Am I making progress?

“Am I making progress? If I am really honest, it seems to me that the question is odd, even a little ridiculous. As I get older and death draws nearer, it doesn't seem to get any easier. I get a little more impatient, a little more anxious about having perhaps missed what this life has to offer, a little slower, harder to move, a little more sedentary and set in my ways. It seems more and more unjust to me that now that I have spent a good part of my life 'getting to the top,' and I seem just about to have made it, I am already slowing down, already on the way out. A skiing injury from when I was sixteen years old acts up if I overexert myself. I am too heavy, the doctors tell me, but it is so hard to lose weight! Am I making progress? Well, maybe it seems as though I sin less, but that may only be because I'm getting tired! It's just too hard to keep indulging the lusts of youth. Is that sanctification? I wouldn't think so! One should not, I expect, mistake encroaching senility for sanctification.”

-- Gerhard Forde quoted in the Mockingbird on Grace in Addiction 3/20/13

Tears

YOU NEVER KNOW what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.

They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.

- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark by Frederick Buechner

The Existence of God

For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.
- Frederick Buechner, from The Magnificent Defeat

Three Rules

This comes from a recently subscribed to daily Frederick Buechner quote of the day.  I've heard this before but I don't think I have ever heard of it's attribution.

WHEN HENRY JAMES, of all people, was saying goodbye once to his young nephew Billy, his brother William's son, he said something that the boy never forgot. And of all the labyrinthine and impenetrably subtle things that that most labyrinthine and impenetrable old romancer could have said, what he did say was this: "There are three things that are important in human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind."

Uncommon Courage

I picked up a Readers Digest Books published in 1941 that for some reason was in a stack near my couch.  As I paged through it I came across a title of a condensation "Reaching for the Stars" by Nora Waln (p.157) written in 1939 about her travels through Germany.  The following passage kind of blew me away and made me wonder what ever happened to this kind of character.  Sadly, it seems in very short supply today.

We drove to Kessel, where we went to find a stranger, of whom we had been asked to bring news to England. She was at her home, with her five children. Her husband, a pastor, was in a concentration camp. She was grateful for the invitation for some of her children to come to England, but thought Germans ought to stay in the Fatherland. The "cause" would be lost in Germany if those with eyes that saw the decline of morals, hearts that felt it, and tongues that dared rebuke it, went into exile.

"Father could come out at any time," a six year old told me. "God gives him courage to stay in."

"To come out," explained the daughter of eleven, "he has to sign a promise to support everything the Nazis do. He has to take the oath of blind obedience to Adolf Hitler. Our father is a Christian. A Christian cannot approve or be quiet in the face of the things the Nazis do."

"Christianity is a religion of love," offered the tiniest solemnly. "Love and sorrow for all whom the Nazis hurt; and love and sorrow for the Nazis, too."

The suffering of Christ

My Madeleine L'Engle devotional book this morning:  George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble -- times when I have seen people tempted to deny God -- when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his."

Mockingbird article: Axl Rose and Michael Jackson attend a Christian music festival -

In one of the most beautiful sections of the book, Sullivan recalls his own “Jesus phase.” But, as he writes, “a phase is supposed to end—or at least give way to other phases—not simply expand into a long preoccupation.” That is, he doesn’t harbor the usual emotional baggage or resentment. “It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It’s that I love Jesus Christ…. [Christ's] breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation.” Amen!

The Universe is God's

A while ago when I was at Berea College in Kentucky I was asked the usual earnest questions about creationism vs. evolution.

I laughed and said that I really couldn't get very excited about it. The only question worth asking is whether or not the universe is God's. If the answer is YES! then why get so excited about how? The important thing is that we are God's, created in love. And what about those seven days? In whose time are they? Eastern Standard Time? My daughter in San Francisco lives in a time zone three hours earlier than mine. In Australia, what time is it? Did God create in human time? Solar time? Galactic time? What about God's time? What matter if the first day took a few billennia of our time, and the second day a few billennia more?

I told the student at Berea that some form of evolution seems consistent with our present knowledge, and that I didn't think that God put the fossil skeletons of fish on the mountains of Nepal to test our faith, as some creationists teach.  But if I should find out tomorrow that God's method of creation was something quite different from either creationism or evolution, that would in no way shake my faith, because that is not where my faith is centered.

Madeleine L'Engle; Glimpses of Grace; October 24; pp. 282-283