Laughter
Sara and Abraham had a child in
their old age. Sara delighted in the child. She said in true
Christmas spirit, "God hath made me laugh so the hearing
smile."
Laughter is a natural form of
praise. It is spontaneous applause of the mystery and irony of
creation. It is a delight in the many facets of life the universe
may reveal. Only depressed and sick men say of laughter: It is
mad. What good does it do?
Laughter is an integral part of
the Christian’s way. Christianity involves suffering, but,
nevertheless, after three days, Jesus, His head whirling from the
anesthesia of death, opened an eye and smiled.’ Then He got
up and went towards Emmaus that He might share with them the
laughter and the news.
The psalmist says, "The Lord
hath done great things for us: whereof we are glad. Then was our
mouth filled with laughter and our tongue with singing."
Enjoy God. He has done great things. Allow those who laugh with
delight to go unto Him. They understand. Is there any house with
a child that has not laughter? The Kingdom of Heaven is such a
house of laughter.
~ Back to Index
Allowing
Wrongs
Jesus taught people that they
should have a charitable disposition towards the universe; going
a second mile, turning the other cheek and trying to do good in
the place of evil. " While He taught the giving of self in
taking the charitable path ", He was protective of others.
He would not allow wrongs to be done. He was not forced to speak
out against the scribes and false religion. When the house of
prayer was made into a den of thieves, He drove the thieves out.
A man letting wrong be done to
others shares the wrong. It takes two to make a wrong, the one
doing it and the one allowing it.
Looking the other way in the name
of religion when a wrong is done is a perversion of Jesus'
morality. I was being done a wrong, and you looked the other way.
How does this lack of response fit in with, I was hungry and you
fed me, I was naked and you clothed me? And if you love yourself
as your neighbor, will you not see that your rights as well as
his are respected too?
What would the Lord Jesus have
been had He not preached against scribes and driven the
moneychangers robbing the poor out of the temple? A person may
preach the high-minded way of Heaven and take it himself, but he
cannot allow evil done to’ others. Overlooking suffering in
others is too near what people want to do anyway. This is what
people have always done. No religion will excuse it.
It takes two to make a wrong, the
active one who wrongs and the passive one who allows the wrong to
be done.
~ Back to Index
God’s
Will
God is steady in His purpose. He
is not put off by people. He is loving, but God will not take any
thing. He knows human nature too well. God likes a straight back
and irony. His will is always ironic.
Christians must put away the
obvious and egotistic. If we pray for victory, God may send
defeat. If we pray for a blessing, to be blessed is what draws us
closer to God. A man generally prays for what elates or elevates
him, but such rarely draws him closer to God.
God’s will cannot often be
discerned in the shallow and obvious petitions we offer in
prayer. In the obvious request, the spirit is rarely evident. We
plot our little designs unaware how God counter-plots, brooding
over us.
Our idea of the will of God is
always the obvious, but God is rarely obvious, yet He is always
logical. He feeds the poor, but has no understanding humorous
wink for the powerful. He sends away the unhappy rich. He is King
over all the children of pride. He is wise and ironic as befits a
ruler. He uses a man’s weakness as His strength, watches the
vindictive, then transfigures suffering they have caused. He
lifts the dead to the resurrecting sun. God’s ways are not
our ways. Observe the creation and how He has dotted every i. His
ways are beyond ours. Every microscope praises God. Every
telescope is a preacher.
Study the animals, the
grasshoppers and the giraffe. They have logic but such beauty of
design as a bird can hardly be called obvious. His conceptions
are beyond ours. The idea of man is dazzling. Will not the
brightness of His will prove more so when seen?
A spirit of joy moves behind us in
ecstasies of creation. This spirit has made of life a festival, a
fountain of disciplined joy. This joyous spirit is working the
will of God through us and unknown to us.
~ Back to Index
Reflections
of God
The spirit of God is too strong to
shine directly on fragile creatures. Spirit must be reflected. If
it is true no one has seen God, everyone has seen reflections of
His spirit.
If I never saw the sun, I would
know it exists. Its rays and their results are everywhere. In
fact I accept the sun's existence second hand; looking directly
at it is too intense. I accept its existence because I see its
rays and their reflections. I know whoever sees does so by its
light, and whatever grows does so by its grace. Whatever is away
too long from some reflection of it dies.
If we cannot see the source of
life, we may see its reflections, and many reflections of God
light up this world. We split, shred and deflect God's light
according to our personalities: nevertheless, the light of God is
not lost, only deflected and broken; and the bits and shreds of
love we see shine in others reflect a broken splendor that rises
as a rainbow of praise.
God is not lost nor is humanity
done while these loving reflections of God shine. Their light
makes rainbows above floods and devastations. Their light gives
shattered things hope in new configurations.
~ Back to Index
Enjoyment
of God
God is an experience to enjoy. The
enjoyment of God is the basis of faith. The enjoyment of God is
its own justification. I am religious because I enjoy it. I revel
in God.
I feel not to experience God is
incomplete living. The experience of God is emotionally
satisfying, cleansing and changing. It gives a sense of freshness
when we feel used or tired. It gives meaning to things and makes
them fit.
" I have proved," says
Pascal, "my faith in the testing of it." We prove air
in the experience of breathing, taking fresh oxygen that is
needed for survival. So we prove faith in heightened life,
cleansing and even raptures that are needed at times for our
survival just as much as oxygen.
This need for transcendence is
something people have always known. Even if people forget it, it
will be discovered again. The natural need of mankind for God
will make it known.
~ Back to Index
Reverence
Man profits more by reverence than
God. God has no need of reverence. People do. Reverence produces
control of self, a shared respect and the agreed upon values that
stem from a common worship. The mystery of things to a healthy
mind produces awe, and the reverent are men who walk in awe of
the eternal, of institutions, of law, of self and of God. It is
fair to say that in praising God people discover themselves.
Those who have no reverence or
faith are the real problem for mankind. They are more to be
feared than the smug who see nothing, because the irreverent have
never grown up. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I was
irreverent; but when I became a man, I learned there were things
worthy of reverence, and I put away childish skepticism.
It is unfortunate that from
misapplied piety some things are wrongly stymied in the name of
God, but the greater danger is that in lack of reverence
everything intangible and decent will end. A healthy civilization
begins with reverence and the shared values implied. A doomed
civilization ends with quarrellings among the intelligent over
what is to be revered if anything. The bright are taught to have
no reverence while the pious are believed to be unintelligent.
Let us therefore caution our
questioning that it may serve us, rather than creating hysteria
and disrespect. For it is as silly to believe there is no God as
to believe there is a silly one. God is too great to have need of
anything, but man desperately needs the reverence he gives to
God.
To reverence Being as life and
humanity as part of a net of life, and this sea of air in which
the net is thrown out as part of God's creation is the reverent
view. For all galaxies worlds and stars are part of the infinite spirit of God and to see this spirit as concerned for us
is the Christian's way. But if a man may not reverence this way,
may he learn reverence some way, and God be with him.
~ Back to Index
Trust
Trust is faith, and the Kingdom of
God is built on trust. Jesus said, "If God takes care of
sparrows, will He not take more care of people who trust Him
knowingly? See the children and the flowers in the fields, and
how naturally they trust, and Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed as one of these."
If a man asks you to go half way,
go the full way. If he takes your coat, give him your shirt. Let
your trust awaken him to the true nature of reality. Your real
gift may awaken him to the real world of trust and harmony.
Let a man take advantage of you,
then who is worse off? The man who is trusting or the man who
could not be trusted? The man who could not be trusted is outside
the deep rhythms of reality and the life of harmony, not the man
who trusted.
