If he is consumed in the very burning, he cares not for it — he is content. He feels that, like a lamp, he is made to burn; and if consumed in burning, he has but done the work for which God appointed him. Such a one will always find a sphere for his zeal. If he cannot preach, work, and give money, he will cry, and sigh, and pray. … If he cannot fight in the valley with Joshua, he will do the work of Mosus, Aaron, and Hur, on the hill (Exodus 17:9-13). If he is cut off from working himself, he will give the Lord no rest till help is raised up from another quarter, and the work is done. This is what I mean when I speak of ‘zeal’ in religion.

Bishop J. C. Ryle, Practical Religion, 1959 ed., p. 130

I know that I have written several times before on this blog about the value of thankfulness; it really does seem to be one major key to spiritual life. If yet another inducement to gratitude is needed, however, it is provided by Lewis in the delightful passage above. Being thankful not just for the big things—creation, salvation, sanctification—but for all the tiny, trivial details of life reminds us of what really gives us joy, and that joy points back to the creator of all happiness. What do you love, not because of any boost it can give to your ambition or to your pride, but just because it exists? What makes you forget yourself entirely in pure delight? It is for these things that should thank God daily.

Yum....

Believe me, I know what it feels like to be delighted in things that I sometimes am ashamed to mention. I’m an English concentrator at Harvard, and yet I like science fiction, murder mysteries, and Top 40 radio; shouldn’t I be reading John Ashbery and Jonathan Franzen and listening to indie bands that no one’s ever heard of? Sure, I can tell this to you, my loyal readers; but would I mention that one of my favorite authors is best known for his Star Wars books to a potential employer or a first date? No, probably not. And that’s because I spend more time thinking about social ambition than thanking God for my own personal tripe and onions.

And this is where gratitude comes in. If we spend more time thanking God for what really delights us, it will be harder for us to get wrapped up in conforming to what other people think. Maybe John Ashbery, Jonathan Franzen, and indie bands thrill you to the tips of your toes; praise God for creating people who could be such wonderful artists, and don’t pay any attention to my reverse-snobbery. If, on the other hand, your leisure reading preferences are more like mine, thank God for the excitement of spaceships and strange new worlds. And if you really, truly do like tripe and onions, thank God for that. Thankfulness of any kind will draw your mind away from the narrowness of your own ego and towards the vast creation, and the vaster Creator.

His delight is in the law of the Lord, says the Psalmist. He doesn’t follow The Rules out of a stern sense of moral duty; he doesn’t set aside the law of the Lord as an outmoded and irrelevant way of living; he delights in it. What does that delight look like? How can we bring it into our own lives?

Brother Lawrence was a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in the seventeenth century. By all rights, he should have lived his life in absolute obscurity—he did nothing of note in politics, art, or science, and indeed rarely left his monastery. He was uneducated, and spent most of his time working in the kitchen. And yet he left a powerful impression on all who knew him—powerful enough that his letters and conversations were gathered into a book, The Practice of the Presence of God. Brother Lawrence was so extraordinary because he devoted every moment of his day to basking in God’s presence. If he lost sight of God for a moment, he would set aside the distracting thought without guilt, and go back to adoring God. He continued this during his set times for prayer and his daily tasks alike, until, like the blessed man of Psalm 1, he had devoted day and night to meditation on God. He didn’t feel the need to be complicated in this practice; he described it as “simple attention, and a general passionate regard to God”. Such a simple thing, this clear-eyed contemplation; and yet it gave Brother Lawrence a peace and joy too great for words.

Even as I write this I’m coming up with all sorts of objections: that sort of adoration is impossible for me. God simply isn’t close enough that I can feel his presence. My attention span is about ten minutes long, tops; how am I supposed to think about one thing for the rest of my life? If basking in the presence of God is as easy as Brother Lawrence says it is, then why aren’t there lots of Christians walking around, visibly filled with a peace deeper than human understanding? But I know that these are all bad excuses, and I expect that you (who no doubt have several bad excuses of your own) know this too. Because God is delightful—he is the fount of all joy, the wellspring of all content. We are already in his presence always, but we cut ourselves off from him by our own sin, distraction, and fear. Brother Lawrence has shown that it’s possible to stop divorcing ourselves from the peace and joy that God constantly showers down on us—so let’s stop. From now on, let us take true delight in the law of the Lord.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. (Psalm 1:3)

A ring won't do much if the spirit of faith isn't there, though.

Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’ Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong. But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function. Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act – that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us? One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one. In the same way, before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we should have to look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence. Contraceptives have made sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis of ‘starvation’ the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations. Here is a third point. You find very few people who want to eat things that really are not food or to do other things with food instead of eating it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare. But perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful. I am sorry to have to go into all these details but I must. The reason why I must is that you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not. They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess.

There is so much to talk about in this lecture—I’m not able to cover even a tenth of what he said in this short post. However, a few things struck me particularly. First, the archbishop never made a dichotomy of justice and mercy. Instead, he shifted the questions of justice from “What law was broken? Who broke it? What punishment do they deserve?” to “Who has been harmed? What restoration do they need? Who is obligated to provide this to them?” The purpose of seeking justice is not to punish the perpetrators, but to restore broken relationships. God sent his Son, not to punish us, but to give us a way to restore our broken relationship with him. Similarly, in our own dealings with the world, we are to seek, not retribution or vengeance, but a restored world.

This restorative justice should stretch from the most personal level to the most international. During his talk, the archbishop told us about Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe who over the last thirty years has killed three to six million of his own citizens—or about a third of the country’s population. The archbishop has been vocal in his public denunciations of Mugabe—but he also writes regularly to the man, asking him to step down from his position and to work to right the wrongs he has done, and telling him that he is praying for him. To me, this was astounding. The archbishop is not willing to believe, a priori, that Mugabe is unable to repent. If you pray for someone, you must believe, however unlikely, that God still has power to change their hearts; you have not yet given up on them. This truly is a theory of justice that seeks to restore.

That was the broad idea of the archbishop’s talk. However, there was one more aspect that particularly struck me. At one point, the archbishop said, “Jesus told us, ‘my yoke is heavy and my burden light.’ If it’s feeling heavy, you’re probably carrying the wrong load.” The archbishop is certainly not a proponent of easy Christianity; he has risked his life and lost loved ones for the Gospel. But still he is able to say that Jesus’ burden on us should feel light. He told the story of how his father once offered to give a ride to a boy who was walking to town with a large parcel on his head. The boy put his load down to get into the truck, but as soon as he was seated he picked it back up and put it on his head again. This is what we do to God, too. We’re so in love with our own fortitude and moral effort that we won’t allow him to take our burden off us. Perhaps if we were more willing to trust God with the weight of impossible forgiveness, restorative justice would not seem so far out of our reach.

As I was perusing A Testament to Freedom (a compilation of Bonhoeffer’s writings), I came across a 1928 essay called “Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity.” One point that struck me in particular was his argument concerning the directionality of faith—that God seeks us out, and instead we are simply open to him as opposed to truly active seekers of His presence. Bonhoeffer elucidates it far better than I can, so I will reproduce a section here:

And yet the correct meaning of the cross of Christ is nothing else than radical development of the concept of God held by Jesus himself. It is, so to speak, the historically visible form which this concept of God has assumed. God comes to people who have nothing but room for God—and this hollow space, this emptiness in people is called Christian speech, faith. This means that in Jesus of Nazareth, the revealer, God inclines to the sinner; Jesus seeks the companionship of the sinner, goes after him or her in boundless love. He wants to be where a human person is no longer anything. The meaning of the life of Jesus is the demonstration of this divine will for sinners, for those who are unworthy. (Bonhoeffer 52-53)

I don’t know about you, but I had always conceived of faith as something active—a “knock and the door shall be opened” mentality, though I realize now that that particular verse (Luke 11:9) was used out of context by the vast majority of my pastors and actually refers to prayer, not faith. I conceived of faith as a self-made project, a one-way belief in God that required constant maintenance and development. But here, Bonhoeffer seems to indicate that the “seeker’s” mentality isn’t necessarily the correct (or Biblical) way of going about faith, as it ignores God’s “personal,” if you will, stake in us.

