Posts tagged june 2011

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Not step twice into the same river.

“One cannot step twice into the same river,
for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on.”  Herakleitos





…the river of relationships.


…the fluidity of faith.




I cannot step into the same river, because I cannot step into the same water.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to not step twice into the same river.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Alive again.


I woke up in darkness
sounded by silence
oh where, where have I gone?

I woke to reality
losing its grip on me
oh where, where have I gone?

Cause I can see the light
before I see the sunrise

You called and you shouted
broke through my deafness
now I’m breathing in
and breathing out
I’m alive again!

You shattered my darkness
washed away my blindness
now I’m breathing in
and breathing out
I’m alive again!

They never loved you
you waited for me,
I searched for you…
what took me so long?

I was looking outside
as a love would ever want to hide
I’m finding I was wrong

Cause I can feel the wind
before it hits my skin

Cause I want you!
Yes, I want you,
I need you
And I’ll do what ever I have to
Just to get through
cause I love you
Yeah, I love you!  Matt Maher, Alive Again





“alive again”

…I awake to these two words each and every morning.




Breathing in… “alive.”  

Breathing out… “again.”







My daughter, Grace, and I, nearly drown two years ago today.  


But we didn’t.  

And whenever I breathe in and breathe out, I’m reminded of it.




Alive?


…again.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to alive again.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Dendrochronology.

“In the last month he tried to tell me about his experience of encountering God.  

“I was in the place where the decisions about the universe were made, where the stuff of life is informed.  And I demanded the right to cast my vote about whether I would live or die.”

A week before he died we had our last conversation.  

In some way I could not understand, he had gained a satisfying answer to his question about why he had been born a man.  

Now he was wrestling with the unique character of his life as a man, seeking the reasons for “the grain in his own wood.”  Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly




Dendrochronology.


…study of dating the grain in the wood.

…rings of sensitivity and complacency.




Etchings about my experience of encountering God.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to dendrochronology.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Stormy sea surrenders.

“A metaphor that was central to Thurman’s thought was the notion of a journey.  Like Gabriel Marcel, he considered the ideas of spirit and pilgrimage inseparable.  

When I was torn apart by the conflicts of divorce, romance and purpose, he reminded me that I dare not surrender my complexity for a false peace.  

“Trust yourself in the deep, uncharted waters,” he said.  ”When there is a storm, it is safer in the open sea.  If you stay too near the dock you will get beaten to death.”  Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly

…trust the turbulence.

…desire the deep.



The storm is safer in the open sea.





…and the open “me.”

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to stormy sea surrenders.

What do I have GIVENNESS NOW to?

Become like a dying Byrd.

“I first heard of Howard Thurman when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School.

In 1953 God had not yet died and there was much excitement in the theological world.  There were giants - Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich.  I wandered into Cambridge trailing broken chains, a wild-eyed fugitive just escaped from the prison of fundamentalism.  

 
I needed someone with a sharp intellect to help me chisel off the broken shackles.  In Tillich I found a “savior” (a word, he reminded us, that came from salvus - to make whole or healthy).  He showed me how a man could think passionately, deeply, and clearly about the complexities of the human condition.  He exhibited a love for reason, an eros for Logos.  

But my spirit was not satisfied.


At Harvard the mind was king, and tyrant.

I was already reading the mystics - Johannes Eckhardt, Jakob Bohme, and D.H. Lawrence - and wondering how the demands of my mind could be harmonized with the longings of my heart and the desires of my body.  

About that time word drifted across the Charles River that Boston University had a mystic who was teaching a course called “Spiritual Resources and Disciplines.”


The first day of the seminar, Howard Thurman, then Dean of Marsh Chapel, arrived in class - a large black man with three prominent bumps on his forehead and a habit of silence so deep that it quieted everyone with whom he came in contact.  He sat on the edge of the table for an eternity or so, not saying a word, looking at the dozen members of the class - 

I mean really looking.



