice, however, that God carefully gives us reason to believe
Him, knowing full well that we are accustomed to lies and deception.  
Hence, He swears an oath of fidelity and truth to us.  What guarantee do
we have that yet again we are not confronting perjury in the Word of
God?  He swears by Himself, and for this reason the Lord Jesus pointedly
asks, "What greater than God do we require?" (Mt. 23:16-22).

    God is One Who blesses.  Especially, He blesses those who resolutely
trust Him (vs. 14).  Look again at the Genesis account from which verse
14 quotes (Gen 22:1-17).  One cannot think of greater trust in the
veracity of God than that which Abraham exhibited.  In turn, God has
proven true to the word He spoke to Abraham, and He continues in truth
to this very day.

    God is Consolation for all who have been lied to, who have been
wounded unfairly, or who have themselves failed and repented.  For this
reason St. Paul says to the Church at Corinth, "Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of
all comfort; Who comforts us in all our tribulation….For as the
sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also abounds
through Christ" (2 Cor. 1:3-5).

~ from Dynamis for April 2, 2006

OK, I read that first paragraph above and laughed out loud. Yeah, right. That’s such a good "guarantee". Someone swears by himself that he isn’t lying and that we should believe in him! Well, actually, if GOD Himself were indeed standing right here in front of me right now swearing by Himself to me personally, that would be one thing! But no, it is merely words on a page, or someone claiming to speak in God’s name. (Even if the words are in the Bible, if a person is still debating the veracity of the Bible itself, swearing by one’s "self" doesn’t do any good.)

The worst of it is that people who lie about God do more harm than ANYONE else on the planet in my opinion. What could be worse? Tell me truly. Even if they do it unintentionally, can you imagine any greater harm? I can’t.

So those next two paragraphs above are absolutely necessary. A hesitant trust in God and what He (supposedly) says has to be verified. And the foundation of that verification is indeed Blessing and Consolation. The kicker is that God gives us, as part of his veracity, only true blessing, which unfortunately, most of us can’t recognize as such most of the time. We want what we want, not what is truly good for us, not what God, in his Truth, lovingly gives us. So how often it seems that He has failed us and lied to us, when in fact it is we who fail and who have been so deeply wounded by being lied to and deceived about what we do want, that we cannot see Truth and Blessing when it does appear.

Assaults

Spiritual assaults and worldly assaults are not the same thing. Sometimes they go together, sometimes they are separate, sometimes they work against each other.

If I am weak physically due to (relatively mild) sickness or lack of sleep or too much going on, it is easy to get "attacked" by irritations, despair, laziness, and all kinds of "stuff." Why does all this spiritual "crap" bother me now of all times? Because if I’m paying attention to my body (self-pitying "woe is me" for this pain or fatigue or stress), then I’m not strong against spiritual temptations. They have a greater chance of succeeding against me. I’m fighting a double-fronted war, against the "flesh" and against the demons, all at the same time.

Very often, worldly stuff simply goes on as it does, every day, day after day, and  it seems to have very little to do with the spiritual life at all. Maybe it’s a misperception on my part (probably!), but if there is any temptation coming from the world at this point, it’s the "benign" pull to get distracted from prayer and remembering God altogether. The world doesn’t seem "hostile"; it’s just "there". Or, maybe it’s the temptation to be content with leaving worldly stuff in the worldly realm and spiritual stuff in the spiritual realm and never the twain do meet. It is to be a dualist, double-visioned in the worst un-integrated way. Here the battle is to stay in the battle at all!

But sometimes worldly assaults, esp. if they are "sent by God", actually help in the spiritual realm. They can help a lot. I remember last summer when we were up in the air as to home, job, where in the world we would live. I felt like a yo-yo as we considered moving to California or Pennsylvania or perhaps back to New Mexico. In the end, we stayed in Kansas City! This  was a tough time to get through, but looking back, I am so thankful for it! Coming so soon after my chrismation, I am sure those external tough times saved me from what I otherwise would have been dealing with "internally". That came later! (And is still coming.) In the face of worldly assault, whether it’s (relatively severe) sickness, joblessness, homelessness, or any other kind of major life trauma, the spiritual mandate is simple: endure with as much patience as you can. It’s time to learn to trust. You don’t have to struggle. Just stand there. Stand. That’s enough. As hard as it is… I think this kind of battle may be the easiest of the three to fight.

Or, maybe the hardest battle to fight is always the one you’re in at the moment!

Or… knowing the mercy of God… maybe your current battle, whatever it is, is truly the easiest… :) Be thankful.