Still

When I read this, I know I’ve found a book I’m going to love:

I am one of those overeducated library types who might be expected to look down her nose at self-help books – but the whole bookstore is a self-help section to me. When something needs to be fixed, when I need something to change, my first and abiding instinct is to read. I think I can read my way to a solution. Or at least an evasion.

Still, p. 23

This is exactly what I do. This is exactly what I have done in finding Still, although it is a searching for some kind of navigation, or way forward, or even just understanding, on this occasion, rather than an avoidance tactic.

The title’s tag line –  notes on a mid-faith crisis - is what attracts me. I wonder if Ms Winner and I can compare notes. Maybe she has found some wisdom she can pass on to me.

The whole book is like a conversation with a friend really. Someone who isn’t exactly in the same shoes as you, but whose life is similar enough that they get how you feel. I love the honesty and humility and the patchwork of inspiration she draws from other writers. In reading, I am reminded of how powerful it can be to invite someone else into your own story.

Winner does this beautifully on many occasions, and I leave you with the quote which resonated with me the most:

I am sitting on a bench in a museum. The museum is a five-minute walk from my office, and I come here often, to be spelled in the middle of the day by thirty minutes of silence… In my lap, the Bible is open to the fifth chapter of Luke, one of Jesus’ healings… the story ends with Luke’s telling us that Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray. A little like  escaping to the quiet of a museum, I think. What can it mean for a place to be lonely?

A place, lonely like Jesus? Lonely like me?

Maybe I can make my loneliness into an invitation – to Jesus – that he might withdraw into me and pray.

Still, p. 141

Procrastination and Violence

So I was in the library avoiding anything remotely productive reading “around” my essay topic, when I came across this incredible sermon called Self-inflicted Violence, by Ellen Davis.

Davis explores the somewhat uncomfortable relationship between violence and praise in Psalm 149:6-9 and in the life of the saint. She argues that “there is a regular pattern of sainthood: first withdraw and do battle in your own heart, then do battle in the world” (2003:295). This is clearly seen in the life of Jesus, as He battles in the wilderness before He goes out to battle in the world.

“Withdraw and do battle against the powers that have made your own heart occupied territory,” she urges (2003:295). “The key to responsibility in ministry is precisely the saint’s practice of self-inflicted violence, rigor in naming and opposing the evil we find in ourselves. It is the toughness gained from fighting the battle within that enables us to be gentle with others” (2003:297)

Davis goes on to describe the difference between godly and godless violence, which I found particularly poignant in light of recent world events:

“every kind of godless violence is directed at getting something or holding onto it – power, oil, satisfaction, vengeance, personal or national security. But the battle of the saint is always fundamentally directed toward giving, giving praise to God, and that cannot be fully, freely given without first giving up what we normally value above all else, namely, a good opinion of ourselves” (2003:296).

I could type out the whole thing really, as it’s so inspiring, but I’ll leave you with the quote I found the most moving, right near the end of the sermon:

“‘Let the high praises of God be in their throat and a two-edged sword in their hand.’ The sword-wielding singers of praise – this is the image that clarifies the conditions of Christian ministry and strengthens us against intimidation. It is an icon of the saints standing firm through the great ordeal, the ordeal that every one of you, and everyone you serve, will pass through in this life; an icon of the imperiled saints, literally singing for their lives, singing God’s praise as they hold fast to the one piece of equipment that will bring them safely through: “the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God” (Eph. 6:17), the sword of God’s cutting and healing word, the sharp instrument of discernment that we learn to wield accurately only through the discipline of prayer” (2003: 297).

******

(After reading the sermon, it wasn’t a huge surprise to find out that Ellen Davis is an eminent Professor at Duke Divinity School, alongside one Stanley Hauerwas.)

Publication details:

Davis, E. ‘Self-inflicted Violence,’ in The Art of Reading Scripture (Eds. Davis, E. & Hays, R. B.) Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2003, pp. 294-299.

You can access most of the sermon on Google books.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Sing Your Freedom.

On “The Urgent Matter of Books”

I’ve been mulling over something I read all day, and I should probably mull over it some more before I respond to it, but I’m impatient, and I also get my best inspiration to write late at night, so here we are.

Now, a little disclaimer before we begin. I don’t necessarily agree with, or endorse absolutely everything this writer suggests.  And I could see how her post could be offensive in some ways. BUT. But…

Yuknavitch loves books passionately and believes they can change people, who can change the world. So do I. She loves the real books, you know, “those thingees with covers and pages that you hold in your hands? Smell like paper and trees?” So do I.

