Ancient Wisdom (Part II)

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.
- Lao-Tzu

Something Borrowed

Stumbled across this in my travels. It's from Rachel Tulloch at RZIM's Slice of Infinity:

"God’s love is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes.”

I have often been asked, “Could not God have forgiven people without going through the pain and the violence of the cross?” As nice as that sounds, reality forces me to ask: When is forgiveness not painful? True forgiveness cannot occur unless the hurt is acknowledged and called for what it is. When you look a wrong full in the face but choose to accept the hurt instead of returning it on the one who did it, that is always painful.

Jesus illustrates forgiveness by telling the story of a servant who owes his master more money than he could possibly repay (See Matthew 18:21-35). The master originally threatens to sell the servant’s family and possessions to get some return for the debt, but when the servant begs for mercy, the master is gracious and forgives the debt. Yet the same servant not only refuses to forgive the debt of his fellow servant, but also has him thrown in prison as punishment.

Sometimes we treat forgiveness and justice as though they are mutually exclusive. If we choose the way of justice, we think the options are reparations or retribution--either the guilty person makes up for a wrong or is punished for it. These are the only options the servant offered his debtor. Since the second servant could not repay, he was then punished. However, the master chose the way of mercy when he forgave the debt, neither requiring reparation nor inflicting retribution. If God has really forgiven us like the master forgave the servant, we ask, then why all the pain and death of the Cross? Does the Cross undermine God’s mercy? Is it merely an underhanded way for God to force repayment from humanity or exact punishment on us?

In asking these questions, we betray a misunderstanding of both justice and forgiveness. Justice can never be achieved by reparation or retribution alone, because like the servants’ debts, true wrongs can never be repaid. The hurt and pain caused are not reversible. Punishing the guilty person does not undo the hurt either, even if it brings brief satisfaction to the victim, just as the first servant did not get his money back simply because the other man was in jail. Justice must be about much more than balancing out the wrongs of the world. It must be about making things right, about the kind of restoration that does not reverse the pain, but moves beyond it toward something new.

And just as wrongs cannot be erased by punishment or repayment, they cannot really be erased by simple forgiveness either. When the master forgives the servant’s debt, the debt does not simply disappear. The master takes the loss! He accepts the full brunt of the debt himself. Similarly, when a person forgives, he or she accepts the full brunt of the hurt or injustice rather than returning it on the one who caused it. Although it is painful, this is the way that healing and restoration begin. This is why there is no way to avoid the bloody Cross. And this is why God’s love is terrible. Think of what it includes: us, with our best and our worst, with our failed attempts and outright cruelty, with our wrong motives for right actions and our right motives for wrong actions... us, with the mess we have made of the world, with our brokenness and despair, with our rebellions and inadequacies. We are the ones included in and redeemed by the deep and wide love of God. Paul is astonished by this reality when he emphasizes that Christ died for us while we were still sinners! (Romans 5:8).

Instead of demanding that we pay what we cannot, instead of punishing us for not paying what we cannot, the God we see in Jesus Christ accepts the loss himself and opens his arms even to those who would murder him. The Cross does not represent God’s mercy being tamed by his anger; rather, it demonstrates that God’s mercy is much bigger than we think. The Cross is a graphic picture of God’s terrible love. Think of all it includes.

On Praying and Prayers, and Why Some of Them Don't Get Answered

Why do we need to tell an omniscient God what our needs and secret desires are? Shouldn't he know already? Why does he make us wait? Does he take pleasure in our grovelling? Why doesn't God just give us what we want?

Why have we fasted and You do not see? Why have we humbled ourselves and You do not notice?' Behold, on the day of your fast you find your desire, And drive hard all your workers.
Behold, you fast for contention and strife and to strike with a wicked fist. You do not fast like you do today to make your voice heard on high.
Is it a fast like this which I choose, a day for a man to humble himself? Is it for bowing one's head like a reed And for spreading out sackcloth and ashes as a bed? Will you call this a fast, even an acceptable day to the LORD?
Is this not the fast which I choose, To loosen the bonds of wickedness, To undo the bands of the yoke, And to let the oppressed go free And break every yoke?
Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry And bring the homeless poor into the house; When you see the naked, to cover him; And not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then your light will break out like the dawn, And your recovery will speedily spring forth; And your righteousness will go before you; The glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; You will cry, and He will say, 'Here I am.' If you remove the yoke from your midst, The pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness,
And if you give yourself to the hungry And satisfy the desire of the afflicted, Then your light will rise in darkness And your gloom will become like midday.
And the LORD will continually guide you, And satisfy your desire in scorched places, And give strength to your bones; And you will be like a watered garden, And like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. (Isaiah 58:3-11)

You ask for something but do not get it because you ask for it for the wrong reason-for your own pleasure. (James 4:3)

We squeeze our eyes shut and rhyme off a Christmas list, address it to God instead of Santa, and sit back with the idea that God is somehow bound to deliver. This is not the prayer the Bible describes, nor does it give us a handle on the Living God.

What is the purpose of prayer, if it is neither the exercise of reciting our wishlists nor the wrestling into submission of a reluctant deity?

Prayer is first of all my recognition of who I am, and who God is. It is my opportunity to relinquish my responsibility for the lack - to lay the burden of my need and my longing before the One who can take responsibility for it. Prayer draws me into the very heart of God and allows me to share his thoughts and his great longing heart.

