Findings

A good friend sent me a gift: Seasons of a Mother’s Heart by Sally Clarkson, a book subtitled, “Heart-to-heart encouragement, inspiration and insight for homeschooling mothers.” In the third chapter, “Beside Still Waters,” the author recalls some advice given her as a young woman when she served as a missionary: look to your personality and determine what you need to keep going. I want to give the question some thought.

1. I need moments of quietness. By that, I mean literal quietness: no audiobooks playing in the background, no radio on, no one talking to me, no interactions between children happening loudly in the next room. Silence. I can’t thrive without it.
2. Moments of solitude. I get up quite early to achieve this (and #1). Sometimes it’s in the house; often it’s on a walk in the neigborhood. (The dog comes with me, but she doesn’t count.) I think my sanity would benefit if I plan some time once a week or so in the evening too… even a half hour to sit at Barnes & Noble by myself as part of a grocery shopping trip.
3. Time in prayer and Bible study. I’ve had the habit of doing this first thing in the morning for 15 years or so, but it seems that prayer gets harder rather than easier. Not sure why that is.
4. Right brain stimulation: music, heard or played myself at the piano; reading; writing.
5. Friends. Between churches, my circle of friends has shrunken, but I have some dear ones far away that I like to check in with.

These are the things that fill my tank so that I have something to give during the other 9/10ths of life, when it’s needed by my family. I wouldn’t say I’m deprived in any of these basic areas. Yet often I feel a stinginess, like I don’t have the things others need from me. *Note to self: feelings can be deceptive. You have what you need. Give it away, like the widow of Zarephath (I Kings 17).

C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964) is a short book (only 124 pages). When I closed it last night and turned off my light to go to sleep, I felt disappointed. It hadn’t reached out and grabbed me by the throat, as I’ve come to expect Lewis’s books to do. But this morning, I begin to suspect that first response was misleading, because I’m still reflecting on some of its lines of thought. Perhaps this book is a seed, rather than a storm; its effects will be felt over time, rather than sweeping suddenly and dramatically onto the scene of my inner life.

As its title suggests, this is a series of letters, written to a fictitious friend named Malcolm. It’s the last book Lewis wrote before his death, and it was published posthumously. This site  provides some interesting information regarding the book’s evolution in Lewis’s mind and pen. Notably, the book was welcomed enthusiastically by its publisher, and regarded as his best effort since The Problem of Pain. (I’ve gathered some excerpts from Letters in this post.)

Lewis defined his audience as recent converts with no regular habit of prayer. He felt that existing books about prayer were written for more mature Christians, and he tries in this volume to address what he sees as the most basic obstacles. A few examples: How do you picture God? How do your mental pictures function in prayer? Why ask for things if God already knows? How do you imagine what’s happening when a finite being talks to an infinite Being? What about emotion? Should I use my own words or someone else’s? And so on.

Lewis does a pretty good job of tailoring his ideas to his audience. I was struck here, as I usually am in reading Lewis, by his humility. For a member of the intelligentsia, and surely one of its more brilliant stars, to want to write for laymen at all is noteworthy, and his overriding desire to communicate rather than show off is always evident. He’s not preachy, though at times he tosses off Latin phrases and references to a breadth and depth of reading that, though commonplace to him, won’t be shared by his audience. And although the book is “practical” in the sense that it keeps its focus on prayer, it delves deeply into theology in the course of addressing practical questions.

In my personal valuation of the book, what I appreciate most is the way it views God and his creation (including people) as connected in an ongoing creative act. This was put forth in The Problem of Pain too. Without belaboring a long and ineffective paraphrase of Lewis’s thought, I’ll just say that he has a way of providing imaginative categories for understanding spiritual realities that has the potential to revolutionize one’s prayer life far more than any single argument on a particular point can do.

I’m glad I read this, and I would recommend it to anyone else who may have run aground in the attempt to maintain a meaningful prayer life. When all is said and done, I don’t close the book with a checklist (”The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Prayers,” or “Things to Do to Make God Do What I Want,” or “Heavenly Incantations”). I do close the book with a few very slight alterations in thinking — alterations at the deep level, where the rudder can change the course of the becalmed vessel in such a way as to pick up a whiff of welcome breeze.

