The Seven Dwrafs may have whistled; there should be a song about groaning while we work

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 3 more and more-

As an observer of the ways in which people put together their faith in God, I have to say that most of us tend to overstate our importance to God’s kingdom.

Once we realize that we belong with God and with His people, we will naturally want to find out what our role is as a new creature in Christ. This is referred to as our calling, our ministry or our apostolate. As we are wont to do, we will figure that our place among the saints is very close to the axis of everything.

For some reason there is immense pressure on the new believer to find some way to immediately start becoming a career Christian. The search begins by listing the kinds of jobs that are fostered by the faith. For example: Pastor, Pastor’s Wife, Missionary, Christian College Professor, Religious Education Specialist, Christian School Administrator, Teacher, Christian Author, Christian Recording Artist, Evangelist, Monk, Nun, Music Minister, Missionary Pilot, Military Chaplain, Christian Entertainer, Christian Bookstore Manager, etc.

In my experience, this pressure retains its felt presence throughout life. This pressure, not the faith careers themselves, has created a great deal of distortion about our theology of work, our notions about God’s will, and it makes harmful inroads into our ideas about a meaningful, purposeful life. When we allow misshapen views about work, about God’s will and about our sense of purpose, we have really messed up a massive portion of our lives.

We have a mindset problem when it comes to work and vocation. If we do not find some clarity and some simplicity here, we will soon find ourselves Christians adrift – living perhaps comfortably, but inaccurately.

As I write this, Apple founder Steve Jobs has just died of pancreatic cancer (technically, respiratory failure) on October 5, 2011. He was a beloved world-changer, innovator and, for a time, America’s Decent Guy.

Among the many televised tributes to Steve, there were included several of his statements made in his commencement address at Stanford University in June of 2005. I am going to disagree with some of the things Steve said about work – not to attack Steve, and certainly not to parse his words, but to demonstrate how favorable an erroneous view of work has become in our culture.

Steve: “I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

My dad, for one, would not have dared look in the mirror and say such a thing. On the majority of his days, he went to work at a job he didn’t particularly care for. He didn’t go because he loved his work, or because the work he did was especially meaningful to him or to others. He had a sense of duty and responsibility to earn money to help support his family. His job was not personally fulfilling, but it met his duty and responsibility.

Day in and day out my father, and my grandfathers, and my great-grandfathers went to work, earned some money, and left absolutely no identifiable dent on their workplace.

Many are the guys my age who will remember their dads “going to work every day to a job they hated.”

Steve: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

It was my generation that first brought a noticeable change in work to the table. We wanted our actual jobs to be important, significant and meaningful. We were not the generation that would do anything for a good paycheck. We were looking for jobs that would make an impact. Work itself wasn’t good enough. The kind of work suddenly made a difference too.

I can’t help but imagine how quiet the world would be on the day that everyone who did not love what they did for a living elected to stay home. Job satisfaction polls are difficult to collate, but one poll suggests that 1 in 5 Americans “feels passionately about their job.” I would surmise that 4 in 5 would look in Steve’s mirror and stay home. In another survey, a full 60 percent of the American workforce said they “plan to change jobs as soon as the economy gets better.”

I have always enjoyed this comment from comedian George Carlin: “Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar.”

Somehow, we are forced to conclude that if we do not absolutely adore our jobs, we have failed significantly. We certainly didn’t lose our way because of Steve. We lost our way when the Christian world view lost its inertia in culture.

Work, from a Christian perspective, is intrinsically honorable and valuable. It is not made more so by how much we love it, how much we earn, or its impact on society. Our work is a manifestation of what Caussade has repeatedly referred to as our “state of life.” In this particular section, he refers to our role or status with regard to work and vocation as “His design” (Page 60.)

Over the years I have had jobs that were invigorating and challenging, and jobs that made my stomach hurt each morning. I have been made to feel like my contribution at work was significant and appreciated, and I have been poorly treated, threatened, degraded and demoralized. Once I even had a nervous breakdown and couldn’t bring myself to leave the house to go to my job. I got halfway to the front door at home and was suddenly stricken with an attack of anxiety. Such has been my stormy romance with work. Sometimes it is a dance, sometimes a dirge.

I could go on with bad example after bad example of how the current mindset about work and vocation is unrealistic and uncharacteristic of the Christian world view.

Instead, let me state that the proper Christian view perceives work as a natural and vital extension of our walk with God. As Creator, God worked. As Redeemer, He revitalizes. As Guide, He directs and illumines. Work – any work – is as much a part of our spiritual life as is prayer. In fact, The Rule of St. Benedict, which has been used in Western monasticism for more than 1,500 years, refers to daily prayer, seven times per day, as “the work of God.”

Up to this point I may have only demonstrated how cloudy the issue of work and vocation can be according to Modern Man with his secularized and striated perception. Next we will try to right the ship on the subject.

Pursuing God's will without tripping over our own illusion

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 3 continued yet more-

It is always a risky thing to tell a believer that part of their life with God will involve responding to impressions and directions that are less concrete or objective, but are understood as suggestions and nudges from God.

Caussade brings up two avenues of submission upon which the believer may travel with relative safety. He states that “God makes use of our being in two ways: He either obliges us to perform certain actions, or he simply acts himself in us” (Page 59).

Saying the same in another way, he says, “There are therefore duties of precept that must be accomplished, and duties of necessity that must be accepted” (Page 60).

These two categories of “duties” certainly involve the will of the submissive soul in obedience and in acquiescence. A believer is quite far along when he or she has lived and loved in the light of these two undertakings. The guidelines for such responses are found in the precepts (and acting upon them in obedience) or the necessities (being acted upon by God) according to which the clear-minded believer can rightly discern a life in accord with the will of God.