All of us have to suffer for
trusting at times, but others at times suffered for having
trusted us. That's the way things are. It takes strength to enter
life. Life is not for the timid, the defensive, the paranoid, who
cannot enter the circle of trust.
The person who trusts himself and
others and seeks for universal laws leading to trust is in
harmony with reality. The non-trusting man is outside the rhythms
of being.
Do not look on this as mere
rhetoric. Believers are practical people. Contrary to malicious
popular opinion, trust is the proven way. Where no trust exists,
there is no higher life', and each round of higher life rises,
reaching out from the trust beneath it.
Trust and go higher, circling in
every round from the child to the mother, the youth to his
father, the woman to the man, the farmer to the earth, the
operator to the machine, the curious to the law, the law to love
and finally to God. Reality is a Jacob's ladder of trust. Life is
a soaring higher, ever higher, on a fugue of trust triumphantly
emanating from God.
If birds are built to fly, then
man is built for trust, and it is through trust he soars higher
and higher. A man who will not trust is a non-flying bird. He
goes back on what he was built for. A man who does not trust is
like a bird that does not fly.
The day people stop trusting the
end of the world is here. Trust is the basis of everything. It is
the only practical attitude. Trust awakens reality to its
potential. Wherever anything is growing or in harmony, trust is
the reason. Faith is trust. Trust is the victory.
~ Back to Index
Kingdom of God
From romance to reality is the story of our years.
In the beginning day dreams put down the track for
reality. The children dream of a free adulthood, the
girl of the boy, the boy of a girl, the young parents
of the future children who will be brave or rich or
good.
Very rarely does anything happen as we will it.
The day dreams are impossible advertising born of dreamy
self-indulgent fantasies.
The result is disappointment in nearly every person. The time comes when wives and husbands see illusions vanish, to look on each other as strangers. The
day comes when the mother sees in a brief moment of
pain the child as he is. The spark in the son‘s eye
dies as he regards that shrinking man, his father.
It is then we learn the nature of God’s love that
takes us as we are, and carries on in spite of it.
Then we decide if we shall try to love as God does.
Love is resigning. “Away with the childish,” says
the Apostle. I am becoming a man, unlearning the self-indulgent and romantic promptings of dreamy ignorance,
and bracing to take tight the rolls and tosses reality
sends.
These are the brave, the Christians putting away
childish things, the quiet ones leaving behind the
mourning dreams of ignorance, to take on a mysterious
reality as it comes, tossing and rolling. They are. as
brave as those who go down to the sea in ships.
Do not go to the shores or the highlands to watch
the daring, or -- as Jesus said, “Listen to those who
say, lo, here, or lo, there is the Kingdom of God.”
The Kingdom of God is within the people. They have
laid aside their dreams, and every night they come
tiredly bringing it in.
~ Back to Index
Preaching
Preaching is an attempt to put across the intangible
to the incorrigible. The Apostle Paul marveled that
through such foolishness people could be saved.
Advice is useless to an honest person. The only
advice he can hear is what he is ready for anyway. But
preaching does allow the hearer in some unknown click
of time to take another view. This negative may lie
developing until one day it appears from the subconscious
and things are made plain.
Conversion experiences are really conversion
appearances. These emotional appearances are for the troubled who have repressed
the picture until one day they have to face it emerging. The Apostle Paul in the
New Testament was one of the few who had a dramatic conversion
experience, and this was because he had been repressing
his awareness.
It is a mistake to preach solely an either/ or
religion of conversion or damnation. Most people are
groping between these, and the slow emergence of God is
valuable and solid.
Preaching is also leadership, and in leadership
people tend to pick idealizations of themselves. If we
choose to lead congregations those who are most like us,
what good is that? And if we choose to hear over and
over what we think already, what good is that? Do not
publicans and sinners do likewise?
~ Back to Index
Non-Belief
Refusing anything to do with God when presented
through shoutings of hell, and an aggressively ugly
morality may be what we need. Indifference to this
kind of God suggests a high opinion of Him.
How much worse off than the ignorant must be the
people that think low things of God. His morality is
vindictive, He lives bitterly to punish, and He becomes
a thing always used in the endless struggle of manipulating man by man.
Believing in God is not enough, but it is the
kind of God we believe in that is important. It is
odd how people who would move away from a low character
next door accept placidly a manipulatable, ugly and
vindictive God. It can only mean He is not considered
of importance by them. Those agnostics refusing to
worship such a God consider Him of more importance.
God is sovereign and cannot be manipulated; He is
Father universal and wise with a pattern beyond us;
He is Christ compassionate and understanding. Our
conception of God must be full. Still the fact remains
no belief is high enough; no words say enough. He must
be known to be experienced. Our dogmas are but nursery
rhymes recited by children.
The words we say about God do not change Him.
They mirror us. God is not changed by what we say of
Him, but what we say of Him shows what we are. So in
all creeds and doctrines, beware.
~ Back to Index
Human Nature
If we believe human nature to be good, we are self
righteous; if we believe human nature to be bad, this is
an oversimplification; if we believe human nature to be
a mixture of good and bad accepted by God, then we may
so regard others.
Jesus saw this when He said, “Do not go into the
temple and give thanks you are not like other men.” No
matter how good you may be, you share human nature. If
you share human nature, you know that everything, all
people and all institutions, is a mixture of good and
evil, and that no matter how much we have done, it is
not enough.
Human nature is a condition we all share, and because all of us share it, pointing out this one as good
and that one as bad is ridiculous.
Instead say each man is good in some way and
probably bad in another way. None of us are all good or all bad at the same
time. Even Jesus said, “Do not call me good. There is none good save God.”
~ Back to Index
Yes and No
Our self respect depends on our ability to say no
at times, and if we are not able, that others will say
it for us. Hubris waits for every person. People too
proud to take a no bring it down on themselves.
God says, no and He says it often; but yes, always
yes is the song that will draw out the defects each man
has in his character. The devil says yes, and he says
it often that we may be destroyed. It puts us to sleep.
Only a few may be roused before destruction by trusty
survival howling within.
Men seek for a no as a tired crew seeks to sight
the line of shore. When they find it, they breathe
easier. The braggarts pretend they regret it, only
they relax too and are secretly pleased with the security.
He who made the shore for ships made the law a
harbor. It is a resting place that is part of the order
of things. For the world is made up of sea and harbor,
grace and law, yes and no. The proper use of these is
wisdom.
~ Back to Index
Tempting God
People pray as children cry to be lifted and carried
off by the miraculous parent. For people usually pray
to God expecting miracles, and with a selfish idea of
what God is supposed to do for them.
Many people do not believe in God because they are
angry over God’s refusal to violate the natural order
of things especially for them. Everyone believes himself special, and the pouting say they do not believe
in God, because He has not passed a miracle for them.
If a father constantly protects a special child
from reality, treats it differently, and builds self-
indulgent life around it, then we say that father does
wrong. He is creating an artificial person from false
circumstances.
If evil people know such an attitude is dangerous,
then why do we throw up to God that He does not grant
false miracles? The cunning, egotism in man tempts,
bribes, vows and begs for special treatment. The
final shot of a child who cannot have his way is to say,
you do not love me. But this is nonsense. How much
more is the man who cannot get his way saying to God,
“You do not exist.” He is saying, “God, you do not
exist for me, because you do not give me what I want.”
A person with that attitude is beyond the pale.
He pretends to be a sheep and prays like a wolf.
~ Back to Index
Prayer of Self
The prayers of people are proof of their depravity.
People generally pray. to further themselves. These
requests are to satisfy vanity.
Our prayers are often day dreams verbalized. Who
would pay attention to such silliness? The God who
hears us dreaming in prayer answers us on a different
level.
“Do not pray,” said Jesus, “saying things over and
over.” The ignorant think repeating can change things.