What Bonhoeffer brings to light is the possibility that God comes to us, that God, somehow, humbles himself before the sinner. It just seems like such an impossibility to me—the greatness of God seeking me out? How? Shouldn’t I be seeking Him? I know it’s the heart of Christian faith, but it’s difficult to fit my “seeker” mentality into a “receiver’s” construct. I am the recipient of God’s attention, not one of many vying for His “time.” Bonhoeffer manages to capture messages we’ve heard over and over again—that God wants a relationship with every one of us—and state it in a new (and clearer) light.

I know seeking is an inherent part of faith, but it appears that I’ve ignored the other direction as well: that God desires to fulfill something in me as much as I desire to find something in Him. This directionality of faith may seem like something obvious, but I know I’ve forgotten it in my dogged pursuit of perfect faith. Perhaps I need to do a little more reflecting, allow God Himself to come to me, and somehow meet Him in the middle.

BEYOND

The Creation vs. Evolution Debate

A talk by Professor Denis Lamoureux followed by a Q&A session.

SATURDAY, OCT 23 at 7 PM in EMERSON 210

Sponsored by the Harvard Ichthus, Harvard College Faith and Action, and Harvard College Alpha Omega

Abstract: Are there only two positions on origins: either “evolution” or “creation”? This lecture is an introduction to professional terminology, science-religion dialogue, and various views on origins (young earth creation, progressive creation, evolutionary creation, deistic evolution, and atheistic evolution). Denis O. Lamoureux is an Associate Professor of Science and Religion at St. Joseph’s College in the University of Alberta. He has debated leading anti-evolutionists, including Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and Jonathan Wells. With Johnson, he co-authored Darwinism Defeated? The Johnson-Lamoureux Debate on Biological Origins (1999). Lamoureux has recently released Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (2008) and I Love Jesus & I Accept Evolution (2009). He holds three earned doctoral degrees—dentistry, evangelical theology, and evolutionary biology. Lamoureux also shares his personal voyage from Christian to atheist, evolutionist to creationist and back again.

Richard Dawkins commented on Denis Lamoureux on The Agenda in 2008. Dawkins doesn’t seem too happy… Check out the video!

BEYOND

The Creation vs. Evolution Debate

A talk by Professor Denis Lamoureux followed by a Q&A session.

SATURDAY, OCT 23 at 7 PM in EMERSON 210

Sponsored by the Harvard Ichthus, Harvard College Faith and Action, and Harvard College Alpha Omega

Abstract: Are there only two positions on origins: either “evolution” or “creation”? This lecture is an introduction to professional terminology, science-religion dialogue, and various views on origins (young earth creation, progressive creation, evolutionary creation, deistic evolution, and atheistic evolution). Denis O. Lamoureux is an Associate Professor of Science and Religion at St. Joseph’s College in the University of Alberta. He has debated leading anti-evolutionists, including Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and Jonathan Wells. With Johnson, he co-authored Darwinism Defeated? The Johnson-Lamoureux Debate on Biological Origins (1999). Lamoureux has recently released Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (2008) and I Love Jesus & I Accept Evolution (2009). He holds three earned doctoral degrees—dentistry, evangelical theology, and evolutionary biology. Lamoureux also shares his personal voyage from Christian to atheist, evolutionist to creationist and back again.

Richard Dawkins commented on Denis Lamoureux on The Agenda in 2008. Dawkins doesn’t seem too happy… Check out the video!

Although I do not celebrate the same days of commemoration as are traditional in the Anglican or Catholic tradition, I appreciate the sentiments behind what Wright says as he discusses “All Saints Day” and “All Souls Day.” He points out that ”this commemoration assumes a sharp distinction between the ‘saints,’ who are already in heaven, and the ‘souls,’ who aren’t and who are therefore still less than completely happy and need our help (as we say today) to ‘move on’” (Wright 168). Within my own thinking, it had been well established that there was an important distinction between the ordinary average member of the early church and the saints – St. Peter or St. Paul or St. James. Even though I don’t generally use the name “saint” to refer to them, I viewed them with all the same properties.

