Waiting to be Filled

photo by Josh Scholten

My God, I look at the creek. It is the answer to Merton’s prayer, “Give us time!”  It never stops…. You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets.  You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.  You’ll have fish left over.  The creek is the one great giver.  It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation.  This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day. 
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Good things as well as bad, you know are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?
~C.S. Lewis- Mere Christianity

…the room was filled by a presence that in a strange way was both about me and within me like a light or warmth. I was overwhelming possessed by someone who was not myself.  And yet, I felt more myself than ever before.  I was filled with intense happiness and almost unbearable joy as I had never known before or never known since.  And overall, there was a deep sense of peace and security and certainty.
~C. S. Lewis

A Heart Inclined

photo by Josh Scholten

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
~C. S. Lewis

I’ve been following Kathleen Mulhern’s blog “Dry Bones” where she is currently illuminating Blaise Pascal’s fascinating discussions on faith and belief (i.e. Pascal’s Wager).   I am learning how “seeking is as good as seeing” (Julian of Norwich).

What Pascal determines is that one must “incline the heart” toward belief in God, to “desire” to fill that “God-shaped hole” in our lives:

I tell you that you will gain even in this life, and that at every step you take along this road you will see that your gain is so certain and your risk so negligible that in the end you will realize that you have wagered on something certain and infinite for which you have paid nothing.
~Blaise Pascal

If we do not know spiritual hopelessness, we cannot hope. If we do not know spiritual wretchedness, we cannot find the happiness we long for. If we do not see the abyss at our feet, we cannot believe there is a way across it; if we are not willing to descend into its depths, which lie in our own souls, we will never ascend the heights on the other side.
~Kathleen Mulhern from “Dry Bones”

Inexorable Love

photo by Josh Scholten

“God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.”
C.S. Lewis

Relentless, unstoppable, inescapable, inevitable, unavoidable, irrevocable, unalterable, unceasing love.  It has always been, is now, and always will be.

It is a gift almost too much to bear knowing He bought it through suffering.  Nothing I have done warrants such loving grace.   Therefore I become inexorable too–nonstop and continuously–expressing gratitude, forgiveness, wonder.

The intolerable welcomed.
The inconceivable borne and born.
The incredible believed.

Longing for Longing

“It was when I was happiest that I longed most…
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…
to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
~C.S. Lewis

Like children who long for Christmas,
anticipating for weeks
what that moment will be like
when they see gifts piled high under the tree–

we revel in our longing.

It is the sweetness
of “already but not yet”,
knowing with eager expectancy
there is more to come,
just a bit out of reach
but still intensely seen and felt,
something more wonderful,
a place more beautiful than we can ever imagine…

Simply Glad

photo by Emily Dieleman

I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what C.S. Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.
Clyde Kilby in “Amazed in the Ordinary”

photo by Nate Gibson at Sendai, Japan

The Most Feeble Thing

photo by Josh Scholten

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
Blaise Pascal

I’m not sure which is getting flabbier faster–my biceps or my brain.  As I advance in middle age I tend to avoid overworking both to just get by with only occasional heavy lifting:  a hay bale here, a challenging abstract philosophical commentary there.   Hard work, whether physical or mental, is getting harder.  As a naturally lazy person, I have to be forced into manual and central nervous system labor out of necessity.  Necessity happens less and less often unless I go looking for it.

Given the choice between a physical task and a thinking task, I’ll opt for thinking over lifting any day.  Even so, I find my mental strengths are ebbing.  My brain is less flexible, I can tend to be stiff headed when trying something new, it starts to feel strained if I push it too fast.   There are times when it feels like it just goes into spasm and I need to sit down and rub it for awhile.  Feeble suddenly doesn’t sound like it just belongs to the aged and infirm.

The only remedy is to use it or lose it, whether muscles or gray matter.   So I dig a little deeper each day, even when it hurts to do so.   I purposely stretch beyond the point of comfort, just so I know it can still be done.  I lift a little higher, heft a little heavier, push a little harder.  Being the most feeble thing in nature may mean being easily broken by the smallest effort, but at least I’ll have thought my reedy limitations through thoroughly, chewed on it until there was nothing left and digested what I could.

Eventually I’ll come to accept that my greatest strength is to know what I don’t know.

“I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted conventional world of science and daily life–is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity?” C. S. Lewis (in a letter to his father, Aug. 14, 1925)

Ready to Hatch

photo by Josh Scholten

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird:
it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.
We are like eggs at present.
And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg.
We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis

I revel in being the good egg.
Smooth on the surface,
gooey inside,
ordinary and decent,
indistinguishable from others,
blending in,
not making waves.

It’s not a bad existence staying just as I am.
Except I can no longer.

There appeared a dent or two in my outer shell
from bumps along the way,
and a crack up one side
extending.

It is time to change or rot.

Nothing can be the same again:
the fragments of shell
left behind
abandoned
as useless confinement.

Newly hatched:
home becomes
the wind beneath my wings
to soar a horizon stretching
beyond eternity.

 

 

 

Peeling Off the Covering

photo by Josh Scholten

“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact to come awake. Still more to remain awake.”

― C.S. Lewis from “Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer”

The older I get, the more I recognize the need to be alert and awake to the presence of God in the crowded world around me.  It doesn’t come naturally.  We humans have an attention deficit, choosing to focus inwardly on self and ignoring the rest.  If it isn’t for me, or like me, or about me, it somehow is not worthy of our consideration.   We wear blinders, asleep.

We need help to recognize the presence of God, to peel the layers off the ordinary and find Him at the core, incognito.  We need help to attend to where He is, invisible in plain sight.

Tell us where you found Him in the crowd today.  Share how you stay awake to Him as He walks next to you unrecognized.  Tell us how your heart burns within you, knowing He is present.

Your input is needed here: God Incognito

 

 

 

Noticing the Dirt

photo by Josh Scholten

“No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes are in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.” ― C.S. Lewis

I am a big fan of hot baths, always have been. No matter how long the day, how sweaty the work, how gritty the accumulated grime, a bath takes care of it. That cleansing is something to look forward to: staying dirty is only temporary, not a permanent condition.

Somehow I manage to stumble and fall regularly, get mussed and messy, and need to get clean all over again. And again. Thankfully there is plenty of hot water, clouds of soap suds, and a stiff scrub brush.

Time for the tub…again.

photo by Josh Scholten

Lenten Reflection–Sacred Somethings

Something of God flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.
C.S. Lewis
Six days so far in Japan: the sky bright blue, the cherry blossoms bursting, the smooth snowy cone of Fuji visible at sunrise, the stars sparkling in the night sky above Nikko, the bounty of the sea and fields displayed in the markets of Tokyo, the warm hug of the hot springs, the sea of humanity streaming into subways.

Something of God is flowing here in this beautiful place, though not yet recognized by all. He is sacred, tangible and intangible, internal and loving.

May we be filled. Even as we sleep.