God is not nagged. His will is not a fort that egotism
can barrage. Nagging will not force Him, to surrender.
“How should we pray?” asked the disciples. “Say,”
said Jesus, “Thy will be done,” The Apostle added,
because we cannot pray as we should, the Spirit of God
prays in us with sighs too deep for words.
Every man’s being is a sigh of longing, of incompleteness, of wanting he knows not what. We may say
things in prayer, but our real prayer is a self that
is a sighing volcano. God soothes this.
God does answers prayer, but He rarely answers in
the simple way we prefer. He knows our effusions too
well. Our prayers are answered not as we understand
our minds, but as He understands our inner fires.
‘Some day,” glorified the Apostle, “I shall understand
even as my self has been understood.”
Each man’s personality is a volcano and hearing
it sigh, God answers the prayer that is deep in every
man. Yet the Gospel also answers each man universally.
How it does this is part of its mystery. God gives to
each person an answer that is above and beyond the
darkness out of which all of us flame and sigh and
sometimes erupt.
~ Back to Index
The Christian's Way
God’s glory is that He accepts people in full
knowledge of their sins. His actions follow full awareness. There is no full
measure of grace in accepting without knowledge. Acceptance without awareness
is unworthy.
Jesus knew where He was going, and He told Peter
to put up his sword, then He went with the Jews. The
glory is that He advanced to Golgtha, knowing.
The result is the Christian’s way. Accept people;
tolerate different ideas in spite of the difficulty
they cause. Just because we Christians allow all types
of ideas, it does not mean we are made fools of by
them, and because we reach out to all men, it does not
mean we are blind to their imperfections. So as the
intelligence is not fooled, the spirit stretches.
Spiritual stature grows to a fuller measure believing
truth will not be vulgarized by the presence of other
ideas. Truth will be ultimately revealed by time.
If people have flaws, and God is accepting, then
how can we do otherwise, unless we cease to believe in
God? Accepting is the Christian’s way.
It is true errors of non-acceptance have happened
in the literal past, no matter, such is the nature of
man; still there resides in the God of Scripture a
magnificence of mind, an Acceptance, made more precious
by the keen awareness of sin that accompanies it.
We may know your ugliness very well, yet because
of God, we accept, we tolerate, we do. A love for
Christ overcomes the force of any ugly knowledge to
shrink our hearts and make us cower. We are not liars
holding out our hands to others. That is the Christians s
way. We know; yet we love.
~ Back to Index
Proportion
We generally ask if men have proportion about their
religion. Only rarely do we ask if their religion has
proportion in it. Yet it is this lack of proportion in
faith that makes us think.
The frustrated or effeminate want a comfortable and
easy religion. Other types are off on some tangent
totally without proportion in it. The history of the
churches is full of tangents.
Overkill is an easy slip in religion. Passion gets
caught up in itself and forgets any real aim. Enthusiasm for law and morality can eat up the understanding of
why it is there. Jesus drove the money mad out of the
temple crying, “The zeal of your house has eaten me up.”
But the psalmist sings of the man who meditates on
the law of the Lord. He considers passionately the purpose of morality and faith, and his religion then has a
sense of proportion in it.
The wise in religion are those whose proportion
comes from considering its purpose. While many are
called, those are the chosen of faith whose zeal has
not eaten up their understanding.
Thank God for them. The sane and level headed, the
undiverted few, the cocked heads of the single hearted,
and all the captains of faith, who find that correct
proportion comes to earth from eyes on Heaven. Thank
God for all like them. Brave ones daring to chart by
some star of purpose and keeping it clearly ahead that
they may rightly reason, sort, divide and calmly steer
us on.
~ Back to Index
Zealots
The greatest enemy of Christian morality is the
enthusiastic oversimplification of the faithful. It was
this anti-morality Jesus warned against in the parable
of the Sabbath Day. He said that the Sabbath was made
for man, not man for the Sabbath. This also applies to
rules, laws and material things.
A high degree of intensity, a low level of awareness,
and a complete absence of honest relationship make the
zealots. Their morality masks a sick attitude. Their
intensity betrays the hysteria of the insecure and their
reasoning is never transcendent. Jesus said, “if your
righteousness does not do better than the scribes and
pharisees, you will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”
Zealots can’t even understand it. They think it is a
new church building or a million members.
~ Back to Index
Pious Fakes
The real enemies of the church are the pious
fakes within it. These are the congregations whose
members lead lives of colorless righteousness, bigotry,
unexamined respectability and moral stereotyping. A
more uninviting Christianity cannot be conceived.
It is almost a universal truth that the mean,
rigid, and judgemental fill up the pews. The churches
are the last refuge of the worst moral and racial
bigotry. If the intention of the church on paper is
good, the social reality of its existence is another
matter. It is sick with the devil’s conformity.
While it may be true that the bigotry of church
members arises out of a deep concern, so what? Bigotry assumes truth and right morality are not able to
survive, compete or win in a free situation. This is
nonsense. Christianity cannot condone moral or racial
bigotry. But it does not stop there. Equality and
fraternity for the different are not enough. There
must be no hatred in our hearts, no matter what the
difference may be. Only when we are without hatred
can we respond to different people as human beings.
There are vast numbers for whom a difference is a
sour thing. The very sight of a skin color difference or the discovery of a moral difference makes
them intensely bitter. These are a sick conformist
people. The saddest thing about these bigots is they
don’t think themselves diseased. They believe the
different ones are the carriers of an evil that may
infect. How totally oblivious they are to the sickness in themselves.
It is not unfair to ask how long we shall be
forced to live in a supposedly religious society
where there is tribal hatred in almost every heart.
Shall the skin colored person and the different never
be free of the devil’s demand for uniformity?
~ Back to Index
Moral Fear
The tendency to superficial judgement is always
easy, and because shallow judgements have caused so much trouble, many people
are afraid to judge at all. If intelligent life is to go on, we must have moral
judgements.
People who are conventional say, “If you can’t say
good things, don’t say anything at all.” In consequence
they lose all sense of the reality around them. They
become social hypocrites: mealymouthed, deaf, and
blind.
They are afraid to judge because it must be done
wisely. Cowards approach life in that way. It does not
become a Christian. Apply this same logic to life. It
would mean that if we make a mistake in living, do not
live at all.
Do not allow caution to paralyze living. Live
boldly. The grace of God is acting, and He can turn
mistakes around and surprise us. Enter into life, because love is there to bear up our errors and the consequences of our lack of judgment.
If you feel called upon to live in a different
manner, live that way. God knows many life styles. If
you see things differently, see them that way and do not
lie to yourself about it. Try with wisdom to fit your
piece of the vision into the redemptive intelligence of
God at work.
~ Back to Index
Moral Sanity
If values do not change, and the things to be valued
are eternal, the application of these values change with
the times. The natural rhythm of things guarantees
shifting circumstances, and new situations call for new
evaluations. It is only by changing constantly that we
can stay as we are, much less advance. To change takes
courage. Knowing when not to change takes moral intelligence.
A higher morality is not for the effeminate who
will not dare or for the unintelligent who have no
vision. It is for the healthy spirited and reasoning
who will dare to spend their lives in pursuit of an
eluding moral sanity, which when found, cannot stay
permanently because circumstances may change later.
Whatever is moral, if it is stereotyped on life
brutally, it becomes immoral. Morality needs reasoning.,
and reasoning must be done in the right spirit. The
right spirit comes from deep relationships with God,
with each other, and with the universe. This is the
way God cracks into life.
It is moral insanity that must be feared, whether
it be through the bad values of the amoral or the righteous indignation of decent people. Good people can do
as much harm as anybody, particularly by smugly thinking
they are good and everyone else is evil. We are neither
good nor evil, only human. God is judging us on endeavors, although the method many of us pick for endeavors must seem curious to God at times since we are
so prone to pettiness, exclusion, accusation, and trying
to pass off rigidity as righteousness.
