"Fantasy........................"

”The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend”…Henri Bergson

The above author was a Jewish atheist philosopher (if those first two terms can be used together) who convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality. I watched an episode of “Perception” last night whose theme centered on this particular quote and no doubt took any truth encompassed by it to an extreme. Who among us, though, hasn’t at one time or another stared directly at someone or something right in front of us and failed to capture the picture in its entirety? My own mind turns to incidents involving driving, i.e. checking the oncoming traffic before margining into it and not registering the guy on the motorcycle at all because cars have my complete attention. Worse yet, how often has the old man, while on the road, been lost in thought and, looking up, discovered he doesn’t remember a portion of the distance behind him? The question becomes, however: Is such illusion limited to that physical connection between our eyes and our brain, or is there also just as much potential for us to “lose the obvious” in our reasoning? Is there a spiritual side to this that’s comparable, our grey matter collecting data, but our heart and our will refusing to accept a truth solidly set before us? The inner man is a strange commodity, an identity forged out of genetics as well as history and environment, individual each time it is packaged, yet judged, at least to some degree, by all others who co-inhabit this space we refer to as “life”. Even with God’s anchor-line reconnected, the mind of Christ alive within us, humanity is prone to error; and progress requires regular “check-ups”, adjustments made through a daily commitment to prayer. “Thy rod and Thy staff,” penned the Psalmist, “they comfort me.” So I believe……

"Respiration.............."

With isolated thunderstorms yet in our forecast for the next few days, Monday was hot and muggy, a sky full of huge, white fluffy clouds that permitted the sun’s heat to sit on us like a heavy blanket. With the park still off limits, I decided to just drive out to the church and utilize the gym’s running track for my “daily” three-mile walk. The place is locked up, but almost never void of human presence. A staff occupies some offices on the upper level and a day-care operates on the lower. Other than a custodian, a secretary, and one or two others who manage administrative tasks, though, rarely will one encounter one of the assistant pastors, their duties taking them elsewhere, hither and yon, ministry, visitation, and situations that arise. Life is more than a Sunday sermon. Community requires connection, reaching out as well as drawing in... This morning a friend posted on Facebook that “Churches are individuals, each with its own character, personality, strengths and weaknesses”, a view I’ve long held, myself. Doesn’t that, though, identify the Body of Christ as being susceptible to its own humanity? It occurs to me that, in spite of our “intelligence” distinguishing us from all other beasts created in Genesis, the only thing that keeps us from exhibiting the “animal nature within us” is a willingness to yield ourselves unto a union with God and our neighbor. While a theology will always be a part of our faith, if it isn’t a work in progress, all we have is a religion. Meaning is in a flow, coming to us and through us from a Father who originally designed us in such fashion, His grace, love, and compassion intended not to just fill the vessel, but to overflow it. Losing one’s “savor” is a condition leading to divine rejection and it doesn’t just apply to the hypocrite in our midst. Any of us can develop it in our stumble down the road, indeed, a congregation, as a whole, is not immune. Jesus didn’t escape the tomb only to be locked up in another. No matter the weather, He lives! The question is: is He alive in me?……

"Evolving........................."

Arriving at the park this morning for my daily three-mile orbiting of the soccer field, I discovered it closed, the flood Saturday evidently causing more damage on that side of the creek than that which we experienced here. From the view accumulated on the way home, mostly it is merely debris left behind and some fence needing to be replaced, clean-up that no doubt will take a few days. Talking with a friend earlier, I listened to his description of moving from several miles outside Montgomery to just outside Atlanta, he and his wife in their early sixties and trying to make everything owned in one box now fit inside another no simple “walk in the park”. Tomas Halik suggested that “Truth is a book that none of us have read to the end”. I’m not so sure that the words “truth” and “life” aren’t, at least in some ways, interchangeable. Old age, as much as known thus far, is not for wimps. When one gets to this point, it helps to possess a faith that goes deeper than a mental theology developed along the way; and, while the Church might well be somewhat responsible for what we believe, it is we, ourselves, who will one day answer for the journey. It doesn’t matter whose pew you occupy as you go. It’s not whose denominational, doctrinal dogma you choose to accept. It’s what you learn in the next step, how much you surrender to Him in your continued stumble down the road. The Bible, in spite of its divine inspiration, is a message delivered through an earthen vessel and deposited into but another clay container much the same. I am in agreement with the above author when he states: “Those who wish to seek the living God and truly follow Christ must have the courage to learn how to swim in deep water, not in the shallows”; for, as he also declares: “The indwelling is paradoxical. It encompasses “already” and “not yet”, the mystery now with us, yet at the same time always yet to come”. The ecclesiastical body may well stand for authority in our life, at least to some degree, but the real teacher is (as John puts it) the “anointing”, the Holy Ghost “in” me day by day. My mother-in-law left this world speaking in tongues, her worship of Him confirming an unbroken connection known for decades. Glossolalia aside, I want to be likewise “plugged in” when the hour for that final relocation arrives….

