Following up from last night....

From Desert to Rivers.

From Rivers to Light.

Enjoy!

The With-God Life: What Is Reality?

We can reflect on much of our worldview with the following questions:

1. What is reality?
2. Who is well-off or blessed?
3. Who is a truly good person?
4. How does one become truly good?

For better or worse, everyone has answers to these questions.  Most of the time the answers are subconscious.  We act on them without thinking.  That is not necessarily bad, but since we are at the mercy of these ideas, they need to be evaluated and reworked from time to time.

Initially, we are going to spend time on the first question.  Another way to understand what we consider to be reality is to ask: "What can you really count on?" or "What is really going on here?" or "What is the story of your life?"  Can we really only count on what we discover in science?  Is what is really going on only power-grabs from various groups?  Is the story of your life, 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. . .  and then get to go to heaven'?"

We touched on a couple of important ideas concerning reality when these questions came up:

1. Is the kingdom of God really here now?  The Kingdom of God is God reigning. It is present wherever what God wants done is done. It is the range of God’s effective will. God’s reign is all around you and is from “everlasting to everlasting” — it is the natural home of the soul. Matthew uses the term the Kingdom of the Heavens to emphasize that the Kingdom of God is not far off and way later but is immediately and directly accessible to us through Jesus Christ. (see my blog for more information)
2. What is the gospel?  Trust Jesus and live in his kingdom with him.(see Dallas Willard article excerpt)

These touch on reality because they are questions about what we can really count on and what we may run into if we are wrong.  We will need to approach them carefully.

We will be careful, but we need not be worried or afraid.  We know that as we move forward, our Teacher, the living Christ, will go with us.  He hears our prayers and takes them seriously.  We need to take them seriously as well.  He will take us through the "dry and weary land" we face and lead us to green pastures and still waters and on paths of what is truly good because that is how he is.  This is what we count on.  "We rejoice for the river is here!"  (The River Is Here Song)  May God help us find what we can really count on!

Next Week:

• Meeting at the Seirps at 6:30pm on Tuesday, 27.
• Please Read C.S. Lewis section in Devotional Classics.

I have been re-reading "The Cloister Walk," by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, New York, 1996) which I first read in the late 1990's.  She is a poet by profession, married,  and a protestant believer.  Yet, she became a Benedictine oblate, not becoming "Catholic" as it were, but rather taking those vows as a means of rekindling the embers of her faith.  I believe it worked.  The book is essentially excerpt/edits from her journal she kept during her time at the Benedictine monastery.  Here is a selection (pg. 93) that struck me while reading the chapter entitled, "The Paradox of the Psalms."

"I became aware of three paradoxes in the psalms: that in them pain is indeed 'missed - in Praise' (ed. from Emily Dickinson), but in a way that takes pain fully into account; that though of all the books of the Bible the psalms speak most directly to the individual, they cannot be removed from a communal context;  and that the psalms are holistic in insisting that the mundane and the holy are inextricably linked.  The Benedictine method of reading psalms, with long silences between them rather than commentary or explanation, takes full advantage of these paradoxes, offering almost alarming room for interpretation and response.  It allows the psalms their full poetic power, their use of imagery and hyperbole ("Awake, my soul,/ awake lyre and harp,/ I will awake the dawn [Ps. 57:8]), repetition and contradiction, as tools of word-play as well as the play of human emotions.  For all their discipline, the Benedictines allowed me to relax and sing again in church; they allowed me, as one older sister, a widow with ten children, described it, to "let the words of the psalms wash over me, and experience the joy of just being with words."  As a poet I like to be with words.  It was a revelation to me that this could be prayer; that this could be enough."

Rod

A Classic - A Place to Draw Strength

Likewise, the word classic has gotten bad press in our day.  If a book is a "classic" we immediately think it must be obscure, hard to read, and most certainly out of touch with modern concerns.  As Mark Twain aptly notes, it is the kind of book that "everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read."  In reality, however, for a writing to be a classic means simply that many people over a sustained period of time have drawn strength from its insights and witness to its value.

When these two words are brought together - devotional classic - they describe a kind of writing that has stood the test of time and that seeks to form the soul before God. (Foster and Smith, Devotional Classics, p.1)

At the end of the week, I long to find something that I can "draw strength from."  I am reminded of what Jesus said to the devil in the midst of temptation: "Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God."  These writers we are going to read and ponder will teach us how to find strength in God's word in the many ways it comes to us.  Pray that we may learn to live on the words that come to us from the mouth of God!

The listening ear and the satisfied heart
       grow in the same soil.
       That soil is the kingdom of God.
       The place where the ear and heart are married.

(More of this poem on my other blog, if you want to read it: http://messagescraps.blogspot.com/2013/05/ripening-to-gods-word.html)

For Monday, September 19th Meeting

It is important at the outset to reclaim the words devotional and classic.  For many people today devotional means ethereal, otherworldly, irrelevant.  To still others it implies sentimentality, superficiality, and an unwillingness to face the hard realities of life.  In point of fact, however, genuine devotional writings have nothing to do with these modern misconceptions.  Rather, they are writings that aim at the transformation of the human personality.  They seek to touch the heart, to address the will, to mold the mind.  They call for radical character formation.  They instill holy habits.  (Foster and Smith, Devotional Classics, p.1) 

As we approach our time together, try to get a copy of the book if you don't already have one (https://renovare.org/books/devotional-classics).  If you get a chance, read the introduction.  Also be praying as we meet online and offline that we may have a gathering that touches our hearts, addresses our wills, and molds our minds.  We want nothing less than radical character transformation!