Jesus saw in the inhumane rigidity of the conventional scribes a loss of control as blind as any passion
In fact, passion has the saving grace of heat. A health
moral intelligence is elastic and understanding.
~ Back to Index
Morality
Among the chief enemies of morality are misinterpretation and laziness. Misinterpretation obvious
enough will eventually attract attention to correct it.
The laziness of conventionality is the larger and deadlier moral poison.
Most people are conventional semi-heathens following lazily the laws of custom. The aim of custom should
be to make good things habitual, but habit is blind and
lazy, and the dead touch of convention is the result.
The conventional is cheap morality made dangerous
by the fact that when society comes together to reinforce
mutual strengths, mutual weaknesses are too, and constant
conventionality is an oversimplifying anti-life.
Jesus said, “Man was not made for the Sabbath law,
but the Sabbath law for man.” Morality should be made
for man, not man for morality. The needs of men must be
considered. Morality cannot be altogether categorical,
such as the blind obedience of a dog to commands. Morality is the triumphant insight into the needs of people.
Love considers people’s needs. Love can say no,
because that is often needed. Only love applies intelligence and energy to a goal. Love considers people’s
needs, not dismissing a reality of needs as if they
were dirt. One need does not cancel out another. “Not
by bread alone,” Jesus preached, then He fed the people
who came to hear Him.
Christian morality is love helping people cope
with a hierarchy of needs in the best possible way. It
is not for the conventional. If the morality of the
Church is oversimplified and conventional, so much for
the Church. Christianity is the subject. The Church
is the baggage of Christianity. It is rarely sent ahead.
~ Back to Index
Thinkers
Higher and higher faith moves forward. It climbs
a constant precipice. If self consciousness overtakes
faith, the fall is certain. It can be saved only by
looking higher, not thinking of where it is, only where
it is going.
When we start to question and be frightened of
where we are, then faith is soon over. We cannot walk
by faith and indulge fears too. One predominates. The
fear of faith is a common complaint. Faith is too high,
too heroic, too unknowing. Either we take unknowns
through faith, or time and belief will pass us by.
Faith helps us cope with reality. False and pretentious faith talks of escape, but a genuine and understanding faith helps us to deal fully with reality.
Many people follow a mirage with sincerity and call
it faith. Following a mirage with sincerity is a misapplication. The only way to avoid this is intelligent
thinking about our faith.
We need thinkers in faith. Whatever things are
true, honest, just and clear, wrote the Apostle, think
on these things. So the Apostle advocated the use of
moral intelligence in faith that Jesus encouraged by the
use of parables.
Particular thinkers on faith are needed because a
lot of faith is a dangerous thing. The more faith we
have, the more dangerous we are for good or evil. Faith
is social dynamite. It is important that it be applied
wisely.
The misapplication of faith has led to the most
horrible things. Unless faith is checked upon regularly,
it can go astray and lead to disaster. Besides individual torments, it has led to the Spanish Inquisition,
Calvin’s Geneva, the excesses of the French Revolution
and Stalin's Russia. The people behind all of these
social disasters believed themselves doing the right
thing. They were inspired by a misdirected faith.
Very few people except the frankly insane, do
their wrong purposely. Instead such people have been
victims of a badly judged and unconsidered faith.
They have been propelled by social visions that have
caught their imaginations but not engaged their minds and sympathies for individuals. The result of this
flawed faith is nearly always a tragedy. If faith is
not examined regularly by thinkers to see if it is
held in the right way, it degenerates into a social
blight, a family curse.
If the faith around us is foolish, we are saved
by lack of faith rather than a wrong faith. Today,
considering the faiths offered to us in the world and
even in the churches, lack of faith may be the respectable course.
~ Back to Index
Perspective
Misdirected people rush from door to door, role
to role, fad to fad, and creed to creed. If we would
feel pity, study those without transcendence. Observe
the spiritually uncivilized as they run from expectation to impossible expectation, and wish for belief as a
magic for weak and fearing selves.
The materialistic are too taken up with life to
know it, too near life to live it. Their lives are
like fool’s errands. They have no higher goal in life
than to be children sent to the store. Satan takes
them to the mezzanine, and shows them the counters of
the earth. Look on life and see it reduced to baubles,
gadgets and vehicles.
We are as lost as stars falling from the great
perspective of heaven, lost to the reason of our rightful mind. In everyone transcendent reason seems fallen
and buried under little vanities. Divine transcendence
is heaped and covered over. The perspective of heaven
is lost and faith alone can restore us to our once high
minded place.
Faith may return us to ourselves and to God.
Faith gives us back our sense of the stars, and from there our reason united
with God considers things beyond mere self. We need a union with God’s mind to
restore perspective, even reason and to bless us once again with
the serene integrity found in faith.
~ Back to Index
Fulfilling Possibilities
A man who can be shocked by anything around him
is still a stranger without grasp of the full power of
evil in this world. Anyone who looks unflinchingly
can see that man’s capacity to deny himself is weak,
his conduct is inconsistent, his good points are vices
through misapplication, his wants are not in harmony
with the universe, and most of his opinions are based
on passion rather than concerned detachment. Human
nature is easily inflamed, prone to false values, and
rarely lifts its eyes unselfishly towards heaven.
An awareness of human nature at its worst should
not force us to become defeated. Those are defeated
who believe God has no purpose, and have given up to
the worst in themselves. They are the cultivated barbarians of the spirit, sinking morally, sighing intellectually. Are we pigs, animals to give up, sighing
and slopping, to a hopeless hedonism?
Neither resignation to what man can slip to, or
trying to cover up what he has done, or illusions over
what may happen can serve the cause of God or humanity.
Away with any delusion of perfectibility; examine
the possibility. Do not examine only the obvious as a
fool limits reasoning. If the literal nature of man
is eternal, the hope of fulfillment in man is also.
Take into account what man can be. His passions
may be purified, his behavior may become reasonably
consistent and still be mysterious, his needs may be
examined intelligently, his opinions rendered more
rational without becoming lifeless, his values may be
improved and he may gain transcendence again and again
in spite of backsliding.
This is a Stone Age of man’s spirit. Anyone with
insight can see beneath the veneer of the age into
materialism, literalism, false images and spiritual
immorality in high places, but what of that? Have we
not made these gnats into camels when we consider the
grace of God granted to the possibility of man?
~ Back to Index
Reality
The attitude we bring to life fulfills it. If we
begin to believe reality is ugly, then we are weak,
because no one can live always surrounded by ugliness.
An ugly situation causes fantasy. This is the real
danger of religion: that those in an ugly situation
make religion into their fantasy.
Reality takes a fighter like the Apostle. He has
pleasure in reality’s challenges, its necessities, its
beauty and the opportunity it offers for the spirit of
Christ to triumph in us. So let us regard reality as
an unknowing friend, and see if we are equal to its
challenges when we have the right spirit of faith.
This spirit does not make religion into escapism,
nor resigns itself to reality stoically. It believes
life is not unfair when it asks of us everything we have
to give. If we exhaust ourselves we might consider
the strength before the hills and the life that came
originally from the sea. For the spirit of God is a
sea that reaffirms itself over and over, exalting in
waves of humanity.
A religion that offers faith in reality and reality
in faith is the only possible religion. Then ask for
faith in reality, and have reality in your faith.
~ Back to Index
Courage
Without courage, what is life?
Courage holds out a welcoming hand to life. Courage dares to
fail. Courage carries on through ups and downs. Without courage,
there is no higher life. Any faith takes courage.
