And once again, the birds will sing and the waters flow

Send forth your strength, O God; establish, O God, what you have wrought for us.  Psalm 68:28

I finished with Letters to Malcolm this morning. And the last line involves Lewis telling his friend whom he is about to visit, that he doesn’t need to have a bed prepared on the ground floor, because he can still move upward, able to “manage stairs again now, provided I take them “in bottom.”

And in that same humility, with His strength alone, may I once again stand back and truly see, with intention and grace, what He has done, those works established since before the beginning of time. 

I tune my instrument here at the door. –Donne

Satisfy us by your lovingkindness in the morning. Psalm 90:14

Jesus taught us, saying: “Remain in me, as I in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself, unless it remains part of the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches.”  John 15:4-5

Lewis writes about how often our daily experiences crowd our prayer into the margin or sometimes off the page altogether. Why is this true if indeed we were created “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”? What can be done with a rose tree that dislikes producing roses?

Is it perhaps because we shrink from too naked a contact, because we are afraid of the divine demands upon which it might make too audible? As one old writer says, many a Christian prays faintly “lest God might really hear him, which he poor man, never intended.”

If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be a delight. Some day, please God, it will be. The same is true of any other behaviours which now appear as duties. If I loved my neighbor as myself, most of the actions which are now my moral duty would flow out of me as spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower. Why is that not so yet?

The very activities for which we were created are, while we live on earth, variously impeded. Not to practice them is to abandon our humanity. To practice them spontaneously and delightfully is not yet possible. This situation creates the category of duty, the whole specifically moral realm.

It exists to be transcended. Here is the paradox of Christianity. As practical imperatives for here and now the two great commandments that have to be translated, “Behave as if you loved God and man.”

The Law, a schoolmaster, as St. Paul says, to bring us to Christ.

But the school days, please God, are numbered.

 And as I head out into the day, to teach young minds grammar, so to speak, so that they will someday be able to read poetry, may I slip into those moments, those glimpses of glory, unimplored, unsought, Happy for man so coming, that refresh and delight in You.

Even now, come Lord Jesus, come.

Forgive, and it will be forgiven you, heaping and overflowing into your lap.

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:

though your sins are like scarlet,

they shall be as white as snow;

though they are red like crimson,

they shall become like wool.

If you are willing and obedient,

you shall eat the good of the land.” Isaiah 1:18-19

And then I flipped open Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm to where the ragged edged paper marked the spot and read a word from God: I really must digress to tell you a bit of good news. Last week, while in prayer, I suddenly discovered–or felt as if I did–that I had really forgiven someone I have been trying to forgive for over thirty years. Trying and praying that I might. When the thing actually happened–sudden as the longed-for cessation of one’s neighbor’s radio–my feeling was, “But it’s so easy. Why didn’t you do it ages ago?” So many things are don easily the moment you can do them at all. It also seemed to me that forgiving (that man’s cruelty) and being forgiven (my resentment) were the very same thing. “Forgive and you shall be forgiven” sounds like a bargain. But perhaps it is something much more. By heavenly standard, that is, for pure intelligence, it is perhaps a tautology–forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved, and it is certainly the great Resolver who has done it. Finally, and perhaps best of all, I believed anew what is taught us in the parable of the Unjust Judge. No evil habit is so ingrained not so long prayed against (so it seemed) in vain, that it cannot, even in dry old age, be whisked away.

Come now let us reason together.

Forgiving and being forgiven are the same thing.

Judge not lest ye be judged. Show mercy to receive mercy. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

Even in dry old age, be whisked away.

And then Lewis goes on to explain why, of course, he prays for the dead. Which goes against my stalwart evangelical upbringing, but shaded in last night’s Dia de los Muertos march through downtown Tucson with 100,000 other souls celebrating lives lived and now not on this earth, rings true in this morning’s considerations, in that, the causes which will prevent or exclude the events we pray for are in fact already at work. Indeed they are part of a series, which, I suppose, goes back as far as the creation of the universe. The task of dovetailing the spiritual and physical histories of the world into each other is accomplished in the total act of creation itself. Our prayers, and other free acts, are known to us only as we come to the movement of doing them. But they are eternally in the score of the great symphony. For though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God’s eyes, that is, in our deepest reality.