"The Tie That Binds....."

The world outside my window Saturday morning was another soggy grey drizzle, nothing of such concentration, seemingly, as to threaten those who live along the nearby creek, but one just never knows the volume of the downpour in the hillside subdivisions that surround us. About ten o’clock my daughter, with a better view of the situation, called to advise us of the waters having crossed the road and now inching toward her front door. Fortunately, however, as it has on other occasions, the pool ceased to rise some fifty feet or so from the cars parked in her driveway; and, with the sky actually clearing for a few hours, by three-thirty or so nothing remained other than a few large puddles captured here and there, that little Methodist church that sits up by the bridge, as far as I know, suffering the most damage. As Beth and I passed on our way to dinner, we saw a fire-engine and a couple other vehicles at that location, the flood, no doubt, having penetrated their lower level to some degree. Surely, though, this particular congregation has clean-up down to a science, such event nothing that hasn’t happened several times before in the past two or three decades. This is “home”, though, the families filling its pews generationally linked, committed to its survival. Service will be held today as usual. Christ will be in their midst... Some old, Tomas Halik quotes resurfaced in my reading this weekend, the Czechoslovakian Catholic priest having no problem in expressing his personal rejection of Pentecostal format. Referring to “tongues” as a “psychological regression into baby talk” and describing our worship as an environment which encourages us to “pray down, shout, weep, and clap (our)selves out of our anxieties” while being “cradled and caressed” by people of “like tendency and often with bigger problems”. Yet he also concludes that “The Church is a mystery for us, for we do not know its boundaries, just where it begins and ends, who belongs and who doesn’t, many thinking they are inside but are outside, and vice-versa.” How about his opinion that we all yet, in the Church, “still encounter attempts to understand God by hemming knowledge about Him into dogmatic definitions and binding our relationships with Him into a straitjacket of a legal system”? I loved it, then, when he confesses to a revelation of sorts last Easter, one wherein he was struck by the Gospel accounts of meeting with Christ after the resurrection, how His own followers failed to recognize Him through signs of His outer appearance. It took His “breaking of the bread”, His speaking their name, and finally the experience of their actually touching His wounds. Isn’t such point where we are all connected in Him? The rest is merely our identity, our individual perspective acquired along the way. This morning I sat in my own pew; but my spirit was with these just a short distance from my home whose faith, in spite of the storm, remains anchored in that One who indwells them…..

"Sonshine...................."

For the last few days in this neck of the woods, all we’ve known is rain, that mixture of huge dark and white clouds seemingly stuffed into a space not big enough to contain them becoming a solid grey blanket that leaks almost incessantly. At times it’s no more than a drizzle; but here and there it turns into a downpour, a deluge that, yesterday evening, transformed the nearby, usually docile creek into a raging current. It makes a turn several hundred feet up the road, passing under a bridge, the onrush at such times more than a tiny wall can defend and a small church positioned there is always the first to suffer the consequences. I walked over there earlier this morning in the “drippy-drip” to investigate the situation, pleased to discover the waters had dropped at least four feet, the level previously about to flood the parking lot and fill their Sunday school rooms. A lone heron took to flight as I turned to reverse my route and return home. Hopefully the wetness yet predicted will not be of sufficient volume to threaten us again so soon… Hope: that word has been utilized a lot lately by those who occupy our sanctuary pulpit. It’s almost as if the definition of “faith”, as preached to us for the last four decades, has finally been realized to be erroneous in its demands. Nobody is abandoning the premises of such commodity being both a trust cultivated within us and a boldness that comes to us in a merger with the Holy Ghost; but I am hearing less of that “name it and claim it” theology wherein arrogance equates to divine authority transferred so as to operate out of our own “stinkin thinkin”. It could be just me. It does sound, though, like the idea of one believing, daring to trust God for the future and being faith-“ful” no matter what tomorrow brings, assurance found in an anchor-line connection that reaches “through the veil”, is starting to be the theme. Can it be we’ve weathered the fog at last?.....

