The Beloved Community

Charles Marsh's The Beloved Community is a literate study of the roots of the civil rights movement, and the seeds of a similar movement that brews today. The roots, Marsh recognizes, are the gospel as a socially transformative message of acceptance and equality, and the Cross as the sacrificial act of acceptance which rises above the culture of rejection and self-righteousness in all forms...

more later.

Bringing Up Young "No-merit"

In God's Secretaries, Adam Nicolson describes a curious trend among Puritans in England during the seventeenth century:

Some Puritans maintained that the names of the great figures in the scriptures, all of which signify something-- Adam meant 'Red Earth,' Timothy 'Fear-God'-- should be translated. The Geneva Bible, which was an encyclopaedia of Calvinist thought...had a list of those meanings at the back and, in imitation of those signifying names, Puritans...had taken to naming their children after moral qualities. Ben Johnson included characters called Tribulation Wholesome, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy and Win-the-Fight Littlewit in the The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair...[anti-Puritan] Bancroft himself had written about the absurdity of calling your children "The Lord-is-Near, More-Trial, Reformation, Morefruit, Dust and many other such-like." These were not invented. Puritan children...laboured under the names of Eschew-evil, Lament, No-merit, Sorry-for-Sin, Learn-wisdom, Faint-not, Give-thanks and, the most popular, Sin-deny, which was landed on ten children baptised in the [Warbleton] parish between 1586 and 1596. One family...would have been introduced by their proud father as Much-mercy Hely, Increased Hely, Sin-deny Hely, Fear-not Hely and sweet little Constance Hely...Among William Brewster's own children...were Fear, Love, Patience and Wrestling Brewster.

Those silly Puritans...

C.S. Lewis's Reflection On "The Fair Beauty Of The Lord"

[The ancient worshipper] had never heard of music, or festivity, or agriculture as things separate from religion...Life was one. If I had been there I should have seen the musicians and the girls with the tambourines; in addition, as another thing, I might or might not have (as we say) "felt" the presence of God. The ancient worshipper would have been aware of no such dulaism.

When the mind becomes capable of abstraction and analysis this old unity breaks up. And no sooner is it possible o distinguish the rite from the vision of God than there is adanger of the rite becoming a substiute for, and a rival to, God Himself...There is a stage in a child's life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas or Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began "Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen". But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer be sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat...at some period in Judaism...a roughly parallel situation occurred. The unity falls apart; the sacrificial rites become distinguishable from the meeting with God...They may be valued as a sort of commercial transaction with a greedy God who somehow really wants or needs large quanities of carcasses...Worse still, they may be regarded as the only thing He wants, so that their punctual performance will satisfy Him without obedience to His demands for mercy, "judgement," and truth.

Is Lewis suggesting that at this point the prudent thing is to throw out the ritual, the sacramental "gateway" into meeting with God? Definitely not. Just that we regain the childlike unity of perception toward the imminent and the transcendant. And thus he nicely bridges a completely unnecessary gap between Catholicism and Protestantism.

C.S. Lewis's Reflection On The Afterlife

One major distinction between Old Testament Israel and New Testament Christianity is of course, the issue of the afterlife. While the Jews had no notion of a life beyond the grave, a heaven or hell, thoughts of paradise to come are wedded inseparably to the acknowledgement of the Messiah. Why is this? C.S. Lewis makes a go at the question in Reflections on the Psalms:

I am concerned to try to understand the absence of such a belief, in the midst of inense religious feeling, over the earlier period. To some it may seem astonishing that God, having revealed so much of Himself to that people, should not have tought them this.

It does not now astonish me. For one thing there were nations close to the Jews whose religion was overwhelmingly concerned with the after life. In reading about ancient Egypt one gets the impression of a culture in which the main business of life was the attempt to secure the well-being of the dead. It looks as if God did not want the chosen people to follow that example.