It still takes some doing, but the mature believer who has trained himself to walk with God will be able to fathom out his required obedience and his requisite acquiescence while he is firmly present to God in his every step.

It is a bold step for any teacher of spiritual things to move from here to what Caussade would consider a Class 3 Duty: “The duties of inspiration to which the spirit of God inclines hearts that are submissive to him” (Page 60).

He goes on to say, “This third class of duties is quite beyond and outside any law, form or determined matter” (Page 60).

This kind of talk has a fascinating appeal to people who want a deep spiritual acumen but a minimal amount of guidance and a low tolerance for boundaries. In each of us there is a craving to express ourselves freely and push back limits. Any high school or college student who has served on the school newspaper will be able to recall the administration banning a story or stopping the presses or ceasing a publication altogether because “the students went too far.”

The universal pleasure that we all take in swearing bears out this craving as well. We push the boundaries of language and force it to go beyond its norms. Something in us enjoys this.

When God told Adam and Eve that they could eat anything in the garden except the fruit of one tree, it didn’t take long for the two, with the help of the Serpent, to force that boundary.

While there is a great deal of freedom to celebrate as spiritual beings made alive and restored by God, a little lack of structures is all we need to get crazy.

“One merely lets oneself go, and freely and simply obeys one’s impressions,” says Caussade (Page 60).

As you must know by now, one can get very weird very quickly when one removes spirituality from its context of sound theology and places it in the context of imagination. If this is the way in which someone is going to “let oneself go,” then there will be no end to the troubles ahead. Many times throughout history and to the present day, someone with charm or talent or gumption has veered away from orthodoxy and has developed theories that are radically off course from the truth. Such veering can result in a “new” religion, although most of those smack of regurgitated heresies which the church has condemned in the past, or they can result in just one person carrying around a very distorted, unsound and unreliable grasp of Christian spirituality.

So, if we are going to “obey our impressions” and call this the will of God, we are in a wilderness with no landmarks. It is certainly adventurous and sounds quite spiritual, but, as Caussade says, we are at risk of falling “under the influence of our own will and be exposed to illusion” (Page 60).

Without guidelines or limits, our chances of enfolding ourselves into a self-made illusion are very good. The chances that we have embarked on a path God has chosen, not so good.

To rightly involve oneself in a Class 3 Duty, Caussade gives us two forms of advice. 1. Receive clear guidance from a spiritual director. 2. Do not make a big deal out of hunting down the Class 3 Duties.

As to Point 1, Caussade says: “That souls may not be deceived in this way,” [self-made illusion] “God never fails to give them wise directors who point out the degree of liberty or reserve with which these inspirations should be utilized” (Page 60).

I needn’t point out that once we become endeared to an illusion, which we believe bears out our advanced spiritual condition, we will not be prone to ask someone of spiritual authority to check out our vision. Anyone who would dare point out our error would be considered an obstacle to the “truth” we have found. When we think ourselves visionaries, everyone else is considered blind.

Father C’s explanation of Point 2 is important enough that I want to give it a separate reflection.

Entire arsenal of spiritual life is needed to overcome pride's destructive force

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 3 continued more-

When we fail to perceive the merit or meaning that is ours at the hand of God, we will devise our own. This is a very troublesome aspect of those of us who seek to follow Christ. We can be ill-at-ease with our own status within the household of God. Probably, we are not aware enough of the gracious work of Jesus by which we have been elevated from “enemy of God,” to “child of God.”

Selfishness never looks good on a person, but, among spiritual people, self-centeredness is just plain weird. Augustine said “Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues.” If that is so, then pride must certainly be the mortar and pestle by which all other virtues are ground to powder.

The best disguise for spiritual pride is zeal. In the very name of seeking God with all our hearts we can jeopardize our true calling by making one up out of our own idea about what we think our service unto God should look like. It is perilously easy to become jealous of another person’s ministry. If he builds a vast network of buildings and people and equipment (and cash) in his work for the kingdom of God, then why shouldn’t I try to get a piece of that?

When I was 9 years old I sat by myself with the small congregation, while my mother sat with the choir, and I was perturbed at the minister, sitting in what appeared to be a throne padded in burgundy velvet, and him doing all the talking. It was a 9-year-old’s version of pride making itself known by spawning the spiteful question, “Who does he think he is?”

It doesn’t have to be strictly ministry that makes us envy others. It could just be their state of life, to use Caussade’s words. I notice, for example, that money comes very easily to some people. They are in situations where their earnings are very good. Myself, I have never been a grand earner of money. I have known men and women who could turn an idea into cash in ways that simply mystify me. My mother is a natural bookkeeper, but I neither inherited nor absorbed any of her monetary acumen. Possibly I am no more financially refined than I was when I was sitting in that church on that Sunday at age 9.

In some spiritual ways I am also no more refined than I was back in 1966, sitting in that red-brick small-town church with the floor tilted toward the front, and the windows stained with greens and blues.

At the root of many of our spiritual immaturities is the lifelong struggle with humility.

Science is prone to tell us, for example, that our bodies are always coming down with pneumonia. In healthy people, the body is strong enough and equipped enough to ward off the pending ailment. A weaker, less-equipped body might put up less of a fight, and pneumonia gets the best of it.

I was a fairly strong young man when I had a bout with walking pneumonia. Other than general exhaustion and my lungs feeling like they were filled with sand, the worst symptom was that of pleurisy. The lung lining is inflamed and hurts. Coughing or sneezing felt like someone was spearing me in the back with a rusty blade, then twisting. I remember running to walls and door jams to press my back against some external support so I could sneeze with less pain. I also remember wishing that something could be removed from my body to make walking pneumonia go away. Alas, there is no such procedure.

