This came to me in a time of praying for a dear friend:
Greater friends don’t simply take up your cause.
Greater friends take up the cause of Christ in you.
In other words, my greater prayer is not simply for the resolution of your circumstance. My greater prayer is that Christ would have his way with you, that He would form you through your trial, that He have the full measure of His purpose for you, in your difficulty, achieved.
When the joy of the Lord becomes real food and real drink – that is a gift, and when being alive makes the most sense.
On so many levels, positive and negative.
I’m still trying to figure out if I’d rather live anywhere else – tethered to home but seeing the new vista.
p.s. to all my friends, that was just a figure of speech denoting that life is challenging, and yet the fresh views we get are somehow worth it. I’m okay 
Love carried by humility. Humility carrying love.
You carry a stream, an emphasis. Live it, and present it with humility.
All the greatest thinkers of history had something beautiful to say, but also something awful.
Our key verse was:
“If you will return… if you can extract the precious from the worthless, then you will be my spokesman.”
If you can live a life continually coming back to me, not too alarmed by dryness, or depression, or wilderness, if you will continue to return to me, then I will restore you. If you can extract the precious from the worthless, then you will be my spokesman.
“We believe that the task of spiritual formation is to form us. We then rub off on others; we’re always looking for the next mass program, but we are the next thing we have to do.” How do we deepen? How do we rise?
William Seymour - if we pray, and form, then maybe 100 years of missionary expansion will follow us.
“Imagined evil is extremely exciting and draws us in. Real evil is actually very boring. Imagined goodness is extremely boring, but real goodness is the most exciting thing in the world.” Simone Weil (not exact quote)
Simone Weil
From PBS, link here
French philosopher and activist Simone Weil was born into a wealthy, agnostic Jewish family of intellectuals in Paris. She studied and eventually taught philosophy, attracting attention for her radical Marxist opinions. Hoping to understand the working class, she also worked in fields and factories and even participated in the Spanish Civil War. Over time she lost faith in political ideologies and was drawn to Christianity. Her religious writings often emphasized sacrifice and martyrdom through an ascetic lifestyle, a lifestyle that Weil personally adopted and which led to her early death at age 34 from tuberculosis. In this 1943 essay, written during the last year of her life, which she spent working with Gen. de Gaulle in the struggle for French liberation, Weil makes the case for the existence of a transcendent and universal moral law, and describes the social responsibilities that accompany it.
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (an excerpt)
Profession of Faith
There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties.
Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.
Another terrestrial manifestation of this reality lies in the absurd and insoluble contradictions which are always the terminus of human thought when it moves exclusively in this world.
Just as the reality of this world is the sole foundation of facts, so that other reality is the sole foundation of good.
That reality is the unique source of all the good that can exist in this world: that is to say, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behaviour that is mindful of obligations.
At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.”
Those minds whose attention and love are turned towards that reality are the sole intermediary through which good can descend from there and come among men.
Although it is beyond the reach of any human faculties, man has the power of turning his attention and love towards it.
Nothing can ever justify the assumption that any man, whoever he may be, has been deprived of this power.
It is a power which is only real in this world in so far as it is exercised. The sole condition for exercising it is consent.
This act of consent may be expressed, or it may not be, even tacitly; it may not be clearly conscious, although it has really taken place in the soul. Very often it is verbally expressed although it has not in fact taken place. But whether expressed or not, the one condition suffices: that it shall in fact have taken place.
To anyone who does actually consent to directing his attention and love beyond the world, towards the reality that exists outside the reach of all human faculties, it is given to succeed in doing so. In that case, sooner or later, there descends upon him a part of the good, which shines through him upon all that surrounds him.”
Fascinating. The bustling, bursting African church has targeted North America. In this case, a Nigerian community. May at least some of our theology shed its pale skin in the collision.
Here’s an excerpt:
“The United States, with its ever-expanding megachurches, influential evangelists and deep religiosity, seems an unlikely mission ground. But the Redeemed Church believes Christianity here has become a lifestyle, not a transforming way of life, and they feel obliged to rescue the people who brought them the faith in the first place.
“There is a vibrancy in Africa,” Akinkoye said. “We are offering that gift back to America.”
Some days I’d like to be a turtle.
People would walk by me, head in and feet withdrawn, and say “Oh, look. A rock.”
This just in from good friend, and fellow student, artist Judith Brannen, on defining Christian community:
“Deliberately keeping it simple in an attempt to truly live in the holiness of the ordinary, understanding that as well-brought-up children (or learning to be that) of the Kingdom, we do this in a framework of prayer, faith, scripture. Allowing the ordinary, the simple, the mundane to become filled with glory, mystery, love; a golden haze over everything, every person, every situation.”
This is my favorite book, or message, ever, outside of the Scriptures. What a joy to study it in class. I don’t agree with every small bit, but I do agree with its energy, and its quest to both celebrate God’s glory and celebrate human glory. I find that every time I read it, my eyes fill with tears, and my heart longs, with Lewis, for a far-off country, that is somehow so near.
Here are some favorite quotes from it, but just a few:
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption which you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.”
“But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.
We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”
“When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson, and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures — fame with God, approval or (I might say) “appreciation” by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child — not in a conceited child, but in a good child — as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse.
Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures — nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration. But I thought I could detect a moment — a very, very short moment — before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure.”
C.S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory
I must note this: There are so many riches in this book, and that were pouring from our discussion that I decided to cease taking notes so that I could learn. I must recommend that you read this book twice. Once is simply not enough to absorb its strength.
Thoughts on Bonhoeffer’s Life Together.
