"Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day." -- Gen 32:24
"If you are left alone with God and you cannot get to a place of victory, it is a terrible time. You must never let go, whatever you are seeking--fresh revelation, light for your path, some particular need--never let go. Victory is ours if we are earnest enough. All must pass on; nothing less will please God. 'Let Me go, for the day breaks.' He [Jacob] was wrestling [with the Angel of the Lord] with equal strength. Nothing is obtained that way.
You must always master that with which you are wrestling. If darkness covers you, if a fresh revelation is what you need, or if your mind needs to be relieved, always get the victory."
-- Smith Wigglesworth
Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.
I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.
They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: then I restored that which I took not away. O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee.
Let not them that wait on thee, O Lord God of hosts, be ashamed for my sake: let not those that seek thee be confounded for my sake, O God of Israel.
Because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my face.
I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children.
For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up; and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me.
When I wept, and chastened my soul with fasting, that was to my reproach.
I made sackcloth also my garment; and I became a proverb to them.
They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of the drunkards.
But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O Lord, in an acceptable time: O God, in the multitude of thy mercy hear me, in the truth of thy salvation.
Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters.
Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.
Hear me, O Lord; for thy lovingkindness is good: turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender mercies.
And hide not thy face from thy servant; for I am in trouble: hear me speedily.
Draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it: deliver me because of mine enemies.
Thou hast known my reproach, and my shame, and my dishonour: mine adversaries are all before thee. Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.
They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.
Let their table become a snare before them: and that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap.
Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not; and make their loins continually to shake.
Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy wrathful anger take hold of them.
Let their habitation be desolate; and let none dwell in their tents.
For they persecute him whom thou hast smitten; and they talk to the grief of those whom thou hast wounded.
Add iniquity unto their iniquity: and let them not come into thy righteousness.
Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, and not be written with the righteous.
But I am poor and sorrowful: let thy salvation, O God, set me up on high.
I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving.
This also shall please the Lord better than an ox or bullock that hath horns and hoofs.
The humble shall see this, and be glad: and your heart shall live that seek God.
For the Lord heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners.
Let the heaven and earth praise him, the seas, and every thing that moveth therein.
For God will save Zion, and will build the cities of Judah: that they may dwell there, and have it in possession.
The seed also of his servants shall inherit it: and they that love his name shall dwell therein.
So what do I mean when I say "God speaks to me"? Well, many things. But here's one example: yesterday was a particularly hard day, and I woke up this morning feeling exhausted and discouraged. And as I was praying for strength and encouragement I heard, as distinctly as if it had been an audible performance in the room with me, this. Not the whole thing, just the violin line. So I quieted my mind, and let the rest of it play in my heart, and I found strength and encouragement. Then, after my prayers, I went and played it on a device, and found hope and peace.
God speaks in riddles and layers. He wants us to seek him, to search for him, to wrestle with him; to unearth meaning and unravel mysteries. Why? I don't know. Maybe he's bored. :)
I particularly liked this rendition, which I clicked on because of the sweet pastoral scene: the child's voice, while not the most technically powerful or flawless performance, adds a layer of significance and poignancy.
Thank you for your prayers. My granddaughter is home earlier than expected, and the physicians say she is extraordinarily strong and healthy in every way for a premie. The prognosis for her heart is optimistic: it is expected now to heal on its own without surgery. Please keep praying until it is totally healed.
God answers prayer.
"Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." -- Psalm 50:15
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Praise God for bright sunshine, the smell of fresh-cut grass, open windows, 60-mile-an-hour wind, and loud rock n roll.
It's a masterpiece. "Boogy bears and real bears don't go together." Sing it to your favorite tune.
Boogy bears, in case you're wondering, are Little Kitties.
Little Kitty
His actual name is Fuzzy, but nobody ever calls him that. He was arguing with me this morning about whether he could go outside, so I sang him a song to explain it to him. Kitties understand better when you sing to them.
I kind of felt bad for not inviting my friend in last night for tea. Not very neighborly or polite of me. But my daughter quoted me an old Norwegian proverb which she'd just made up: "Never invite a bear in unless you have honey." Sage advice; bears have terrible manners when they're hungry or upset. And I am indeed out of honey.
Remember those cute bear cubs I caught in my chicken coop? Well, they're yearlings now, about 200 pounds or so. I've been seeing them here and there, down in the woods and stuff. This evening, though, I walked out of my office and found one of them had come to say hello: he was standing up with his paws against the sliding glass door of my deck, like he'd been invited in for tea and honey. Unfortunately, I didn't think to get a picture for you before I ran him off: I'll try to remember if he comes back around. I was actually in a bit of a hurry, because I didn't want him to break the glass: a lot of mess and expense, and I'm going out of town tomorrow.
I had a bear in my trash a couple of weeks ago, but I don't think it was him. I felt the house shaking while I was in bed reading, and thought it might be a little earthquake: didn't think to get up and look outside, nor consider that it might be a bear on the deck until next morning, when I found the garbage strewn from here to hades. I don't think this one was big enough to shake the place like that. The kid from down the road says they've been seeing a 400-pound adult male; I think it must have been him. So I started shutting the trash cans up inside the garage to discourage them from coming around the house. I went out and hollered at this one and fired a shot off into the trees, to give him a good scare. I really don't want to have to shoot them: I like bears.