As I come near to the God who is Love and lay my burdens down, I am drawn into a circle of shared understanding. I begin to see, not through my own priorities of fear-driven pain-avoidance, but as Love sees. As I name my hurts, my worries, my wants, he puts them in with his own, and I am allowed, as much as I will, to see things as they truly are. Most amazing of all, I am allowed to join Love in his great aching and longing over his own broken creation. I participate in the hurt of his loving, and I know the comfort of his love toward me in my brokenness.

In prayer, I am reminded that Good is far greater than the petty ideas of comfort and self-satisfaction that we humans seek so doggedly. As I pray, my self-centred wants are deepened and transformed until I begin to long after those things that God himself longs after: the redemption of the broken, and the filling of the whole universe with Love and Light and Truth - beginning with your heart and mine.

When my requests remain un-granted, I am sure of this: the God who hears is ignoring my worded request for good things because instead he is satisfying the cry of my heart after the Good I cannot name. There are two reasons I am sure of this: the Bible promises it: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28), and I have tried it. Never has God refused my request for a good thing and not given me instead the Good I couldn't have imagined. Every bitter, painful thing I have surrendered to him in prayer has been sweetened and time after time I have seen the very thing I begged to be set free from become the means by which I have received my deep heart's desire.

The God who hears my prayers has proven himself faithful to his word again and again and again. He doesn't always save me from hurt or hunger or embarrassment. He doesn't make me immune to the difficulties or the indignities of ordinary life. But God is changing my selfish thinking, bit by bit. I have been surprised to find him less like Santa Claus, and more like my Mother. He is filling every corner of my life with a Good that is more like carrots than candy, and with every passing experience, I learn that His love doesn't always mean giving me what I think I want.

He hears all my prayers, but sometimes he doesn't obey me. Thank God.

Shopping for God

God is not easily seen in our lacquered, branded, and packaged world. He hides himself even from those who say they are looking for him. Some have looked long and hard - up and down the theological mall, and even in through Sunday sermon-markets. They've read treatises, attended churches and conferences and camps, tried their best to have faith in healings, participated in book studies and prayer groups. Others have searched online, asked questions of their leaders, studied apologetics. Why does God hide his face?

Oh, there's a plethora of God-shaped toys and God-labelled substitute deities - all cheap knock-offs that are sure to let you down when you most need them. There are God-rituals to participate in and God-songs to sing and play and God-movies to watch and any number of God-clubs to join. There are books about the most efficient ways to follow God, and scientific discoveries that pinpoint which brain cells are used when thinking about God, and university courses on the history of world-wide philosophies about God. There are God-stickers for your car, and God-approved political parties to vote for, and theological God-alternatives.

But where, oh where, is God? What else can we assume, except that what so many are looking for doesn't exist?

Thank God, it doesn't.

The kind of God you can go shopping for and pick out the same way you pick out a pair of shoes is blatantly and hopelessly non-existent. Our lives have become so padded with comfort, so bloated by excess, that we have little concept of what it means to need. We are more burdened by the results of too much food, too much leisure, too much choice, than we are by any sort of lack.

‘Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked... (Revelation 3:17)

Our society is looking for a commodity - an accessory; a divine talisman that can be toted about with even less trouble than those cute little be-ribboned dogs poking their heads out of purses. We want a magic genie who will make our troubles go away and rewind-and-erase our little slip-ups, and so save us from our guilt. We want a friendly grandfather who will scratch his chin and forget just how things really are, and who will just step in with gentle words and smooth over things in our relationships when we need the help. We want a pretty little God-pet that will do back-flips in his cage to impress un-believers. Oh, we'd be happy with any of the above, actually, so long as God, when he shows up, is well-documented in scientific journals. Or at least approved by the scientists they interview on the nightly news. The thing is, we'd like this God to be real - we aren't going to be hoodwinked like generations before us. We want a well-pedigreed Dog, er, God - one with papers.

And the search goes on, because there is no such thing.

You might shop 'til you drop, but none of us ever finds the God who is Love until we see our desperate, awful need of him. When we find ourselves, dizzy and sick, at the precipice overlooking the dark caverns of selfishness in our own souls; when we awake to the fact that the poison eating away at everything of ours that is pure and good comes bubbling up from the inky depths within us; when we have grown bone-weary of the struggle to fix the broken-ness that increases its destructive force as we take arms against it... When we cry out in utter helplessness for the Love and the Light and the Truth we so terribly need - then is revealed the God who Is.

He's not waiting for us to manipulate our skepticism into blind belief. He doesn't expect us to join the 'right' religion, or pretend we don't think evolutionary theories are likely. But God is neither philosophy nor meat. He is not consumed at your whim or mine. He cannot be sought as one seeks a new rug. It is our understanding of our need that defines what it is for which we search.

The Living God is freely known, but never cheaply. He comes warm and swift as a rushing wind into the awful vacuum created by the admitted need for what He alone is - Love. Light. Truth.