God’s spirit is courage. The
Creation, constantly fouled, keeps purifying itself. The spirit
of evolution, constantly experimenting, keeps trying. The love of
God, constantly spurned, keeps redeeming. Every manifestation of
God’s spirit reasserts itself endlessly. God keeps on
giving. God’s courage never stops, but is prodigal.
Our courage may fail. Faith can
falter. The truth remains, courage and faith are necessary to
life. They may agonize and disappear for a time, but they will
resurrect, because man's spirit comes from God. It will not be
vanquished. It is a part of God. No part of God ‘
surrenders.
Since the spirit in man comes from
God, the spirit is a part of God. Not even death can stop it. The
disciples went out to say, "Christ is Victor. In this man,
Jesus, was God. He did not surrender.
The spirit of God and the spirit
of humanity are one. In His image we are made. In our image He
has risen. Not even death can hold down the spirit of God within
us. God’s spirit in man is there.
What does the eternal say? What
does the Lord always say—I speak courage, Oh, Jerusalem. You
need courage to be God's and to fail and to be human. Now courage
is the victory.
~ Back to Index
Love
I
The love of God is as the sun that
shines on all, grandly indiscriminating. To be in harmony is to
love openly and freely as God and to treat all warmly and alike.
The sun is marvelous in its benevolence towards all, thus
Christianity demands a magnificence of mind towards all. That
people should take a path as benevolent as the sun was taught by
Jesus as the way of heaven.
Christ is our sun whose circuit of
understanding is the earth. A magnet of understanding is His
love. All things revolve around Christ, and wherever there is
love, there is Christ. He moves around the earth as the sun, He
draws all to Himself, and He leaves everything clean and warm.
The horizon itself is the
Lord’s Table, His chalice is the sun, and each day the earth
receives its communion. So Christ shines at the end of our
understanding radiant with acceptance and compassion. As the
earth receives its communion at dawn, God’s love is ours. It
too circles the world.
~ Back to Index
The
Spirit of Growth
In concern for tomorrow, today may
be lost. Too much planning is the mark of the spiritually
insecure. All situations have many delicately balanced
components, and planning can be only superficial foresight at
best. . One aspect may take on a new weight on the scale, or a
new circumstance is introduced, and things readjust inevitably.
Any concern for the future must
take into account that no one knows what the future will bring.
The man who does not know what is coming must be ready for any
thing. The only way to be ready is to be spiritually alive.
Whoever chooses to be spiritually alive takes the risk of
suffering. Many have crossed to the other side of life to protect
themselves from suffering, but this is not the Christian’s
way.
It is better to be spiritually
alive at the risk of suffering, preferring a ready living to a
secure dying, than blaming what comes’ on God. Rather we
should work with God to create an enduring trust.
Trust alone provides us with the
spirit of growing things. It is through trust growing things
become what they were meant to be. Man becomes what he is meant
to be by entrusting himself to God, then trusting self. A man who
trusts only himself can be trusted to do evil.
~ Back to Index
The
Earthly Kingdom
The Jews prayed to Jehovah to send
a warrior to form a Kingdom of God on earth. The Jews were a
naive people, and literal about the ways of God. A baby born, in
a manger appeared instead to one day preach spiritual truths.
Jesus carried the Gospel, saying,
"Re-orient yourselves, make God the center of your lives,
for the Kingdom of God has appeared." The Jews of a literal
and non-spiritual cast of mind asked, "Where is this Kingdom
of God?" And wearily Jesus replied, "Oh faithless and
unthinking, why am I among you? … The Kingdom of God is
within you."
If social conscience is to bring
the Kingdom of God to earth, and such Genevas have often been
attempted, then it will be another magnificent failure, a kingdom
of legalism, unless it has deep spiritual understanding and
depth.
If we bring together every ethnic
group and have not love, and the state has powers of prediction
and understands mysteries through computers and has every
righteous law and men to die for them, it will be nothing. It
will be the naive people to whom Jesus came, and who will be very
blind to the ways of God.
~ Back to Index
Harmony
Society will always pick and
chatter till we shudder and go inside ourselves for peace,
because our lives are spent in forcing others to our desire.
Because of this, the violent and loud always seem to prevail. The
meaning of truth seems lost in a conflict of noisy wills. The
harmony and counterpoint of life seem gone.
Harmony comes from laying aside
the violence of what we like or is like us, and learning a
respectful consideration for what already has a life of its own.
Life cannot be changed by force;
it must be served with love. If life is served with love, it
hea1s and transfigures itself naturally.
Force may change the position of
ignorance, but what use is served by passionate rearranging of
the ignorant. Only people have ideas in their heads, and they
learn late that imposition of their wills on others is defeating.
No matter what the passive may accept, they do not understand, so
they cannot carry on.
Outside of our attempt to force,
there is a harmony not seen. It is the spiritual rhythms of life
humming as the universe continues. A spiritual life of great
complexity is going on around us. Only people are too insensitive
to enter the Kingdom of healing and harmony that is Christ. They
prefer force, injury and disorder. Such people are spiritual
barbarians caught on the wheel of violence.
The Kingdom of God is within us.
~ Back to Index
Integrity
Life is made of complex
structures. The devil tempts people with a superficial method. He
leads us to think we can reach in to change things without
profound understanding of the depth of situations. Jesus said,
"Why do you try to pluck that beam in another’s eye?
First pluck out the beam in your own."
Some people fool themselves into
thinking they know just how to pluck out the beam in
another’s eye, only they do not realize the integrity of the
eye structure and how they will blind. A cheap and easy morality
of naïve solutions does not take into account the depth of sin
nor the integrity of the structure.
Is not this character etched in
acid upon the face of the old? Years have taught them carefully
the integrity of things. The length and hardships of life have
taught them the discipline of humanity. We are taught to respect
those who have learned the discipline of humanity, and have
respect for the complexity of the structures at the basis of
life. How very hard they are to change.
~ Back to Index
Want
And Need
In my state want and need are
split. God knows my needs. I know my wants. Between us a civil
war is raging and all that is touched is laid to waste. In
similar confusion most people spend their lives.
A unity of minds and wills LS
needed, but we are as personalities divided. In all of us want
has seceded from need and declared war. The struggle is on, even
if war is not openly declared.
Some people live getting what they
want, ignorant of their needs. Others fulfill needs to be
tantalized still by wants. Yet other people find deep needs still
aching after silly wants are satisfied. This state is obvious
about us and others know it to be self-evident.
We have in God what we need, but a
paradise of wants is the mirage before us. Yet we know if we get
them, we will find a fool and his paradise are soon parted.
Give us the grace to see what we
need, the strength to want it. End this civil war of raging
prayer between us. Mend want and need to make us whole. Only if
Christ is Victor in each Gethsemane will we be one. Here ends
this skirmish.
~ Back to Index
Clergy
A mealy mouth is the
clergyman’s disease. The fear of catching it should make
everyone have second thoughts about Christianity. Everywhere the
majority of preachers seem mealy mouthed positive thinkers or
shallow revivalists.
The reason for their mealy mouths
may be that the ministers are paid by congregations and they fear
a loss of prestige and money if there is any dissension. The
Apostle Paul earned his right to freedom of speech by making his
living as a tentmaker. Another reason no preacher speaks out may
be that these ministers have hostages held by the community in
their families. They have to look after the security of their
wives and children first. A very true reason for it is the
fantastic ignorance of some of the revivalists. They know little
but the most primitive and cheaply sentimental vulgarizations of
theology.
Whether the reason is economics or
ignorance, the clergy are a bovine lot and easily dismissed. They
have their own little church world. Spirit is best shown when a
larger congregation looms ahead, so that they can claw, peck and
manipulate to get it. There is nothing quite as broad as the
smile of a clergyman for a bishop.
