Tag Archives: deeper life

An Altar in the World

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An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith is a beautifully written contemplation on the ways ordinary living can intersect with the divine. Barbara Brown Taylor writes about the everyday disciplines that become portals into God’s presence: paying attention, wearing skin, getting lost, encountering others, feeling pain. It was not surprising to discover late in the book that Brother Lawrence is one of Taylor’s spiritual mentors, because in one important way her perspective resembles his: no earthly activity is too humble to be a meeting place with God.

An Altar in the World is an eminently practical book. Each chapter proposes not a theory or teaching, but a practice. I liked this feeling of being anchored in the good world God made. Taylor writes poetically, and with a wit that reminded me a little of Anne Lamott without the shock value. Taylor is an Episcopal priest who left parish ministry to teach college, and though I come from a different theological background I found her to be a delightful guide — honest, wry, and at times profound.

I’ve quoted several passages from the book over the last few days. But I wanted to include another from the chapter on feeling pain, where Taylor discusses the book of Job. She comments,

One night of real pain is enough to strip away your illusions about how strong you are, how brave, how patient and faithful. Who would have thought that a torn cornea could hurt all the way down to the soles of your feet? Who would have imagined that a really bad case of food poisoning could make you doubt the mercy of God? You do not need a torturer standing over you to recognize the direct link between pain and truth. Pain is so real that less-real things like who you thought you were and how you meant to act vanish like drops of water flung on a hot stove. Your virtues can become as abstract as algebra, your beliefs as porous as clouds.

See what I mean? Over and over as I read, I felt the pull to buy the book (I read a library copy) just for the pleasure of owning words like that. The chapters on pain, Sabbath, paying attention, and wearing skin were favorites out of the dozen practices addressed.

The chapter on prayer didn’t resonate with me as well; I felt a little lost. I couldn’t really relate to Taylor’s reluctance to say that God answers prayer:

The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom. Only you can say whether God answered you. If you have any sense, you will ask someone with more experience than you to help you decide what the answer means, but even then the choice is yours. Are you still waiting for God to answer you, or is your life the answer you have been seeking, hiding in plain view?

While I would agree that God’s dialogue with us is personal — a fact that Jesus illustrates over and over in the gospels by answering other questions than the ones people are actually asking him — I don’t think it’s helpful to open up a question about whether he answers at all. Scripture seems pretty plain on that: he does. Even though we all struggle at times with what seems like his silence.

I also think that though Brother Lawrence was onto something in offering his activities and bodily life to God — we are to do “everything in word or deed as unto God” — there is also a verbal component to prayer that I certainly need. I get tired of it sometimes; it’s a burden to be always having to formulate words in prayer, and I will lapse into phases of wordless, rather vague meditation “in God’s presence.” But then I’ll wake up in the middle of the night some night — as happened recently — and realize, “I miss you, God.” It’s my words that somehow form a bridge, a meeting ground. They offer some terms in which God’s answers can be recognized, whether through insight or solution or event or transformed perspective. I need the mundane labor of words, and I need the commitment of words, in my relationship with God — even though temperamentally, I’m someone who seems always to be craving silence.

An Altar in the World engaged me on several levels and I found it deeply satisfying. It sends me back into my life with a heightened sense of its richness. It is full of altars, and full of purpose — something I know, but which seems more real after having read this.

From the Notebook: Joy

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I received this notebook for Christmas. It’s a present from my husband and daughters. They know I love notebooks and journals, and I’ve been wanting a new one. Inside is an encouraging message about my writing, written by my husband.

Like so many bloggers, I think of myself as a writer. I even have one book to show for it. But my usual reflex when someone says, “You should write a book” is, “I have nothing to say.” Nevertheless, when my husband asks me, as he occasionally does, “What do you want to do?” my answer is, “Write.” I’m a verbalizer, a generator of words, a stalker of experiences the meaning of which can be spelled out and shaped into sentences.

So I’ve been writing a little in my new notebook. No perfectly formed book is leaping from my fevered brain. But I feel already that the writing is valuable, that it is an act of discovery. And what I’m discovering is how little joy I have in my life. It’s not because I am emotionally depressed. It’s because I am chronically distracted — distracted with a distraction I have actively pursued and zealously implemented in all sorts of ways. David Ulin and Nicholas Carr have both written about the way the Internet is changing the way we think, and making us less able to concentrate. But what they don’t really talk about is how very much that distraction is something we crave (or at least, I do). It’s not that our technology is doing to us something we didn’t expect. It’s performing exactly as we’ve created it to perform, and perpetrating on us exactly what we want. Or what we think we want. Until we realize it leaves us tired and unfulfilled.

For instance, blogging. For several years I’ve blogged, and I really enjoy it. It even has had the virtue of developing a discipline of regular writing. The problem is that it has become the only writing I do, and it is writing with some built-in limitations. I don’t get too personal in a blog post. I can’t go on for very long to develop an idea. Even at its most intellectual, it’s by nature a fairly superficial form of writing because of these limitations.

