Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise

 Madeleine often makes me think and challenges my spiritual box.  This reading totally fit a conversation I had with a student today. --- drs

I seek for God that he may find me because I have learned, empirically, that this is how it works. I seek: he finds. The continual seeking is the expression of the hope for a creator great enough to care for every particular atom and sub-atom of his creation, from the greatest galaxy to the smallest farandolae. Because of my particular background I see the coming together of  macrocosm and microcosm in the Eucharist, and I call this Creator: God, Father; but no human being has ever called him by his real name, which is great and terrible and unknown, and not to be uttered by mortal man. If inadvertently my lips framed the mighty syllables, entire galaxies might explode.

As I read the Old and New Testaments I am struck by the awareness therein of our lives being connected with cosmic powers, angels and archangels, heavenly principalities and powers, and the groaning of creation. It's too radical, too uncontrolled for many of us, so we build churches which are the safest possible places in which to escape God. We pin him down, far more painfully than he was nailed to the cross, so that he is rational and comprehensible and like us, and even more unreal.

And that won't do. That will not get me through death and danger and pain, nor life and freedom and joy.

Glimpses of Grace Madeline L'Engle; Sept 21; pp. 246-7

Above the Horizon: Buechner

Another moment I have always remembered was walking out on deck one night after supper and finding a young red-haired officer peering into the dark through binoculars. He told me he was scanning the horizon for signs of other ships, and the way to do that, he explained, was to look not at the horizon but just above it. He said you could see better that way than by looking straight on, and I have found it to be an invaluable truth in many ways. Listen not just to the words being spoken but to the silences between the words, and watch not just the drama unfolding but the faces of all around you watching it unfold. Years later when preaching a sermon about Noah, it was less the great flood that I tried to describe than the calloused palm of Noah’s hand as he reached out to take the returning dove, less the resurrection itself than the moment, a day or so afterward, when Jesus stood on the beach cooking fish on a charcoal fire and called out to the disciples in their boat, “Come and have breakfast.”

- Frederick Buechner via the internetmonk.com

Chesterton on the reality of Atheism

A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like.

-- Quoted in Battling For the Modern Mind by Thomas Peters; p. 105  from "Science and Religion" in All Things Considered, p. 147.

The habit of turning to God...

And perhaps, as those who do not turn to God in petty trials will have no habit or such resort to help them when the great trials come, so those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less readiness to ask Him for the great ones. We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.

This was from a Mockingbird (March 7,2012) quote of C.S. Lewis' Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer.

Understanding the Brevity of Life

All this is temporary...

One of my best friends in college died when he was twenty-five, just a few years after we had finished Mississippi State University. I as in law school, and he called me one day and wanted to get together. So we had lunch, and he told me that he had terminal cancer.

I couldn't believe it. I asked him, "What do you do when you realize that you are about to die?"

He said, "It's real simple. You get things right with God, and you spend as much time with those you love as you can. Then you settle up with everybody else."

That left an impression on me.

-- John Grisham; Promises to Keep; August 8; p. 255

God Loves Even Us

The glorious message of Scripture is that we do not have to be perfect for our Maker to love us.  All through the great stories, heavenly love is lavished on visibly imperfect people. Scripture asks us to look at Jacob as he really is, to look at ourselves as we really are, and then realize that this is who God loves. God did not love Jacob because he was a cheat, but because he was Jacob. God love us in our complex isness, and when we get stuck on the image of the totally virtuous and morally perfect person we will never be, we are unable to accept this unqualified love, or to love other people in their rich complexity.

If God can love Jacob -- or any single one of us -- as we really are, then it is possible for us to turn in love to those who hurt of confuse us. Those we know and those we do not know. And that makes me take a new look at love.

Madeleine L'Engle: Glimpses of Grace; July 24; pp194-5

Expecting something to happen

 I came across this quote on my computer today and thought it was a good one for the blog. I don't know the source but its from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of my favorites. -- drs 

 
Possibly one of the most devastating things that can happen to us as Christians is that we cease to expect anything to happen. I am not sure but that this is not one of our greatest troubles today. We come to our services and they are orderly, they are nice ‒ we come, we go ‒ and sometimes they are timed almost to the minute, and there it is. But that is not Christianity, my friend. Where is the Lord of glory? Where is the one sitting by the well? Are we expecting him? Do we anticipate this? Are we open to it? Are we aware that we are ever facing this glorious possibility of having the greatest surprise of our life?
Or let me put it like this. You may feel and say ‒ as many do ‒ ‘I was converted and became a Christian. I’ve grown ‒ yes, I’ve grown in knowledge, I’ve been reading books, I’ve been listening to sermons, but I’ve arrived now at a sort of peak and all I do is maintain that. For the rest of my life I will just go on like this.’
Now, my friend, you must get rid of that attitude; you must get rid of it once and for ever. That is ‘religion’, it is not Christianity. This is Christianity: the Lord appears! Suddenly, in the midst of the drudgery and the routine and the sameness and the dullness and the drabness, unexpectedly, surprisingly, he meets with you and he says something to you that changes the whole of your life and your outlook and lifts you to a level that you had never conceived could be possible for you. Oh, if we get nothing else from this story, I hope we will get this. Do not let the devil persuade you that you have got all you are going to get, still less that you received all you were ever going to receive when you were converted. That has been a popular teaching, even among evangelicals. You get everything at your conversion, it is said, including baptism with the Spirit, and nothing further, ever. Oh, do not believe it; it is not true. It is not true to the teaching of the Scriptures, it is not true in the experience of the saints running down the centuries. There is always this glorious possibility of meeting with him in a new and a dynamic way.