Behind everything is a complete
lack of any sense of tragedy as it applies to themselves.
Particularly since these clergymen are tragio-comic figures, pathetic little
men, rabbit-souled and dumbly conventional,
unbelievably silent on every form of bigotry.
The clergy are the tragicomedy of
the churches. However, it may be best for little men to address
themselves to little things. Let their worries be how to get a
few more members as bland and blind as the ones already enrolled,
how to put up bigger and uglier buildings and how to get the
deacons to raise their salaries. I see little men preaching
little sermons to little people.
Yet the pitiful are those
innocents looking to these preachers for the Kingdom of God.
These preachers may hold a formal church service, but members
should not look to them for the Kingdom of God. Anyone can sense
they lack not only a certain something, but a certainty of
anything. A man who has been to the Kingdom of God and returns is
forever different and certain about the difference.
~ Back to Index
Puritans
All good children have this view
of their parents: they will aspire in their way only never apply
in their way. Our spiritual forefathers were Puritans. There were
many excellent things about them, but Puritans were people with
the right aspirations making the wrong applications.
Puritans wisely did not assume the
difficult to be ugly. They saw reality as a challenge for
man’s spirit. They brought strength of purpose to morality.
They knew an effeminate attitude was no solution.
Nor did they advocate
self-defeating extremes. The Puritans knew it wiser to purify
morality and institutions than to abolish them. They saw that the
argument was over the method of satisfaction, not the abolition
of need. They knew that to purify was not always to simplify.
They had fine aspirations.
However, they became too concerned
with inconsequential rules and accusations. Their ideals bogged
down in a swamp of literalisms. They passed ridiculous actions
off as high cause. A sublime purpose was their excuse for
ridiculous and comic moral behavior. They fell on application.
Puritans were a people with the
right aspirations and the wrong applications. All should aspire
in their way only not apply in their way. Then the best part of
our fathers is not buried.
~ Back to Index
Going
And Being
Being Christian and going to
church are not the same thing. Nowadays the two have a tenuous
correlation. The ones going to the churches seem to be the most
unchristian in their values. Going and being are not the same
thing.
What is worse is a popular
solution to the problem is thought to be a revival. We have
enough frightened neurotics scared silly enough by death and
damnation to say they accept Jesus. Whatever that is, what good
does it do? People are really confused enough to think they can
make it to the Kingdom of God by mumbling magic formulas of
acceptance and showing up at church. Jesus said that heathens
thought they would be saved by vain repetitions.
It is possible to love the church
and not be a Christian. Church members seem to have all sorts of
reasons but the right reason. Sentiment from long association,
community involvement, meeting the right people, the minister or
priest is attractive, the music is good, the service is pleasant,
the ancestors founded it, the kids like the Sunday School teacher
are wrong reasons. My God, is there even one Christian in these
congregations? It is like Abraham searching the city to find some
righteous ones to avert the anger of God.
The churches are the conventional
way the respectable testify to their moral superiority. If the
conventional are the moral leaders, God save us all. In
Jesus’ day the Pharisees had simpler work. They blew
trumpets on the street corners to advertise their goodness before
giving to name charities. They attended the synagogues to be
seen.
Jesus said that He wept over
Jerusalem. Jerusalem represented the Church of His day. It was
the conventional moral leaders of the synagogues who were
responsible for His death. It is not pagans and wicked men who
are killing God today. It is the churches.
The bitter irony is that these
churches send missionaries to anybody. Physician, heal thyself.
~ Back to Index
Tragedy
Of Christ
Christianity is the tragedy of
Christ. The organized church was once the glorious company of
apostles and martyrs. Now it is more of an assemblage of
unthinking mediocrity's. People of any stature resent going. Why
not? Any sensible person would.
Kierkegaard said that the fallen
church served as an immunizing agent. As people were exposed to a
disease so they would not catch it, so the flat and fallen church
gave enough exposure to religion so that the people who attended
would be forever safe from it.
Nor is that all. The back biting,
the pettiness, effeminacy, the emphasis on money, buildings,
members; all these mark the flat and fallen church. To these can
be added the holy security neurosis that fights any change. The
moral outlook often is rigid, negative and domineering.
People who truly enjoy God are
never satiated, but they can be too sick of church to go. Where
is any of God in these churches? Church going should be a joy. It
has degenerated into a cold duty for nearly everyone.
Who can actually be fond of
manicured spiritual parlors where well dressed Pharisees gossip
about the neighbors in a state of titillation? Or to hear people
known to be race bigots give a Sunday School lesson on the Good
Samaritan?
Away from this. Christianity is
the tragedy of Christ. It has cut, torn, shredded, overlooked,
forgot, distorted and misconceived its founder. No amount of
Sunday morning moralizing is going to erase the lack of a good
heart and a proportioned mind. God asks a good heart, a cheerful
giver. Instead, God is given sermons, rituals, and hymns. Such
are the toys we squeak to keep God away.
God can use churches, but the
churches oddly enough do not seem to have any real use for God.
His presence would be an embarrassing variable, cutting down
barriers of class and race, oh so subtly erected and reinforced.
The churches are more often the
enemy of Christ than a friend, if we measure by a Christian
yardstick. No one is asking for a perfect anything, but in some
of these churches not a modicum of love or acceptance exists. The
only thing they have is a preacher who talks a good game on
Sunday morning- a Sunday morning quarterback.
All about us are the churches and
denominations that represent what the intentions of Christ have
come to. That Christianity has come to this is the tragedy of
Christ.
~ Back to Index
Religion
Religion is its own worst enemy.
How many evils has religion been used to cover? A fifth column in
the Church represents evil motives as good to the unsuspecting
and gullible.
The organized Church is supposed
to be the friend of religion. With a friend like false organized
religion in the Church, who needs enemies? False members go to
Church because they like to be thought respectable. Others swell
from being in the center of things.
Often false members are
evangelical figures of fun with a cure all in the form of some
Bible verse. These enthusiastic people with a low level of
awareness are comic. They make missions out of literalisms. Such
Christians may have a high plane of intensity, but they lack a
level of awareness to match it.
"I bear them witness,"
wrote the Apostle, "they have a zeal for God, but not
according to knowledge." Jesus Christ remarked, "They
cross the earth to make zealots worse than themselves."
Bear the Church members witness
that they often have religion but without proportion or
knowledge. What is to be done when religion itself lacks the
transcendence that is the highest kind of knowledge? Religion is
needed, but it needs to he held in a different way.
~ Back to Index
Reverie
The church is no place for a
Christian. The temperament of organized religion is that of a
neurotic old woman propertied, frightened, rigid and reactionary.
There is little to offer those sick with a desire for God.
It does not offer any consuming
fire of holiness that burns a sinner clean. Nor does it speak of
danger and the wild, mad joy of God that threw out the stars and
is the axle upon which the universe turns. These churches do not
bring the tone of some world far from ours, a mysterious Kingdom
of God.
The task of the churches is a
difficult one. It is true that telling of the Kingdom of God is
like having to sing a color to a blind man. No easy task. But the
necessity is there. The churches must convey the tone of some
world far from ours, show a mysterious Kingdom of God that opens
to everyone.
Our churches have not done this.
Distorted, broken, degenerate, every now and then they pound a
note but never do they raise a strain. They do not convey by
their tone that faith has the missing colors which irradiate
life. They inspire no one to go gathering eternity.
Once there were churches which,
however misinformed on some issues, trumpeted God, put a message
across, arrested and awakened. These brought the tone of a world
far from ours, a glorious Kingdom of God inside of us for the
asking. As we look around it is evident that all this is lost.
But no people can live without
transcendence for too long. We shall see it resurrected.