I listened to A Christian and an Atheist yesterday. It was about the existence of hell. I like the concept (of the podcast, not of hell), but I couldn’t listen to the whole thing! (I will. I’ll finish it, then probably I’ll have to come back and unsay some of this in another post…) I felt too uncomfortable for Wonders for Oyarsa, the representative Christian, who was having to pick his way very delicately over a ground littered with hurt and anger. He was doing a good and discerning job of it, but it was… almost like a counseling session in some ways, rather than a strictly cerebral debate. It’s not a bad thing, I just felt anxious. Always do, listening to such debates.

It has me wondering, is there such a thing as a serene atheist? What I heard from the atheist side was anger at God, not unbelief: a sense of “this is too hard,” of grievance. You can’t be angry at Nothingness. But at least in my limited experience I don’t think I’ve ever heard an atheist at peace. 

The thing is, I think I understand this anger, because I harbor it myself, to a degree. All of us, or at least I myself, even though we realize how ludicrous it is, find ourselves saying from time to time, “If I made the world, I’d…” This month, even yesterday morning as I walked through the neighborhood with my dog, it’s pain (again) that’s bothering me. Why so much pain and blood? Why does human life necessitate killing? Even at the center of biblical faith, the Old Testament temple, the air was filled with the braying of animals and the smell of blood; our experience is much less earthy. That’s before we even get into the slaughtering of various people groups, the beheading of all of Ahab’s sons by their tutors (which I read this morning), the sacrifice of Jesus himself.

If it were up to us, perhaps we’d have chosen different terms of existence.

Nevertheless, I believe. Even though I don’t like it all, I believe in such truth as has been revealed to me. I understand that reading scripture is unique, and it won’t be comprehensible unless I approach it with at least the minimal faith that God is. The question isn’t whether or not the biblical story is true, but whether I can read it without clothing myself in a self-protective anger that expresses itself in argumentativeness. 

My problem is that I am beginning (again) to run aground in a kind of numbness, continuing to read my Bible, but without really looking it in the eye. I believe the scriptural view of cause and effect, which teaches that where your heart is, there your treasure will be; treasure follows disposition, rather than vice versa. It’s counter-intuitive. Applied to Bible-reading, it would mean, discard that analytical, argumentative spirit, and the treasures will come into focus — not because God’s truth is irrational, but suprarational.

My disposition toward scripture must still harbor rebellion in reserve, because I find it deadening under my eyes. This is NOT what I want. I want to grow into the kind of reader Dennis Kinlaw describes in this passage from This Day with the Master, which summarizes his advice to his son, a doctor:

You must be careful. The first thing you know, you will wake up and be 50 years old, and the only thing you will have between your ears will be human anatomy and how to cut on it. That is a pretty thin ration on which to live intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. You need to start forcing yourself every day to read something that is not medical so that when you are 50, you will be a human person as well as a surgeon. You ought to read your Bible from beginning to end every year for ten years. If you read three chapters a day and five chapters on Sunday, you can work your way through it in a year, and in ten years you will be a halfway intelligent Christian layman.

Wow. I’m a long, long way from halfway intelligence.

Here’s a “poem” I wrote a few years ago that explores the way a habitually argumentative state of mind preserves autonomy, but also deadness. In the strange discursiveness of living, I find myself located not in the ending lines, as I was when I wrote it, but in the beginning lines. I hope this means not that I’m running in circles, but that God is taking me another layer deeper with him:

I for an i

I AM WHO I AM. This is my name forever, and my memorial name to all generations. (Exodus 3)

I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees Thee. Therefore I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42)

A soul preserved inviolate
A spirit locked in Heavenly embrace
hold forth in endless debate –
To be, or not to be –
I am, or I am not—
Back and forth I go,
tossed between their questions until I am a blur,
a whirring like hummingbird wings
sending their breeze Heavenward:
Are You?
Or are You not?

Are You there?
Are You good?
Are You trustworthy?
Are You aware of all this?

Or are You not?

I remain a seed of possibility
imprisoned—
entombed—
in its armor of doubt—
trapped in being
intended for becoming.