"Investigation......................"

”The present world we live in does not have much use for God as a living reality. It finds a dead God who can be used to justify dead systems more manageable. That is why the path of contemplation is so difficult, because to walk that path we have to come to the edge of those myths which give our lives meaning and look down into the nothingness surrounding them”……Monty Williams, SJ, “Stepping Into the Mystery”

Our Wednesday evening Bible class, in truth, was a bit “dry” for me last night, the sixth chapter of Acts being merely documented evidence of that initial group of believers being yet human and one of the “deacons” elected to solve the problem being “full” enough of the Holy Ghost so as to find himself brought before the Jewish Council, accused of blasphemy. Our teacher, for whatever reason, elected to build our lesson around “wisdom” and our ninety minutes was mostly spent in quoting Scripture, looking for a definition of such term. There wasn’t much “spelunking” at all, no real investigation of the Gospel, just discussion wherein the obvious, our propensity for error, was illustrated by numerous stories, most of them told by the guy up front. It was enjoyable; but no real expedition into the “meat” of Christianity… I “borrowed” the above quote from Hope’s blog (the link is to the right), some things that she, herself, said, igniting my thoughts as well. In pointing to a discovery that it was her beliefs, not her faith, that suffered having been “rocked off its foundation” in a battle with cancer, she reasoned “I’ve been fighting against how other people think God works, fighting against how I think God should work” and then, in suddenly realizing “Oh! I don’t know how God works”, allowed her spirit to embrace one sentence that was, in her words, “both manageable and unmanageable, too”. “It is a start,” she said; “It is a start.” For me, there was a connection. This was never a matter of claiming truth equated to my interpretation of the Book, never a ministry of thumping denominational tenets in an attempt to accumulate more converts. It’s been a mystery from the beginning, a “born-again” conversion forty-one years ago “merely” providing me an inner anchor-line securing me in my stumble down the road. My life in Christ isn’t a theology written in concrete, but a journey wherein each and every day comes to me as a lesson in learning my original potential, my present purpose in Him. I’m the biggest part of any enigma, His patience with me something called “grace”, His depths more than I can ever conquer……

"Fellowship......"

The sky was no more than a thin grey blanket overhead, a reflection of the fog covering my brain as I began my three-mile exercise orbit of the soccer field this morning. Aspirin had thus far failed to completely eliminate the sinus headache that aroused me from slumber earlier, but my thoughts nonetheless contemplated the church service last night, trusting “auto-pilot” in so far as navigating the laps. Beth had accompanied me on that occasion and my usual perch in the balcony, therefore, was abandoned for seats about four rows back from the altar. The worship music was a tidal wave at that location, the volume enough to swallow you in its substance, no doubt merely an old man’s opinion. We had chosen to endure the location, though, sacrificing our ears for a better view of the granddaughter who would be participating in a drama interpretation scheduled later, one in which Barabbas was portrayed as the embodiment of all men, God, not Pilate, being the authority for his release, and Christ expressing through such grace His love for all. While that message was nothing new to me, somehow, through an anointing that was on the kids, and to me if nobody else, there was this moment within it when, in spite of all my disagreement with much of what this bunch of Pentecostals believe nowadays, I was nonetheless “one” with them, connected in the very depths of who we are in Him. Theology mattered not. Format was dismissed. These were “my people”. It lasted but a few minutes, the knowledge of His presence in our midst slowly receding, but without leaving altogether. The women’s Gatlinburg retreat group would next share and, in their witness, we would once again find ourselves swimming in such waters, testimony after testimony drawing us into a communion that needed neither cup nor crumb to signify its sanctity. Now, with a vision of such experience yet fresh on my mind, I circled the track considering how, in truth, we all are “walking our own course”, each of us with our individual story to tell, our particular view of the journey as it has come to us, the details formed in accordance with our history, our environment, and our own identity. What we get is an “anchor-line”; and one day we will all give an account for how well we maintained a relationship with it. In the meantime, what’s important is not that we see all things alike, but that we find Him in all things……