And you shall seek me, and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13)

'til Love Returns

"'That there is brokenness,' he says quietly. 'That this world is brokenness. But within brokenness is the Unbreakable Name. How the whole earth groans 'til Love returns.'" (Joy Kogawa, Obasan, 1981)

Wise Men on Wisdom

"There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
Big words are always punished,
And proud men in old age learn to be wise."
- Sophocles, Antigone

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding."
- Proverbs 9:10 (KJV)

Jesus still calls...

“Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matt 11:28-30

Words and wishing, and God

The trouble with talking about God is that we all use the same words, but they mean such different things. When many people talk about "God", they refer vaguely to a magical being who decides how everything is, and yet - despite the horror and confusion we see around us - is also somehow good. People talk about love and mean warm, fuzzy feelings that make you want to talk all night and buy flowers for no reason.

The "God" I want to tell of is not God because he or someone else decided that he could be, nor because he won a shootout with the other powers in the universe. He is God because he is Love, and Love is the most powerful force there is. The "love" I speak of is not the thing they make movies about. You know you've encountered it because it sits like lead in your chest. It forces you out of bed in the morning, and half- sets you free and half- kicks your butt until you find yourself choosing to do things you hate doing. It stomps with heavy boots on your pride, and hurts more than anything else has the power to hurt. It's wearying and difficult and sore and will make you grow up if you can just stand it.

So, a God who is Love is not all gumdrops and roses. He is difficult. If we would reach out to him, or attempt to join him in loving, we will ache and weep in bewilderment. But let me say again that, in the end, he alone is enough.

Oh, if I could only draw back the curtain and let you see his vast beauty and his intricate order and his deep warmth... But you've seen snows and sunsets; ocean and sky; stars and dogs - and the eloquence of words must be laid aside when such speak.

On Beggars and Choosers

Modern capitalism is based on the manipulation of desire. We find ourselves a consumer society; one that has gone softly into a long good night in which guilt and fear prevail, and longing is dulled and re-directed. Our need to choose has been substituted with the much more glamorous privilege of choosing from.

Willingly, we have accepted the outrageous lie that individuality and personality may be satisfied by making consumer decisions. Our need for freedom is sublimated in the exercise of consumer privileges. That I may select from twenty varieties of toothpaste, or twelve movies, or four electoral candidates, appears as freedom. We have become convinced that choice need involve nothing creative: it is enough for us to merely select from an array of options.

Ideas, too, have been added to shelves of the grand marketplace in which we all live. Having succeeded in throwing off our need to seek and think and feel and consider, we have succumbed and contented ourselves with selecting entire blocks of thinking, based on processed and packaged philosophies, theologies, and belief-systems.

Consumerism creates the illusion of luxury, which is tied to the act of selecting. Since beggars can't be choosers, we must all be first convinced that we have no needs, only desires. We are all choosers with no real needs, but only the luxurious privilege of selecting the goods and the packets of theory that best match our personalities.

In allowing ourselves to be transformed from thinkers to consumers, we have been elevated from scrabbling in the dust of reality and experienced truth. Instead, we discuss theories that we have chosen to ascribe to, but hardly even understand. From trusting and experiencing a God that we can't see, we have gone to trusting what amounts to little more than popular opinion. Science has been unjustly discounted in the Christian world; but much of what is passed off as scientific truth in the secular world is only that portion of science which agrees with other socially and economically convenient truths. We toss around scientific arguments and other "facts" as though we aren't simply trusting those who purvey them; as though they have been researched by us; as though we deeply understand why they must be true.

We look for ideas that have been well-packaged, endorsed by appropriate authorities or celebrities, and carefully branded. I select and carry about my preferred brand of truth as I might a new handbag. It's a fashion statement; something that sets me apart and tells the world what type of person I am. Even we who call ourselves Christians want to think it's enough to believe that Jesus exists; that on that basis we will be acceptable to God. The demons themselves know that he exists!

Because you say, "I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing," and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked... (Revelation 3:17)

Truth is not something to be consumed. If I am to know it, I must first know my need of it. We are not, after all, choosers, but beggars, if we only knew it. The question is not, "Does God exist?" or "Who was Jesus?", but one that I may have a full answer to: "Who am I? What do I need?" If we can see the problem within that is utterly destroying us; which makes a mockery of all that is beautiful and true in us, then we know that, whether or not he exists, we need Jesus. That he is the only solution that matches our one great need. And if he does not exist, then there is no hope for us anyway.

The man who knows himself carried swiftly along a river that ends in a waterfall asks no questions about the rope thrown to him. He grasps it, because, though he knows not whether it may be trusted, he knows his problem. There is no shortage of solutions being bandied about by the philosophical and religious people of our world, and what can we know of their viability? If we know our problem, we will take part in no elevated selection of an appropriate solution, but a desperate grasping of what will meet our deep need.

Jesus Christ the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

My Scary, Surprising God

How can we be sure that our God is not a product of our own minds? How can we know that the God we believe in is not a projection of ourselves and our wishes and hopes?

This post is in answer to a challenge presented by DagoodS: "How does your god Frighten you? How does your God surprise you? How does your God change your thinking?"

Power can be exciting and comforting at the same time. What child doesn't like to imagine superheroes with great powers? In the same way, our imaginations of God make him an all-powerful genie, and Jesus the ultimate Superman. We can love this kind of a God because his unlimited powers are, in a way, at our disposal. He is on our side. We just have to pray diligently enough, sprinkle a little faith-dust, and *poof* - our wishes are granted.