It is the same with pride. It cannot be removed. It has to be overcome. With what? In the same way that the overall health of the body wards off pneumonia, the life that God gives us and renews us to includes the gifts, the fruit and the character of spiritual life that will hold pride at bay.

In order to answer the problem of pride we have to engage the entire arsenal of our spiritual life.

It is possible that over the course of time we have fallen prey to the idea that we have to balance a certain amount of pride with anything spiritual in our lives. Purity of heart will not allow a percentage of pollution. Pride killed us in the garden, while humility made resurrection possible through the work of Christ on the cross. We cannot see the cross clearly and conclude that a little bit of pride will give us the balance that we suppose we need.

Having become Christians, we are not now immune to pride, but are rather more vulnerable to it in its most horrific form: Spiritual pride.

The presence of pride and the absence of humility are two sides of the same coin, but we must realize that the presence of pride undoes far more than humility. It contaminates every other aspect of the spiritual life. I can trace everything I have ever done wrong, and every right thing that I have avoided to a proud “me-first” spirit.

Pride won’t stop any of us from reading about self-abandonment to God’s providence, but it will most certainly stop us from actually abandoning ourselves to God’s providence.

The passive and the active work together in a balanced Christian life

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 3 continued-

Self-abandonment is “the complete donation of our being to God to be used according to his good pleasure.” ~Caussade

As Father C continues to weave together strands of spiritual insight to help us better delve into our own life with God, he brings us to a discussion of the active and the passive responses that a disciple might make to God. In light of our previous discussion, we might call these the active and passive forms of submission to God.

For just a moment we need to consider that over the years talk of the interior life etc., distressed the relationship between the inner life (the passive) and the exterior life (the active). Extremists in favor of passivity-only were called Quietists in 17^th-Century France, although the roots for this are found earlier in Spain. This is considered an unbalanced bearing on the doctrines of the Christian life. Included among these are the views that the “perfect” among the Quietists can achieve sinless perfection; that their souls can be completely absorbed into God in this life; and that any dealings with the ordinary life in the world are to be strictly shunned.

The better-known of the writers from this movement are Jeanne Guyon (d. 1717) and Francois Fenelon (d. 1715). A Church Commission condemned the Quietist views of the two, for which Guyon apologized and Fenelon, an archbishop, submitted to papal authority on the matter.

Caussade carefully prefers the passive approach to God. “Although souls raised by God to the state of self-abandonment are much more passive than active, they cannot be dispensed from all action” (Page 59). Careful indeed, for Caussade wrote these notes just a dozen or so years after Guyon and Fenelon died, and in the same country. He gives something of a nod to the Quietists, but achieves more of a balance by adding, “they cannot be dispensed from all action.”

The institutional memory of the Catholic Church contains a movement toward passivity (or contemplation) and the equal and opposite reaction of movement away from passivity and toward faith in action.

While studying the contemplative lifestyle with a group of believers, I found it strange that we were warned by some of the members to avoid becoming otherwise active in the church. I believe this to be a “memory” from the debates of yesteryear.

I think it is easy for us today to see how an inner life of prayer and contemplation is needed to inform and energize an active life of faith. The two are complimentary to one another. However, it took our predecessors some time to reach this balance.

By 1907, Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard (France again!) wrote a pamphlet that later became the book The Soul of the Apostolate, which defends and prefers the interior life. You can tell that there is still strife in the air by this time, as two of Dom Chautard’s many sections of the book are: “Is the interior life lazy?” and, “Is the interior life selfish?” His conclusion is that action is made fruitful by the interior life – a fairly balanced reckoning.

Further still, we have to consider that solitary contemplation is as much of an action as spooning up mashed potatoes at a soup kitchen. A prayer warrior confined to his home or his bed is as much a part of the overall spiritual well-being of the church as is a brilliant evangelist or popular Christian author. We must see this, although we do so rather poorly, and then still balance isolation with community; the prayer closet with the marketplace.

Jesus managed to spend time alone and isolated in prayer as well as working and teaching among people. “In the morning, long before dawn, he got up and left the house and went off to a lonely place and prayed there” (Mark 1:35). “… he would often go off to some deserted place and pray” (Luke 5:16). Matthew reports that, after Jesus healed the sick and fed the crowd of thousands with five loaves and two fish, he pressed the disciples to get into a boat and head for the other side of the Sea of Galilee, sent the crowd away, “and went up into the hills by himself to pray” (Matthew 14:23).

In passing I will point out that St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) (and France again!) was a great example of this balance. His contemporary, Geoffrey of Auxerre, reported of Bernard: “Contemplation and action so agreed together in him that the saint appeared to be at the same time entirely devoted to external works and yet completely absorbed in the presence and the love of his God.”

In his 12^th sermon on the Song of Songs, Bernard speaks of three ointments that waft from the body of the Bride. They are, he says, “Contrition, devotion and lovingkindness.” What follows is his unsurpassed description of the external manifestation of the believer filled with mercy and charity:

“Who, in your opinion, is the good man who takes pity and lends, who is disposed to be compassionate, quick to render assistance, who believes that there is more happiness in giving than in receiving, who easily forgives but is not easily angered, who will never seek to be avenged, and will in all things take thought for his neighbor’s needs as if they were his own?

“Whoever you may be, if your soul is thus disposed, if you are saturated with the dew of mercy, overflowing with affectionate kindness, making yourself all things to all men yet pricing your deeds like something discarded in order to be ever and everywhere ready to supply to others what they need, in a word, so dead to yourself that you live only for others – if this be you, then you obviously possess the third and best of all ointments and your hands have dripped with liquid myrrh that is utterly enchanting.” (Vol. 1, On the Song of Songs, Sermon 12, Page 78.)

In light of the history of the church and of the Scriptures, we can safely say that self-abandonment is not something we do lying down. The donation of our life to God for his purposes will entail a life drawn away for prayer and a life lived in the service of others.

