Single God-hating World seeks Christian trying to serve God only. Smokers okay. Send photo.

Book 2, Chapter 1

-Part 7 Continued Even More-

The faith that was once and for all handed down to us from Christ – the faith of which he is said to be the “author and finisher” (Hebrews 12:2) – is a faith that has warnings attached to it. This is a faith that can be infiltrated or suckered in by a world that not only disbelieves, but also attacks, challenges or taunts the faith or the faithful. The believer is expected to don the armor (Ephesians 6) that will protect him as he does battle with the forces that clamor against God. If this were an easy fight, we would require nothing more than an attitude and a good argument.

We are, instead, told to be wise in considering how to express our faith against the world.

We are not to expect our culture to make a nice place for our faith to reside. For the time being, we are supposed to co-exist, in the style of wheat and tares, with a world fraught with doubt, disbelief and disorder. We are, in fact, the ones who are expected to infiltrate the world – to provide refreshment and healing to the parched, the unwell, the wounded and the contaminated. To fail here, according to the Scriptures, is to have it backwards – to live infiltrated, contaminated and lukewarmly.

The world’s theology, if it has one, is a nebulous one. Worldliness cannot provide the understanding or the level of care about truth to conjure or develop a faith that can put a person in touch with the Divine initiative. As was pointed out, Christ – not the world – is the author (originator) and finisher (perfecter) of faith.

The world preaches bad theology. Christians who try to annex their faith to an existing structure built from the spiritually flimsy materials of, for example, post-modernism, humanism, or materialism, have built their house upon sand. They have not heard Christ. The mentality of this present world has penetrated their lives. They will have no choice but to fit only small fragments of the faith into their lives. Once broken down into scrap by world view and selfishness, the faith that they possess is mortally damaged and distorted to the point that it is unrecognizable, and certainly undistinguishable from the prevailing mentality of the present world.

For those who think that some kind of arrangement can be reached between the world at odds with God and their relationship with God and His kingdom, the Scriptures bring this thinking to an end: “Do you not realize that friendship with the world is hatred for God?” (James 4:4) “Do not love the world or what is in the world. If anyone does love the world, the love of the Father finds no place in him” (I John 2:15).

In the Scriptures, God tells the church of Laodicea (Revelation 3) that those believers who have arrived at spiritual mediocrity have riches, but not the right kind of riches; they are clothed nicely, but virtually naked; they have vision, but they see nothing:

“Write to the angel of the church in Laodicea and say, ‘Here is the message of the Amen, the trustworthy, the true witness, the Principle of God's creation:

‘I know about your activities: how you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were one or the other,

‘but since you are neither hot nor cold, but only lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.

‘You say to yourself: I am rich, I have made a fortune and have everything I want, never realizing that you are wretchedly and pitiably poor, and blind and naked too’”

(Revelation 3:14-18).

The faith of the Laodiceans was a disaster. Why? Because, unlike Peter, who said, “Lord, we have left everything to follow you” (Matthew 19:27), the believers of Laodicea left nothing. They padded their existing life with the packing peanuts of Christianity. Big mistake.

Their faith, neither hot nor cold, was not good for bringing healing and comfort as was the use at the time for hot drink. Nor was it good for refreshing the weary, as cold drink does. Their lukewarm faith had not changed them nor brought any evidence of change in their thinking or behavior.

We can say they tried to “serve both God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24), by adding Christ to the many ingredients or aspects of their lives, when the Gospel is clear that Jesus requires a complete exchange in which He supplants all other attachments that one has had to the world. Paul makes this clear in a watershed statement in Scripture: “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).

This double-edged death allows no lingering attachments between the believer and the world. Obviously, we cannot successfully befriend God and the world that hates Him. This will yield the very condition of the believers of Laodicea. This is a much different description from the faithful who are rich in the kingdom of God for having stored up treasures in Heaven; who see according to the light of Christ rather than stumbling in the darkness; and who are clothed in the righteousness of Christ instead of the rags of their own righteousness.

Rather than renounce the world that renounces God and seek detachment from the spirit of the world, these believers have tried to forge an accord in order to possess the blessings of God and the pleasantries of the world. The Gospel makes this impossible. “He will either hate the first and love the second, or be attached to the first and despise the second” (Matthew 6:24). The way of the world and the way of Christ diverge sharply – one path leading to death and the other to life.