This quote kind of summarizes the article:

Books, like all art, breed in us desire. In times of crisis and fear and misrepresentation we need desire, or else we shut down and hide out in our houses, succumbing to infotainment and the ease of an available latte, turning off our brains and emotions. Books breed desire. Even if, as Jeanette Winterson argues, the responsibility to act remains with us…

… And underneath the story of BUY THIS and FEAR THIS and HATE THAT, rising up and punching through the infomercial we call public discourse in a moment of danger is this: read books.

Books are so vital because they remind us that “buy this and fear this and hate that” are only one story, told from only one perspective. There are a lot of other stories that need to be heard, made available, lived. There are good and beautiful stories that remind us of how things could be. There are stories of hope and redemption, where justice and mercy walk together hand in hand, fingers entwined.  There are stories of generosity and self-sacrifice, where love drives out hate and power is perfected in weakness.

These are the stories infused with the Kingdom and the Gospel. They breed in us the desire to see the kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven. They tune in our emotions as we grieve over brokenness and lament that things are not as they should be. They switch on our brains to help us realize that we are what we desire, and maybe what we have desired is too shallow to satisfy us. And maybe the cost to other lives to produce what we want to consume is too high to pay.

As we read, we are coaxed out of our individual houses into communities where thinkers and writers and believers and hopers re-envision and re-inspire us to re-imagine our world and re-awaken us to all the glorious possibilities for change that exist.

And yet “the responsibility to act remains with us.” We have to do the hard work of forgiving and loving and acting and serving and being the way we want the world to be.  We have to fight for the poor and the oppressed, the widow and the alien. We have to manage our time, our money, our habits. We don’t just read the story, we are the story. We infuse the stories of the Kingdom so we can live them out and offer an alternative way of being in the world to the dominant discourses of consumerism and violence.

*****

I enclose a link to the article mentioned above in the interests of quoting my source, but…   It is not recommended for the faint-hearted, the Republican American, or those offended by bad language.  If you fall into one of these categories, you probably won’t like the whole article, you have been warned!

The Urgent Matter of Books

How do you spell gratitude?

I’m reading a new book. I know. I always tell you that you should read whatever I’m reading, but this time I really mean it. One Thousand Gifts: a dare to live fully right where you are, by Ann Voskamp. Seriously.  You need to read it.

You can see my review over at Completely Devoted, but the essence of the book is gratitude. Gratitude as the way to see God and appreciate and enjoy him in all of life’s moments, right where we are, in exactly this place. Even the places and moments we didn’t choose or don’t want to be in.

It reminds me of the children I teach and how they are learning to read – we take what seems like an impossible word and we break it down: Well, you know the first sound.. What is the next sound? What do those two letters say together?

I wonder if gratitude is God’s way of teaching me to read the world. Well, you know the first thing to be thankful for… What else can you be thankful about? When you put those things together, what do they say? Sound them out…

They are all gifts. And seeing them transforms the ugly into the beautiful, the ordinary into the miraculous. And they sing to us from the rooftops that in the mystery and in the mundane, there is fresh mercy for us every morning and we are loved beyond all we can ask or imagine.

“From His fullness we have all received grace upon grace” John 1:16

Ann’s blog is at www.aholyexperience.com

You can also join a book club reading through One Thousand Gifts here.

Waiting for hope

Betsy sent me this a while ago, from a sermon by George Matheson. It seems appropriate again today.

“There are times when things look very dark to me — so dark that I have to wait even for hope. A long-deferred fulfillment carries its own pain, but to wait for hope, to see no glimmer of a prospect & yet refuse to despair; to have nothing but night before the casement & yet to keep the casement open for possible stars; to have a vacant place in my heart & yet to allow that place to be filled by no inferior presence — that is the grandest patience in the universe. It is Job in the tempest; it is Abraham on the road to Moriah; it is Moses in the desert of Midian; it is the Son of man in the Garden of Gethsemane.

There is no patience so hard as that which endures, “as seeing him who is invisible”; it is the waiting for hope.

Thou hast made waiting beautiful; Thou has made patience divine. Thou hast taught us that the Father’s will may be received just because it is His will. Thou hast revealed to us that a soul may see nothing but sorrow in the cup and yet may refuse to let it go, convinced that the eye of the Father sees further than its own.

Give me this Divine power of Thine, the power of Gethsemane. Give me the power to wait for hope itself, to look out from the casement where there are no stars. Give me the power, when the very joy that was set before me is gone, to stand unconquered amid the night, and say, “To the eye of my Father it is perhaps shining still.” I shall reach the climax of strength when I have learned to wait for hope.
Strive to be one of those–so few–who walk the earth with ever-present consciousness–all mornings, middays, star-times–that the unknown which men call Heaven is “close behind the visible scene of things.”

~

“He has made everything beautiful in its time” Ecclesiastes 3:11