Regret

Regret--How many times will I descend to this--reaching below the bottom?  I know it's not politically correct, but I can't forgive you and I won't forgive me.  Regret pulls like a gravitational force, tugged down toward a bottomless journey of tragedy.  Regret is an irrepressible weight obliterating every element of optimism and joy in its wake.

I need the fresh perspective offered by Frederick Buechner:

THE QUESTION is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God's things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak—even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys. We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. "Be not afraid," says another, "for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him.

- from The Sacred Journey and Listening to Your Life

Faith and Necessity

I just watched a man walking toward a shoe repair shop in 30 degree temperatures while wearing one shoe and carrying the other. An authentic marriage of faith and necessity. I can't help but wonder if my own intermittent lack of faith results from a shortage of perceived need. Too frequently I opt to function like I do not need God's involvement at all.

 Father, grant me the faith of a shoeless man in winter whose hope rests on the availability and skill of the cobbler.

I Mattered

This thing of writing is madness. To think the world needs one more clamoring voice, much less cares about its motive, is lunacy. Why, then, must I write?  What force compels expression? In base manner it comes forth as narcissistic Facebook posts or mundane quips. Higher forms we term 'literature.' In between is every manner of utilitarian utterance and philosophic postulating. And somewhere in the rainforest of words I wield my own like an African panga that cuts a pathway through strangling undergrowth. In final analysis writing is my heart's desperate attempt to shout, "I was here. I mattered. At least for a little while."

Narrative of Grace

I'm more convinced than ever that salvation is a narrative of grace. This explains why testimony convinces more surely than mere proposition. Grace unfolds through the natural rhythms of life, persisting river-like over tranquil pools as well as stoney shoals. "If I ascend to heaven, you are there!  If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!"  To understand transformation, listen to life. We're drawn to story because only in this way are we able to comprehend the effect of the Gospel.  "In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin again after each stumble -- because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

Congruent Intercession

I am struck by clarion chords of delight that accompany Paul's praying. The Apostle's vertical climb was joyfully congruent with his horizontal connections. I am increasingly convinced that persistent intercession proceeds from meaningful relationship.  In other words, I will never wrestle with endurance over that with which I am only distantly acquainted. I am not arguing for what Thomas Merton argued against: "To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence."  What does seem clear to me from scriptural observation and personal experience is that disinterested prayer may be the most decisive descent into violence.

Excruciating Sweetness of Remembering

I've conducted far too many funerals over the past twelve and a half months here in our Mitfordesque community.  I agreed at the outset of last year to serve as supply preacher for the aged Methodist church in the community and her handful of aging members, but I failed to anticipate the connection between the median age and the inevitability of standing all too frequently graveside with Psalm 23 and John 14 and 1 Corinthians 15 in hand. However, I confess there is a double-edged reality to my predicament. On the one hand, I embrace these events as open doorways to exercise once-in-a-lifetime ministry on behalf of the Christ. On the remaining hand, such moments induce the unavoidable pain of encountering my own mortality and that of those I have loved dearly and lost or soon will. There is an excruciating sweetness in remembering, like tasting the most longed for delicacy in the presence of a cavity exposed tooth. But remembering, in and of itself, is the clearest evidence of real life. Because I remember, they lived. And because I remember them I too live. "When you remember me, it means you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart. For as long as you remember me, I am never lost" (F. Buechner ).  'Father, grant that I may live in such a way that those who met me and knew me might choose to remember me.  And in doing so, may that memory both validate my existence and honor you as Lord of Life and Memory.'

Looking Over My Shoulder Into Eternity

This is the third time in recent months to have basically the same unsettling experience. After officiating at the funeral service of a 92 year old church member, I led the procession across the road from the church to the Bosqueville Cemetery for the internment.  Standing in front of an intimate cluster of family members of the deceased with the coffin behind me awaiting its final descent, I could not help but sneak a glance over my shoulder at the cemetery plots my wife and I purchased for ourselves a year ago.  It's an odd feeling to be pronouncing the final committal for someone while thinking about the inevitability of your own just across the way at some undisclosed future moment.  What will it be like to pass from this life into the next? How will I finish this race I'm on? Who will I have influenced toward Christ on my journey to eternity?  While I have followed the sage advice to listen to my life and find God's saving and sustaining grace in the ordinary? Will I finish well?  So many questions when looking over your shoulder into eternity.

Wrestling with Shadows

Much of my energy is expended wrestling  with shadows.  Granted, that may sound strange coming from a follower of the Light of the World.  After all, Jesus said that he is light, making me a child of the Light.  Herein lies the crux of the problem.  Wherever light exists shadows are inevitable.  Anything allowed to come between an object below and a source of light above casts an inescapable shadow.  And to be quite honest, shadow wrestling is entirely of my own doing.  Any shadows darkening my existence are there because I've allowed an object to intrude between myself and the Lord who is my life.  Will this be a passing cloud or something lodged there long term due to my own obstinence? Shadows by nature elongate and distort their objects of origin, so the pressing matter for me is to identify the habits, choices, emotions, vices, etc., that I tolerate and eradicate them so that once again I may "walk in the light as he is in the light," (1 John 1:7 NIV) and stop this shadow boxing.

Listening While Living

Listening while living is an art form worth learning.

"There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak--even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even in the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere.  He speaks, I believe, and the words are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our own footsore and sacred journeys." (F. Buechner )

Again Buechner writes: "Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster."

I am praying differently these days, not so much to know God's will any longer but, instead, simply to recognize him in the commonplace, ordinary events of this life.  Perhaps the greatest gift I may offer him is to no longer take him for granted.

College Football and Sleep Patterns

College bowl games change my sleep patterns. I seldom fall asleep on purpose at an unrespectfully early hour (we won't count recliner dozing), but no one that knows me would accuse me of being a night owl.  But college football and the holidays alter everything. I exchange soft warmth of a custom mattress for a viewing platform that allows a measure of  comfort while propelling me to cheer wildly for schools I would be hard pressed to locate on a map. What is this magnetic pole that drags so delightfully on my soul?  I have no answer to the mystery, but pledge to forge ahead at least through Monday night's BCS championship contest. It's the least I can do since I'm not sleeping well these days anyway.

Fighting Senility

Writing is one of my ways of fighting senility. The Oxford Companion to Anerican Literature tells about Ralph Waldo Emerson at a point in his life when he had "gradually slipped into a serene senility in which his mind finally became a calm blank."  Apparently, Emerson happened to pick up a volume of his own essays one day, and after reading through them commented that although he couldn't place the man who wrote them, all in all he thought they showed promise. Although I may one day look back on what I've written with what Buechner called "serene senility," writing in the present always demands at least a measure of hand & mind coordination. In keeping with one of my five New Year's resolutions, I intend to add at least five entries in my blog each week--call it an effort at thwarting senility. Hopefully, something I compose and record will be worthy of someone's contemplation. No doubt I will miss that literary mark much of the time, but on occasion I may succeed: Not as if I will produce anything to keep one awake at night, but perhaps at times something "that will help me see something as familiar as my own face in a new way, with a new sense of its depth and preciousness and mystery" (Buechner).

(Photo from aacc.edu)