The God of the Bible bears no resemblance to such a magician. His purposes are vastly different from ours. He does not grant wishes to his favorites. The privileges I am offered if I follow him are himself, and the privilege of knowing him - though my choice allows God to use his power for my benefit, he doesn't use it for my comfort; nor is his power given into my control. Similarly, we experience this in nature. As we take our rightful place in the natural world, the benefits of nature come to us - but never is nature under our control. The universe laughs at a person or people who think they can through study or industry bend the natural forces.

I love the ocean whose salt waves cool my body in summer; whose unseen depths and ceaseless tides at the same time calm and intrigue me. But though I splash and play in the waves, they are no playthings. The ocean is relentless. It is set upon principles that will not be denied, though I cry and beg. It is a thing wholly outside of my control, and is therefore a thing to be feared as well as loved.

So is God. His principles go far deeper and higher than my wanting. He is not controlled by my pleading. He is not devoted to my comfort. He let Joseph be falsely accused and languish in prison for ten years. He let the Hebrews be made slaves to the Egyptians. He allowed John the Baptist to rot in Herod's dungeon until John questioned all that he had lived for - then he let them cut off his head. Who would imagine such a God?

But wait - there's more. The same God who seemingly ignored the pleas and tears of those who followed him the most closely all through history showed that he is merciful, not by granting them favours (as you and I would imagine) but by becoming a man. He became one of us, with all of the human weakness that we despise in ourselves (except sin). He was tired, hungry, dirty, lonely, weak. He had, like us, to seek even his spiritual strength and comfort from heaven. The power that allowed him to give to others offered him no pillow, no home, no dainty food, no freedom from pain or weariness.

Even if it were possible for me to conjure such a God in my own thoughts, if he is an illusion only, then he is a God for contemplation; for philosophizing. When I am cold, I want a blanket. When I am hungry, I want bread. When I am tired, I want a place to lay my head. When I am lonely, I want a friend. The mere thought of a God as the Bible describes him is awe-inspiring when I sit comfortably on my couch and meditate - but such thoughts are easily quenched by the realities of life: loneliness, disappointment, tiredness, hunger, pain. Only the experienced reality of a God who sees and knows - though he denies my request - is enough then.

This sort of a God is frightening. He's too complicated. He's too big, not in the good, "my-Dad-can-beat-up-your-Dad" way, but in the "do-you-even-know-I'm-here?" way. He can give me pain. He can leave me lonely. He can let me be confused. On top of it all, he expects far more from me than I want to give. He's disconcerting.

Then, too, he surprises me. He doesn't do what I expect him to do. He reveals himself as a person I didn't expect him to be.

God surprises me by not being the person I expect; by being subject to reality in a way that he is not in my imagination. In my mind, no one characteristic of God has to have a bearing on any other characteristic, because he doesn't have to make sense except in the way I think of him. In real life, he has to be what makes sense even before I've gone over the parameters and the consequences of his characteristics; even before it makes sense to me. I have to know what he is before I understand why it's necessary for him to be that way.

I used to think that God was completely unlimited; that he could do anything - just anything. Of course, that left me with a million problems that began in my own life and ended in places like Darfur and Indonesia. The God I imagined didn't have to make sense - he could be good AND unlimited AND thus have both the ability and the will to relieve the plight of millions of suffering people down through history... but in reality my little daydream broke down. The God I came face to face with in reality looked astonishingly different because he was limited in the way EVERYTHING is limited in reality. He can't be what he isn't. He can't serve opposing purposes. He can't make a rock so big that he can't lift it. There are reasons for what he does. And yet, the Bible tells me what he is like without my being able to understand how that fits with what I see. It corrects both my imagination and my reasoned deductions. I can see what he does BEFORE I understand why; and I can know (from the Bible) who he is BEFORE I can reconcile that with the evidence. Both of those things are baffling to the imagination. But the fact that I can know who God is before I can understand why it is necessary for him to be that way offers me evidence that my knowledge of God comes from outside my own thoughts.

I thought I could please God by being kind, by helping others, by doing my best to conform myself to the teachings of the Bible. I also thought that by pleasing God, I could expect some favours in return. Oh, not so simply as that. I wasn't thinking that God would ply me with sports cars and overseas flights because I traded in my time and money and tried to be kind to hurting people. But I did expect that there would be some kind of return on my investments. I thought there was some sort of perk to be had for those who follow Jesus. Not so, as it turns out. Well, not like I expected, anyway. No extra comforts, no signs that the King of Kings is my own father.

Just Him. He is the perk. There is deep peace in knowing him. There is joy and purpose, even in the midst of struggle, confusion, and depression.

The more I get to know him, the more he surprises me. He wakes me up early, just to talk. (Ask my mother how likely it is that I'd wake up early on my own!) He shows me the selfishness at the core of the sacrifices I make, and the pride that surrounds my most selfless acts. He bursts all my balloons, and replaces them with himself. Oh, he is lovely, but make no mistake - God is a party pooper. Just when I'm feeling great, patting myself on the back for a particularly selfless act, he sticks his foot out and I'm flat on my face. That's not just surprising, it's frustrating.

And just when I've got him in a nice, neat little box - the kind you can hand to someone like a present - I come smack up against a whole new side of him I've never seen before.

