.:| The Mr. Renaissance Bi-weekly Newsletter |:. archives | discuss | subscribe | print page
July 04, 2007
Hello everyone
In the previous issue we began by speaking of trust and surrender, noting that our spiritual relationship was unlike our human ones in that in all ways we were the weaker, dependent party. That recognition does not obviate our responsibility, but ironically the responsibility that promises us the greatest freedom is also the most costly and difficult: we have been asked to trust God implicitly and depend on him for all things. Most of us are familiar with the words of Jesus according to the sixth chapter of the gospel of Matthew in which are told to offer up our acts of charity unto God, not for rapturous applause (for that is the reward we give to our entertainers who, for the most part, have fully earned their kudos for the pleasure they have given us for the evening), but because we believe and trust that by so doing, we are bringing honor and pleasure to God who forms our private audience, a bit like the son who performs brilliantly because he knows that his father—the most important person (MIP)—is sitting in the stands. If others admire our deeds, so much the better, but none the worst if they do not: public opinion is fickle and one day we’re hot, the next we’re not, and a good many more days we’re somewhere in between.
It is in this same chapter of Matthew that the Lord teaches his disciples how to pray, laying special emphasis on forgiveness as a salvific virtue. He then discusses treasure, suggesting that such comes in two varieties, the one ephemeral and the other eternal, and that of the latter, we should seek to increase such virtues of the heart, for nothing can take these away from us. Regarding ephemeral treasures, the chapter concludes with Jesus instructing his followers not to worry about what they will eat, what they will drink, or what they will wear, but, just as with stockpiling eternal treasures: “seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” In short, he is suggesting that we are to care for nothing for our Father cares for us. To care for nothing, however, is not so easy as all of that. It involves a very high level of trust: a trust that would very well be naïve if it were invested in a human party. Most of us have too many wounds to trust easily; we have too many scars to so readily hand over our hearts and even our very lives. Yet if we are to believe the words of Jesus according to Matthew, to the degree that we can hand over our hearts and our very lives, to that degree we will have discovered a great secret: we will be fully satisfied, having everything we need concerning our ephemeral affairs, and what is more, we will have spiritual treasures like peace of mind and joy of spirit as well. In a word, we will have discovered the wellspring of spiritual bliss.
The fact that we cannot see God; the fact that he rarely speaks in words (and then only in telepathic utterance or through the lips of another): this can sometimes be a great hindrance to our ability to trust. Of course, what is a hindrance in one way can also make things easier in others: there are times that the knowledge of God being God makes trusting much easier. Yet for all the times that we are thus aided in trust, there are plenty more in which we question either the reality of God himself, his goodness, or both. How can we trust when we cannot see, when we cannot hear, when we cannot sense any discernible presence? How can we trust when we cry ourselves to sleep without seeming comfort or consolation to awaken on the morning to more of the same? The answer to these questions is faith and hope: this answer is not an easy one, yet it is not particularly difficult either: desperate people do desperate things and find resources they did not know they possessed. So then, in the face of utter desperation, we often find that our faith and hope are stronger than we had thought; what is more, if we persevere, holding out at times against all hope, eventually the new dawn will come again and with it the warmth of the sunlight.
We do not trust because we fear: we fear being hurt, we fear being wrong, we fear being disappointed yet another time, and we must often get desperate before we relinquish our hold. It has been said that without struggle, there is no growth—illustrations from childhood come to mind of the bird helped out of the egg or the butterfly out of its cocoon to the ultimate demise of either. That may not always be true: growth does not necessarily have to involve struggle: there are no cosmic laws engraved in tablets of stone or otherwise that show struggle to be the necessary prerequisite of growth. Yet while there might not be a causal necessity between the two, where the one is the other often will follow (and in no particular order). Or, if there is a causal necessity, it can at least be decreased: the seed can either push its way up through moist, cultivated soil or dry, scaly earth. In this case, the very lack of struggle through the moist, cultivated soil actually increases its vitality. Struggle in and of itself is not noble: it is only struggle. What makes struggle noble, even Sisyphus’ existential struggle against his rock or the fatal flaw of the tragic heroes, is the inner (and by extension outer) transformation it brings. Where there is struggle, there is a spirit who is alive and a spirit who cares. Yet struggle, though it may be the overture and preliminary to trust, is not yet trust, and the goal we seek is complete trust. Struggle is noble for us insofar as it is struggle to overcome our remaining lack of trust. Such struggles will visit us from time to time as long as we live on this earth and we will not always be victorious, at least not always with individual struggles all the time. Yet any struggle, absolutely any struggle at all, against the side that doubts and fears and lacks in trust is progress: the struggle shows a spirit who is alive and who cares and cares deeply. I am reminded of John Powell’s words in Why Am I Afraid to Love?, a book that blends beautiful theological passages with developmental psychology:
The Christian must always accept himself in his present, pilgrim and human condition, which will inevitably involve failure. Ideals must always be introduced to the test of actual experience, and in this introduction our ideals, which very often sound beautiful, become a struggle, a renunciation, a battle for control of self, a willingness to start again in the wake of failures, a lucid acceptance of the mystery of the cross.