Finally, in a slow rich voice, he began to read from Admiral Byrd’s account of being alone and near death at the North Pole.  When he finished he paused and asked, “If you were alone, a thousand miles from any other person, it was fifty degrees below zero, and you were dying, what would have happened to allow you to die with integrity and a sense of completion?”


The question dropped down beneath all the manufactured certainties of my mind and exploded in my gut like a depth charge.  I knew I was in the presence of a man who thought with his mind, heart, and body stretched to their fullest.”  Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly

Sit on the edge of a table for an eternity or so.  

Don’t say a word.  


Look.


I mean really look.  



And ask a question that drops down beneath all the manufactured certainties of your mind and explodes in your gut like a depth charge.




…satisfy my spirit.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to become like a dying Byrd.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Deserving that.

“The next time something bad happens to you through no fault of your own, and you are about to complain to God, ”I didn’t deserve that,” look at a crucifix and say those same words to Him:

“I didn’t deserve that.”

It gives you a sense of perspective.”  Peter Kreeft, Before I Go: Letters to Our Children about What Really Matters

My petty perspective.  Put in perspective.  


…forsaken or partaken?






The crux of the crucifix.


Look at it.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to deserving that.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Garden snakes.

“History is full of discarded scientific theories.  Almost all of them were too neat.  The real universe has always proved to be messier, more mysterious and surprising than our dreams.

And that tells you something about its creator and ours, and therefore, us.


Living things delight us because of their moreness, their messiness.

We love trees more than neat houses we make them out of them, though we don’t know why.  We love real animals more than mechanical animals, and we do know why.

Eighteenth-century Europeans liked to confine nature in perfectly geometric formal gardens.  Thirteenth-century Europeans like to confine the universe to perfectly geometric concentric spheres, with the earth right smack in the center.

Wrong, wrong.

Even the earth isn’t quite geometrical: it’s not a sphere but a pancake, about 8 miles fatter through the equator than through the poles.  


Your own body looks isomorphic, but it isn’t; your heart is a little bit to one side.


God is “tricksy,” as Gollum would say.

We expect Him to be either nothing (atheism) or a vague everything (pantheism), or purely one (rationalism), or merely many (pagan polytheism), but He turns out to be one in three!  

Why?  

Because love has to be three: lover, beloved, and loving.

To be complete is to be messy to our simplistic expectations.


He could have put a simple sign in the Garden of Eden:

“No Snakes Allowed.”  

He could have solved all the world’s problems by miracles.  Instead, He designed the mystery that is our history and the mess that is our bless.


So the next time He treats you like Job, don’t be scandalized by the shit pile. (The word is in the Bible: “dung heap.”  Do you want to correct it, like a prim schoolmarm?)

Ivan Karamazov called himself a “rebel.”  He didn’t want to rebel against God but he thought he had to because he rebelled against God’s world: its injustices and irrationalities and messiness: its shit.  His brother Alyosha loved God and His world, because God did.


Be close to the earth and you will be close to the heavens.  

Ivan’s hope was that he still loved “the sticky little leaves.”  Peter Kreeft, Before I Go: Letters to Our Children about What Really Matters

…the divine dung.


…the sacred shit.




…messiness.  


…moreness.




Don’t hate the snake!

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to garden snakes.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The roots of the rav4.


“I am a tree 
Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy 
When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize how beautiful you are and how great your affections are for me.”  John Mark McMillian, How He Loves 




Anger.  Hurt.  Frustration.  Fear.  Guilt.  Shame.  Blame.  

He could still love me through that…

In this process of dealing with my daughter’s and my near drowning, He still loves me.  

Even though it happened two years ago.

And He will still love me, as I begin to deal with the near fatality of the auto accident I had last Thursday.  


I listened to this song over and over and over and over after the near drowning, and it was just about to play on a David Crowder Band CD, in my RAV4, moments before the auto accident.  

I never knew who wrote the song, or why he wrote it, until now.  

And wept, when I found out why…

My son, Gabriel, took a photo of my RAV4 on it’s side, immediately after the accident.  The same crashed car was suddenly becoming a tree on the Father’s Day card he made for me yesterday.