“I AM,” You reply—
“I AM here
I AM good
I AM trustworthy
I AM aware—
I AM to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
and to you—
in all your was,
all your is,
all your yearning to become,
I AM.
Let your being find its root in Mine.”

A soul clenched in a protective fist
clasps hands with I AM
only in the agonized death of “I am not”—

yet apart from I AM,
I am not.

You are I AM.

Planted, I break open
root reaching, clinging
leaves spreading
stem unfurling toward Heaven.

I want to record a few excerpts from Buechner’s Listening to Your Life and Pearcey’s Total Truth. I’m getting them in before year’s end because they confirm some observations about church that have pretty much flattened me under a boulder of disillusionment this year. But thankfully, after some wrestling, some prayer, some whining (okay maybe a lot of whining–?), and some positive church experience, I’m beginning to pull out of disillusionment and into the certainty that there are Godly alternatives to what’s described here. The challenge for 2008 is to be clear-eyed, and at the same time, to let God renew my mind. (Hmm, that sounds like a definition of maturity. Never my strong suit.)

First Buechner. He gives a visceral description of some problems, but no solution:

The church often bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the dysfunctional family. There is the authoritarian presence of the minister– the professional who knows all of the answers and calls most of the shots– whom few ever challenge either because they don’t dare or because they feel it would do no good if they did. There is the outward camaraderie and inward loneliness of the congregation. There are the unspoken rules and hidden agendas, the doubts and disagreements that for propriety’s sake are kept more or less under cover. There are people with all sorts of enthusiasms and creativities which are not often enough made use of or even recognized because the tendency is not to rock the boat but to keep on doing things the way they have always been done.

Now for Pearcey. Her book is about developing a Christian worldview, and the following excerpt is taken from a context of moving toward solutions. She touches (with the objectivity and expertise I desperately lack) on phenomena I’ve written about, especially here and here:

Many ministry leaders have uncritically absorbed a nonbiblical view of business and success. “They are deeply infused with an American capitalist culture concerning the gospel,” writes historian Joel Carpenter. They unconsciously assume “that God measures success by the numbers, that more money means more ministry, which means more success for God’s kingdom. So they tend to measure their own success as disciples and servants of the Lord by the size of their ministry.”

Do we recognize a pattern here? We are witnessing history come home to roost. In earlier chapters on revivalism, we watched the seeds being sown. The appeal to emotions. The pragmatic attitude of using whatever works. The habit of borrowing marketing techniques from the commercial world. The celebrity style of leadership. The focus on measurable results. “Religion is a work of man,” Charles Finney said, meaning that conversions can be induced simply by manipulating the right conditions. All too often, today’s ministries exhibit the same naturalistic attitude, the only difference being that they have access to vastly more sophisticated marketing and promotional techniques.

“The nonprofit economy has become more like the for-profit world,” writes Thomas Berg. . . . Sometimes the marketing hype shades into subtle deception. . . . This is the ultimate danger of doing the Lord’s work in the flesh: It may eventually lead to outright sin. We can be so driven by ministry goals that we are blinded to the use of unethical methods. Without really thinking, we begin to stretch the truth to enhance our image and attract donors. A former high-ranking executive in a parachurch organization told me he had resigned after discovering an internal “culture of lying”– a regular pattern of shading the truth and cutting ethical corners in order to look better and win influence– all for the good of the ministry, of course. It is a modern form of thinking we can “speak lies in the name of the Lord” (Zech. 13:3).

Oswald Chambers writes that personality is “like an island: we know nothing about the great depths underneath.” It is the characteristic of the spiritual man; individuality is the characteristic of the natural man. Personality comes to know itself by uniting with others; individuality insists on being separate. I guess then that personality is what’s capable of humility; individuality isn’t.

So if Jesus is interceding for me right now, he’s not asking that I would find my particular niche in life. He’s not asking for my gifts to mature. He’s not asking that in my main relationships, I be recognized as having certain traits, or that they be encouraged.

He’s praying that I would love.