He tells me I'm wrong. In fact, sometimes he shows me that my whole perspective is wrong. I used to think that it was my job to point out sin - from my schoolfriend who lived a gay lifestyle to my sister who hurt my feelings with her carelessness. One day God showed me that judging is his job, not mine, and that being right is far from enough in his eyes. In fact, in trying to take his place, I am worse than those I judge! Do I like that? Nope. When somebody does what I know is wrong, I love the rush of knowing that I'm right and they are wrong, and I want them to understand exactly what the situation is. (There, now you know just what a little prig I am, though I usually try my best to hide it!)

Then, when I thought I was doing a pretty good job of showing what God's love is, He showed me that I don't know a thing about love. He pointed out how much of my "love" is emotionalism, neediness, and pride. He let me see how fast my brand of love turns to hatred and resentment when it is met with rejection, weakness, or apathy. But he didn't leave me there - this is the wonder and the loveliness of the God I worship! - he let me have a little of his love. I had to receive it myself before I could give it, and even then, it wasn't anything like I expected. As it turns out, God's love isn't a warm, smooshy feeling, but a heaviness. It isn't what makes me smile and hand out sandwiches to homeless people - it's what lets me come back for more when I've been kicked in the teeth; it's what lets me sincerely want good for someone who has rejected me; it's what makes me see the beauty of God himself in the kind of person whose sinfulness is all too evident to me; it's what allows me to want another's good at my cost. Don't get me wrong, I've experienced real love in trace amounts - but even the minutest grain of such a thing was enough to turn my whole thinking on its head.

Oh, I am smart enough to figure out what my weaknesses are - but God shows me the deep darkness and the flapping foolishness that entwine themselves about my strengths. The better I know him, the less I trust myself.

No, the God I worship is far more frightening, more complex, more deep, vast, and breath-takingly beautiful than I could ever dream up. I know myself more free as I am changed by him, but I am not released from the chains of selfishness with smooth sighs - it is a bitter struggle with one who is stronger than I. His purpose cuts across mine. He offers me pains that I could not and would not choose for myself. Many in our world have pain, but the pain God gives is different in this - it results in love, joy, and peace. It sets free those who choose Him.

The idea that I could imagine a God so wise, so pure, so full of the kind of love that doesn't even make sense to a human being, is not only laughable but indeed, if it were possible, it would make me - the dreamer of such a dream - myself worthy of worship. That I am patently unworthy is a fact beyond dispute.

Testing the Hypothesis

Research has always interested me, while the logistics of carrying out solid research have always repelled me. However, it is clear to those of us who study the unquantifiable that, despite the paucity of answers available through even the most painstaking and principled of research, without it there are no answers that may be communicated. I may hold any beliefs I choose about "the way things are", but without an appeal to primary research, I have no basis on which to offer my beliefs to others.

My life's thesis, that God is Love, must too be tested and subjected to experiment under varying conditions if it is to be communicated. It seems that Paul had the same idea about the responsibility of the apostles:

"For it seems to me that God has put us the Apostles last of all, as men whose fate is death: for we are put on view to the world, and to angels, and to men." I Corinthians 4:9

He saw the apostles' lives as a spectacle, a display - living, breathing experiments of their great hypothesis, Jesus Christ the Savior of the world.

If I live true to my own hypothesis, it will be tested. My life will become an experiment in which the reality of God may be tried and the results displayed to anyone interested enough to watch.

One of the great medieval biology experiments on the effects of rest and exercise on digestion was one ordered by a cruel emperor. He had two of his servants fed well for a month. After each meal, one was forced to rest; the other was forced to exercise. At the end of the month, the servants were brought before the king and disembowelled to determine which lifestyle was better suited to healthy digestion. Obviously, the knowledge gained in this case hardly warranted the brutality it involved. But the results were clearly more to be trusted than reams of arguments on the matter.

Whatever it cost me, may I subject to the necessary tests my life's hypothesis. Let me prove amid the rigours of life's inevitable weariness and bewildering unfairness and absorbing variety and strange, surprising happiness, who is that One who is more dear than solace and more beautiful than joy. Let me not speak with smooth, swollen words of such deep, darling, powerful, and pure things as God and love. Rather, let me eat them. Let the bowels of my self be ripped apart, that the precious results may be displayed to those who wonder.

Aha! Moments...

Why didn't anybody ever explain to me the vast difference between the things in life that make me feel good and the things that make me happy?

Or maybe they did, but it didn't feel good, so I didn't listen...

Ancient Wisdom in Modern Language

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve, and bad things are very easy to get. (Confucius)

Faith: How Much is Enough?

ex·pe·ri·ence (ĭk-spîr'ē-əns)
n.
The apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind: a child's first experience of snow.
Active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill: a lesson taught by experience; a carpenter with experience in roof repair.
The knowledge or skill so derived.
An event or a series of events participated in or lived through.
The totality of such events in the past of an individual or group.
tr.v., -enced, -enc·ing, -enc·es.
To participate in personally; undergo: experience a great adventure; experienced loneliness.
[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin experientia, from experiēns, experient-, present participle of experīrī, to try.]