I am a tree.






Bending beneath the weight of your mercy

…or the “wait” of your mercy.


I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the roots of the rav4.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

A 4D feline.

“Everything we do has four dimensions.


The one we see is the length: how long it takes to do a job, how big a material object is.  This is the material, visible, external, outer, this-worldly, natural dimension.  We are created to work with and in this dimension, to shape wood and space into statues, and sound and time into song.

This dimension is quite real, but as an adjective, not a noun: it is not reality as such but a dimension of reality.  It is not another, lower, lesser world, like a cellar or a cave.  Though it is material, it shares in the honor of the three other dimensions, which are spiritual, as the body shares in the honor of the soul and as the molecules of a painting share in its meaning and beauty.


The second dimension is the height: the relationship to the “higher power,” to God, however inadequately He is known.  (And we must admit that He is always inadequately known, once we stop fooling ourselves.)

The whole universe is a work of art, the primary work of art, that points upward, like a Gothic spire. That is the second dimension: up.  The art points up to the Artist.  Everything in nature is an incarnation of an idea in the mind of God.

Nature always coincides with its divine idea.  Humans alone, have free choice, can fall away from it, can be what God does not know: “Depart from me, I never knew you.”  When we choose to coincide with our divine idea, we are God’s masterpiece.


These first two dimensions of everything are like two bars of a cross: horizontal and vertical, material and spiritual, natural and supernatural, secular and sacred, this-worldly and other-worldly, human and divine.  


The third dimension is depth.   What we see with our bodies is one dimension, and what we see with our bodies-and-minds is two dimensions, but reality also has a third dimension, which neither body nor mind can see, and that is depth.  

Everything, especially every person, is more, is deeper, than we can see.  Everything is a sea, an abyss, a deep.  The most boring person you ever met is a potential god or goddess, far greater than the entire universe – or else an unimaginably hellish horror.  

Everything is more than it seems.  We see only the scrim on the stage, the wave’s first line on the beach the epidermis of the body.


The third dimension, depth, is like a more real kind of space that transcends space.  The fourth dimension, eternity, is like a more real kind of time that transcends time.

Everything has an eternal dimension even if it is temporal, because everything real is real only because God knows it into existence, and since God is eternal, so is His knowledge; therefore, all that is real is eternal in God’s mind.

A remote analogy of this happens in human memory: that kitten that died years ago still lives in your memory.  

You give it a second life there.  

For how long?

For as long as you live.


If your soul and your mind (not your brain) is immortal, so it that kitten – not in itself but in you.  You are the world’s God and God’s world.  Nothing is lost if it is loved, for if it is loved, it is remembered, and if it is remembered, it transcends time.

Only in time is anything lost.  

In a novel, the characters grow old and die; youth, happiness, and life are lost.  But not in the novelist’s mind and love!  Well, life is like a novel and God is the author, so that the novel exists not only in itself (in the first three dimensions) but also in the mind of the Maker.  That is its fourth, eternal dimension.


Perhaps these are the fourth dimensions Saint Paul meant in Ephesians 3:18.  That verse at least tells you what they are dimensions of.

What?

Read it.”  Peter Kreeft, Before I Go: Letters to Our Children about What Really Matters

Lost kitten?


The capacity of the cat.

Only in time is anything lost.  

Nothing is lost if it is loved, for if it is loved, it is remembered, and if it is remembered, it transcends time.




How wide and long and high and deep is love?


…know this love that surpasses knowledge.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to a 4D feline.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The viscosity of the volcano.

“As love cools, the glowing lava of its immense spontaneity hardens into the fixed and narrow molds of individual commandments.  

Where love grows sluggish, law flourishes.


Love does not inquire how far it must go, but how far it may go.”   Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life 





The tale of two volcanoes.


…spewing sluggishness.

…spewing spontaneity.




…how far must love go?


…how far may love go?


I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the viscosity of the volcano.