"Transendence..............................".

Tomorrow’s dental appointment and a salute this coming Monday to Martin Luther King will give me three consecutive four-day work-weeks as an entrance into 2012. Every Wednesday is something I await with a bit of enthusiasm, either the Bible study class or the monthly visit to the rescue mission occupying that repetitive spot on the calendar. This Friday is another of the grandsons’ basketball games. Spring Break is right around the corner! It recently occurred to me, however, deep in thought while driving to school, how easy it is to “lose the moment” by merely walking in the mundane routine of our existence, looking only to the future toward some event we think will give us rest or bring us excitement. I think God understands that it’s just who we are. I’m not so sure, though, that He approves of such practice. The Detention Center and the rescue mission may well be worthy causes, ones wherein hopefully my zeal is more about being a vessel for His outreach than it is about occupying a pulpit with my ego; but, likewise, working in Elementary Special-Ed is a privilege and must never be allowed to become nothing but a paycheck. Going through the motions, dealing with life as it comes to me, has to be or I fall into the rut and miss most of His resurrection as it takes place around me. It’s like being in your automobile and suddenly realizing where you are, the last twenty-five miles or so a blur you don’t remember passing through……

"Relationship...................."

”It is not prayer we seek in prayer, but God, Himself. It is not an experience of God, but the living God inherent in, and yet transcending, all experience.”

My two copies of James Finley’s tribute to Thomas Merton are loaned out to friends, so I am not sure which man should get the credit for the above quote. Nonetheless, whoever said it, as far as I’m concerned, has captured the gift that Jesus actually purchased for us via Calvary’s crucifixion and Sunday morning’s resurrection. We speak of Christ having “spanned the gulf” between Heaven and Earth, but seem unwilling to think of such bridge in terms of an existing connection available unto us. Like Caesar of old, “He came, He saw, He conquered”; then He ascended and we’ve been trying to cross on our own ever since. We preach the Book. We build our individual Towers of Babel. The doorway to Infinity, however, is a living extension of the Trinity, a Reality who dwells within those who would dare to plumb their own depths, the One waiting to take us “through the veil”, God, Himself, the “cleft in the rock”… Over the weekend I heard three sermons, each one dealing with a different aspect of benefits that the Holy Spirit extends unto us, none of them addressing the subject in terms of the Third Person of the Trinity actually being the embodiment of such treasures. Grace, faith, peace, answers to our pleas for whatsoever, are all seen as items we can achieve through our “works”, indeed the achievement thereof being the focus upon which we should come full force. I see it, however, as more of a need for us to “push into Him”, to “become one with the Indwelling”, and therein find all that He is, the Keeper of my soul, the Assurance in my next step. In losing that bit of truth, it seems to me that the Church, as a whole, has either drifted into religious sleep or charged into what the Bible, in one place, calls “strange fire”…….

"Character............................"

Friday evening was passionately filled with watching my grandsons play basketball. Varsity very decisively beat the opposing team, holding them to minimal scoring while successfully plying their own skills with the hoop at the other end of the court. Our younger boys, however, earlier found their game a mirrored reflection of that one, their loss not quite as drastic, but bad enough. I approached the young assistant coach afterwards, suggesting that, even though we had lacked equal height in that particular contest, the kids had shown much grit in their defense, our offense being the main reason for the loss; but he determined that proper execution of the basics would have eliminated any such advantage for the other side, our real troubles being that we possessed only one fellow who had any real talent, pointing to a fellow who is a good player, to be sure, but one whom I personally perceive to suffer from ego and attitude. Such opinion, though, was kept to myself while pondering if this is what we promote in sports, just how does that carry over into what we teach them in the sanctuary… In re-reading a bit of Ravi Zacharias yesterday morning, I was taken quite with his take on a question put to Christ by two of the disciples at their initial discovering of the Messiah. “Where do you live?” they wanted to know; and the author thought such a simple interrogative, of all the queries one might ask of a man just pronounced by John the Baptist to be “the Lamb of God”, surely giving reason for pause concerning its motive. He pointed to its significance being a matter of importance to that culture, those people at that time, their value of such credentials; but my own thoughts reversed the roles. How would each of us, I wonder, respond if Jesus were inquisitive of our existence, not necessarily seeking a physical location, a post office address, but a descriptive analysis of where we reside in our day-by-day identity, indeed, in our manners, our interaction with others, and our relationship with our Creator? What might we say in return?.....

"Illusions................................."

Last night’s midweek Bible study took us into the first half of Romans, chapter two, with a short reference back to the previous class. While no one “went to war” over perspectives, it was evident that one lady, my age, simply saw the world divided into two categories, lost or saved, the one thing separating the sheep from the goats being a confession of Christ, therein requiring no further discussion concerning human nature, God’s grace, and just how the two coexisted in the journey we all walked. Just like Monopoly, all one needs is the right card, one that reads “Go to Heaven. Go directly to Heaven. Do not pass judgment. Do not collect that which you deserve.” There’s a small paperback in my collection written by a guy named Shelley and entitled “What Is the Church?” It’s the best thing I’ve ever read on such topic, one segment of it opening with a scene set in the original “Alice in Wonderland” where the heroine and the pompous caterpillar are having a conversation. When he speaks of “glory”, she asks him to define such term; and he gets rather inflated, as if insulted by her audacity, declaring that whatever word he uses, whenever he chooses to use it, means exactly what he intends it to mean at the time. Nothing less! Nothing more! This, indeed, at least as far as my own digestion of the class suggested to me, way the very subject we were addressing: tunnel vision; being unable to see any farther than the doctrinal dogma we have cemented into our individual confession of faith. I wonder if there’s any significance to the fact that any great physical structure must be built with a “give” allowance, an ability to sustain outward force by being a bit “elastic” in its material design. Truth may well be “black and white”; but His mercy covers a lot of area in any direction one might be from center……

"Dogma....................................."