Just now, after I'd searched for Massenet and Seeli Toivio, this appeared on my youtube page, and smote my conscience; as if to chide me for having so long slighted poor St. Cecile by neglecting her art. So I post this as penance: your pardon, gentle Saint.
Perhaps, having appeased sweet Cecile, who also shares patronage of poetry with St. Columba, my fleeting muse will return to me and I will be able to engage productively in my own art. (Although, to be honest, I feel more at home with St. Columba, who was also a warrior: Scots-Irish patron of warrior-poets--yes!) Perhaps they share a court in heaven--after all, what goes together better than words and music?
.....
Also, it's quite good. I especially love the part from the Handel/Dryden section, "What passion cannot music raise and quell?" <sigh> And incidentally, isn't the cello the soloist plays in this part mega-cool, decorated with the heraldic sun and fleurs-de-lys?
.....
The soft complaining flute
In dying notes discovers
The woes of hopeless lovers,
Whose dirge is whispered by the warbling lute.
Sharp violins proclaim,
Their jealous pangs,
And desperation!
Fury, frantic indignation!
Depth of pains, and height of passion,
For the fair disdainful dame!
Oh, my. Well-said, Mr. Dryden. Well-said indeed. That is why I cannot easily listen. As Shakespeare says, music is the food of love. And any appetite one feeds grows stronger. Save me.
.....
No, it's no use. I am lost. My God...the Haydn Credo....
I have a hard time listening to classical music these days, and so don't very often; it makes me think and remember, and we all know what happens when I do that (↓↓↓↓). But every once in a while I'll venture it, usually either when I'm feeling relatively well or so bad it just doesn't matter. I won't tell which it was today.
Anyway, I've never heard this played on cello before, but it came on my pandora mix a little while ago, and I found the melancholy of the piece and of its associations in my own life to be perfectly suited to the naturally somber tone of the cello. The one I heard on pandora was actually Yo-Yo Ma, but I thought his interpretation was a bit lacking in expressiveness, so I found a cellist whom I like better to share with you. Considerate of me, right? Yeah, I'm just like that.
"God wants to be wanted, to be wanted enough that we are ready, predisposed, to find him present with us. And if, by contrast, we are ready and set to find ways of explaining away his gentle overtures, he will rarely respond with fire from heaven. More likely, he will simply leave us alone; and we shall have the satisfaction of thinking ourselves not to be gullible.
The test of character posed by the gentleness of God's approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. For centuries now our culture has cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a posture, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Therefore only a very hardy individualist or social rebel--or one desperate for another life--stands a chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright. This social force toward skepticism remains very powerful even among Christian congregations and colleges for ministers.
Partly as a result of such skepticism, very few people develop competence in their prayer life. Their respectable uncertainty prepares them to explain away as coincidences the answers that come to the prayers that they do make. Often they see this as a sign of how intelligent they are ("Ha! I am not so easily fooled as that!"). And in their pride they close off a possible entrance into a life of increasingly confident and powerful prayer. They grow no further, for they have proven to their own satisfaction that prayer is not answered." -- Dallas Willard, Hearing God
I am reminded of two passages from C.S. Lewis: the dwarfs in the stable at the end of The Last Battle, who refuse to be taken in again by any nonsense about Aslan, and therefore only see darkness where there is light, taste straw where there is a feast and dirty trough water where there is wine, and remain trapped in a tiny stable where there is a heaven. And also of the three children who don't see Aslan in Prince Caspian, and won't believe Lucy when she says she has seen him and they must follow him.
What Willard says here about Christian skeptics is tragically true. There are entire churches, denominations, and schools of theology devoted to the denial that God not only does not work supernaturally in our lives any longer, but does not even speak to us and guide us. They interpret Jesus's promise to be with us always, even unto the ends of the Earth, as meaning that we will have the Bible, and say that we are to use our own logic and common sense to learn and apply its principles to our lives, and that is the sum total of the Christian life. And thus they fall into the exact same error as the Pharisees. And there are also large segments of the Church, especially in the West, who place their modern "intellectual" cultural assumptions first, interpreting scripture and the historical beliefs and practices of the Church through the filters of skepticism, rationalism, and humanism. Thus they end in, if not a dogmatic, then at least a practical denial of any real working of God in our lives, scoffing at reports by more naive and credulous believers that they have indeed heard from God, had their prayers answered, or witnessed a miracle. These are also the ones who tend to be proud and dismissive about things like scriptural literalism, creationism, and those who take eschatology seriously, trying to distance themselves from them in embarrassment and instead lining themselves up with the world and with "respectable" beliefs on those subjects: a kind of baptized Scientism. And thus fall into the spirit of the Sadducees.
