The primacy of now

George Macleod, the 20th century Celtic/Scottish saint said that, "the primacy of God as Now is what we must recover in Christians mysticism." Later quoting George MacDonald he says, "'Whatever wakes my heart and mind, thy presence is, my Lord.' Our innumerable 'nows' are our points of contact with God." Too often, I think, we relegate the perceived presence of God to the prayer closet. Bidden or not not bidden, God is here. All life is sacred as we see it enfolded in the presence of God.

Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, talks of how Arthur Greeves introduced him to the experience of the "homely": "Often he recalled my eyes from the horizon just to look through a hole in a hedge, to see nothing more than a farmyard in its mid-morning solitude, and perhaps a gray cat squeezing its way under a barn door, or a bent old woman with a wrinkled, motherly face coming back with an empty bucket from the pigsty. But best of all we liked it when the Homely and the unhomely met in sharp juxtaposition; if a little kitchen garden ran steeply up a narrowing enclave of fertile ground surrounded by outcroppings and furze, or some shivering quarry pool under a moonrise could be seen on our left, and on our right the smoking chimney and lamp-lit window of a cottage that was just settling down for the night."

I'm not sure I understand all of what Lewis and Greeves meant by "homely", but part of what I take from it is that nothing escapes the redeeming presence of God.

Practiced Presence

Reading Brother Lawrence's "The Practice of the Presence of God" I was struck by his invitation to experience the continued presence of God. God is in our midst whether we want to pay attention or not. He seeks to be known. But do we really want to know him? Do we really wish to acknowledge his presence in every little corner of our lives?
Says Brother Lawrence: "We must know before we can love. In order to know God, we must often think of Him. And when we come to love Him, we shall then also think of Him often, for our heart will be with our treasure."
This cycle of invoked presence leading to knowledge leading to love of God can turn quickly into a healthy and vibrant pattern for life. But it begins, I suppose, with practicing the presence. Hard to do when you think life is supposed to be all about you!

What I could be doing if I wasn't watching the Super Bowl

To study the life of C.S. Lewis is to be astounded by the amount of words he read, wrote, prayed, spoke and thought: 49 books written, 3 volumes of letters that stretch across half a book shelf, hours a week in prayer and worship, two meetings a week with the Inklings. The man was intelligent to be sure, but there has to be more to it than that. Or maybe the most intelligent thing about the man is how he chose to spend his time. It's hard to imagine Jack Lewis spending four hours on a Sunday night watching ANYTHING on TV, the least of which a sporting event. It makes me think of my use of discretionary time. I do a lot of mindless things with it. Not that every waking waking moment is supposed to be filled with thinking, reading and writing. The mind and spirit are called to rest - that is what Sabbath is about. Yet I suppose I could come up with more to offer the world if I wasn't always planting myself in front of some screen - movie, TV or computer. Maybe life would be more purposeful if we did more purposeful things with our time. Back to the Super Bowl.

Given

I suppose a lot of how we look at life has to do what we take as a given. If we take as a given that life is about consumption then we will gauge success by how much we have If our"given" about life is that it is to be a bed of roses, then when challenges come we will grow disillusioned. I think the greatest opening line in a non-fiction book is the one found in "The Road Less Traveled", when he writes: "Life is difficult.". Do you know truer words? How we deal with that reality says a lot about how we find meaning for our days. Is difficulty to be avoided? Ignored? Medicated? Or is it be lived into? Are we to shy from those righteous things that mean suffering or hardship? Only when we think that difficulty is something that we can somehow dodge in this life does the door open to bitterness when things don't go our way. But It is a liberating thought to know that if life in itself is hard then it might as well be hard doing the right things. I'd rather stay awake at night worrying about the consequences of a courageous decision than in thinking about how to avoid making one. (Not that i've made many or any courageous decisions in my life.) So I guess that's what we see at the cross -- the righteous life meets the difficult life. Therein we find our salvation.

Transposition

In another one of Lewis's great sermons, "Transposition", he talks about a mother who gives birth to a son in a prison cell. As the boy grows his mother tries to describe the outside world by drawing pencil sketches. She tries to picture for him fields, rivers, fields, etc. And the boy for years gets along with these depictions. But then one day the mother realizes that the boy really thinks the world is filled with pencil lines. He can't imagine anything different. He does not understand what reality is really like. The shapes of the real works are not defined by lines, they "define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve.". As Lewis imagines our earthly lives in relation to our heavenly ones, he continues, "...we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.".
What a message of hope! We can't begin to imagine what reality really is! We aim short when we project our greatest pleasures onto heaven's landscape -- golf courses, fishing holes, beaches of powdery sand. These are just the pencil sketch. What awaits us is immeasurably greater. The fullness of time and the fullness of our selves! Hard to imagine and wait for!

Far too easily pleased

From, in my estimation, one of the greatest sermons ever preached, "The Weight of Glory", Lewis said, "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." When I think about the amount of time I apply to seeking entertainment I can only wonder what I'm missing. Joy comes from peace, i think,and peace is found in the abiding confidence we have in the presence and promises of God. And abiding confidence results from abiding. Abiding in the shadow of the Most High. Little chance of doing that while watching the Golden Globes. I am far too easily pleased.

Which question?

There seems always to be two questions that you and I vacillate between as we go about our days. How we live between them seems to make all the difference. The first question is one we started asking pretty early: what is the meaning of my life? As soon as we started asking our parents all those "Why?" questions we were trying to figure out what meaning there was behind all the things we were experiencing. Later those "meaning" questions took on greater measure as, perhaps, they guided us in our early life decisions. The second question is: how do I manage my life? Somewhere along the way we get preoccupied with the little management decisions of life. How do I make an income? How do I succeed in my job? How do I provide for my kids? What should I set aside for retirement? And then before we know it the management answers supplant the "meaning of life" answers. The meaning of my life is now determined by how I manage my life. And when management drives meaning life gets smaller and smaller. It grows as small as our calendars or checkbooks or retirement accounts. But when meaning takes center stage and we ask questions like, What is my God-given purpose? What does God want with his world? Where does life end up? Answers to these questions serve to compete with the decisions of "management". They push us not to give up control, but just to let the other answers take over.

There don't appear to be a lot of kingdom awards handed out to those who are efficient and organized. Jesus seemed more interested in those who were willing to live, and die, for a cause. Meaning trumps management.