Tag Archives: Testimony

Apostle to the Apostles

23 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Early Church, Easter, Faith

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This happened to catch my eye over at Father Z’s. While in my tradition we don’t do Saints like the Catholics do, we do respect the stalwart in faith who have gone before us. Amongst them is Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the Risen Christ, and her Feast day was yesterday. That is why she is sometimes called the Apostle to the Apostles, Christ himself charged her with going and telling the apostles that He was risen.

Well, I gather some think that the Church has rather shortchanged her and that her reputation has been sullied. Maybe so, not my department, but I keep in mind what Jessica wrote long ago about her on NEO, my blog. It was this:

Under Jewish Law the testimony of a woman was no testimony at all. The first witness to the Risen Lord was a woman – Mary Magdalen. She was tearful. There she was, come to the tomb to anoint Him, and there was the stone moved. Her mind went where most of our minds would have gone – someone had taken Him away. That great stone had not moved itself, and dead bodies don’t walk out of tombs. The grave-clothes were bundled up and there was no trace of Jesus. Hard to imagine her feelings at the point. Only two days earlier her world had fallen apart. The man whose feet she had anointed and whom she had followed so loyally had been taken, tortured and then crucified. She knew that; she’d been there (which was more than could be said for most of those Apostles). It was over. All that remained was for her to do a final duty to the corpse. But even that was to be denied her. They had taken her Lord away.

She ran back to where the disciples were and told Peter the horrible news. Typically Peter, he ran to the tomb, and equally typically was outpaced by the younger John. But John stood at the entrance, and when Peter arrived he it was who, impulsive and brave as ever, went inside to see that the tomb was, indeed, as empty as Mary had said. The men went back home, no doubt to tell the others; Mary, as is the way of women, wanted to stay there a moment longer, perhaps to gather her thoughts, perhaps to mourn a moment alone.

She looked into the tomb again, only to be met by the most amazing sight – two angels asking her why she wept. The answer she gave echoes down the ages:  “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.” As she turned away she saw a stranger, whom she took to be the gardener and asked where Jesus was. Then the man spoke – just one word, one word which shattered the world as she had known it and which echoes down the ages, even to the end of all things. ‘Mary’ was that word, the first from the lips of the Resurrected Lord. However much her tears had blinded her, that voice was clearly unmistakable: “Rabboni!” She said. Teacher, teacher, that was what she called Him. She went to cling to Him and He said: ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.’  He bade her to go and tell the others what she had seen.

The testimony of a woman was no testimony in Jewish Law, and yet it was to a woman that the Risen Lord first came. He had broken the bonds of death, He had conquered the power of death and of Satan, the hold of sin on mankind was broken; and these things He entrusted to the power of one who in Jewish Law could offer no testimony at all.

She was the first. Let us love and honour her for that this Easter morning: ‘He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!’

And there, on Easter morning itself, our Lord made his statement on the equality of women. We would do well to note that he made no case for their superiority, as so many these days seem to think, he made the case that women are valuable, and trustworthy, in their own right, which role is not the same as men but is complementary and equal to men.

In the Tridentine Missal, the Epistle is this (from the Song of Songs)

I will rise, and will go about the city: in the streets and the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, and I found him not. (quaesivi illum et non inveni.) The watchmen who keep the city, found me: Have you seen him, whom my soul loveth? When I had a little passed by them, I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him: and I will not let him go …

Would that we all (or any of us) were that faithful to the Lord.

Tradition

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith

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This morning I’m blogging on NEO about Neptunus Lex, a legend on the Milblogs, the American blogs that deal with the military, almost all of us read him until his untimely death on 6 March 2012. But what death of an honored leader is ever timely?

In any case, of all American services, perhaps the Navy and its Marine Corps are most cognizant of its tradition, and that transcends the military to many other things including the faith. Lex wrote this:

So, we were 231 years old yesterday. And still have our hairline, most of our own teeth, and a good resting heart rate. And we’re still at sea, or getting ready for sea or coming back from having been at sea, pretty much all the time. Being, you know: The Sea Service, and all.

Which, in terms of enduring connections to our storied past, is worth keeping in mind. There’s a tendency for people inside institutions to lose the big picture sometimes, a tendency to look back at some memory-shrouded and idealized past, or look forward to some hazy, perfectly realized future, if only this decision had been made or that program had been supported, or if that other institute of higher learning could be shut down until it had been re-habilitated until it once more clove to our own concept of the ideal.

The fact is that we’ve never had a perfect Navy, and we have never all of us been content. Our ships and aircraft have never been perfect, and the vagaries of fate may mean that fools will rise further than they ought to while good men are all too often left behind. But we have always been better than the sum of our individual parts and always the mission has remained. We have always accomplished that mission effectively, even if not always perfectly, if not always efficiently. Being an interlinked and interdependent pyramid of imperfect beings, our vision is clouded at times; we see the world darkly, as through a glass. We err.

We have a grave responsibility to the republic, and it would be irresponsible of us not to focus on our imperfections – although, perhaps we might not do so on our birthday, but never mind: While doing so, we should always strive to maintain a decent degree of humility and proportion. We must see ourselves in the mosaic.

There are activist legal scholars who discover to their gratified amazement that their personal policy preferences were enshrined in the Constitution all along, that they had been secretly encoded. Not unlike them are many of us who love our service so well. We often think that we could love it just that little bit better, if only it would be more like we would like it to be. More ships, better airplanes, a couple of those submarine thingies. SEALs. CB’s. EOD. More nearly perfect.