The adoration includes both the notable saints like Paul as well as the more notorious sinners who came to repentance. All Christians are saints, and all Christians are sinners.

Yet as Wright reminds us, “In the early Christian writings all Christians are ‘saints,’ including the muddled and sinful Corinthians” (169). This can be easily seen from a quick survey of the verses with the word saints in them:

• “To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.” – Romans 1:7
• “Pray that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea and that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints there…” – Romans 15:31
• “If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints?” - 1 Corinthians 6:1
• “To the church of God in Corinth, together with all the saints throughout Achaia…” – 2 Corinthians 1:1
• “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus…” – Ephesians 1

Recognizing that all believers in the church are saints changes our thinking in two ways:

1. It calls us higher – it calls us to start acting like saints. Since reading Surprised by Hope, I have started asking myself questions like, “Is my behavior like that of a saint?” “Would a saint do this?” This is mostly a way to not get sick of the other question which I often ask myself, which is “Is this action pleasing to God?” But also, it reminds me that I am a saint, that my character should be fitting my identity as a saint, and sometimes remembering that sense of identity challenges me to behave even better than I would if I simply ask, “Would God like this?”
2. It prevents idolatry. Although we should admire and be humbled by those noteworthy Christians of yesteryear who did amazing things for God’s kingdom, remembering that all Christians are saints also reminds me that all saints are human. They struggled with fears and doubts and questions. One of the most surprising revelations in recent years came when Mother Teresa’s letters were published; although she did amazing work for God, she was filled with a spiritual void and emptiness during the later portion of her life. Saints do not have to be perfect. Paul was imperfect. Peter was imperfect. The only one who ever achieved perfection was Jesus.

There are all sorts of other implications from these beliefs, and if you’d be interested in checking them out, NT Wright also has a short book (only 70 pages) titled For All the Saints? which I would happily loan to anyone on campus. But more importantly, check out Surprised by Hope. His discussion of sainthood is only one of many great insights from the book.

This question posed by G.K Chesterton’s well-meaning publisher, served as the premise for Chesterton’s book, Orthodoxy, in which he provides the answer to this query (hint: it involves God!) Indeed, belief in one’s self is a value so ingrained in secular society that when Chesterton dismissed the concept earlier in the conversation, the publisher was completely baffled. His puzzlement is understandable. Instead of being told by the world to humble ourselves before God and each other, we have been told to raise ourselves up and to delight in our latent potential. Since birth, the mantra is repeated: if we believe in ourselves, we can accomplish anything! Taken with a grain of salt, this in some ways is true. Humans are amazing and have done awe-inspiring things because they believed they could do so. However, without God’s redemptive power in the picture, it is all meaningless, as the Teacher repeats over and over in Ecclesiastes.        

Although striving to imitate Christ will bring spiritual growth, we can't guarantee the physical effects shown above

Complete self-reliance is essentially a more noble-sounding form of pride. Evoking the image of the rugged individual, who succeeds through his own know-how and determination, self-reliance is appealing. The irony is that we can only become the person we are meant to be if we submit our will to God instead of “believing in ourselves”.

Deep down I am not a confident person. But like thousands of other people at Harvard and for that matter everywhere in the world, I’ve learned over the years how to establish a façade of sharp self-assurance. This is a tiring thing to do, especially when most of the time, I do not know exactly who I am or what I want to do with my life. It is an especially pain-inducing act to put on when so many people around me are poised, with ambitious dreams that they are likely to achieve.

That is why I was so thankful to come across this passage in Orthodoxy: “A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason.”

What a relief, to know that I do not have to have my whole future mapped out but instead am required to quietly and steadfastly depend on God!  The ambiguity of my life on earth takes on new meaning as I understand that I am running a different sort of race than the world expects me to. Instead of looking within myself into what appears to be a muddle of ugly contradictions and faults for assurance, I know that I am to look to God. Instead of a blank canvas, calling me to paint my own destiny, I am meant to be a mirror reflecting Christ. Paul reminds us of this beautiful calling in his letter to the church in Ephesus and to all believers everywhere: “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God”. Ephesians 5:1-2 (NIV)