Writing in my notebook that no one else will ever read, I realize that in a way, blogging is a distraction from the things lurking under the surface that fascinate a writer and demand to be given shape and expression. My notebook writing goes a little deeper and has a different purpose than blog writing. It’s writing as exploration, writing as excavation, writing to generate more writing. Perhaps it’s writing as prayer, with God as the ultimate Muse. It can be that because it’s not written for anyone’s consumption. I’m realizing how much I’ve missed journalling. But it’s work. Writing longhand forces me to slow down. My handwriting doesn’t look as nice scrawled across the page as print does on a slick blog template with a few images thrown in. And always, in the back of my mind, is the little voice saying, “Maybe nothing will come of this. This writing has no audience. What’s the point?”

There is a point, Little Voice. I’m not sure what it is yet, but there is a point.

Another pleasure that easily tips into becoming a distraction is reading. There is not a thing wrong with reading, and I will always be a reader. But I reach for a book whenever I have a spare moment. It’s a way to keep my mind “busy.” After three years or so of reading about a book a week and churning out a book review for my blog, I feel glutted with books — books I’ve swallowed quickly and moved on to the next one without pausing for very long to reflect or process along the way. Rather than stopping to figure out how the books are being incorporated into my thinking (and most of them are becoming so incorporated, whether I notice or not), I’m moving on to the next one.

Why am I so bent on distraction?

Maybe it’s because joy, as I think of joy, comes through fully experiencing life, and the moment I turn away from the things I’ve instituted to keep me busy, I’m faced with a raft of things I don’t know how to deal with. I’m good with long-term goals. But working them out is usually much more mundane, and I have a hard time staying engaged in the mundane. Turning off the computer and picking up a pen, or turning to my mundane life for today, the first thing I feel is frustration and uncertainty. Why would I want to “fully experience” those? So much easier to turn to one of my distractions.

The reason I like to read John Eldredge from time to time is that he talks about the heart — the heart, which I’ve given to God, the seat of my deepest desires. It’s so easy to put it on the shelf. But God draws us along into his purposes for us through the desires of our hearts. I keep myself busy enough to ignore those desires, maybe because I figure they won’t be met or because I don’t know how to deal with them. But somehow, that’s where joy is: keeping the heart engaged in the impulses and disciplines of my mundane life.

Eldredge quotes C.S. Lewis, from “The Weight of Glory,” where Lewis says that the things

in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not in them, it only came through them; and what came through them was longing. These things… are good images of what we desire, but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself.

The challenge for me is to keep blogging and reading (neither of which I have any intention of quitting), and the other things I’ve used to distract and busify me, as mere “images,” and not “dumb idols.”

I thought too of this passage from George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons. He’s speaking of how God will not force his way into our hearts, but must be invited in:

The door must be opened by a willing hand, ere the foot of love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest is but an assault in the siege of love. The terror of God is but the other side of his love; it is love outside the house, that would be inside — love that knows the house is no house, only a place, until it enter — no home, but a tent, until the Eternal dwell there. Things must be cast out to make room for their souls — the eternal truths which in things find shape and show.

Somehow what he’s describing there sounds to me like joy. Here’s to the search for those eternal truths behind the things I have used to keep me busy.

Walking with God

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John Eldredge is a needed voice. He writes about something that might seem obvious — how to walk with God daily. But lately, listening to others, I’ve realized that this is something many people don’t know how to do. They know how to have a “conversion experience.” They know how to go to church, how to sign up for activities there, and how to talk the talk. But how to listen to God’s voice in their everyday lives? Not so much.

That’s where John Eldredge comes in with Walking with God. He takes us through a year of his spiritual journal, essentially. He demonstrates what it means to seek God through the Bible, and through prayer, and through being willing to stop and listen at moments that we might be tempted to blow right by — moments of heartache, or heaviness, or decision in comparatively small matters.

I have to stop here for a moment, because it’s so easy to judge what “small matters” are. I remember a Bible prof speaking on God’s will once when I was in college. He wanted to make the point that it’s okay to use common sense about some things, and at one point he leaned into the mic and said emphatically, “God doesn’t care what color tie you wear!”

Point taken — sort of. The same issue came up recently in our parenting class at church, where some of us questioned whether the author of the book we were reading was over-spiritualizing when he stopped the family and suggested asking God whether they should go to Disney World.

But really, couldn’t everything we struggle with here in our mundane lives be considered trivial to the eternal mind? The truth is, I’ve prayed for some embarrassingly trivial things, and when God has answered it has communicated his love and involvement very compellingly. In other more “important” matters, he remains silent. So who am I to judge what’s important and what’s not important to God? He has his own scale of values, his own plan that he’s unfolding. And more to the point, who am I to judge what’s “trivial” for someone else? Walking with God brought me back to this issue and reminded me that seemingly small, quiet moments can be the most significant of all in determining the course of our lives.