'For which reason, because we have righteousness through faith, let us be at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; Through whom, in the same way, we have been able by faith to come to this grace in which we now are; and let us have joy in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but let us have joy in our troubles: in the knowledge that trouble gives us the power of waiting; And waiting gives experience; and experience, hope: And hope does not put to shame; because our hearts are full of the love of God through the Holy Spirit which is given to us.' (Romans 5:1-5, Bible in Basic English)

'I think you ought to know, dear brothers, about the hard time that we went through in Asia. We were really crushed and overwhelmed, and feared we would never live through it. We felt we were doomed to die and saw how powerless we were to help ourselves; but that was good, for then we put everything into the hands of God, who alone could save us, for he can even raise the dead. And he did help us, and he saved us from a terrible death; yes, and we expect him to do it again and again.' (2 Cor 1:8-10 Living Bible)

'A big wind storm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so much that the boat was already filled. He himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion, and they woke him up, and told him, "Teacher, don't you care that we are dying?" '(Mark 4:37-38 World English Bible)

Sometimes I can really relate to those disciples in the boat, crying, "God, don't you CARE? Don't you SEE?" It's always amazing to me that God is not weakened by his love for me. His pity doesn't soften his resolve to give me the experiences I need. I've been in the boat with him before. I am beginning to realize that he never planned to keep the storms from touching me. I'm beginning to learn that with a little patience, I'll have an experience that will allow me to trust him further.

I can sympathise with those who find themselves unable to span the chasm that lies between their present knowledge and a knowledge of God with a great leap of faith. We who ask others to do such a thing ought to first ask ourselves if this is what we have done. I have not.

On reflection and careful consideration, however, it has taken a little faith. Enough to make me begin, and to keep me searching for what I had only sensed, and that rather dully. There was no single leap, for me, from doubt to faith. I carried both all along the way. I took little steps with the hope that there would be Something There, and my "faith" was replaced by experience.

Just as there is no way to quickly know or trust a person, or even a methodology, so knowledge of God is rarely sudden and undeniable. Rather, it is a cumulation of experiences that, looked at individually, may amount to little, but as a whole offers a body of knowledge that satisfies the questions we ask.

How much faith does it take to know God? A little. Enough to give me a little patience so that I can see the end of a thing. Enough to take a single step forward in the search for what God is - not a super genie offering wishes; not a white-robed grandfather-in-the-sky, but Light, Love, Truth. We need not take a second step until our faith be replaced with knowledge.

To all of you who have tried to make the leap and failed, many have done as you have done. But God does not require a leap into the dark. I hope that I can shine enough light on the trail to convince you only to take a tiny step toward whatever you may sense of Him who is Light. You don't have to take off your "atheist" sticker. You don't have to change your religion. You don't have to begin attending church. Just take a little step. Put yourself in a place where you could experience a God who who is Light, Love, Truth; the kind of God who makes stars and suns and trees and oceans and lions and puppies and people; the kind of God who is what he is no matter how much it hurts you OR him.

Faith doesn't mean deciding what God should do and believing sincerely that he will do it. It means knowing God well enough to be sure that what God does do is good, no matter how rotten it feels. There is a huge difference. Faith requires experience.

"No Scar?" Amy Carmichael on love and pain

Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright ascendent star
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,
Leaned me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that encompassed me, I swooned;
Hast thou no wound?

No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the master shall the servant be
And pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole: can he have followed far
Who has nor wound nor scar?