~ Back to Index
Awareness
Everyone is born to a desire for a
life of quiet selfishness. Actions for this seem predetermined
and obvious. On this level, we see exactly what we ought to do.
The temptation is to do it. And given a life without some other
and higher level of awareness, nothing remains but the hard logic
of vicious common sense culled from insights into a pitiful human
nature.
Faith brings in a conflict. New
problems in thought and action introduce new ways. Other things
have to be considered, things outside the ring of self. Faith is
not the problem solver people think. It is no panacea.
Faith itself creates problems,
because life in faith has to be lived on two levels of awareness.
There is one level where everything is clear and selfish. It is
what we want. On another level, there is what God wants, and this
cannot be discerned clearly. This higher level of awareness
evolves painfully and only a little at a time.
The real danger is if we live on
one level of awareness. Take the simple path. It is through the
introduction of a higher faith that the simplicity of minimal
thought is left behind, and we move toward the proud complexities
of human beings.
~ Back to Index
Indifference
So many beautiful people are cut
down blindly, and he wise may die before their wisdom seeds and
flowers some wide expanse of fertile ignorance with hope.
Death, have you no shame to, take
the student from life, the child from its mother, the father from
the family, a husband from an old wife? Death have you no shame
to make fathers cry, Absalom, would to God I had died for thee.
Indifferent mankind, have you no
shame to be as ignorant, hardened and blind as death? Or has that
part an shares with death won life? and man is unashamed to war,
curse, openly confound a neighbor, or look aside to damn with
attitudes that spell catastrophe in class and racial ways. How
long can people stand unredeemed by shame? Or has man too become
indifferent death?
God, let not man be a bigger fool
than he must be, the unashamed child of shameless death, only
give to unblushing men their only hope, the gift of sorrow. For
Christ in greatest triumph conquers death, and reason is restored
to life thereby and so restore to man his Christlike reason his
only hope, his greatest victory, the grace to blush and be
ashamed.
For the fool has said, there is no
shame, and his customs are his blind to veil despair.
~ Back to Index
Election
The word of God is a
unity. The truth goes out, but who can say who will respond to
it? Truth is part of the Word of God. It takes a person to
respond to it as much as it takes a person to say it.
The truth goes out to all; only a
few recognize it. Many hear, but few are chosen for
understanding. Some recognize truth and a response is formed.
The people who can recognize truth
are the people ready for it. They are the people who can bear the
light. Every truth has its own elect waiting to respond to it.
Respect the election of all
truths, for each of us is elected to some response. Respect the
election of others, as you would have them respect yours.
Life should be used in moving the
series of unities to which you have been elected by experience,
temperament or circumstances for response.
~ Back to Index
Differences
The normal thing is to magnify a
difference. The sight of a difference swells the conformist's
eye. He cannot wait to iron it out. A weak man thinks a
difference is a wrong.
Ugly people do not find a common
purpose, but keep their eyes fixed on differences. It is love,
not agreement, that keeps life together. Those who love hold life
to a high purpose without perfect agreement; those who hate
destroy life for unanimity.
The benevolence of God is a sun
that shines on all differences alike. Love is gracious: love is
courteous; love has the same manner with everyone. If you accept
only those who agree with you, what thank have you? Do not
sinners and evil men do likewise?
Pretending there are no
differences is a lie, but renouncing differences to conform is
sick. Love considers differences, then rises to a higher purpose.
Trying to abolish differences is the devil's way, but trying to
rise above them to a higher consideration is the Christian's way.
Love is not love if it does not
call men higher than conformity. Love does not bully; it takes a
stand, then transcends it. Love is the only solution with
integrity. Do not keep your eyes fixed on differences, but raise
your eyes to the purpose of life, which is love. In love
differences are valued, cherished, ultimately forgotten.
~ Back to Index
Dehumanization
The world is boiling over with
fools. It needs no more. Every day can be counted on to bring
fresh passion to stir the ignorance.
Passion does not wish to pause to
reason or find instruction. It wishes to delight in itself. If
passion by itself is wrong; passion in itself is not. Life would
be sorrowfully thin without passion, and those who act as if
passion were evil try to dehumanize life in the name of God.
Since it is dehumanizing to live
without passion, a man must not try to separate himself from
passion, but to separate his passion from ignorance. Nowhere is
this more needed than in humanity's passion for God, which has
often been an excuse for sustained and militant ignorance.
Faith is also man's attempt to
separate ignorance and passion, and so reaffirm his belief in
creation. A belief that he must have if he is to survive.
~ Back to Index
Selfless
Love
We are seldom loved as we wish to
be loved. Each loves his or her own way. We give what love suits
us and we have to take what suits others. The two rarely fit.
Being caught in selfishly
expressed temporary exchanges of love gets boring eventually.
Constantly accepting a love that is only partial becomes
frustrating. God's love is needed.
The love of God is selflessness
that alone is satisfactory. It enables us to pass on a newer type
of love to those around us.
We can only give the type of love
that we have known. No person can give a love they are
unacquainted with. No one can pass on what has not been
experienced. We are caught in a helpless round of partial love
until we experience the love of God. Then we are sometimes
enabled to give selfless love and to became involved in
compassion beyond self.
~ Back to Index
First
Things
People have a natural feeling for
God. If they seek this first, everything else will pull itself
together. Therefore, Jesus said, "Seek first the Kingdom of
God, then all these things will be added to you." If God is
the center of life, only then do things fall into place and seem
to fit.
Everyone has God within. This lies
latent in us as the hidden negative that appears in the right
solution. It is true that only the outline appears at first, but
finally the developed picture will appear.
If human nature appears black,
outlines of God are hidden in it. Shapes and signs of redemption
move in the background of reality, and as the Apostle says, we
peer through a glass darkly at spiritual shapes. If the figures
are not clearly discernible, do not be discouraged, but take
pleasure in the signs of coming redemption and that God is at
work.
~ Back to Index
Love
II
Before love, reason is the
catechism of a child. Before love, differences are no longer
feared. Before God's love ours is base and mixed with
self-interest.
Love is the most appealing
motivation of all. In a healthy family love enables diverse
members to regard each other with tolerant affection. For love
people will put up with things. For love, people will sacrifice
with a happy heart. Love is the ultimate discipline of innocence
that civilizes us.
Love is dangerous in that it may
be blind, over protective or indulgent. It may lose its capacity
for truth and lapse into mere sentimentality. There are many
foolish methods and expressions of love, but love remains easily
the most genuine and desirable force in our lives. As a
compelling force, it has no equal.
It is written in the very
egocentricity and ignorance of humanity that people will be
foolish in their expressions of love, but often very awkward and
defective expressions of love are redeemed by the undoubted
sincerity of the motivation. Other motivations are always with us
vanity, egocentricity, greed, only these are handicapped by base
emotions that are socially destructive.
Our expressions of love are
usually according to our temperament and moral intelligence but
the best and soundest motivation of these is love.
Jesus Christ called His love the
rock. If He is not the motivation there is no solid foundation,
therefore; consider the forces that are presently compelling us.
Are they not socially destructive and individually brutalizing?
Love is truly not the answer for
everything, but it is the basic foundation for almost anything
that is to be healthy and sound. Thus, the Apostle says,
"Make love your aim."
~ Back to Index
Discipline
People reach out to innocence as
the best discipline. Parents think they discipline their
children, but their children discipline them far more. The best
discipline in life is responsibility for innocence. Christ,
family, patriotism, responsibility for earth are these.
The future of Christianity is
assured. The storms will come and the winds howl, but the house
is built on rock. Christianity gives me Christ, and Christ is the
discipline of innocence that will bring out the good
in every man. Christ is innocence reaching out to put the
responsibility on every person. It is every person answering the
responsibility for innocence that made the Apostle say, "The
love of Christ constraineth me."
