Ponder: God's word through the lips of man

"He who insists on hearing God himself shows that what he really desires is not to believe, but to know; not to obey, but to react to his own experience.  It is entirely fitting and proper that man hear his God through his fellow men, for all lives are inextricably interwoven into the one great community of human existence.  No one life is self-sufficient.  My existence draws on the core of my being but simultaneously on others in order to exist.  Plantlike, we sprout from our own seed, but we grow by feeding upon other growth.  In the same way, we arrive at truth through personal recognition; the 'ingredients' which go into that recognition, however, are brought us by others.  Man is humanity's way to God, and it befits us that God's word personally penetrate each of our hearts, but that it be brought to us by others.  God's word through the lips of man: that is the law of our religious life."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 251.

Good News from a Far Country

“Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see.”  St. Matthew 11:4

They ran a picture with his obituary in The Washington Post on Tuesday, “Star of the Green Hornet Dies at 82.”  I’d never seen Van Williams, the masked man with his gun pointed at the camera.  His starring role lasted only one season, back in 1966, more than a decade before I was born.  That had been the high point of his acting career, one show that no one really liked as much as Batman.  Williams had played a character here and there after that, and then hung it up to be a deputy sheriff and then a fireman in Southern California.[1]

I’ve read quite a few stories like this lately, as we slowly bid farewell to so many who stepped briefly into the public eye in that great flourishing of popular culture in the decades after World War II.  A few weeks ago, there was a famous dancer who had married a respectable dentist in her early twenties.  He didn’t like the way men looked at her on the stage, and she hung up those satin slippers for decades of ferrying children to music lessons and a hand of bridge once a week at the country club.  There was a man a few months before that who hit 23 home runs one golden summer in the mid-fifties.  He hurt his shoulder, and spent the rest of his life selling insurance in Western Nebraska.

Second acts can be very hard indeed.  Our talents fade.  Public taste is fickle.  The next generation always seems a little more clever and ambitious.  We wonder about the thoughts running through their minds as they watched the stop light and turned over restlessly in bed.  Was it all worth it?  Did I do something wrong?  Who am I now?  What will I do with the rest of my life?

Ponder:"as the First Man partook of it, so must the last"

"Christian Redemption is God's mercy to all Mankind; but it could not be so, if every fallen Man, as such, had not some Fitness and Capacity to lay hold of it.  It must have no Dependence upon Times and Place, or the Ages and several Conditions of the World, or any outward Circumstance of Life; as the First Man partook of it, so must the last; the learned Linguist, and the Blind, the Deaf and Dumb have but one and the same common Way of finding Life in it.  And he that writes large Commentaries upon the whole Bible, must be saved by something full as different from Book knowledge, as they were, who lived when there was neither Book nor any Alphabet in the world...It must be something as grounded in human Nature, as the Fall itself is, which wants no Art to make it known; but to which the common Nature of Man is the only Guide in one Man, as well as another.  Now this something, which is thus obvious to every Man, and which opens the Way to Christian Redemption in every Soul is, a sense of the Vanity and Misery of this World; and a Prayer of Faith and Hope to God, to be raised to a better State.

William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728).

Ponder: "som New Way, as easy, but more strange"

"Even Earthly Corn from Heaven comes, tho sence
Discerneth not the secret Influence
From which it Springs; even Rie is rooted there
Altho the Ear and Blade do flourish here.
But we are inconsiderat and Dead
And Blind and Deaf, unsensible as Lead:
And till the Ordinance of Nature change,
And som New Way, as easy, but more strange,
Awakens us, that Heavenly Influence
From whence they come affecteth not the sence."
Thomas Traherne, Manna

The faith in the waiting

“But he said, "O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?"”  Genesis 15:8

Abram had learned to wait.  God had spoken to him powerfully, when he was a man in the prime of life, living in the great Mesopotamian city of Ur.  “"Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.[1]”  And he had gone, following this strange God and his lavish promises. God told him of an abundant land.  He promised wealth.  And most poignantly, he told of a multitude of descendants.  Abram would be the father of a great nation. 

God had spoken to him once more, when his protégé, Lot had set off to make his own way in the world.  Again, there were the same promises, the assurance that God would be faithful.  That was decades ago, though.  Abram amassed cattle and slaves, he dabbled in politics, he became an elder statesman among the tribes of the Palestinian desert. He’d just been through a rather fierce battle, which has a way of clarifying your perspective, I’m told.  But still there were no children.

And Abram was tired of waiting. 

"In His Glory"--Sermon for Easter 7

“All mine are thine, and thine are mine, and I am glorified in them.”  St. John 17:10

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

“She was in her glory today.”  That’s what my father would say when he was describing my grandmother at a family reunion, carrying out the groaning platters, a baby cradled in one arm, beaming for all the world to see.  It’s how he described my brother that time the bases were loaded and he sent the ball over the left field wall.  I remember him teasing my mother, returning home from a day shopping with her friends.  There were a few more bags in the back seat than he had been expecting, and that’s what he said—“well, I can see you were in your glory today.”   I think it’s a rather old-fashioned expression these days, but we still know what it means.

To be one’s glory means to feel deep happiness, a sense of fulfillment.  We are in our glory when we are doing that thing we are truly made to do, when our distinctive talents are put to use, and others respond to us with respect and admiration.  We smile when we are in our glory.  A kind of light seems to shine from our faces. 

For Meditation: Eternal life

From my morning reading, Hughson's With Christ in God.

"Eternal life begun consists in knowing by faith--a tender and affectionate knowledge which inclines the soul to love.  Eternal life consummated consists in seeing God openly, face to face."  Bishop Bossuet (111).