It sometimes happens in doctrinal development that things that are discussed separately become unnecessarily separated. Faith and works is the most glaring example. In the case of the interior and exterior life, it is the believer’s responsibility to respond to God in a way that integrates “pray without ceasing” (First Thessalonians 5:17), with “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31).

The separation of the two is needless, impractical and doctrinally unsound.

Why bother with this discussion? If it has been a problem in the history of the church, it could well be a difficulty in the life of the contemporary believer. Doctrinal history is nothing if it does not show us how to put together the forces that flow from our belief.

If prayer is your left hand, and action is your right, you must clasp them together for the Christian life. It is neither in the right, nor the left, but in the interlaced fingers that bring them together.

We kind of want God to manage our inner life ... sometimes

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 3-

God’s actions upon the soul are his alone.

I think this is often overlooked. The soul is in his domain only. Divine action upon the soul can only be authorized and completed by the movement of his Spirit, the operation of his mind, the production of his being.

What indeed would be the result if we were supposed to build and keep our own soul? Each of us may or may not be aware of the ruinous result and the incidental damage we do to our inner life when we believe ourselves to be the maintainers of the soul.

That life, the spiritual inner life of the person, is best kept in the exclusive care of God. Since he is the only one who divinely acts, and the soul exists to be divinely acted upon, it stands to reason that the best ground for us as the beloved of God is one of submission to him.

As was pointed out before, there is something instilled in us as creatures of God that makes it natural for us to give ourselves away. Obviously, mankind is faced with choices as to what or to whom he will give himself. The crucial theological fact of what we might here call “The Problem of Man,” is that we can abandon ourselves to destruction or to restoration; to death or to life; to denial of spiritual truth or acceptance of its reality in God. If we are in fact made to give ourselves away, then, for the sake of our position in eternity we ought to review our choices. As the Scriptures say, “Choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15).

As it is, we do not know very much about our own inner life, and we do not know the mind and workings of the Holy Spirit who dwells in the midst of the inner life. So, I myself am not the best option as my own inner life manager, director, remodeler or repairer. Little spiritual growth can occur until we grasp this. Somewhere, at conversion or in the teachings of the faith, this concept has been lost while being central to spiritual well-being: My soul is in God’s domain, and only he will act upon it whenever and with whatever he wants. No one else gets to play.

We may never in our lives be comfortable with this, but we must face the utter and uncomfortable truth. Why are we so uneasy with this? Partly, because we can only trust God so much. As Christians, we believe our souls to be very precious. So precious in fact, that we are not at ease when we do not know or cannot see what God is doing with the soul. We are not sure if we want him to do all the directing.

We know that he can use anything terrible, painful or tragic and make it something good for the soul, but, who wants terror, pain and tragedy? With just that much mistrust, we will want just that much management control over the soul. This, beloved of God, is a rookie mistake.

So, to whatever extent we mistrust God and acquiesce to our entanglements, we place the soul in peril. Perhaps not peril of eternal damnation, but peril of inestimable damage.

While the life of the soul is entirely in God’s domain, we are to respond accordingly to the action of God upon us. His work, although beyond us, is not separated from us. He does not take our inner life to the laundry while we live our lives awaiting a pressed and folded spirit to be given to us at a later time. So, we need some guidance on what to do now that we know God as the first mover, director and owner of the soul.

As we shall see, our response is not nothing. This submission to God is not doing nothing.

Can we freely belong to God while held by entanglememts?

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 2 continued some more-

We are hard pressed by these pages to relinquish our grip on the snares that hold us fast; to allow their unwinding and loosening so that we can turn more fully and more willingly to the awesome condition that awaits us: “the state of pure love” (Page 58).

Already we have reviewed how much we love and enjoy our entanglements. We have seen enough of ourselves to wonder if it is really worth it to give these up in order to obtain something as admittedly nebulous as “the state of pure love.” After all, we can be saved and entangled, can’t we? That is surely a comment that the 21^st Century Christian should mull.

Do we not, in fact, have plenty of God in salvation, such that the search for deeper and less-convenient spiritual domains is, well, kind of unnecessary?

It is not a strong faith, not a biblical faith and not a Christian faith that entertains such questions. There appears to be no doubt in Caussade’s mind that his hearers will want to proceed with this deeper walk with God. My readers are different. Our culture has provided us with many thinking options. God, if there is one, is accommodating, easy-going, and quite possibly a woman.

But here is where Caussade steps out of line. God, he says, is one of “loving severity.”

He answers how we go about getting ourselves disentangled: “It is only through a continual self-contradiction and a long series of all kinds of mortifications, trials and strippings that one can be established in the state of pure love. We have to arrive at the point at which the whole created universe no longer exists for us, and God is everything” (Page 58.)

Two opposing forces are at work in our faith: Our desire for “the state of pure love” with our God, and our recoil from this love’s severity in terms of “trials and strippings.”

Here we are at the heart of Christian mysticism. A wrong turn here could lead us down a weird and twisted path; a pretense that the world doesn’t quite exist or that physicality is an illusion.

No, we are still talking about the master that we will serve; the influence to which we will yield; the winds to which our sails will respond. We are here faced with the same two shepherds that are mentioned in the Psalms – the Lord, or Death. Truly, the world as our guide is in essence Death in a deceptive more acceptable form.

Christian mysticism does not ask us to live in pretense, but to choose entirely between God or Death (disguised as the world) as master. Once we are faced with this choice, God, indeed, is everything.

“A heart that thus lives for God is dead to everything else and everything is dead to it.” (Page 59)

Here is wording is nearly identical to Paul’s in his letter to the Galatians: “But as for me, it is out of the question that I should boast at all, except of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14).