What ever survives will offer
mankind the discipline of innocence. How wise was Jesus to say,
blessed are the meek. The meek ones offer the discipline of
innocence that shall inherit the earth.
~ Back to Index
Imitation
of Christ
Neither imitation of Christ nor
accusation of others is the Christian's way. By criticizing
others, we do not enlarge ourselves. Magnifying the flaws of
others will not diminish ours. Nor can any man imitate Christ,
nor should he wish to.
We ought not to wish to imitate
Christ, because this is superficial. We ought to enter into a
deep relationship with God, and in this way we discover our best
selves. If we bring out this best self, then we have become true
brothers to Christ.
We become members of the family of
Christ by making God our father, and from this relationship, we
become friends of humanity and respecters of the living world. In
this way, Francis of Assisi called the moon, sister, and the sun,
brother, because through Christ he saw all creation as kindred.
There have been too many
stereotyped imitations of Christ without an inner light to give
real life. Righteousness has been made a caricature by pale
imitations. How long is Christianity to be in the hands of the
rigid and the dead?
~ Back to Index
Joy
The world runs by. It knows not,
cares not, praise God, why. This is fortunate, because a look at
the world's blunderings, its excesses, its literalism, its oddly
dumb masses and all the vexations that weigh down humanity's
efforts to rise illuminate the defects of conscious reason and
effort.
At the center of life is a geyser
of natural joy, leaping and praising. Around us every manner of
life is glorifying God without taking any thought: horses
leaping, tigers jumping, boys racing, men thinking, petals
opening, and birds flying. Everywhere is the praise of spirited
being, natural and unashamed.
Life itself praises God. We may
become dispirited by the inaccuracy of human effort and the
implications of original sin, but life glorifies God continually,
unfolding its variations on a theme of being in brave wonders and
speckled elaborations.
The Auld Catechism says the chief
end of man is to glorify God as well as to enjoy Him forever. How
much better life does this in general than individuals do in the
particular. Our greatest spiritual danger is to lose sight of the
glory of overall being in focusing on the sins of individual
people. We lose sight of the forest in analyzing the trees.
The creation is aflame with
glory, crackling with praise. Let us not think God is dependent
on our poor attempts. God has no need of us. Job reminds us,
"What is man that thou are so mindful of his efforts?"
God is continually praised by infinite forces of which humanity
is only a very insignificant part.
Therefore, it is not up to us to
be too discouraged when our well-meaning efforts go astray. The
praise of God will go on without us. No matter how notable and
grand our effort may have been, it is inconsequential in the vast
eternity of the mind of God. The galaxies will dance their rounds
without our help. The fountain of joy that is the permeating and
invisible spirit behind creation will not fail or fumble. Who is
man that we should be so mindful of his efforts?
So all our attempts may have gone
for nothing. This is unfortunate, but not insurmountable. It has
happened before and will happen again. Take heart in the irony
that truly, God has no need of anything, only humanity is in need
of the reverence it finds in God. If we have given God honest
reverence, we have risen above the circumstances around us.
Why should we pretend God needs
us? The galaxies have no need of us. We are merely summoned as
guests to a tiny segment of God's festivals of joy.
If we have had reverence for God,
for life and for creation, we have done what is necessary.
Nothing else is expected from us. Let us then enjoy horses
leaping, boys racing, men thinking, birds flying, stars shining
and planets spinning in the vastness, glorifying God. Everywhere
is praise. Too much discouragement is unworthy. Be united to God.
Enter into universal joy. On this universal joy the world runs
by. It knows not, cares not, praise God, why.
~ Back to Index
Spiritual
Evolution
What is this life but a continual
spiritual development? It is a constant unfolding of phases
understood only when they pass. The young, adult awakes from
youth and looking back is contemptuous. The middle aged man aged
man looks back at his early manhood as naive, unrealistic, and
warped by lack of experience. The older person looks back on
maturity as immaturity obsessed with wrong values and far too
frantic and shallow in a search for success.
At the end of each phase we awake
more fully to understanding. Each compartment of life opens to
another giving a more commanding view. Each step of life takes us
higher and grants more perspective.
Why regard death as the end? This
view places us outside the logic of life and the spiritual
evolution of nature. Death is far more likely to be the final
fulfilling wisdom, the last judgment, the greatest awakening.
"I shall understand then," prophesies the Apostle,
"as I have been understood."
All of us are in a process of
evolution that is spiritual, as well as physical. Evolution is
the force moving towards higher life and the specialization of
spiritual consciousness. It is an evolution from the
egocentricity of the child, to the protective instinct of the
young buck, to the larger responsibility of the middle aged
father and eventually to the grandfather gray with understanding
who has learned compassion for the young from experience. The
last phase is the fulfillment of death that makes him one with
God and ultimately concerned for all.
The final stage of our spiritual
evolution is the selflessness of God that comes from being
returned to the glorious fountain of life. Death is not the end.
It is the last post of our spiritual journey towards
transfiguration. When fulfilling death comes, it is the happy end
of the long march of self to soul. Death is the end of the
evolution of the single cell to joyful selflessness. Let us thank God
for it.
~ Back to Index
Sentence
Every person is sentenced to a
life term in the cell of self, and when maturity unveils this, it
is natural to wonder about God's plan for the world. Yet, he who
has known himself has known the world in a distorting mirror, and
the question of each man is the same as the world, so if we are
to deal with the problem of the earth, we might best start with
that piece of earth which is ourselves.
Jesus said, "The kingdom of
God is within you," and this means the treasure of any earth
is to be found when we reach out and bring a relationship in. The
world has a new awareness when we enter a relationship with God,
because it is then life calls unto deeper life, and we experience
ourselves as part of I the flow of mysterious refreshment that is
God.
If we learn to live peaceably with
ourselves as part of the consciousness of God, we may then live
with others because we have knowledge of a deeper pattern. It is
awareness of being part of this deeper stream of God that allows
us to live without losing hope among others who may be
irritating, or to live with ourselves without losing hope over
our own deficiencies.
The unbalanced define God as
enthusiasm. In this way, man having gone mad in the cell of self,
escapes from God by calling his excess divine. This torment
pillages, burns, makes morality ugly, and tries to lock out
others in many ways as it has been locked in.
Living in the self with dignity
and balance is the first lesson of God the universal Father. The
second is we must all accept, as Jesus Christ the fact we are
given a term in this world. Though our longings are immortal, we
must reconcile the longing and reality as best we can.
~ Back to Index
A
Season Of Grace
If for everything there is a
season, the best season is that of grace. Purpose reasserts itself
then. Hope that shines in eyes as the sun on water makes light
and happy many colored seas. Grace fills even limpid souls with
high resolve as the wind, a spirit where it wills, makes pregnant
sails of graceless, slacking faith.
At such times men will venture
into parts badly named and barely known. Then small ships set out
on oceans of circumstance and hurdle storms of passionate
position.
The safe have to be shown that
they are silly. Life starts where the horizon stops. In our end
is the beginning because the end is where faith must begin. Those
who have explored the bounds of grace, hurdled storms: passionate
denial, and dared the vast sea of uncharted circumstances are
better than the ones who will go down unseasoned. Contemptible
are the safe ones who will remain forever green.
We learn from different seasons.
From one season we learn that gentleness makes strength bearable.
In another season that reason makes love endurable. In still
another season of grace that any harbor is named despair hat
stops short of the goal before us.
The man who has not had his season
of grace will remain forever callow. It is the voyage of grace
that makes character. No man has lived wisely or even well until
he has had a season of grace in which he dares to venture. Nor
will he be of any use to others.
~ Back to Index