It is surely, therefore, very possible that when God began to reveal Himself to men, to show them that He and nothing else is their true goal and the satisfaction of their needs, and that He has a claim upon them simply by being what He is, quite apart from anything He can bestow or deny, it may have been absolutely necessary that this revelation should not begin with any hint of future Beatitude or Perdition. These are not the right point to begin at. An effective belief in them, coming too soon, may even render almost impossible the development of (so to call it) the appetite for God; personal hopse and fears, too obviously exciting, have got in first. Later, when, after centuries of spiritual training, men have learned to desire and adore God, to pant after Him "as pants the hart", it is another matter. For then those who love God will desire not only to enjoy Him but "to enjoy Him forever", and will fear to lose Him. And it is by that door that a truly religious hope of Heaven and fear of Hell can enter; not as things of any independent or intrinsic weight. It is even arguable that the moment "Heaven" ceases to mean union with God and "Hell" to mean separation from Him, the belief in either is a mischievous superstition; for then we have, on the one hand, a merely "compensatory" belief(a "sequel" to life's sad story, in which everything will "come all right") and, on the other, a nightmare which drives men into asylums or makes them persecutors.

C.S. Lewis's Reflection On Psalmic Hatred

In Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis eloquently takes on the challenge of some of Scripture's difficult passages-- the vitriolic resentment and cursing found in the Psalms. While one contemporary Christian interpretation states (and valuably) that such is the posture we are to take with our spiritual adversaries rather than human enemies, it remains that these often terrifying rants were spoken, by the original poets, against a very human enemy; the anguished cry was that Sheol would swallow up the wicked men, not demonic minions. Lewis addresses this with astonishing clarity(though my excerpt is piecemeal):

The examples which (in me at any rate) can hardly fail to produce a smile may occur most disquietingly in Psalms we love; 143, after proceeding for eleven verses in a strain that brings tears to the eyes, adds in the twelfth, almost like an afterthought "and of thy goodness slay mine enemies". Even more naively, almost childishly, 139, in the middle of its hymn of praise throws in (19) "Wilt thou not slay the wicked, O God?"--as if it were surprising that such a simple remedy for human ills had not occurred to the Almighty. Worst of all in "The Lord is my shepherd" (23), after the green pasture, the waters of comfort, the sure confidence in the valley of the shadow, we suddenly run across (5) "Thou shalt prepare a table for me against them that trouble me"--or , as Dr. Moffatt translates it, "Thou art my host, spreading a feast for me while my enemies look on." The poet's enjoyment of his present prosperity would not be complete unless those horrid Joneses (who used to look down their noses at him) were watching it all and hating it.

At the outset I felt sure, and I feel sure still, that we must not either try to explain them away or to yield for one moment to the idea that, because it comes in the Bible, all this vindictive hatred must somehow be good and pious. One might have expected that this would immediately, and usefully, have turned my attention to the same thing in my own heart. And that, of course is one very good use we can make of the maledictory Psalms...in the Psalmists' tendency to chew over and over the cud of some injury, to dwell in a kind of self-torture on every circumstance that aggravates it, most of us can recognize something we have met in ourselves. In fact, however, something else occured to me first. It seemed to me that, seeing in them hatred undisguised, I saw also the natural result of injuring a human being.

[In Pagan literature], I can find...lasciviousness, much brutal insensibility, cold cruelties taken for granted, but not this fury or luxury of hatred...One's first impression is that the Jews were much more vindictive and vitriolic than the Pagans...the absence of anger, especially that sort of anger which we call indignation, can, in my opinion, be a most alarming symptom. And the presence of indignation may be a good one. Even when that indignation passes into bitter personal vindictiveness, it may still be a good symptom, though bad in itself.

If the Jews cursed more bitterly than the Pagans this was, I think, at least in part because they took right and wrong more seriously. For if we look at their railings we find they are usually angry not simply because these things have been done to them but because these things are manifestly wrong, and hateful to God as well as the victim...The Jews sinned in this matter worse than Pagans not because they were further from God but because they were nearer to Him...In that way the relentlessness of the Psalmists is far nearer to one side of the truth than many modern attitudes which can be mistaken, by those who hold them, for Christian charity.