”Each society suffers from a we-have-finally-arrived syndrome in which the attitudes, achievements, and opinions held by it are given a colossal significance that towers over what other such bodies say… The desert where prayer flourishes is the desert of our own hearts, barren of all the slogans that we have been led to believe to be our very identity and salvation. We learn that to love Jerusalem is one thing, to prostitute ourselves to it is another.” ….Palace of Nowhere

The author, in this portion of his book, appears to be interweaving the church, as a moral institution, into the subject of contemplation. “In religion,” he states, “it frequently occurs that we give God a name, then equate Him with the name we have given Him; and, in so doing, we make ourselves, in effect, God’s God. Instead of acknowledging Him as the source of our identity, we make ourselves the self-proclaimed source of such identification, making Him the one made in our image and likeness, defining all things and giving shape to the perimeters of life.” When he speaks of running and running “in our squirrel cage, thinking that the constant squeaking of our achievement wheel verifies our reality and worth”, I am reminded how easy it is get “lost”, even in ministry. Indeed, “the crux of the matter” is that we cannot be like God without God; and prayer, in its most sincere form, begins “when it becomes the one thing necessary, when we go to our closet as into a sacred place, realizing that our own heart is the actual location where Jacob’s ladder touches the earth.” The balance then, that state of failing to connect, of finding yourself swimming in His waters, wet but not fully submerged, of maintaining a thirst to know Him even deeper in the fullness of all that He is, is life itself, the breath that keeps us on a daily basis. The Trappist monk and I may, indeed, see a few things from different perspectives, but on this gift we are agreed. It is free unto all who are willing to humble themselves to receive it……

"Duplicity............................."

“Prayer emerges from and leads to a certain way of knowing that is most difficult to communicate in words, the immediacy of the experience making almost impossible to do so. It is much like describing the taste of salt to someone who has never tasted it. Such encounter with God is, like love and death, an unexpected and unprecedented event.”…”Palace of Nowhere”

The subject of the above paragraph, in grasping what its author means, must first be defined in terms, itself, as to how each of us holds it in our own personal dictionary. The book I just pulled from my computer shelf expresses it as “addressing God” with a number of possible issues. The question it leaves is whether or not we expect, in doing so, any sort of conformation at all that divinity is actually receiving our efforts. Are we satisfied with merely “shooting messages into outer space” in the name of “faith”, content to accept that however events evolve is, in itself, an answer from on high? My words are not meant to mock another’s endeavors, nor to suggest that I, myself, always find connection “through the veil” every time my spirit cries out in need. In no way do I claim it possible to “own” Him in such manner. Using St. John’s imagery that there is a path to walk with “no light except the one that burns in your heart”, Merton speaks of setting out “to find Him who calls you out of nothingness to union with Himself, even though an inner wisdom tells you know that “to reach Him whom you do not know, you must go by a way you do not know. You’re “lost” before you even start! Yet, in “letting go” of everything within us, a desire to see, to taste, and to experience the presence of God overcomes fear, opening a door for Him to fill our void. There are no guarantees. Our invitation remains His to accept and there is no shame if the union falls short. Reaching out through Christ unto Him, though, ought to be more than just making a list, fulfilling a requirement. Calvary didn’t just buy us a free pass into Heaven, but purchased, as well, the availability of a Holy Ghost escort into His throne-room In that I rest, the promise of His peace upon me…...

"Cross-cultured........................"

“Contemplation does not simply find a clear idea of God and confine Him there within the limits of that idea, hold Him there as a prisoner to whom it can always return. On the contrary, contemplation is carried away by Him into His own realm, His own mystery and His own freedom. It is a pure and virginal knowledge, poor in concepts, poorer still in reasoning, but able, by its very poverty and purity, to follow the Word wherever He may go.”...Thomas Merton

One may wonder why a tongue-talking Pentecostal should rejoice in the theology of a Trappist monk, but the above author was an “eye-opener” for me, his book “The Palace of Nowhere” now seemingly unattainable and James Finley’s sharing of wisdom he found within such pages being the only link I possess to it. Merton and I certainly do not see eye-to-eye on all things and some of his terminology leaves me with questions as to how he, himself, defined a few words. His use of “contemplation”, for example, coupled with his classifying it as a form of “mysticism”, leaves me with a bit of hesitancy concerning the subject matter; and yet his whole description of making contact with the Creator witnesses to me of my own experience and is a far cry from that which is preached by my own bunch. If nothing else, the paragraph above speaks to me of coming into His presence, yet always with a knowledge that “greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world”; and that, alone, keeps things in a perspective quite different than what all these celebrity television evangelists have been feeding us for the last couple of decades. That first fellow sees himself as graced and unworthy of such union. The last group believe themselves to be “anointed and appointed”, their knowledge of the Book coupled with their arrogance entitling them to call the shots concerning whatsoever. I have no problem with “faith”. I just find it to embrace all of Him regardless of what comes to me and not a measureable means of “handcuffing” God. Finley sees each of us, as Christians, finding our own way to THE Way which is Christ, our journey a stumble centered on He who not only IS that path, but our anchor-line as we go as well. It is a road, he suggests, that must be walked in humility with abandonment to the life and death questions that He asks of us. Progress in prayer is always a gift……