 As well as his belief in Purgatory. Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, “It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with those things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy”? Should we not reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleansed first.” “It may hurt, you know”–“Even so, sir.”

I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering. And it really doesn’t matter whether you call it refining fire, or God’s megaphone, or, well, even Potter’s Wheel. We are being made in His image. Remade in His image. Consider it pure joy, brethren.

“But it’s so easy. Why didn’t you do it ages ago?”

Forgive, and it will be forgiven you, heaping and overflowing into your lap. A lot like yesterday’s waterfall of love.

It is a mystery indeed.

Happy are the people whose strength is in You, whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way. Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water. They will climb from height to height, and the God of gods will reveal himself in Zion. LORD God of hosts, hear my prayer; hearken, O God of Jacob. Psalm 84:4-7

Well the thing about that viral “Happy” video is the sense of release. No matter what weights and complications and fears those little dancers have, for at least five or ten seconds at a time, they set them aside, and are in the moment, splashing through the springs of refreshment. Release. He will provide.

I think that is my favorite thing about teaching, for the moment, as I look into the eyes in front of me, the thing that is important is that he or she gets whatever is right here in front of us, whether is be the Greek understanding of hospitality, xenia, or the difference between preterit and imperfect tense. Or how things are a little rough at home and, yes I would love to pray for you. It is a release moment with no little voices crowding in.

And today Lewis quotes from Midsummer’s Night Dream,

Never anything can be amiss

When simpleness and duty tender it

Which in my mind, means bringing a childlike heart to the LORD God of hosts, my Abba Father. And what more perfect example of a child’s heart than beautiful Miss Everette? Her newest trick is the “Put the paper on…your head…your nose…your chin…your shoulder…” And Everette will grab that folded up piece of blue paper and slap it on the appropriate body part, with proud joy and attentive eyes that do not leave mine.

And I am pretty sure she is happy. Simpleness and duty, which, really means fixed attention, hearts set. Release.

And Lewis talks about the mystery of communion. It is a mystery indeed. I do not know and can’t imagine what the disciples understood Our Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and wine, saying they were His body and blood…Yet I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds, nowhere else so opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand from the hidden country touches not only my soul by my body.

I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.

And Shelley sent me a Beth Moore quote yesterday, which sustained me throughout the Readers’ Theatre and the third ser/estar lecture in a row, and the drives up and down Speedway where there are no distractions and enough silence to allow the questions and fears to squeeze in by the cracks. She wrote: Now I believe those decisions that felt like stabs in the dark at the time were as determined by God as the ones that burned with conviction.  I've come to believe that very little of this is as fragile as it feels.

 He is not fragile. He provides the springs of water in the valleys and He will carry me from height to height. The God of gods. Jehovah-jireh. His strength. Release.

Happy.

Once again the chortle of the St. Francis fountain dribbles in the background

Our soul waits for the LORD; He is our help and our shield. Indeed, our heart rejoices in Him, for in His holy Name we put our trust. Let Your lovingkindness, O LORD, be upon us, as we have put our trust in You. Psalm 33:20-22

I will sing of mercy and justice; to You, O LORD, will I sing praises. I will strive to follow a blameless course; oh, when will You come to me? I will walk with sincerity of heart within my house. Psalm 101:1-2

Back to Letters to Malcolm and Mr. Lewis… who seems to nail it once again, opening him up where the bookmark was left a few weeks back and yet a seemingly eternity: Anger–no peevish fit of temper, but just, generous, scalding indignation–passes (not necessarily at once) into embracing, exultant, re-welcoming love. That is how friends and lovers are truly reconciled. Hot wrath, hot love. Such anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it. The angers, not the measured remonstrances, of lovers are love’s renewal. Wrath and pardon are both, as applied to God, analogies; but they belong together to the same circle of analogy–the circle of life, and love, and deeply personal relationships. Al the liberalizing and “civilizing” analogies only lead us astray. Turn God’s wrath into more enlightened disapproval, and you turn His love into mere humanitarianism. The “consuming fire” and the “perfect beauty” both vanish. We have, instead, a judicious headmistress or a conscientious magistrate. It comes of being high-minded.