Amy Carmichael,

On Faith

I hesitate to use this word, faith. It has been mangled and strangled and left, weak and whimpering, decidedly beyond the pale of respectable rationality. It is the last, desperate appeal for those who are too tired or too lazy to look any further. It is a smug euphemism for the self-satisfied who feel no need to substantiate the validity of their own thinking.
Let me tell you what faith as the Bible uses it most assuredly is not. It is not an excuse not to think, nor is it an exemption from the responsibility of drawing clear links between beliefs, knowledge, rationality, and experience, at least within our own minds. It is not the obstinate clinging to what I wish to be true despite all evidence to the contrary.
I will begin from the Bible, for the simple reason that I have found in it above all a consistent presentation of the reality I know, and of the person and claims of God, in relation to whom "faith" is traditionally understood. The "faith" I am interested in is the Biblical idea. I believe this idea of faith has been historically, routinely, and universally misused and misrepresented. The concept of faith as the Bible presents it is quite simply, "reason to expect" a certain thing.
Nowhere does the Bible encourage ignorance or disregard for rational evidence, either sensory or logical, in favour of fuzzy feelings or a certainty which is based on the strength and value of "my belief". Readers of the New Testament will note that the apostle Paul, when he was questioned about the veracity of Jesus rising again, never said, "Relax, guys. Just have faith." He told those asking the question to go talk to some of the hundreds of people who had seen Jesus after he rose from the dead. Sound like the popular version of faith? It sounds a lot more to me like he was suggesting they use their brains and their eyes.
The Bible clearly and reasonably defines the term, which is so central to its thesis, as "the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen." Nothing airy-fairy about that. It is substance; cold hard evidence. Let's think about this. What is the usual evidence for knowedge which is unseen? Umm, like the existence of DNA or electricity, for instance. I personally have never seen either one of them, but they make sense to me. The very same concepts may well have seemed like pie in the sky to someone in my situation about 500 years ago. What makes the difference? They didn't have certain other important pieces of information with which to form a rational body of knowledge. However, there is another evidence for "things not seen" - experience. Had it been possible for them to observe the working of a flashlight or a CD player, there are many things they might have been able to understand and perhaps infer about "electricity" even if they didn't know its name. For example, turn on the flashlight. Light! Turn of the flashlight. No light. Take out the batteries and turn on the flashlight. No light. Put the batteries in and turn on the flashlight. Light! A few repetitions of this demonstration would likely satisfy even a skeptic of the rationality of a concept like electricity. The results of DNA might also be readily evident to them were its viewable results linked with a unified explanation.
Rational, consistent explanation and experience are, in our world, the generally-accepted forms of evidence for things that are known but not seen. I expect that the flashlight will light up when I turn it on because I have a general understanding of the working of electricity AND because it has done it before, repeatedly. When it has failed to turn on, there have been reasonable explanations that have also been consistent with my experience of flashlights and batteries. I know a little how electricity operates, and it is reasonable. My knowledge, combined with my experience of flashlights, has given me "reason to expect." I have faith in electricity, although I don't understand it fully and I have never seen it.
By the Bible's definition, faith is no leap in the dark. It is something substantial - something that appeals to and requires the participation of the whole person, body and mind and spirit. It requires experience and it requires reasoned understanding. You cannot have faith of any quality in a God you do not know, whether that God exists or not. My faith in God depends on my understanding and experience of a God whose person is rational and consistent.
Believing that God exists is radically different from having faith in him. I have faith in my sister because I know her to be trustworthy, not because I believe that she exists. I believe that Tom Cruise and George Bush exist, but my faith in either one has definite limits! In the same way, whether he exists or not, I have no basis for faith that God will cure me of cancer, unless he has said that he will. Believing that he will is not faith. It is a lovely but unsubstantiated hope.
The Bible says "all things work together for good to them that love God". Since the Biblical concept of God includes truth, and my understanding and experience of that God affirms that he is, and that he is truthful, this allows me to expect that whatever God does do with me is ultimately good, by his definition of good. That is faith - matching up my reasoned understanding and my experience, and acting on my "reason to expect". Job, in the Old Testament, knew the God that I know. Sick and poor and in pain and alone, he was able to say about God, "Even if he kills me, I will trust in him". It wasn't because Job stupidly persisted in trusting a God who failed to bless him in the ways he hoped, it was because his understanding and experience had brought him into knowledge of a God who sees pain as a price to be paid; a God who gives pain when it is necessary - and when it is necessary, accepts pain himself.
What about people who don't believe in God? How then can we ever know a God who is not reachable through raw belief?
We must seek a reasonable and unified concept of "God". By this I mean a concept that is non-contradictory rather than one that is "natural". If the "God" is also creator he doesn't need to be wholly subject to the laws of nature, but his reflection in the creation must be either consistent with his person or another rational explanation must tell why it is not. The concept of God may be incomplete and imperfectly comprehended by us, but it is necessary that it be reasonable and consistent. When seeking scientific knowledge, we first offer a rational hypothesis, then we test it. If it fails, we adjust the hypothesis. However, if your hypothesis fails, that doesn't mean God himself doesn't exist - it just means the God you have imagined doesn't exist.
We can come to believe in God by beginning with reason and following with experience. This allows us to know God. It is only then that we will be reasonably able to put faith in God. Putting faith in someone you don't know is - excuse me - stupid. Religious people may expect it, but the God of the Bible doesn't expect it. He says, "You will know me when you search for me with all your heart." Notice it's not a reward for searching diligently. No, it's the searching, the reasoned thought, that is the way to know God - which necessarily comes before having faith in God. The "with all your heart" has tripped up many people. Their search has not been genuine. Neither was mine for a long time. I searched for "God", but I had already prepared a box that I expected him to fit into. This kind of narrow-mindedness is no different in the search for truth about God than it is in the search for scientific truth. Many discoveries have been delayed because people were unwilling to accept certain possibilities.
Some people do arrive at the right answer without understanding, but without understanding, we can't be sure it is the right answer. Just experience is powerful - lab rats depend on it all the time - but again, without understanding, we can't be sure the answer it gives us will continue to be the right answer. Then again, just understanding can be fatal if your understanding is even occasionally flawed. That's why student pilots have to log hundreds of hours of flight experience before they are certified - even if the theories are perfect, sometimes we aren't.
Lest I be misunderstood, I will assert that I am not trying to suggest that a knowledge of God is purely academic. What I want to say is that any real knowledge of truth must begin in the intellect. It is how we respond to our understanding of God that involves a moral choice, that deepest part of a person. Turning off the mind and trying to move straight to the moral decision has resulted in a gross ignorance, darkened understanding, and a terrible corruption of our world's concept of who God is.
For those of you who still cherish a small hope of finding truth, God, whatever it is that you call the thing that sometimes still fills you with longing from your deep heart's core; that greatness and dearness in oceans and mountains and trees and tigers and baby deer before which something inside you bows - let me offer the Bible, and the God of the Bible, as a beginning hypothesis. Read about him for yourself - you just may be surprised.