I love the final jab, in nearly the last sentence of the chapter, intimating that the taken-for-granted Christian demeanor of calm temperance is very often a mask for the refusal to admit that anything is wrong.

Philip Yancey's time with leprosy specialist Dr. Paul Brand supplements this entire theme nicely. He writes in Soul Survivor:

I was writing the book Where Is God When It Hurts; he invited me to consider an alternative world without pain. He insisted on pain's great value, holding up as proof the terrible results of leprosy-- damaged faces, blindness, and loss of fingers, toes, and limbs-- all of which occur as side-effects of painlessness. As a young doctor in India, Brand had made the groundbreaking medical discovery that leprosy does its damage merely by destroying nerve endings. People who lose pain sensation then damage themselves by such simple actions as gripping a splintered rake or wearing tight shoes. Pressure sores form, infection sets in, and no pain signals alert them to tend to the wounded area..."I thank God for pain," Brand declared with the utmost sincerity. "I cannot think of a greater gift I could give my leprosy patients." He went on to describe the intricacies of the pain system that protects the human body..."Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, it forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies...Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust-- blister, callus, swelling, fever, sneeze, cough, vomiting, and especially pain-- demonstrates a reflex toward health."

As I listened to Brand, I realized that I had been approaching God like a sick patient- as if the Creator were running a complaint desk. I anguished over the tragedies, diseases, and injustices, all the while ignoring the many good things surrounding me in the world. Like the psalmists, could I learn to praise and lament at the same time, with neither intonation drowning out the other?...As the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel wrote, "The cardinal issue, Why does the God of justice and compassion permit evil to persist? is bound up with the problem of how man should aid God so that his justice and compassion prevail."

It strikes me that every time I've had a wild supernatural experience, a great time of worship, or just that Spirit-induced joy of being with other in the Lord, it has come at a time where my awareness of God's love for me, independent of my actions or merits, has been high.

In other words, I'm able to respond to his love.

Of course God's love isn't dependent on my response. But I am unable to receive a package when my hands are full-- to paraphrase C.S. Lewis. The verse in 1 John, "we love because he first loved us," becomes much more practical and in-focus when I understand this. God's pursuit of me is that soil out of which my love springs. The "worship was great today" compliment is put into perspective-- God found a way in, through our narcissism and disquieted hyper-activity. We let our guard down. We left a chink in the armor. We decided that we needed to simply receive instead of give to earn. I guess that's one reason why it's so much easier to meet God when we're at the end of our rope.

The lesson? Maybe "live like you're at the end of your rope?" How do I depend on God utterly, without neglecting my responsibility? Without being totally inactive, and never leaving my bed until God "gives me a word," how do I do only what I see the Father doing?

Right now, my answer is "live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness." Meditate on and receive God's unqualified love, throughout the day. When my heart starts racing, or my face stars burning because of a memory of something in the past, I will remember that God is not scolding me for it, and that my likeableness to him is 100% undiminished.

Only three minutes left and The Man's gonna kick me off this computer: so long...

Accepted Tenderness, cont'd

Having finished The Wisdom of Tenderness in all of 2 days, I am compelled to continued excavating its gold mine by plagiarizing the daylights out of it on my blog, until you no longer even have to read the book...

"The notion of unmerited mercy is quaint but unintelligible to most of us, since it has no prototype in our human experience. The dramatic surprise that comes in the stories of the searching shepherd, the searching woman, and the searching father[Luke 15] is that being found by a searching God is more important than anything we do." Consistent with this notion of the initiative of God, followed by a response of joyful worship on our part, Manning has put things in their correct order for Christians to see. The tearful ecstasy of charismatic worship, the well-ordered processional entry of high liturgy, the tossing of our tithe into the offering plate, the Biblical devotion of a believer in solitude, the reading of Psalms of praise, even the confession of a Christian hunted by his sin, all are second in line to the thunderous pursuit of God, out of heaven and into a sin-scarred world, to win back his beloved. God likes us. And so we run back to him.

