Posts tagged February 2012

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Not have been baptized in lemon juice.

“And whenever you are fasting, do not look gloomy and sour and dreary like the hypocrites, for they put on a dismal countenance, that their fasting may be apparent to and seen by men.  Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full already.
 
But when you fast, perfume your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may not be noticed by men but by your Father, who sees in secret; and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you in the open.”

Matthew 6:16-18 (Amplified Bible)

…what does Lent “look” like?

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to not have been baptized in lemon juice.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Where the wash was.

“See I am doing something new!  

Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  In the desert I make away, in the wasteland, rivers.

It is I, I, who wipe out, for your own sake, your offenses; your sins I remember no more.”  Isaiah 43:19-20, 25

Lent.



…remind me that the rains which once ran, will run again, in this desert.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to where the wash was.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Play this game of risk.

“We too often forget that Christian faith is a principle of questioning and struggle before it becomes a principle of certitude and of peace.

One has to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after one has begun to believe, one’s faith itself must be tested and purified.


Christianity is not merely a set of foregone conclusions.


The Christian mind is a mind that risks intolerable purifications, and sometimes, indeed very often, the risk turns out to be too great to be tolerated.

Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe conventions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture.”  Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The spell and dispel.

“All things have an element of enchantment but also an element of disenchantment and disappointment.

The enchantment derives from the fact that all things are reflections and images of God, and the disenchantment is due to the fact that they are only magic and not the real reality.

They are not God.”  Ernesto Cardenal

…of God and not God.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the spell and dispel.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Not just chewing things and spitting them out.

“The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism - for that is what the words ‘one flesh’ would be in modern English.

And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact - just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument.

The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined.

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go alone with it and make up the total union.


The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating.

It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasure of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.”  

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

…intimacy cannot be isolated.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW not to chew things and spit them out.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

A roofless church.

“The greatest error of which historical Christianity is guilty is due to the circumcising and deadening notion that revelation is finished and that there is nothing more to be expected, that the structure of the church has been completely build and that the roof had been put on it.”  

Nicholas Berdyaev

…the new “porciúncula.”

A GIVENNESS NOW to a roofless church.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Resist the phantom of omnipresence.

“I must think about H. and less about myself.

Yes that sounds very well.  But there’s a snag.  I am thinking about her nearly always.  Thinking of the H. facts - real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers.  But it is my own mind that selects and groups them.  

Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman.  

Founded on fact, no doubt.  I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t).  

But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own?

The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.


The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.

Is all that work to be undone?

Is what I shall still call H. to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor-pipe dreams?

Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back - to be sucked back - into it?”  

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Insidious and imaginary.  








…when the composition inevitably of Genine and God become more and more my own.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to resist the phantom of omnipresence.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

An expandable suitcase.

“‘Second half of life’ wisdom requires prayer and discernment more than knee-jerk responses toward either conservative or liberal ends of the spectrum. 

You have a spectrum of responses now, and they are not all predictable, as is too often the case with most knee-jerk responses. 


Law is still necessary, of course, but it is not your guiding star, or even close. It has been wrong and cruel too many times.

The Eight Beatitudes speak to you much more than the Ten Commandments as you grow older. 


Life is much more spacious now. 

The boundaries of the container have been enlarged. 

You are like an expandable suitcase, and you became so almost without your noticing. 

Now you are just here, and here holds more than enough.”  Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“And what happened then?  Well, in Whoville they say that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day.”  

…and here holds more than enough.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to an expandable suitcase.