Through the book of Psalms this same is emphasized as we are presented with only two possible shepherds: The Lord, who guides his flock to life (e.g. Psalm 23:1, 95:7); or Death, leading to death’s environs (Psalm 49:14). Two paths face mankind always. The Bible is clear everywhere: Life with God, or death without Him. The narrow way or the broad one.

Remember the words of Christ aimed at Satan in the wilderness: “Him alone you must serve” (Matthew 4:10).

A strong interior life helps us face the world

Book 2, Chapter 1

-Part 7 Continued More-

Let us consider the world and how it operates against us – using “world” as it sometimes appears in Scripture to represent a collective of people and ideas that holds in contempt the notion of God and of Christian spirituality.

For clarity, let's consider that the same word for “world” is used in Scripture as the world that God so loves (e.g. John 3:16) and the world that is at odds with and opposed to God (e.g. First Corinthians 2:12). There are no separate words for “good world” and “bad world” in the original language.

What is true of the language is also true of us Christians who live in the world, good and bad, depending on our context.

We live in the aftereffects of the devil’s third temptation of Christ in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11), which was the devil’s attempt to trade with Jesus all of the kingdoms of the world in exchange for Christ’s worship and recognition of Satan and his authority – such as it is – in the world. William Barclay refers to this as a temptation for Christ to “come to terms with the world” through compromise (The New Daily Study Bible, The Gospel of Matthew, Volume I).

Jesus rejects this offer to swap by ordering Satan away from Him, and stating Scripture: “The Lord your God is the one to whom you must do homage, him alone you must serve.” (Deuteronomy 6:13)

When believers accuse one another of being “worldly,” they are saying that the other person is like the world, or under the influence of the world, or, borrowing from Barclay, has come to friendly terms with the world. Worldliness is understood to be the opposite of spirituality, and usually carries the meaning of being connected to and interested in the pleasures of the world in a way that does not acknowledge one’s submission to God.

The “world,” in this sense, shows itself to us through our culture – our surroundings. Our culture provides us with written and unwritten rules about appropriate, inappropriate – acceptable and unacceptable – behavior, thoughts and ideas. Culture becomes a context by which a people consider something useful or useless; of value or of no value; dangerous or harmless; hateful or acceptable; ridiculous or inspired.

What does this have to do with our Christian spirituality? The world can influence, water down or demolish a spiritual life. This is why it is so important for us to visit and understand how this can happen.

The book of James warns us to keep ourselves unpolluted by the world around us: “Pure unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father, is this: coming to the help of orphans and widows in their hardships, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world” (1:27).

Of the word group that is translated “uncontaminated,” “unpolluted” or “unstained” –  it is said: “The common factor is the absence of anything which would constitute defilement before God” (Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Vol. 3). This is echoed in the teaching of St. John of the Cross, who proposes that the way to “ascend the mountain” and attain union with God is to “rid oneself of everything that is not God.”

There is a statement in Part Four of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Christian Prayer, which reflects the same warning: “We must face the fact that certain attitudes deriving from the mentality of ‘this present world’ can penetrate our lives if we are not vigilant.” (Section 2727) (My emphasis.)

The “mystical theologians” are remarkably practical here in how to develop and carry a soul that is absent defilement and impenetrable to the mentality of this present world. The believer must have a strong interior life supported by the structure of right doctrine and moved by the musculature of prayer. The heart of this life is God’s indwelling presence.

The Big Blunder: We are co-heirs with Christ, carelessly spending our inheritance

Book 2, Chapter 1

-Part 7 Continued-

It is by our own fault that we do not possess and enjoy an extraordinary spiritual life filled with the graces and privileges that we by right inherit as princes of the new kingdom.

In this very emphatic section of his book, Father C expresses both the crucial purpose and the essential shortfall or blame associated with his overall topic: That self-abandonment to divine providence is crucial to a spiritual life under God’s care; and that any lack thereunto is essentially an error exclusively on the part of the human person.

For example, nowhere in Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 18) can we detect any blame or want of fatherly love on the part of the father. The son who left is certainly his own cause of his eventual dire predicament as he had carelessly spent his inheritance and came to the point where he envied the pigs their food, which he provided for meager means.