In short, the key to freedom from entanglements and those things that hinder us is a true desire to get released from them.

For us, one of something is never enough, which plays hell with our theology

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 2 continued-

This particular section in my copy of Caussade’s book takes up less than two pages – just a few moments to read. But, this part really makes me want to look away and find something less arduous to read. The good father has found me out, and his invitation to my own complete freedom with God in Christ accuses me, at the same time, for having become accustomed to and comfortable with my entanglements.

I am a comfy Christian, I confess; a product of my society; friend of the world and occasional thinker of higher things. I like to think of myself as among the beloved of God, but I shy away from considering the consequences of being so loved. Frankly, I like being loved by God, and I also like all the people and things and toys that make my life my life.

When we come to the aspect of Christian spirituality that leans disturbingly inward upon my soul – that is, my suitable response to the God who is precisely and lovingly my life is to be an all-or-nothing one – this makes me start looking for exit signs. There must be some way to get out of this!

A very unfamiliar and uncommon word comes to mind: “Singularity,” with the nuance of “one,” or “sole.” Not since the days that “stereophonic sound” was coined by Western Electric in 1927, beginning the gradual demise of one-channel monophonic sound reproduction, have we been led to think that one of something is enough.

We are a two-channel people (at least two). Take away one of our speakers or pull out one ear bud, and the sound is less than half as good. Philosophically, we like to take two opposing concepts and mash them together in a Hegelian stew to synthesize a third new entity. As a people, we have either become pluralists or fans of pluralism beneath the loving care of one God who describes Himself as “one,” and who is like no other thing or person in all existence.

As we live and pray before an all-or-nothing Lord who asks us to be singular in our attachment to Him, we will be quite naturally in conflict with this God and the multi-stranded attachments that we have invited or permitted that hold us bound to the Earth. Possibly we are bad people. More probably, we carry around a poor-quality Christianity.

For example, a few days ago I wrote “Self-love and self-denial cannot occupy the same person.” Well they can if we twist Christianity out of shape and make the faith something that it is, indeed, not. We might, in passing, have to also adjust our definitions of “self,” “love,” and “denial.” If we mess with the words enough, we can come up with a satisfying “both/and” distortion from an “either/or.”

It is possible that the actual true Christian faith has been buried beneath a barrage of semantics and clever words. Since the day Jesus said we cannot serve two masters (Matthew 6:24), we have done everything we can to prove him wrong. He told us the kingdom of heaven was like a hidden treasure in a field, or a pearl of great value, where the discoverer “sells everything he owns” to buy the field or the pearl (Matthew 13:44-46). We have since then tried to figure out how to acquire the treasure without selling everything.

We think we know stuff. We will find a way around everything God ever said. We damage our souls every time we nod in agreement to the world. The infinite transcendent difference between the realm of the fallen world and the realm of the kingdom of glory cannot be filled by all the Christians in the world who want a life that is one part God and three parts world.

If I may dare quote Kierkegaard again, “Christianity and worldliness never come to an understanding with one another – even for a moment.” (Works of Love, Page 82.) Whenever we think we have successfully mitigated the two, we do untold damage to the faith, to our own soul, and to the people in our world, who each must have a clear depiction of Christ from us.

How we love the bonds that keep us from flying

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 2-

I grew up surrounded by dark green cottonwood trees painted against a flawless Wyoming sky of perfect blue. The horizon in any direction was edged by pale granite lazuline mountains that granted the same reassurance in their presence as would a dog sleeping at the foot of one’s bed. We were all protected and somehow aware that we were under the watch care of these quiet, loyal, ancient stone guardians.

Before I started the first grade, we moved from our town of 2,000 to its outskirts, the east side of the Big Horn River; an area unofficially but ubiquitously known as “the heights.” From then on I was surrounded by space, most of which was made up of alfalfa fields framed by slackened strands of barbed wire fence to keep whatever horses or cattle in their places. The fences by no means meant “keep out” to humans – at least not to us kids.

Our neighbors’ fields were just as much a part of my turf as was our own yard, which itself was actually quite small. It was in these fields that I raced with my dog, built snow forts, inhabited my own “fortress of solitude,” built a tree house, dug underground shelters, pole vaulted fences and ponds, caught frogs, climbed trees and practiced boomerang Frisbee.

In one of these fields on a summer afternoon a friend and I noticed a scuffling on the ground in front of us. We could not make out what was causing the movement. I immediately assumed the worst and concluded it was a child-eating snake. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from drawing closer to the disturbance on the ground.

To my relief, we found it was a bird. One of its legs was entwined in a short single strand of dried weed that tethered the bird to the ground. The commotion we had seen was the bird trying again and again to fly off, always thwarted by the twist of weed.

I lifted the frightened bird and couched it in one hand while undoing the thin strand that had wrapped itself under one wing and once around the leg. Once freed, the bird got to its feet in my opened hand and looked into my eyes. It perched on my finger for a second or two and then flew off.

Today we seek God’s help with our disentanglement. For we are called to live a life from above, and yet we are ensnared by bonds and attached to the life below by cables made of materials we, in our folly, consider agreeable and harmless. We insist that we can live as citizens from heaven while carrying with us the cares, concerns and adventures of the world at our feet.

Who among us would not like to fulfill our personal goals and also serve God? Which of us would turn down the opportunity to do exactly whatever we wanted and believe that this alone would be our acceptable service unto God? Who can resist the irresistible inclination to both befriend the world below and serve the King above?

It seems quite natural that we should be able to synthesize an existence that borrows from both worlds – to homogenize a palatable essence made of what we might call “the best of both worlds.” While this is a keen idea, it is not a Christian one. Mind you, Christian thought is very easily polluted by this blending of spirituality and worldliness, because the mixture is powerfully attractive. It is quite human of us to want to compromise two disparate realms into a single agreeable one. Where we offend the world, we justify our faith; and where we offend our faith, we justify our sophistication. Rather than live in one realm we are vagabonds in both.