Wish Dream: you create ideas of idealism
Psychic Push: the community always has to be better, always pushing, so an ideal and vision is pushed that has a dark human power – empire building. The weak are absorbed into the vision of the strong.
Understood properly, you can’t build it without vision. But, the slavish obedience to “vision” to become the best thing, is “antichrist.”
We never end up being grateful for just what we are; a community.
p. 26 “Looking for some extraordinary social experiences. Confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea of religious fellowship…”
“Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. the serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires…”
“The one who wants community the most, who has dream and disatisfying dream of what it should be, will never simply be grateful for their brother or sister beside them.”
When you have the psychic reality going, the weak are absorbed into the strong. It looks good and other worldly, too good to be true, it probably is worth suspicion. Driven by a human, ugly ideal.
Human community is a fellowship of devout souls. Christian community is a community of the spirit, a friendship.
When you see people or communities working too hard, too long, too much – you are seeing a human drive that is driven by a form of “eros” love; rather, an “agape” love is a lighter yoke; agape doesn’t call you to do what you can’t do, agape make you a certain way and limits its requirements to who you are.
SSU
We prepare the thinkers, not the thoughts
Big, rich, beautiful discussion on mavericks, visionaries, innovators and idealists, and how they contribute to us. When using the community’s resource though, drawing the weak into the visions of the strong. When the leader lacks humility, even in the midst of great vision, the community gets increasingly corrupted.
homolegeo - confess - “to say the same thing” - recitations, songs
“Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the stropng, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship.”
The Ministry Of Community
1. The Ministry of Holding Ones’ Tongue
2. The Ministry of Meekness (elevating another)
3. The Ministry of Listening (to another)
4. The Ministry of Helpfulness (support)
5. The Ministry of Bearing (the pain, the load)
6. Proclaiming
7. Authority
To confess to one person, is to confess to all. We are a solidarity.
Today is the final day of Master’s work, before our thesis year. It’s been grueling, but more than worth the journey.
Good friends from across the states and Canada will be connected by threads (as the SSU student body prayed for us) of community, and the space between us (thanks, Steph) will be holy ground (Nouwen).
This is an interesting article:
SCIENTIST WINS TOP PRIZE (Globe and Mail)
John Barrow, a cosmologist and mathematician at Cambridge University in Britain who believes that science reveals the reality of God as the sole Author of Creation, is this year’s winner of the prestigious Templeton Prize, according to the Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada Newspaper).
The award – this year worth $1.6 million dollars – is presented annually to scholars whose research or discoveries advance the human understanding of spiritual realities.
Barrow is a leading proponent of the anthropic cosmological principle. This is essentially the belief that the universe is the way it is because it was God’s plan that there be life on Earth – and that this would not have been possible if the universe had been fashioned in any other way.
Barrow is director of Cambridge’s Millennium Mathematics Project and professor of astronomy at London’s Gresham College. The author of 17 books, his most recent book is The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless. The Ottawa Citizen called it “an elegant discussion of our concept of infinity throughout history: as an expression of God, as an expression of mathematics, or as an idea about the unimaginable vastness of the universe.”
Barrow credits recent discoveries in astronomy with “[transforming] the simple-minded, life-averse, meaningless universe of the skeptical philosophers,” he told the Globe and Mail.
“It breathes new life into so many religious questions of ultimate concern and never-ending fascination. Many of the deepest and most engaging questions that we grapple with still about the nature of the universe have their origins in our purely religious quest for meaning.
“We see now how it is possible for a universe that displays unending complexity and exquisite structure to be governed by a few simple laws that are symmetrical and intelligible, laws which govern the most remarkable things in our universe – populations of elementary ‘particles’ that are everywhere perfectly identical.”
Folded fire,
Garment laid aside the tomb, we mourn
Take it up,
I lift it wide, and spread it o’er my head
Shawl it is,
And covering now, this my frame
Renewing soul,
And mind and strength, this resurrection flame.
Okay. I’m not a good ping pong player. It’s like after I watched my wife give birth; I’m not tough… I’m a guy.
You’ll need the free Real Player to watch this:
One of the Best Table Tennis Points of All-Time
Overachieving is an addiction for some of us. I suggest, with Therese de Lisieux and other spiritual friends, that the love of God could replace the underlying motives that push us to overachievement.
I’ve been afraid to give myself to silence and reflection, because when I do, I slow down both mentally and physical. I fear that if I give myself to this quietness, I will underachieve, lazy in the love of God. I receive accolades from overachievement, work and opportunity. To disquiet my pattern is to quiet my forward motion.
Now percieving that I am addicted to my overachieving, growing in impure soils as it is, I seek a remedy that will not take away from impetus. Is it possible that the seed of love could displace the seed from which my present overachievement springs? Might I become more centered, more creative, more discerning in my ways?
Knowing that I need not impress God, that I may no longer want to impress people, could I become not only a more liberated child of God, but also a great gift to my human family? It is my hope that such dreams could pass into my reality, and that is enough to move my heart to decision. I will allow the love of God to be my addiction, and let the fruit grow as it may.
The Evolution Of The Ordinary
…is series of ordinary events that start out somewhere, and 3 years, 5 years, or 10 years down the road we see the results. If we could see the 10 year result of Choice A, we’d say “There’s no way I’m going there!”
Our daily choices, connecting with real people and real families, is what make up life. Every choice contributes to richness down the road or brokenness.
Fight for your next choice, to be whole, to be loving, to be about others. I’m 41 now, and I see the fruit of many 20 year old decisions; make today’s choices well, friends.