Remember this phrase: “… he carelessly spent his inheritance,” as we shall soon see how applicable this description is of those who live under a thin, unsubstantial film of faith – one J.B. Chautard referred to as “a Christian varnish.” (The Soul of the Apostolate.)

As to fault, Caussade rather plainly says this:

“What are called extraordinary and privileged graces are so called solely because there are few souls worthy enough to receive them. This will be seen clearly on the day of judgment. It will, alas, be seen on that day that it was not in consequence of any reserve on God’s part that the majority of souls were deprived of this divine largesse, but solely through their own fault.” ~Caussade (Page 51, my emphasis.)

This is the same kind of comment that was made later by author G.K. Chesterton, when he said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”

In Caussade’s language we can say that self-abandonment is difficult and, to some extent in each believer, has been left untried. It must not be said of us Christians that we are the keepers of a faith for which we have found no use! And, yet, some of us certainly lean in this direction – some without realizing it. We are carelessly spending our own inheritance in spirit.

If this blunder is indeed this costly in the life of the believer, it is imperative then for us to correct this defect so we might better live with our God without lacking any aspect of the exceptional, amazing life we might have with Him.

The 'Ka-Bam!' of the Christian life

Book 2, Chapter 1 

           -Part 7-

_{“I teach all souls a general means of arriving at that state which [you, god,] will assign to them; all that i ask from them is the will to abandon themselves to thy leading; you will make them arrive infallibly at what is best for them.” (Page 50)}

Complete abandonment to the leading of God is quite different from following Him whenever we feel like it, or when we cannot see our own way through something, or when crisis comes. In the quiet of every day, we ordinary people are to be found having consciously placed our will aside so that God may work unimpededly to bring us to what Father C calls “a point of excellence.” (Page 51)

This statement may be placed as a kind of banner over everything else that he says:

_{“I preach faith to them: self-abandonment, confidence and faith; the will to be the subject and instrument of the divine action and to believe that in every moment and in all things this action is simultaneously applied according to the state of the soul’s goodwill; that is the faith i preach.” (Page 50)}

Here we are again reminded that God's graceful divine action – His willingness to be present to us at every moment – must be met with the willingness of the believer to receive and respond to this presence. The believer is acted upon by the primary force of God’s grace, to which there follows the believer’s cooperation, acceptance or agreement with this continuous action of God.

When Jesus first invited the Apostles to follow him, it is clear that they had heard him and responded by following him. Perhaps our very first cooperative act is to listen when God speaks. Had any of the Twelve simply sat tight and refused to follow, we could say that they had not heard Jesus, or that they had heard but did not respond with obedience. Or, they may have been merely afraid.

I will note here in passing that on the first day of John the Baptist’s identification of Jesus as “this is he,” there is no recorded response from the onlookers in the Gospel of John (Chapter 1). On Day One of Christ’s ministry, he had one herald and zero followers.

What we do see on the part of the disciples is the will to abandon themselves to God’s leading. This is the first-order response on the part of any disciple in order to apprehend what Paul calls “the prize”: “But one – on one hand forgetting the things behind, on the other hand stretching forward to the goal I seek, the prize that is the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13-14)

I have left the above quote in its rather raw original Greek rendering to show the stark, emphatic way Paul pounces upon the prize. To convey the meaning, we translate his opening phrase this way: “But this one thing I do …” Literally, there are only two words, very forceful blows: “But one.” Like two cannon shots fired to call attention to Paul’s summary of the whole of Christian life.

“Ka-bam!” if you like.

That is to say, if we are good at anything, if we strive toward any singular skill, it should be in regard to living consciously within the upward calling of God. That God wants us to be like Him and to dwell with Him through all eternity – these are the greatest pair of truths regarding the human person. Often these two ideas are fused into one theological concept – that is, union with God. The Eastern Church uses the term theosis[1] to describe this fusion. An utter transformation of the human person takes place as one is transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light, delivered from the entanglements of sin, and qualified or officially established to take one’s place among those whom God has made fit for union with Him. (See Colossians 1:12-13.)

As a spiritual being, the human person in some way concurs with this process, allows it to happen, and takes whatever action God requires to bring about the best, most complete renovation of the person. This is an echo of the exemplary fiat or “yes” of Mary, where she said, “Be it done unto me according to Your will” (Luke 1:38).