As Christians, our faith demands of us a singularity of purpose and satisfaction. “To live is Christ,” said Paul. We are to detach ourselves from everything else, leaving ourselves completely free to serve God in whatever way he would like at the moment.

The psalmist says he watches the hands of God like a handmaiden watches her mistress, looking for the slightest indication from the master’s hand that God’s mercy and some obedient response is about to come due (Psalm 123:2).The life fully free to serve God at every instant is watchful for any inflection within the current moment to indicate God’s wise and loving presence and direction.

Before we consider detachment, we have to see Christ. Otherwise this is just a religious exercise. Something must pull us away from the world we fancy, the cares we adore and the concerns we caress.

Seeing Christ is the essential first movement in the believer’s soul that will draw him apart from all else. Fail to see Christ, and no real detachment that benefits the soul will follow. Whatever else can be said about the condition of one’s soul at this point, it must be said that the soul remains entangled. Not homogenized; not synthesized; but strangled.

We try to live with ties that bind us to God and ties that hold us fast to this world. Although we talk and sing of flying, the entire Earth is shackled to one of our ankles. We can no more fly than we can pull the planet skyward with our frail wings. We are perilously suspended between two domains. In some awkward way we are built to fly, but, to quote a Pink Floyd song, we are “earthbound misfits.”*

Like that little bird on that summer day, we will require assistance with our disentanglement.

*(From their Division Bell album, 1994. Song: Learning to Fly.)

The obstacle is self-love -- paraphrasing Pogo's 'We have met the the enemy, and he is us'

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 1-

Continued even more ridiculously on …

Those few who may be following along in the book, which is the source of these reflections, will notice that I have not budged from this section (Book 2, Chapter 2, Part 1) for many days. By my count, this is the sixth reflection that these few pages of the book have pried loose from me.

I want to move on – I truly do, but Caussade keeps saying things that deserve some time. It has not proved good for my soul to read things without giving myself ample time to integrate or, a better word, internalize what my eyes see and that at which my mind gives but a passing glance.

As journalism rendered my penmanship unreadable, even by me, it was during my college years that my reading life was ruined. The sheer race against time to absorb at best a shadow of an outline of a book led to a very utilitarian way to read – fast and light. Get in, get what you need, and get out. It was less like reading and more like committing a robbery. In this state of mind, the spiritual writings of some of our best teachers are considered frustrating and unworthy. No one likes hot tea where the water encounters the tea leaves for less than a moment. Jesus himself was considered too watery for those who were trained not to ponder. He was asked once (and we can assume more than once), “Tell us plainly.”

So, while the student in me grows impatient with an author who will not get to the point quickly enough for me to get on with it, the beloved son in me wants to linger and pause in the thrum of God’s presence.

So here we go with further musing . . . especially on the matter of indifference and its stake in the life of the spirit.

“Come, my soul, let us pass with head erect over all that happens within us or outside us, remaining always content with God, content with what he does with us and with what he makes us do.” ~Caussade (Page 56.)

As we shall soon see, Caussade’s words here are from movements of the beautiful musical suite that makes up the life of the soul. His invitation is for the soul to enter into the peace that passes all understanding and the love that knows no bounds.

In order to experience in our limited way the unlimited expression of God’s presence in peace and love, we have to replace an obstacle in our path with a spiritual discipline: Universal indifference.

Probably none of us feel particularly comfortable with the word “indifference” – a word that means unconcerned, unresponsive, unsympathetic and uninvolved. It suggests a cold, unfeeling apathy toward something or someone. Perhaps it has even been thought that a good Christian person shouldn’t have any of this laying about in his or her personality.

Used wisely by a proper handler, indifference can help remove the most powerful obstacle in spiritual life. It can clear the path for the seeker who wishes to give answer to the groanings and yearnings for God that well up from the depths of the soul – “Deep calling to deep.” (Psalm 27)

The obstacle is self-love.

“Let us pass this labrynth of our own self-love by vaulting over it . . .” ~Caussade (Page 56.)

Let us first admit that we have a mind-set problem when it comes to the topic of self-love.

Starting sometime in the 1970s, if not earlier, it was in vogue to consider that one of the mental issues facing Modern Man in America was that he did not love himself enough. This proposal was picked up by the church and many a Christian was told that one could not love one’s neighbor unless and until one loved oneself. This inversion of Christ’s “second greatest commandment”: “To love your neighbor as yourself,” was put forth to help us with our self-esteem issues.

The conclusion, simply, was that self-love was our best friend.

Obviously, the two attitudes toward self-love collide. They are two different worlds. Self-love is either friend or foe. Here there must be a radical reconsideration on our part regarding the true nature of self-love in its theological, psychological and practical consequences.

It is not possible to look into a book with the first-word title “Self-Abandonment” and expect self-love to be supported and thought in keeping with the pursuit of holiness.

In Christian theology, self-love is the source for all the bad news that infects the human soul. For example, here is the list of the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Laziness, Wrath and Envy. Seven outcomes, if you will, resulting from applied self-love. Find any other list of sin (Galatians 5 for example) and you will find each unclean act or attitude has the same cause – applied self-love.

In the case of self-love, neither self nor love are put to use in the way they were intended by God.

The individual human person is made in the image and likeness of God. Of all created beings, we are at the top. We were made with much individuality and freedom in order that we would turn ourselves over to the care and authority of our Maker.

The self has always been something to give away. In the Garden of Eden, Adam yielded nothing, but clung to himself resulting in death. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus yielded himself to the will of the Father resulting in life.