It is not the problem, and in this case not the isolated failure that is critical, definitive, and paramount. It is our reaction to it. The reaction of the Christian must always be suffused with a confidence nourished by the conviction that God and he are a majority, even stronger than his own weakness. . . .
Powell reminds us that failures will come: at times, failures will show us that the ideal that we so ardently held, when held “to the test of actual experience,” was a false ideal and we do better off without it. Many other times, the ideal is not yet actualized and the only way to reach it is through struggle and at times failure. We are not yet as we want or ought to be: none of us. The real key, however, is that we are “nourished by the conviction” that with God on our side, there is absolutely nothing that can stand in our way. Again, we are back to trust: even as we struggle to trust God fully, we must trust God to help us struggle against ourselves so that our struggling will not be in vain. The secret to breakthrough very often is persistence in the face of adversity, failure, and the apparent absence of light.
We began, as we did last week, by speaking of relationships, both human and Divine. Certainly, as we have noted, there are times in which we serve God in the dark, neither seeing, hearing, nor feeling his presence. There are other times in which his presence seems evident and many more where we feel neither of these extremes but fall somewhere between. The one thing that sustains us during times in which God either seems absent or our feelings are rather tepid is faith and hope. There is a reason the biblical authors so often compare the spiritual life to a marriage: that honeymoons do not last forever is proverbial, but time-tested wisdom suggests that given more time, deeper levels of love and intimacy will develop. Marriages also often involve struggle and renunciation, selfishness manifesting in ways it would go unnoticed in another setting. Depending on the persons involved, the battle of the sexes also often factors in, not unlike the inner jihad of our own wills over and against that of our Lord’s.
The rules of marriage have adapted with the times, and it is quite rare to hear a ceremony in which the bride promises to obey her husband; it is also increasingly common for a bride to keep her surname in addition to taking on her husband’s. We will here offer neither praise nor criticism of such practices: we merely observe and acknowledge them, noting that they have to do with the recognition of humanity’s fallibility and the age-old struggle for identity. (For those interested, we have discussed the very topic of husband-and-wife relationships on the discussion forum recently.) What we will say here is that when it comes to our relationship to God in which we are the weaker party in every way, the older conceptions of marriage may provide us with better spiritual insight: better because the Groom suffers no fallibility and because the Bride is utterly dependent on her Groom (as in ancient times, when brides were truly dependent on their husbands in virtually all ways, or at least all ways material). To this end, though the words of J. Hudson Taylor’s 1893 Union and Communion or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon may sound a bit antiquated to our ears today, his message, when applied to the Groom of grooms and his Bride of brides, is compelling:
What should we think of a betrothed one whose conceit and self-will prevented not only the consummation of her own joy, but of his who had given her his heart? Though never at rest in his absence, she cannot trust him fully; and she does not care to give up her own name, her own rights and possessions, her own will to him who has become necessary for her happiness. She would fain claim him fully, without giving herself fully to him; but it can never be: while she retains her own name, she can never claim his. She may not promise to love and honour if she will not also promise to obey: and till her love reaches that point of surrender she must remain an unsatisfied lover—she cannot, as a satisfied bride, find rest in the home of her husband. While she retains her own will, and the control of her own possessions, she must be content to live on her own resources; she cannot claim his.
Taylor’s words seem to blame the bride—and by implication, us—for her unwillingness to surrender. Yet he clearly sees that though surrender is a necessary part of the spiritual life, it is not the surrender of a woman who is forced into being with a man she cares nothing for, but rather a willing surrender in which she gradually learns to relax in the presence of the one she loves and trust that her longing and desires will be not only reciprocated but exceeded: it is ultimately the surrender of the beloved to the lover who woos her. After all, this relationship is all so very new to her: she had a life long before she met her husband. Thus Taylor writes of her desire (yet her fear) to be with the one who completely absorbs her thoughts:
It was not always so with her. Once she was contented in His absence—other society and other occupations sufficed her; but now it can never be so again. The world can never be to her what it once was; the betrothed bride has learnt to love her LORD, and no other society than His can satisfy her. His visits may be occasional and may be brief; but they are precious times of enjoyment. Their memory is cherished in the intervals, and their repetition longed for. There is no real satisfaction in His absence, and yet, alas! He is not always with her: He comes and goes. Now her joy in Him is a heaven below; but again she is longing, and longing in vain, for His presence. Like the ever-changing tide, her experience is an ebbing and flowing one; it may even be that unrest is the rule, satisfaction the exception. Is there no help for this? must it always continue so? Has He, can He have created these unquenchable longings only to tantalize them? Strange indeed it would be if this were the case.