This is the aim to which Father Caussade points when he says, “You (God) will make them arrive infallibly at what is best for them.” (Page 51.)

To whatever extent we fail to realize this, the whole of our personal existence will be weakened. Philosophically, we will look for other ways to meaningfully define ourselves. Spiritually, we will doubt the lovingkindness and authority of God in our lives. God as we know Him will not be enough of a basis for us. We will seek out other definitions, other loves and other authorities to help us determine our place in the universe.

In a profound way we will come to dismiss our essential spirituality.

As we embark on these excursions, we find that the culture around us does not prize St. Paul’s prize, nor does it consider his goal as anything other than ridiculous. Any culture that chooses to misunderstand and discard God’s definition and role for humanity will never see the light of the life He offers. So this is no small mistake. This is a massive disaster.

The believer in possession of an unremarkable belief – a common, thoughtless, uninvolved belief – may find himself in another form of the same disaster. Caussade will next addresses himself to this defect.

---

[1] The process of a worshiper becoming free of hamartía ("missing the mark"), being united with God, beginning in this life and later consummated in bodily resurrection … II Peter 1:4 says that we have become “ . . . partakers of divine nature.” Athanasius amplifies the meaning of this verse when he says theosis is “becoming by grace what God is by nature.” (OrthodoxWiki.org)

We lack everything -- take courage

Book 2, Chapter 1

-Part 6, Continued-

“The rest,” says Caussade, “is His business.” (Page 49)

We fail to appreciate how much of our life involves “the rest.” If we could but glimpse God’s unseen undertakings on behalf of each of us our faith would know no limits. Indeed, our salvation is boundless, as the great hymn declares (“O boundless salvation, deep ocean of love …”), but in truth, our faith is no match for the wonders and the beautiful acts of love that he amasses towards us.

God, it seems, will always be more than we can contain.

Again and again we are reminded in the Scriptures of God’s loving, fatherly, mothering watch over his beloved children.

Jesus told his listeners not to worry about what they would eat, what they would wear or what shelter they should use. He reminded his disciples before his ascension that he would be with them unto the ends of the earth – that he would never leave them nor forsake them. He had come to seek and save the lost, to give us life abundantly and to unite us in a way that no other existing creature would ever be united to the fellowship of the Three Persons in One.

When Christ ascended we had no authority of our own, so Christ gave the church his authority. We had no knack for healing the sick or bringing the dead back from the grave, so Christ gave these to us. We were without the constant companionship and guidance of Christ, so this was provided through the giving of the Holy Spirit to each believer. We were without a fortress to protect the purity and rightness of doctrine, so Christ gave us the church itself as his body, and promised us that the gates of hell itself would not prevail against it. We lacked organization, so Christ gave us pastors, teachers, apostles and evangelists – and deacons and bishops and careful thinkers – to stay the course of the once-delivered full truth of the Gospel.

We had nothing to offer God in our hopelessness and helplessness. In Christ is all our hope and help. In our emptiness we had nothing to contribute to the movement of the Kingdom of God. Christ is our fullness once we donate our lives to him for his use and receive more than we can hold of his riches.

We can never raise ourselves above what Jesus said, “Without me you can do nothing.” To try without him is to fail.

Sometimes I submit to God; sometimes I don't -- Bad move, my friend

Any time an author says, “There lies the essence” of something, we ought to sit up and take notice. In this section Caussade sounds this clarion call, tying it directly to the very title of the book:

_{“it is not the business of the soul to determine the particular matter of the submission it owes to god, its sole business is to be ready for everything and to submit to everything. there lies the essence of self-abandonment; that is what god demands of the soul. the free self-offering that he asks of the heart consists of abnegation. obedience and love; the rest is his business.” (Page 49)}

In other words, it is possible for me to decide how and under what circumstances I will go about submitting to God. This is perilously self-limiting. If the circumstances do not meet my expectations, or the means by which my submission is called upon are not the course I wanted my submission to take, I could likely pass on the opportunity and await the time when the call to submit is more agreeable.

This is not the path of a consistent, moment-by-moment, step-by-step follower of Jesus. This is more the path of a flighty, spiritual hobbyist who “checks in” with Jesus every so often, and then goes his own way once more.