Here’s another picture:

Oswald with his wife, ‘Biddy,’ and daughter Kathleen. (Click on the picture for a larger version.) They met on a boat trip, let each other go, then God gave them to each other. (BTW: Why is it that I always think of him as ‘Oswald’? ‘Chambers’ is never my first impulse.)

Here’s another tidbit about Oswald: he graduated from art school before receiving his calling into the pastorate. So much for artists being free, undisciplined hedonists! He’s as tough and cerebral as they come.

One more tidbit: the devotionals, though they have the terseness and densely-packed quality of notes, aren’t from sermon notes. They’re from lectures and talks he gave, so they represent completed reflection. (Right in the preface of my book, though I’ve never looked.) I wonder, what was it like to hear them, rather than read them? To hear these profound nuggets sail past without the luxury of rereading?  

Individuality is the husk of the personal life. Individuality is all elbows, it separates and isolates. . . . Individuality counterfeits personality as lust counterfeits love. (Oswald Chambers)

I’ve read this elsewhere, too. I think it’s a profound truth: the further down you go, the less distinctive, and more universal, you are as a human being. In the most loving relationships, you’ve gotten beyond the surface features and bonded in your basic humanity.

I’m between books right now, but I’m developing a curiosity about Oswald Chambers. I’d love to read a bit more about this fellow that speaks to so many believers:

Rather stern, isn’t he? Just like I picture him, though younger. So far I’ve learned that he died in Egypt, where he was chaplain to the troops during WWI, following surgery to remove his appendix. Only officers carried his coffin, and all 100 soldiers that accompanied the funeral procession held their arms reversed as a sign of respect. He was 43.

What is the attraction of this book?

It came a few years ago in a stack of old children’s books from my mother-in-law. It has small print and no pictures. I’ve never read a word of it to my girls.

But they love it. They play with it. No matter where I put it~even on the bottom shelf behind the piano~they find it. The other day I found it under my 4-year-old’s pillow.

No idea. Absolutely none.

The will can only be made submissive by frequent self-denials, which must keep in subjection its sallies and inclinations. Great weakness is often produced by indulgences which seem of no importance.  (Miguel de Molinos)

These are uncomfortably enlightening words. Once again I’ve fallen off the South Beach diet wagon after a mere four days. It’s not really that big of a deal~~or is it?

This passage invites me to see my whole character reflected in the smallest choices. 

True confessions: after years of exposure to the doctrine of entire sanctification, I still don’t “get it.” A crisis and a process. Perfection of will but not perfection of behavior. A second work of grace, even though you’ve given your life to Christ already.

Could it be as simple as this one sentence from Oswald Chambers today? “Consecration is our part, sanctification is God’s part.” Consecration–inviting God to investigate each area of myself as it rises to my attention, and to show me the “logs in my eye” that make blockades against him–is my part. When he shows me a log, I choose whether to move it out of the way or not. It’s always a free choice, and sometimes I’m not to the point where I see the cost clearly enough to do the necessary work of moving the log right away. But if I do move it, that place is consecrated (prepared for him), and he is free to sanctify me there–if he chooses. Or maybe he’ll let me wrestle a while longer to develop a spiritual habit, or an awareness of the extent of my sin. It’s his call: microwave holiness or crock-pot holiness. The most I can do is prepare the way.

This goes along with something Boundaries with Kids has helped me to see about myself. God can’t produce his fruit where I’m not submitting to reality–submitting to the boundaries he’s placed around me in his world. I can’t just pray for the result–fruit of the spirit–without meeting the conditions required to make my heart a fit soil for his spirit to take root. He can’t yet indwell me in those places where I’m immature, refusing to accept reality and insisting that it become easier before I face it. His boundaries won’t change.  Immaturity=rebellion in those places. 

I don’t see how “entire sanctification” is possible in this life, at least for me, because I’ll never be perfectly mature in all areas. (I’d settle for just a few… <sigh&gt So I say with Chambers, “Consecration is our part; sanctification is God’s part.” I can’t see how you can make a doctrine out of “entire sanctification” without putting God in a box. But if there’s such a thing as a doctrine of “increasing consecration,” sign me up!

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.

And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful; and that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honor and glory, world without end. Amen.

(”The General Thanksgiving,” from The Book of Common Prayer)