I struggle, though, with Eldredge’s warfare emphasis. Many times he comes back to the need to pray against demonic activity. Scripture teaches that there are demons, and they are active in the world. But reading this, the dark spirits come off sounding more powerful than God. If Jesus has already won the war, why would we have to re-fight every day by praying the incredibly specific prayers Eldredge gives here — prayers that imply that Jesus will not protect us unless we give him specific instructions as to how and against what.

In II Peter, we’re told that “his divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness, according to our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.” The battle is already won for those of us who are in Christ, and here Peter is telling us how to walk in that victory: through our knowledge of the truth. This is one of the things I loved about Spiritual Depression — its emphasis on the importance of knowing, and structuring our lives according to, Scripture. It’s not about going out and vanquishing demons by naming them and giving God instructions on how to fight them off. He’s already done that.

So much for my reservation about Walking with God (a reservation I also feel when I read Waking the Dead, another Eldredge book). But the basic model Eldredge provides is very useful and truthful. Eldredge has a realness, a grittiness, that carries a lot of credibility. He doesn’t sound churchy, or use evangelical-speak. He writes about real things that real people struggle with: runaway thought life, heart desires that we bury rather than trusting God with, the impulse to do life on our own. Dallas Willard writes that prayer is “talking to God about what we are doing together,” but it’s Eldredge who shows us what this looks like in an accessible way.

Overcomers

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Today’s Oswald Chambers is very thought-provoking. I’ve been mulling it all day. It was a meditation on the phrase “to him who overcomes,” from Revelation 2.

I don’t normally quote things in entirety, but I find this such rich food for thought that I wanted to preserve it here. I love the way it teases purpose out of struggle. And I love the basic analogy to the natural world, where “the very elements that sustain me while I am alive work to decay and disintegrate my body once I am dead.” The difference is our internal disposition and energy; that’s what throws the balance in favor of inward life against outward decay. It reminds me too of the passage where Paul says though “outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”

Anything that comes against the habitual passiveness of our convenience-saturated, consumer-oriented, machine-assisted comprehension of reality is welcome. For me this reading fit the bill.

To him who overcomes . . . —Revelation 2:7

Life without war is impossible in the natural or the supernatural realm. It is a fact that there is a continuing struggle in the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual areas of life.

Health is the balance between the physical parts of my body and all the things and forces surrounding me. To maintain good health I must have sufficient internal strength to fight off the things that are external. Everything outside my physical life is designed to cause my death. The very elements that sustain me while I am alive work to decay and disintegrate my body once it is dead. If I have enough inner strength to fight, I help to produce the balance needed for health. The same is true of the mental life. If I want to maintain a strong and active mental life, I have to fight. This struggle produces the mental balance called thought.

Morally it is the same. Anything that does not strengthen me morally is the enemy of virtue within me. Whether I overcome, thereby producing virtue, depends on the level of moral excellence in my life. But we must fight to be moral. Morality does not happen by accident; moral virtue is acquired.

And spiritually it is also the same. Jesus said, “In the world you will have tribulation . . .” (John 16:33). This means that anything which is not spiritual leads to my downfall. Jesus went on to say, “. . . but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” I must learn to fight against and overcome the things that come against me, and in that way produce the balance of holiness. Then it becomes a delight to meet opposition.

Holiness is the balance between my nature and the law of God as expressed in Jesus Christ.

A little further on, in Revelation 2:11, we’re told that if we welcome opposition as an opportunity to assert the priorities of Jesus — to defer to the Spirit of Jesus within us –  we “will not be hurt by the second death.”

What a thought.

Sunset at the beaver pond

Spiritual Atmosphere

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Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you?

It was on the strength of this passage, seen most recently at Amy’s blog, that I began reading Spiritual Depression by David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. It’s pretty good, but I haven’t found anything in it so far (I’m about a quarter of the way through) that surpasses these words.

I am not sure if “spiritual depression” is a label that applies to me. I experience joy in life. But I do seem to be burdened by a vague sense of inadequacy and unworthiness at least some of the time. I was noticing it especially last night when I went to bed. I felt I had failed, but as I looked back over the day, I couldn’t find a reason.

These are just habits of mind, floating in the atmosphere and occasionally gathering to drain away my energy and initiative — especially when, as I have this week in a small way, I step out of my comfort zone to do something in the hope that God will be honored.

I’m a high-functioning self-flagellator. Or so Rev. Lloyd-Jones would say; he believes that it’s self that whispers these self-defeating things to us. But I am willing to entertain the notion that it is not my self — which is hidden with Christ in God, which is a new creation, which is blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. I’m willing to entertain the notion that my self is only listening to the noise in the spiritual air of this fallen world — noise generated by a defeated enemy whose protestations as he falls are still audible to me, still “natural” feeling in the same way a person with an amputated limb still feels sensation from time to time in flesh that’s no longer there.

It’s not a matter of turning one half of my “self” to argue with the other. It’s a matter of rousing my whole self out of passivity and affirming the truth of who I am in Christ — redeemed and blessed and made able for the good work God has for me to do, not by natural abilities, but by the loving support of a God who needs only a willing heart to do his wonders.