The self has always been something to give away resulting in fullness from God.

Once this abandonment is in the works, rather than finding himself hollowed or drained, the individual finds himself filled with the Spirit of God. In this condition, we share intimately and powerfully in the love that exists between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and we can most fully respond to the love that God has for us.

We find contentment and fulfillment not in loving ourselves, but in receiving the love God has for us and responding in kind with the love we have for him.

Once self and love are used properly, and we realize something of the depth to which we are loved of God, this begins a healing trend upon our wrecked self-esteem and some of our insecurities that have plagued some of us since childhood. Here is where professionals can help us, but only if they will not foster the misuse of self or love.

Man was created by a self-giving God. As such, we bear the imprint of our Creator as self-givers. We are to find it natural to turn our lives over to God. We have spent enough time in our broken condition that we could find these words appalling. Still, every one of us is seeking some way to give ourselves away to something or someone. That is the imprint talking.

God is the only safe keeper of each of us. If we give ourselves to another person, a career, an object, a cause or even a ministry, we find instead a lack of fulfillment and a certain amount of damage to the self. In realizing this, we may happen upon the erroneous advice that we need to love ourselves more and this emptiness will go away. Great. We just keep digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the mire that we think will deliver us.

If we instead abandon ourselves to God, he will perfectly keep us by wisdom and tend to us by love.

We have to get off the self-love treadmill and recognize this false and perilous path.

The follower of Christ who answers the call to the shallows of self-love will have no depth of spirit, and will have no defense in light of Christ’s command to “deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me.” Self-love and self-denial cannot occupy the same person.

Back to Caussade’s point – Once we belong to God, we are free to be indifferent to matters that could either overwhelm us or subtly distract us.

Like eagles, says Father C, let us fly free: “Come my soul, let us pass beyond our languors, our illnesses, our aridities, our inequalities of humour, our weaknesses of mind, the snares of the devil and of men with their suspicions, jealousies, sinister ideas and prejudices.” (Page 56)

As we shall see next, we cannot fly free when entangled.

At root, the problem is not that we do not love ourselves; the problem is we have not come to love God.

God's reply to a young man's plans: 'Well, that's not quite what I had in mind.'

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 1-

Continued ridiculously on …

These three pages that make up “Part 1” of this chapter in Caussade’s book contain a number of central thoughts that help guide the follower of Christ. As with the faith itself, just about the time I think I am finished with these pages, I find that I have merely begun.

Caussade is going to introduce us to the matter of indifference when it comes to embracing the will of God.

I will start with a story from the life of one of the most insecure people I know: Me. As a young pastor (and here I mean “extremely, very green”) I had been called up by my then-denomination to start a church from scratch in a small town in western Montana. The Christian & Missionary Alliance Church had sent me to Hamilton, where neither I nor my wife knew a single soul. We were to scrounge up our own jobs, find willing church-starter-type people, make converts and start services.

Many were the Sundays we set up borrowed folding chairs in the spacious living room of the apartment we miraculously rented on our second day of arrival. We had to return the rental truck on the third day after we arrived. Our first night in this strange town – our new home – was spent in a distressingly-decorated motel that excelled in a depressing atmosphere. Sunday after Sunday I preached carefully-studied sermons to my wife and our two cats. I had a sign made and kept it in our front window, which opened immediately onto the sidewalk on North Second Street: “Valley Alliance Church meets here.”

Almost 30 years later, that sign is all that remains of my failed attempt at church-making in Hamilton. I use it as level footing for my backyard barbequer.

I was daily tormented by lack of success. Every once in a while a wanderer would knock on the door for food, and I would walk with him to the Range Café and buy him a hot beef sandwich. For a while, a welfare family of 10, two parents and eight children, with one on the way, took up the use of us. When they showed up on Sundays, we had an immediate need for a Sunday School and a Children’s Church. When they didn’t show, it was back to my wife and the two cats. Other than that, the Valley Alliance Church wasn’t much of anything. From my point of view, neither was its pastor.

I had no doubt that God had led us here, but I was quite dubious about myself as someone . . . effective. I didn’t seem to have a meaningful ministry. Wait, and you will see what a trap that word “meaningful” can be.

Feelings of inadequacy were only worsened when I was required to attend pastors’ conferences within the district. A group of pastors is not unlike any other group of professionals. There are the quiet, there are the blustery, there are the competitors, there are the self-assured, there are the nice, and there are the asses. I was never comfortable in this group. I was always afraid someone would ask, of all things, “How’s it going?”

At one of these conferences, in Missoula, we had all been given roles in the night’s events. There were featured speakers, people to introduce them, song leaders, invocators, benedictionaires, special music presenters and Scripture readers. And ushers.

Ushers, of course, are as necessary at a pastors’ conference as the French were in World War II. When I discovered that I had been assigned to ush, which amounted to walking backwards down an aisle and pointing knowingly in a direction with an expression on my bitten-closed smile that said, “That right there is a chair,” I fled the conference.

I silently, privately had no confidence in myself, but I could not endure having it publicly confirmed among my peers in this way: “Tim, we think, would make a passable usher.”

This was a microcosm of my general malaise. I wanted my ministry to have meaning. Instead, I felt like a sticky note in a vast library full of massive, intimidating, important books.

You can tell I was let down, disappointed, frustrated, self-absorbed, fragile and angry.

I had made a fundamental error in my walk with God. I had not yet learned that even a Christian’s idea of success can lead to problems. I had come to believe that the work I did in God’s kingdom would have to be satisfying and meaningful to me; that I would somehow look good on paper; that I would be seen as successful and competent by my fellow creatures. I might even win a prize.