Things to think about.

Let Your lovingkindness, Oh LORD, be upon us, as we have put our trust in You.

The sweetness is a beam from the glory.

Ascribe to the LORD, you families of the peoples; ascribe to the LORD honor and power.  Psalm 96:7

Great are the deeds of the LORD! They are studied by all who delight in them. His work is full of majesty and splendor, and His righteousness endures forever. He makes His marvelous works to be remembered; the LORD is gracious and full of compassion. Psalm 111:2-3

My eucharisto this morning was full of grandpas jiggling the little babies pressed up to their chest, and little girls with braids playing tag in the grass and mariachi musicians passing on the joy of their music to the next generation with shiny slicked-back hair and tamales and horchata and bumping to an old student with curly hair going in every direction helping his girlfriend sell little bags of lettuce from the school garden. And the night was clear and the air was full of laughter and violins and soaring voices.

Let them see You in me.

And afterwards we tucked into the Denny’s on the other side of the freeway, the Denny’s that has been there in all of its glorious bottomless cup of coffee and lots of ice cream on the pies and I really don’t think much has changed in fifty years except for a few light bulbs.

And what lets them see You in me and us and the bigger Us? And when do we blend into the scenery, indistinguishable?  How do we hold His honor and power in the forefront of our mind and hearts, undistracted? Many is that which does so easily entangles and dims His light in our lives.

And somehow when I got home and tucked up on the red floral couch, Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm answered this unfinished discussion. Somehow pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility. They [are] not the hope of glory, they are an exposition of the glory itself. That which is manifest.When the wind roars I don’t just hear the roar; I “hear the wind.” This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasure for evermore. One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.

I don’t always achieve it. One obstacle is inattention. Another is the wrong kind of attention. One could, if one practiced, hear simply a roar and not the roaring-of-the-wind. One could concentrate on the pleasure as an event…and ignore the smell of Deity that hangs about it. A third obstacle is greed. Instead of saying “This also is Thou,” one may say the fatal word Encore.

And really this is the same beginning of our unfinished list. Inattention. The wrong kind of attention. And greed. These are what keep us from declaring the hope which sets us apart, the hope the world might see in me, see in us, see in Us, the Church. Christ manifest here on earth. Joy is the serious business of heaven.

Trust as if everything depended on God

Whom have I in heaven but You? And earth has nothing I desire besides You. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Asaph, Psalm 73:75

In conclusion, be strong–not in yourselves but in the Lord, in the power of His boundless strength. Ephesians 6:10

I remember the little Plymouth Brethren Chapel Alan and I were a part of when we first married. It was sort of cheating, an unmerited grace, to be part of a such a fellowship of believers, full of astute noticing from the poet Luci Shaw and the profound depth of Jerry Hawthorne, the Wheaton Greek professor for example.

And there was the breaking of bread service in which we filed into a silent room and took our places on the wooden pews surely intentionally designed for alert discomfort. And before us lay the body broken and the blood spilled for our sake. I seem to remember flickering candles but perhaps that was just the tone.

And we rested in the Spirit, and waited. And voice by voice a theme would emerge, a Scripture read, a hymn lifted up, an admonition offered.

Our God weaves together His creation to wrap around us that we might know Him. Know His heart, His mind, and His strength.

And today He is calling on me to know His strength.

Nothing else.

And echoing Ignatius’ desire to have his desires and goals be His desires and goals, Lewis wrestles with his understanding of prayer with his friend Malcolm: Our struggle is to go on believing that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already.

A good question. The emphatic silence.

And Lewis’ solution to this question is that so often we approach God as a suitor, a man praying on his own behalf. It is no sin to be a suitor. Our Lord descends into the humiliation of being a suitor, of praying on His own behalf in Gethsemane.

