May, 2008

‘One by Our Side’

…It is never ideas about God, not even aspirations after him, which in the real battle of life keep us fresh and unexhausted. Ideas, and even aspirations, strain as much as they lift. They give the mind its direction, but by themselves they cannot carry it all the way. Nor is the influence of a Personality sufficient if that Personality remain far off. Reverence alone never saved any human soul in the storm of life. It is One by our side whom we need. It is by the sense of trust, of sympathy, of comradeship, of fighting together in the ranks, that our strength is thrilled and our right hand preserved its freshness. Without all this between us and bare heaven, we must in the end weary and wither.

George Adam Smith, Four Psalms (Keats Publishing, 1980), pp 77.78.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

God has his own ways of preparing a life for special service. The cultured home and the attention given to an only son were factors of incalculable value in training the impressionable mind with those ideals and thoughts necessary for character. Out of the education of the home the boy was fitted for the more serious discipline of college training. His early years were years of mental growth, balancing the spiritual struggle of his inward being.
Reading is essay “Of Insects” written at the age of twelve, or his observations “Of the Rainbow” is to be aware of the alert and precise mind of a youth who saw accurately and recorded correctly. Coupled with this, we have the picture of a normal boy who, if limited in play, was filled with the wonder of the world about him. He was not interested in the small things of child life, but early found abiding interest in the wonders of the soul and its relation to God. In youth there was the concern for the eternal and the divine. How early can God’s secrets be whispered to and be shared by youth? “From a child thou has known…” says Paul to Timothy. The Holy Spirit was upon John the Baptist before he was born.
Was Edwards a child of destiny? We shall never know all the workings of that strange and lightening mind, but we can believe that in youth there walked in New England an unusual life with the qualities of spiritual genius upon his brow.

Ralph G. Turnbull, Johnathan Edwards The Preacher, (Baker , 1958)

A Slave Father’s Prayer (1898)

When the time came for us to go to bed we all knelt down in family prayer, as was our custom; father’s prayer seemed more real to me that night than ever before, especially in the words, “Lord, hasten the time when these children shall be their own free men and women.”
My faith in my father’s prayer made me think that the Lord would answer him at the farthest in two or three weeks, but it was fully six years before it came, and father had been dead two years before the war.

James Melvin Washington, Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans (Harper Collins, 1994), p. 95.

Light and Blindness

“Every man that trusts in his own wit is a fool,” says God in the propjet. “Let him become a fool, that he may be wise,” says the Apostle. Let him be so, in his own eyes, and God will give him better eyes, better light, better understanding. Saul was struck blind, but it was a blindness contracted from light. It was a light that struck him blind, as you will see in his story. The blindness which we speak of, which is a sober and temperate abstinence from the immoderate study and curious knowledge of this world, this holy simplicity of the soul, is not a darkness, a dimness, a stupidity of the understanding, contracted by living in a corner; it is not an idle retiring into a monastery, or into a village, or a country solitude; it is not a lazy affectation of ignorance; not a darkness, but a greater light, must make us blind.

John Donne, The Showing Forth of Christ (Harper & Row, 1964), p. 175.

‘Nothing Is Far from God’

One of the most beautiful passages in The Confessions, and indeed in all religious literature is Augustine’s account of his conversation with his mother shortly before her death, as they stood by a window looking out over a garden in Ostia. They speak of the meaning of “eternal life,” the life set free from all the burdens and shadows of time. As they converse, they rise ever higher in thought and spirit, until, as it were, they are in the very presence of the Eternal. It is not strange that Monica was ready to bid earth farewell. Earlier she had wanted to be buried by her husband in Africa, but now she simply said, “Nothing is far from God.”

Bernhard Christensen, TheIinward Journey: An Introduction to Christian Spiritual Classics (Augsburg, 1976), p. 19.

Ready for a Revival of Faith?

In our own day faith is more likely to be fidelity to nominal Christianity than to orthodoxy. To be a believer is to be a nice person. The next step is to identify what is believed with humanitarian wishfulness. To have faith means to be for the United Nations, foreign aid, the Peace Corps, Africa for the Africans, and many other things, all good in themselves but all mundane and hardly sources of Life and Truth.
We are nevertheless ready for a major revival of faith. It will begin in that work of the Holy Spirit which baptizes men [and women] into one body, that is, identifies them with Christ. And it will eventuate in that work of faith of which the Apostle speaks, which is imitation, witnessing, suffering, rejoicing, and waiting.
But faith waits upon Life and Life waits upon a new manifestation of the divine favor,

Karl A. Olsson, Seven Sins and Seven Virtues (Harper & Brothers, 1962, p. 112

Thoughts on Old Age

Old age is and always will remain difficult. It demands much from us, and on first impression seems to offer every little in return. Contemporary society, however, compounds every burden by offering us a monstrous old age that bristles with disease, disability, dependence, decline, and ultimately death. It is the fearfulness of this vision that has led us to ignore the old, to deny aging, and to hope that somehow, someday a cure for this malady might be discovered and made available for our personal use. Such a hope, while understandable, ignores the possibility that there is something vital and true to be grasped and then savored within the distinctively human experience of growing old.

William H, Thomas, What Are Old People For? (VanderWyk & Burnham, 2004), p. 31.

Two Types of Science

In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail’s eyes or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one’s head about. The world of the secondary qualities—color, sound, thought—is reduced to illusion. The only true reality becomes the chill void of ever-streaming particles.
…Blaise Pascal, as far back as the seventeenth century, foresaw out two opposed methods. Of them he said: “There are two equally dangerous extremes, to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in.” It is the reductionist who, too frequently, would claim that the end justifies the means, who would assert reason as his defense and let that mysterium which guards man’s moral nature fall away in indifference, a phantom without reality.
…”A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order,” say Albert Einstein. Here once more the eternal dichotomy manifests itself. Thoreau, the man of literature, writes compassionately, “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth. Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” Pr Walt Whitman, the poet, protests in his Song of Myself: “whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in a shroud.”

Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower (A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1978), pp. 190, 191

Peace and Thanksgiving

Jesus:
…Do not believe that you have found real peace if you feel no burden nor that all ids well if you suffer no opposition. And do not assume everything to be perfect if things seem to be going your way. Neither should you consider yourself something great or especially beloved by God if you happen to enjoy devotion and tenderness. A true lover of virtue is not known by such things as this, nor does your progress and perfection consist of such things.
Disciple:
Of what, then, do they consist, Lord?
Jesus:
They consist of offering yourself with your whole heart to the will of God, in not seeking your own interests in things great or small, in time or eternity, si that with one steady outlook through prosperity and adversity, weighing everything in the same balance, you will continue to be grateful…. And if you thank me just the same both in comfort and in trial, then you will know that I am truly present in your life. When you achieve such a complete disregard for your own self-importance, then you will find as much peace as is possible to have in this present life.

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, tr. William C. Creasy (Ave Maria Press 1994), pp. 115, 116.