For many of us, these words are compelling. For others of us, however, perhaps our greatest fear is not that God has created these unquenchable longings only to tantalize us: perhaps we have difficultly believing in God period, much less being concerned with his goodness (or apparent lack thereof). Such difficulty would appear a long way away from the discussion of marriages, whether earthly or divine, though for many persons, the difficulty is real. Yet they know that even if all that we hope for as believers should be proven a sham, still, things do generally seem to work out okay (some even posit it as a cosmic law) and in any case, when we worry, we most often worry about things over which we have little to no control. There is really nothing to fear in taking the approach to God’s provision ”Lord, I believe: help my unbelief,“ and a great deal to be gained by it.
One of the ways we get ourselves in trouble is in believing that we cannot be fully happy unless God answers our prayer in a certain way. There is nothing wrong, of course, with taking our requests to God; in fact, there is much to be said for it. The difficulty comes in when we have our heart so set on a certain request that if and when God fails to grant it, we feel he has let us down. That is, of course, very human, but that is also not complete trust. Complete trust—we are here speaking of an ideal of which we all fall consistently short—would say, “Lord, I think that this request would make me happy. Nevertheless, I can confidently say, ‘Not my will, but yours be done,’ because I know that you know even better than me what will make me happy and what I need. I trust you: I know that if you do not grant me this request, it is not because of any lack of goodness on your part, but rather precisely because of it. Therefore, this is my request, but I also pray that if this request not be what I believe it to be, that your will would be done. I pray also that if possible you would show me the reasons why, yet I also pray that if you do not show me the reasons, this too is not a reflection of any lack of goodness on your part, but rather because of it. I trust you completely.”
That particular prayer (or at least a variant of it) scares many of us to death, for we often have our heart set on a particular request: the request of requests. However, when we can learn to pray this prayer from the heart, and keep praying this prayer from the heart until the struggle is past, we will then be tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. We simply do not understand many times and it is our tendency to get angry when we fail to see the reasons why. Most of us dislike people who say over and over, “Just trust God; it’s God’s will.” We do not like being told not to question; in fact, in many cases our minds work overtime and we conclude that being told not to question is a façade that hides a sham. Let us admit for the sake of argument that perhaps the life of faith is a façade that enshrouds a sham. However, the only way we can know for certain whether this is true is to trust. Our doubts will never reveal the truth, because by its very nature, doubt is predisposed to disbelief (all a part of that sophistication we spoke of in the previous issue designed to keep us from getting hurt). Only our trust—only our staking it all—will reveal whether or not there be any truth to the words of Jesus.
In a truly ironic twist to the universe, if we question too long and loud, we shall never receive answers, for answers are only found by those who seek, not with their heads, but with their hearts. They too may question, they too may doubt, but in their earnest quest they question their questions and doubt their doubts more often than they question their faith and doubt their hope. Their faith, to the degree that they have faith, and their hope, to the degree that they have hope, continues to grow and bloom, increasingly giving way to love and the reality of intimate encounter. To the degree that they are able to trust their lives to God and trust their lives completely, to that degree they will have paradoxically found true freedom: they will have found eternal life, that spiritual bliss so many seek but few find. They will have learned the reality of Jesus’ words according to Matthew: “seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you”; they will have learned, along with the author of 1 Peter, to cast all their anxiety on God, because they have learned that he truly loves them and will provide for their needs (5:7).
The last point that we might make here is that God is by definition that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought. Put another way, by definition, God is utterly perfect and lacking in nothing. As we covered recently on the forum, we as human creatures are needy, and it is this neediness in part that contributes to our sinfulness. When we love, none of us love perfectly or purely. When we love, there are always a few strings attached: we seek to fill up our lack with our love. God, however, lacks nothing, and that means that he gains nothing from loving us save perhaps the pure pleasure of doing so. In fact, for Father Weinandy (whom we gloss on the forum), that is the very reason agape, or selfless love, is possible for God and the only reason it is possible. It is the property of goodness to want to give itself away, to share itself with another, from the enjoyment of a beautiful sunrise to the desire for children of the new husband and wife deeply in love. God, being all good, naturally wants to share that goodness as a very property of being good. Because he lacks nothing whatsoever, he not only does share his goodness with us, his fragile creatures—the weaker party in every way—but he has no strings attached when he does. He does not seek first to fill his lack or also to fill his lack: he has no lacks to get in the way of perfect love. Therefore, he alone can love us perfectly because he alone lacks nothing and thus has everything to give. When we learn firsthand the reality of this theological and philosophic truth, we appreciate all the more why total trust is the secret to eternal bliss.
God bless,
Eric
Table of Contents | Home | About | Newsletter | Forum | Misc. | Contact | Search | Links | Random Page
.:| get up to date: newsletter :. 1&1 .: discussion forum: participate |:.