But I am not called to be a suitor, I am called friend. I am called to take up my cross and follow Him as a companion who co-labors so united with Him that I share His desires and goals, His foreknowledge.

And thus Mary prayed: I am the LORD’s servant. May it be to me as You have said.

In His strength alone.

I’m not a beggar you know.

Lord, each day soften the soil of my heart for Your Spirit’s work.

What I desire: The grace I need to discern wisely and choose well those things that will most enable me to grow to my full potential and serve the purposes of God with wisdom and joy.

Everything is permissible for me–but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible for me–but I will not be mastered by anything. Everything is permissible–but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible–but not everything is constructive. 1 Corinthians 6:12, 10:23

Conversion is the graced process of personal integration. Integration is when things hold together in wholeness, balance, and order all seamlessly contributing toward the greater purposes of God.

Question: What good gifts and opportunities have I neglected or misused? Why did I do this?

I think I have misused the goodness of people in my life by skimming along the surface, tromping around the edges of relationship out of fear. Fear of being seen for who I am and found lacking. And, well, there is the other side of the coin–judging too quickly and dismissing too quickly the others with whom God has gifted me and those opportunities to delight in the reflection of Him in the hearts, the souls and the minds of His image bearers. And both sides of this counterfeit coin is pride–a fear of vulnerability bound together with a dismissal of the proffered humility of others.

My to do list is a good thing, a tool to give order to a demanding and chaotic world, and yet it too can drive me too quickly along the path, so I do not notice the wee little man up in the sycamore tree or the bleeding woman.

And mixed in with this need for reordering and reintegrating my life, is the brokenness that Chris addressed last night. May I not cling to His good gifts rather than to Him.

Brokenness is to be an ongoing way of living. It is to live in agreement with God about my absolute need for Him in everything.

And Chris passed out another checklist to weigh and prayerfully consider, one that contrasted Proud Spirits and Humble Hearts.

·       And Proud Spirits are both self-conscious and keep people at arm’s length, as well as having a critical, fault-finding spirit that looks at their own lives/faults through a telescope, but at others with a microscope,

·       And Humble Hearts risk getting close to others, willing to take the risk of loving intimately, and are also compassionate and forgiving, always looking for the best in others, for that reflected image.

And somehow this ugly unbrokenness rears its head awkwardly exactly with the wee men and bleeding women by the side of the road. Why do I not pause long enough to affirm their personhood? And while emptying my wallet into the outstretched hand weeping in the gravel last night after the service is one thing, it is not my thing, my issue. Money really has no hold on me, but rather the intimacy of kneeling down in the pebbles and touching that hand and looking into the eyes of the soul and resting in prayer before Abba Father, yes that is my thing, my issue. Certainly it’s not in-my-arms Everette-with-the-heart-of-a-child’s issue; she greeting the man by the side of the road with characteristic tenderness and let him know that he was seen. He was seen, with a capital H, because He is Jesus.

And it is the story that I have told again and again, even just returning from Guatemala, to the brilliant Yale/Harvard entrepreneur for the sake of womankind nursing her child in the seat next to me, of kneeling by El Camino and not only finding image bearers but also my Abba Father, powerful and loving in every situation.

Brokenness.

Leaving the safety of my lists and my productivity and my capabilities and kneeling before Him and others. So many missed opportunities by the side of the road. To walk as Jesus walked. To do as Jesus did. To love as Jesus loved. To die as Jesus died.

Christ died not only for Man but for each man. It is for the sake of each human soul. Each is an end.  And prayer may be to bear witness that the course of events is not governed like a state but created like a work of art, in which every being is both an end and a means. The great work of art was made for the sake of all it does and is, down to the curve of every wave and the flight of every insect. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

This is the purpose of God, and all else is dust to be swept up and dried weeds to be tossed into the flames.

Prayer: Abba Father, soften the soil of my heart for Your Spirit’s work.  I long for Your conversion, integration, to be held together in balanced wholeness through Your grace.