To choose a course of response or conditions for submission is quite the opposite from being “ready for everything and to submit to everything.” It is not the way of abnegation, obedience and love.

I think we have become too accustomed to analyzing things in parts – dissecting, as it were – and in so doing killing the life of the thing we study. For example, as an orchestra conductor, I think very little of sectionals – rehearsing with only part of the orchestra present. My view is that the orchestra should always rehearse as a unit, as one, so that the whole has met as much as possible to rehearse together.

Here, too, Caussade has given us a nice three-part breakdown of self-abandonment. Rather than look at each characteristic – and likely separating them from one another in our heads forever – I want to look at them in relation to one another. Self-abandonment is a three-stranded cord and will only exist as such when the three strands remain bound together. Any real separation of the three will result either in self-abandonment becoming ineffective, or horrible.

Abnegation is simply self-denial. It can be perceived as positive or negative. It can be done for health reasons (a diabetic avoiding sugar), conscientious reasons (a customer avoiding an item that was made in a sweat shop), socio-ecological reasons (minimizing one’s carbon footprint), or for spiritual reasons (fasting or limiting something to bring one closer to God). Negatively, self-denial can be seen as a form of self-rejection – certainly not the Christian view of abnegation. A malformed self-denial is a cause of self-deprecation or the toleration of abuse to one’s person, or quietly allowing oneself to be overlooked, or even permitting injustice.

Under Caussade’s more general title of self-abandonment and, indeed, in its practice within Christian boundaries, abnegation is done out of obedience and love for Christ.

Jesus seems to have bound these together when he said, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me.” (Luke 9:23, also Matthew 16, Mark 8)

He also said, “Anyone who refuses to believe in (obey) the Son will never see life.” (John 3:36) And, “Whoever holds to my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me.” (John 14:21a)

Using only these examples of the teaching of Jesus (there are plenty more), it is plain that the wrapping together of self-denial, obedience and love for the one result of becoming a follower of Christ or belonging to him is not a secret locked away for a supposed “mystical” or “hoity-toity” brand of faith, but is in fact something that is supposed to mark every Christian believer.

I hope to be clear here that abnegation, obedience and love, taken in any order, are interrelated and inseparable as required qualities for a Christian self-abandonment. Self-denial is something we do out of obedience to Christ, and this obedience is done out of love for Christ. If we love him we will deny ourselves and follow him in accordance with his command. This describes someone who is experiencing the grace of salvation as Jesus himself described it.

The three – abnegation, obedience and love – are not mere exercises. They have an aim and an end, which is the heart of God himself, who lovingly brought each of us into existence. We deny ourselves in order to give way to receive God. We obey a captain who would never sway from his commitment to us. We respond in love to the One who first loved us.

Understood within the Christian doctrinal framework, self-abandonment describes salvation for the Christian, with belief in Christ either assumed or the sum of these parts.

Some are on candlesticks, most of us are not

 

Book 2, Chapter 1

-Part 5, Continued-

We have looked at obscurity from the point of view of its erasure of meaning from life. Indeed, if it is as bad as all that – and in one form it is – then we would expect our religion to rise against it and put it away.

Were that the case, then we would hear no more stories about believers who anxiously go through some of the previously-mentioned experiences of obscurity. Obscurity is a form of loneliness, or fear of loneliness, and the presence of our faith does not make it impossible to experience the “covered over” life.

Rather than remove the threat of obscurity, God has sanctified it and transformed it into something that he can powerfully use for the good of life.

After his birth, Jesus was introduced to this kind of obscurity. His birth was significantly marked and celebrated, of course, but its meaning was still left to be unfolded. Mary, his mother, it is said, “hid these things in her heart.”

After finding the boy Jesus in the Temple, we have no biblical knowledge of Jesus until he showed up at the Jordan River to be baptized by his cousin John. It is interesting to me that none of the gospels contain an interview with Jesus about his doings from, say, age 12 to 30. We really have only one word to help us fill in those years of his life: “Carpenter.”

This gap has left space for quite a few illusory liars to write ridiculous tales of Christ’s childhood and his young adulthood.

Under a positive, theological light, obscurity is understood as an aspect of spiritual humility. We sometimes see it referred to as “the hidden life.” This is the life that is not noticed, or seeks no notice for itself. In the Gospels we see Jesus sometimes saying, “Tell no one.” He lived in the same dynamic tension that we see in the Old Testament, between God as one who reveals himself, and God as the hidden, unsearchable one.