Central to our answer to this pursuit is spiritual poverty. "When we deny our spiritual poverty, danger lurks...The spiritually poor--like the economically poor--experience genuine gratitude and appreciate the slightest gift. Ironically, the more we grow in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the poorer we become. The more we realize that everything is gift, the more the tenor of our life becomes humble, joyful thanksgiving."

"Times of worship can no longer be evaluated by the felt effects they produce in us; the quality of the eucharistic meal can't be measured by the number of chairs at the table, the nature of the appetizers, or the tangible, visible results on a diner's psyche. The poor are bewildered that mercy has even bothered to show up, nonplussed that God and man at table are sat down."

In contrast, "The rich in spirit are often as downcast, guilt-ridden, anxious, and dissatisfied as their unbelieving neighbors, while the poor cry, 'It is right to give God thanks and praise!...how do we get from the poverty of spiritual wealth to the wealth of spiritual poverty?...attention to the attentiveness of Jesus." Living in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. The knowledge that God likes you, as well as loves you.

Why blog, when you can let Brennan Manning do it for you? By the way, please read this book. After all it will only take you 2 days!

Accepted Tenderness

I'm kind of off the subject of "Is God Listening" now, but this blogging is kind of all flowing together as one piece, so I'll keep picking up where I left off, until I have no more to say.

What I've been talking about, I will try to sum up in short: That true grace, not only in doctrine or definition, rolls over the spirit like floodwaters over a piece of dry ground, convicting the heart and mind that God's gifts and his love belong simply to those he chooses based on his nature as Giver and Lover, and not to those who prove their spirituality and right-thinking. God's Grace is here (Repent, believe, for the Kingdom of God is at hand...), it's powerful(bringing sight to the blind, setting the captives free, good news to the poor...), and the Church changes the world when they walk in it, demonstrating in their response of worship, and manifesting it in their acts of mercy and lifestyles of grace. The "siamese twin" of worship is mercy, justice, and faithfulness[Matt 23:23]. Correct worship(or doctrine, or orthodoxy) is a product of transformation, and not something that is worked up or contrived at its expense.

Brennan Manning, in The Wisdom of Tenderness, says not a few things that heavily jive(yeah, man) with this theme(116 pages and 1 day into the book). Manning's premise is that our need as Christians is not to do better, love better, adhere better, or worship better, but to "wholeheartedly trust that God likes me(not loves me, because...God loves by necessity of his nature.)" Manning suggests that "Jesus experienced in the depth of his human soul how much his Father liked him...[that] the Man who was like us in all things but ungratefulness discover[ed] his own truth in the light of the loving gaze that rested upon him."

This liked-ness(which insists on unconditionality in a way that 'love' does not, at least in our perception of the word) deserves the most attention of anything in the New Testament, Manning would have us believe. Because it is from this position, that of "receiver" that His mercy(termed "given tenderness") is allowed to roll over us. The imperative then is to "live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness." From this initiative, our own righteousness springs. To accept that you are loved by God is more important than to love God.

Not to receive(respond to) the unconditional love of the Father is to live in fear...crippling fear that one will not be accepted by his/her peers, him/herself, and finally God. It is to hopelessly and endlessly scrub one's actions, beliefs, and worship toward the end of approval and acceptance by others, rather than to genuinely respond to the Famous One's overtures of love. How then, do I deal with this fearful and sin-scarred state, which has and continues to characterize me? Well, having ruthlessly taken stock of myself in terms of sinful motives and desires as well as actions, I am to "be gentle with myself, as the Master is, humbly acknowledg[ing] that the Word hasn't taken sovereign possession of my life, accept my own need for further conversion, quickly repent, ask forgiveness, waste no time in self-recrimination, and smile at my own frailty."

It is in a post 9-11 world of this fear that the Church can stand out like a sore thumb among the dictates of fame, position, and wealth: "In the face of fear and uncertainty, the faithful remnant-- anawim in Hebrew, "ragamuffins" in the vernacular--remain agents of hope in what theologian Oscar Cullman calls the 'isness of the shall be.' The twinkle in their eye suggests that they possess a higher vision." The vision of accepted tenderness for themselves and others, even--especially--in the place of sin's devastation.