The truth is, the work I do in His kingdom has to be satisfying and meaningful to Him. I may have something in mind completely different from God’s idea when I involve myself in my plans. By now, for example, I can tell that, while I wanted a career and a stable employee life, the Lord has thought otherwise. Since my college graduation I have had at least 23 jobs scattered in many different fields. Bursting forth from high school, I was committed and unstoppable in my pursuit of becoming a music teacher. Exploding out of Bible college, I was singularly set upon becoming a pastor.

God’s response to my plans might have sounded like this: “Well, that’s not quite what I have in mind.”

About the will of God, we have this example from Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as you, not I, would have it.” (Matthew 26:39) and again, “My Father, if this cup cannot pass by, but I must drink it, your will be done.” (26:42)

Once we carefully integrate this approach in our walk with God: “Let it be as you, not I, would have it,” we are closer to what Father Caussade calls “a universal indifference.” That is, as he writes, “a soul freely submitted to the divine will with the help of grace” (Page 55).

This is a radical distinction, and brings us to another of Caussade’s thoughts in this section of his book.

“We should then love God and his plan in everything … We should abandon ourselves purely and entirely to God’s design, and thus, with a complete self-forgetfulness, be eternally busied with loving and obeying him, without all these fears, rejections, twistings and turnings and disquietudes which sometimes result from the care of our own salvation and perfection.” ~Caussade (Pages 55, 56.)

The indifference here required is to realize that your life is not what your life is all about.

My ministry, such as it is, has not been packaged in the way I thought it would. In my earlier years this led to the above-mentioned disquietudes. As I develop a better-integrated spiritual life through grace and practice, it becomes clearer that God is doing what he wants with me at all times. As I grow in the faith, I kick somewhat less against this.

If you aren't growing you are doing it wrong

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 1-

Continued even more …

“This foundation being laid, the soul has nothing to do save to pass all its life in rejoicing that God is God.” ~Caussade (Page 55.)

It seemed disingenuous to breeze through Father Caussade’s comment here without revisiting the notion of Christian growth and the development of one’s spiritual maturity, as we have done above for some time.

Indeed, it is because he said, “This foundation being laid,” that I had to stop my writing for many days and consider the condition of “this foundation” – not only in me, but in all of us.

For a moment, let’s consider Father Caussade’s full description of the foundation: “The great and solid foundation of the spiritual life is to give oneself to God in order to be the subject of His good pleasure in everything internal and external, and afterwards to forget oneself so completely, that one considers oneself as a thing sold and delivered to the purchaser to which one no longer has any right, in such a way that the good pleasure of God makes all our joy and that this happiness, glory and being become our sole good.” (Page 55)

Only then does he go on to say, “This foundation being laid …”

The material for such a basis for establishing a life of faith is made up of a will to submit to God. No one can “rejoice that God is God” without submitting their will to him. Those who know God as God either submit to him, or remain stubbornly lost, or are darkened by evil.

          It is upon this “great and solid foundation,” as Caussade puts it, that we may then move on to “grow completely into Christ,” as Paul states in Ephesians 4 – to be “fully mature with the fullness of Christ Himself.”

What is the true condition of this foundation among those of us who dare say we walk with God? Do we not see how exclusively and single-mindedly, and with what commitment this foundation is composed? Do we not see its beauty?

More often than not, when reading the words of long-past spiritual shepherds, their comments about the initial phase of spiritual growth (beginners) are beyond any one of us who might think we have adequately moved on in our faith. Myself, thinking that my spiritual journey by this time should be at least at mid-sea, I have found instead that I haven’t left the harbor. My shoes are still dry.

Even during the best occurrences of spiritual growth, the believer is faced with the same ever-fading horizon that plagued the aging king in Tennyson’s “Ulysses” – “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move.” As I progress, I see how much farther I have yet to go to reach my drifting goal. I sail toward, but never seem to reach, the receding horizon.

In his 12^th-Century work Ladder of Monks, Guigo II wrote that the function of meditation on Scripture is like squeezing much juice from a small grape. At this, he says, “I am still an ignorant beginner, and it is only with difficulty that I have found something in which to draw up these few drops.” (Page 71)

We want to become better at knowing God, but once we make progress, we realize what little way we have come and how unsearchable he is. The believer’s ever-fading horizon is the sheer magnitude of God.

Even so, we are encouraged not to look back on the field of discoveries that we have made, but to face forward with the plow and continue on. Moses, thank goodness, did not pitch a tent where he saw the burning bush awaiting succeeding fiery interludes with God. Moses is a good example of a spiritual person who was free to move on from one solid experience with God to others. The ground there was called holy by the Lord, yet no altar was built there, nor did the people of Israel camp around an unburnt bush for the rest of time.

From this well-made foundation, as described by Father Caussade, our vantage point from which we perceive God through our inner man is lifted, as though we are children on our father’s shoulders, seeing and enjoying just that much more fully.

Why would the believer then stop building at this point – satisfied to have constructed a passable foundation? What composer would think he had finished an orchestral score when he had only marked out the blank measures and affixed the time and key signatures? Is there not now music to create? Cannot the imagination be summoned to fill pages with notes, and eventually a concert hall with music?

What soul can say that its sole good is the good pleasure of God, and that its life is about rejoicing that God is God? Let us admit together that we are all far from this. We must as well note a careful distinction: Some have the same heart as the psalmist, who yearned for God in his heart. Some have not this heart for yearning. Those who are satisfied should take warning from their inert inner man. As Jesus pointed out, only those who thirst will be satisfied.

How far along am I in loving God? Notice, I didn’t say “studying God,” or “understanding God,” or even “loving what God has done.” There are, in fact, many reasons to love God, but we are required to do more than love these reasons. Note the reasons if you like, but get on with it. Grow in your love for God. If this is not happening, as far as your Christian faith is concerned, you are doing it wrong.