I have absolutely no problem with people holding various views and interpretations of theological beliefs, even ones which disagree with mine. Really, I don't. I do have a problem with arrogance, and the assumption that anyone holding a belief which does not agree with their own, or with the "mainstream" view does so out of naivete or ignorance or insanity. And with the categorical, unconsidered, unexplored rejection of anything that does not fit into one's preconceived, narrow little worldview. Thus, for example, you will find, even among Christians who actually believe in the authority of scripture, those who will vehemently dismiss even the possibility that the evidences for Creationism should be considered and explored using the scientific method, because...well, because it just can't be true: it's silly. Such people are not thinking rationally and scientifically: they are thinking rationalistically and dogmatically (their dogmas being those of Scientism).
But the worst sin of all is the one in which the Christian passes judgment on the work of God in other Christians' lives. This is the sin of the Scribes, who accused Jesus of casting out demons by Beelzebub, and whom Jesus subsequently warned about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. We certainly must exercise discernment and judgment (in the right sense) about things we see and hear reported. But to pass judgment dismissively or scornfully (or, as the Bible puts it, to sit in the seat of mockers and scoffers) is to tread on very, very dangerous ground. Even when it seems goofy, we have to be careful: goofy is neither a sin nor a heresy. God meets people where they are, and never feels embarrassed.
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." -- Shakespeare
Remember my friend Charlie? The one who drove across Florida and bailed my ass out when my gear was ruined in the storm? Well, I hadn't heard from him in a while, and several recent attempts to contact him elicited no response. So I sent him a text asking if everything was okay, and got the following reply:
"Everything's good: fooled around and fell in love."
I've been reading Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, and it's got me thinking about a hypothesis I've been floating around in my mind for a long time.
Chesterton talks about how the truth of God and the coming Christ was reflected or foreshadowed--perhaps preflected would be better, if I may be permitted to coin a term--in the mythologies of the pagans. Or, as Lewis puts it, "He sent the human race what I call good dreams" (I think Lewis must have been drawing directly from Chesterton here). On the other hand, Chesterton points out the wide gulf between pagan mythologies and pagan religion.
"Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them."
He then goes on to talk about the hideous depths to which the darker sort of paganism inevitably descends:
"But with the idea of employing the demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden spring that works in the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world."
So this is the state of pagan man, before Christ and outside of Israel. He is either striving blindly toward a mark which he cannot possibly hit because he has no revelation, as Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, or Marcus Aurelius, but achieving good in a purely human way. Or he is wallowing in a depravity of utter evil, like the Canaanites sacrificing their children to Molech, the Aztecs sacrificing, well, everyone they could get their hands on, to the sun, or Pharaoh giving his wife to perform fertility rites with the priests and even the idol of Osiris.
At least, this is the commonly accepted Christian view. But is it accurate? Did God really leave the entire world, except for one insignificant Mediterranean nation, in utter darkness?
Here's a question to begin the search with: Who was Balaam? And more importantly, what was his relationship with Jehovah, and how did he know him? Balaam was not an Israelite, yet he clearly had the ability to call on God--the True God--and prophecy, curse, and bless in his name.
And what about Melchizedek? He was apparently already practicing the true worship of the true God, and was somehow even superior to Abraham such that Abraham brought him his tithe.
Also, consider the Magi who visited Christ in his infancy. Why? Who were they, and what did they believe?
Then there are the extra-biblical examples of monotheism which come close to, if not fully reaching, the worship of the True God as given in revelation. Zoroaster, whose original teachings (before a later reform which reduced his religion to a crude dualism) so closely parallel the God of the Old Testament that they recognized the Jewish Messiah as their own expected savior (that's the answer to the above question: Magi are Zoroastrian priests). Hermes Trismegistus of Egypt, who taught a monotheism so similar that later scholars assumed his writings were a counterfeit of Medieval Christians, as they assume any biblical prophecy fulfilled was written after the fact. And Pharaoh Akhenaton who, (probably following the teachings of Hermes) cast down all the idols of Egypt, closed the temples, fired the priests, and instituted worship of one God. An act which so offended the priestly and ruling classes that they assassinated his son, Tutankhamen, in order to restore idolatry in the land. What about the fact that the Temple of Heaven in Beijing contains no idol, but was to an invisible God, and that the Chinese characters contain the same history as Genesis? Or the monotheism of North American Indians which has been remarked on so often? The great god Ohm of Hinduism, who exists in three aspects? The First Cause of Socrates and the temple of the Unknown God in Athens? I could go on, but you get the idea.
My hypothesis is that the true worship of God was passed down by Noah to his sons and their descendants, and continued (often in hiding) alongside the other two branches of human religion, that is, mythology and idolatry, and eventually either became merged with them (as in India or North America), was corrupted and debased (as in Persia), or was wholly supplanted by them (as in Egypt). So, when one comes across a Melchizedek or a Balaam in the Old Testament, Abraham and Moses are not really surprised: these are just men practicing the true religion as it had been revealed to their common ancestors, and they immediately recognize one another.
I'm thinking of writing a book about this, but I'd need access to a really good library, like at a university. As of now, it's just an interesting but undeveloped theory.
No, not me; my granddaughter. She has two small holes. It happens with premies, and usually isn't as bad as it sounds. But please pray for her, that they heal naturally (or supernaturally) without surgery or complications.