On Knowing God

I sympathise with all you atheists. I too don't believe in the God you don't believe in. He's a tyrant and a teddy bear. He's stuffy and too desperate to remain fashionable. He's wishy-washy and bigoted. He's self-centred and falls in love with anybody. He's one thing on paper and wholly different in action. It seems like everyone's looking for him, and the only people who are finding him are the ones who have turned off their brains in favour of "faith" - more or less an excuse not to think, not to be all that we know ourselves to be.
Quite simply, I must agree with you wholeheartedly - to the extent that such a God exists, he is no God at all. We have proven it over and over again with the best of humanity's tools of understanding - science, logic, philosophy. We have wrapped up that ugly, inconsistent God in the stiff brown paper of reason, tied him into a tight, four-cornered package with the strings of conscience and consciousness, and tossed him bitterly into the wastebasket of thought. There he sits, covered over with crumpled bits of well-researched and defended resentment - resentment because he has failed to fulfill, and thereby stolen from us the dearest hope of the human heart. Deep down, don't we all long achingly for something? Something that might have been called "God"?
So some of you have sadly, bravely, or angrily chosen no answer rather than a cheap one that denies first what you know yourself to be. And yet there he sits still, the God who is no God, even in the term "atheist" calling out to you - mocking you for defining your thought in relation to him, and for having dared to hope for something more.
Could I offer you back your hope one more time? You've been disappointed so often - no, don't open your mental door and take it back just yet. Just let that faithful dog, Reason, outside to sniff carefully about one more time.
I am not going to give you any scientific or existential arguments for the existence of God. Let me just tell you a little, now and then, about who the God is who does exist. He'll never be proven through reason, but he never goes against it, either, so reason will protect you from what is not God. There are reasons for everything he does. He answers question asked sincerely. Everyone who searches for him finds him, even those who don't know that his name is "God". (Not everyone who searches for their idea of "God", but everyone who searches for HIM.) Indeed, no one ever knows him without searching. Let me just tell you who he is, so you'll know what to look for.
He is energy and force, but he is personal. He is as harsh and demanding and uncontrollable and beautiful as a snowstorm. He is as kind as a mother should be. He is as deep and strong and inexorable as the sea, as vast as a starry night, and warm and light and comforting as a curled-up cat. He is great and fine and dear. He is love. Not he loves, but he IS love, personified. It is he who created reason and understanding and a billion intricately interconnected natural laws. He is the one who thought up animals, with all their innocent ferocity. He dreamed up the rugged delicacy of the tree, the burning splendour of the sun. He, like the nature that reveals him, is both infinitely incomprehensible and undeniably reasonable. Look deep inside your heart. What is it, underneath the flotsam and jetsam of life, that you truly long for? This is God. This is the God who is.
I haven't always known him. Even after we met, after I knew that he was, I didn't know much about who he was. I spent a long time confusing Him with other things named "God". As a child, I was aware of God in nature and in my grandfather. I felt certain God was present in thunder and lightning storms, which I loved even while they terrified me. I also knew him as my grandfather's friend. If I couldn't see him, I was completely aware that my grandfather knew him even better than he knew me. As I grew older and realised the need and the responsibility of an adult to reconcile experience and thought, God seemed more and more distant. Analysis and measured understanding are the privelege and the duty of mature humanity. I couldn't always reconcile my understanding of "God" and my consciousness of the rest of the world. I almost gave up hope. Then I remembered my grandfather. I was sure he knew someone, whether or not that person's name was God.
I went in search of the God my grandfather knew. In case he could hear me, I asked him all the questions that sprang out of my philosophy classes and my rather imperfect knowledge of science, and the conundrums of humanity- the problem of pain, injustice, tragedy. I was groping desperately in the darkness, only given hope because I was convinced my grandfather had talked to someone real, someone who talked back. While I couldn't accept his experience, it gave me enough hope to keep looking. I started walking outside everyday alone, looking up into the sky and asking God, if he were there, to speak to me.
I met him. I found him in the Bible, as it turned out. I had read the Bible once before, but had failed to see him there. My mind was too busy trying to make what I read fit into the view I had already established about who God was and what the Bible was going to say. What a letdown, huh? You hoped I was going to give you some new information about a mystical experience with a fresh new deity, perfect for our modern world. Instead, just the same old dusty Bible and its dusty version of God. Not quite. Same Bible, different me. Turns out the dusty version of God was only in my head, because the one in the Bible is deep, dynamic, responsive, and absolutely trustworthy.
It was an incredibly painful experience, being forced to let go of my own "beliefs" about God and about myself, but it set me free in a way I never was before. I have never seen him with my eyes, just as I have never seen the wind. But I did become as lucidly aware of his evidence as I am of the wind. I have been in his presence. He has spoken to me as he did my grandfather. And he has answered every question I have dared ask him. I am not resting on some belief, some warm feeling of faith inside that allows me to believe in something without having to use my brain. I learned who he was by reading about him and engaging in linear thought. He has fully engaged both my reason and my experience. I didn't have to lower my expectations. I didn't "get religion".
I am convinced that the God who is meets people in their own way. After all, if he created so many varieties of personalities, cultures, and personalities, wouldn't it be inconsistent in him to insist on a "one size fits all" meeting? What is it that draws out your deep longing, your sense of something more? Science? Seek him in science. History? Seek him in history. Art? Seek him in art. A genuine search for truth will always lead a person to a God who is truth. He is more amazing than you ever imagined. He is knowable, on every level. He is.