Jesus said to the woman at the well, “I who speak to you am He.” Other times he spoke in parables. There was a divine humility about him.

The kingdom of God has only a few known names in it. Once we add all the major players in both testaments, all the saints proclaimed by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, all the great men and women of history in the Protestant tradition, and the well-known evangelists, writers and speakers from within the faith, we may have only peopled a small town. The vast majority of those who belong to God are in the unheard-of masses.

As Cassaude puts it, there are some among the faithful who are placed by God “on a candlestick.” He goes on in this short section, to say:

_{“There always will be, as there always have been,  saints like these as well as an infinite number of others in the church who are hidden, who, being intended to shine only in heaven, send forth no light in this life, but live and die in profound obscurity.” (Page 49)}

Whereas before we looked at obscurity as a threat to a meaningful life, here we see obscurity as something that is good for our spiritual well-being and pleasing to God. This is certainly not the only occurrence wherein God takes something painful or awful and sanctifies it to his people as something enriching.

I was once called upon by a young friend whose father was on the third floor of our local hospital. The father was a gruff, weather-beaten sort of man. He was a guy who had a hard personality. He was likeable for all that. He had lived and worked hard all of his life, and he hadn’t had much room for anything religious in his life. Now he was living out the last days of his diagnosis – terminal cancer.

“Dad wants to talk to you,” his son told me.

This father wanted salvation, and he was asking for directions. At this point in his life, all he needed was an invitation. After I gave voice to this invitation, the man responded in faith and took on a life of belief that last only for another seven days.

I remember telling him that he was “lucky that this is about grace, because there is nothing you could do right now to earn it.” He was physically helpless, tucked away in a room in a community hospital.

He had told me he wanted “just another couple of years” of life, but it turned out that he had to settle for just one more week, during which his lucidness came and went.

The morning he died, his son called me from the hospital. I drove up there in a few minutes to be with him and his mother. I was not expecting to be escorted into the father’s room where his body was bent a little oddly under the covers. His mouth was wide open, his head tilted back, and his eyelids half open.

The three of us sat on the radiator next to his bed and muttered soft things. One of my less-profound musings came out as, “Well, this is weird.”

All of the faith, hope, love, laughter, pain and death that occurred in that little room were known only to a handful of people – had happened in obscurity. The unseen witnesses to all of this could be numberless – the angels watching; God himself knowing, present and involved; and unknown other beings who saw this man flicker alive in spirit just a matter of hours before his body gave out.

The obscurity under which all of this took place was a small, humble event. We can call it a routine event, as it happens in hospital rooms all the time. Its smallness and its commonness did not keep God from involving his entire self in lifting this man into an abundant and eternal life with him. Obscurity does not go unnoticed by God.

_{“We should note that there are souls whom God wishes to keep hidden, little in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Far from bestowing striking qualities on them, his design for them prescribes obscurity. They would deceived themselves if they tried to walk by any other path. If they are sufficiently instructed, they will know that their part is fidelity in their own nothingness, and their lowliness will be their peace.” (Page 60. . . More on this in days to come. T)}

There is nothing that threatens to cover over or obscure a person’s life as much as death. In the small Wyoming cemeteries where some of my relatives and friends are buried, I walk past row upon row of people I have never heard of – people whose lives never intersected with mine, at least not to the point where I caught their names and made some mental note of them. In some cases, everyone else who once knew them is dead as well. Nothing is second to death as the big, final obscurer.

Whitman called cemeteries “the final democracy,” where all are equally covered by a nice lawn. Even one headstone larger than another doesn’t mean all that much.

Death’s prime undertaking in history was to obscure the life of the man who said he was the king whose “kingdom is not of this world.” He was punished as a criminal, killed between two thieves to further obscure his dignity and his position in the history of mankind. By his death Jesus took away death’s power as obscurer, and replaced it with his life.

We need no longer fear being hidden away in life or forgotten in death.

“Where can I go from your spirit?” asked the psalmist. “Where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139.)

         In the “nothing much” which our lives often are, God is neither absent nor idle. Obscurity will never be a condition that separates us from him nor the life to which he has called us.