It’s necessary to remember though that we are but ghosts and we pass through, leaving only traces behind. The institution endures, the mission will be accomplished.

It strikes me that this is even more true for us, as Christians, our mission is 2000 years old instead of 240 and change. It strikes me as unlikely that the same thing that appealed to King George II will appeal to a young woman in 2017, so perhaps the message must be repackaged, with all due respect to our beliefs and traditions.

Chalcedon’s report from Flame strikes me as that. The same message, but repackaged for a new age. And that’s the thing:

The Mission goes on, it always will.

Doctrine Really Does Matter: So Does Evangelization

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in Consequences, Faith, Prayers, Salvation

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This is very interesting, although I’ve heard this anecdotally for years, here are some real results. From On Religion via The Catholic Herald.

When they set out to find growing mainline churches, sociologist David Haskell and historian Kevin Flatt did the logical thing – they asked leaders of four key Canadian denominations to list their successful congregations.

It didn’t take long, however, to spot a major problem as the researchers contacted these Anglican, United Church, Presbyterian and Evangelical Lutheran parishes.

“Few, if any, of the congregations these denomination’s leaders named were actually growing,” said Haskell, who teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University in Branford, Ontario. “A few had experienced a little bit of growth in one or two years in the past, but for the most part they were holding steady, at best, or actually in steady declines.”

To find thriving congregations in these historic denominations, Haskell and Flatt, who teaches at Redeemer University College in Hamilton, had to hunt on their own. By word of mouth, they followed tips from pastors and lay leaders to other growing mainline churches.

The bottom line: The faith proclaimed in growing churches was more orthodox – especially on matters of salvation, biblical authority and the supernatural – than in typical mainline congregations. These churches were thriving on the doctrinal fringes of shrinking institutions.

“The people running these old, established denominations didn’t actually know much about their own growing churches,” said Haskell, reached by telephone. “Either that or they didn’t want to admit which churches were growing.”

I found that fascinating, the growing churches, are simply putting their head down and growing the church, but they are not really telling the hierarchs what they are doing. I can’t say I’m surprised, though, I can remember when I was a trustee of my home church, even the council paid no attention to the mission fundraising, we were a fairly conservative E & R church in the maelstrom of the UCC, it was not a happy combination. You know, we traditional types were not enamored of supporting Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who was and is a part of the UCC. Continuing:

In growing congregations, all the clergy interviewed said it was crucial to encourage non-Christians to convert. In declining ones, only half the clergy agreed.

The study found that, in growing churches, pastors were even more orthodox than their congregations. In declining ones, the pastors were even more liberal.

Growing congregations were likely to be younger and have more children.

via On Religion – Canadian researchers find that doctrine really does matter, in terms of church growth – Columns

I don’t really think I have much to add to that, except that I told you so, and so did a lot of others here. A lot of the mainstream churches have become political clubs, or as I said once, coffee shops full of do-gooders, not houses of God. Well, the ones that remember the mission seem to be progressing in the mission.

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

A Remarkable Faith

07 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Book Review, Church/State, Faith, Persecution

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irinaIt’s funny sometimes, how things come together. Last night, I was looking at some old posts on NEO, thinking about rerunning a few over Christmas. Some are mine, and some are Jess’. Two that really struck me were two of hers speaking about Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and his not all that favorable view of the west.

This morning I read in the Catholic Herald, from our friend Francis Phillips, about an interview on Radio Four with Irina Ratushinskaya. She was, as I’m sure few of you know, I hadn’t, sentenced to four years in the Soviet labor camps, mostly, I think, because she was a Christian. Well, make that present tense, because she still is.

Here is some of what Francis says.

By coincidence, I happened to visit the friend who had introduced me to Ratushinskaya on the evening of the morning I had heard the broadcast. We both listened to the interview again and I borrowed Ratushinskaya’s subsequent book, In the Beginning, about her life before her mock trial in 1982, from my friend’s book shelf.

It struck me how God can penetrate the most improbable places, such as the rigidly atheistic school environment in Odessa, where Ratushinskaya grew up in the early 1960s. Stalin might be dead but under his successor, Khrushchev, the penalty for anti-Soviet behaviour, such as writing religious poetry, was still extraordinarily harsh.

As a child Ratushinskaya started to pray, convinced that God existed because her teachers kept insisting that He didn’t. She understood almost instinctively that that only through religious faith would her soul “remain my own: nobody will be able to manipulate me.” Later she learnt that her grandmother had her secretly christened when she was a baby.

It struck me, as it seemed to strike Francis, as remarkable how in a society as aggressively atheistic as the Soviet Union, she still managed to think her way into Christianity, as did her husband. It’s also remarkable that they were able to find things like an Orthodox priest to marry them, and to soldier on, carrying the flame of Christ, now finally in the open.

What a remarkable story, do read the whole thing.

Stay with me: a meditation

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by in Faith, Prayers, Saints

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After I receive Holy Communion, I pray Padre Pio’s Stay with me. It expresses better than any prayer I know the reality of my own life as a Christian. Recently I have been putting some thoughts together on this, which I want to share with you.

So, here goes.

Stay with me, Lord, for it is necessary to have
You present so that I do not forget You.
You know how easily I abandon You.

How true that is. AT the church I now attend, they have a ‘communion hymn’, and I just want to remain quiet and ponder my Lord, whom I have just received. But the world seems determined to move on; are we that frightened of the silence and the thoughts of our hearts that we cannot linger a moment?

Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak
and I need Your strength,
that I may not fall so often.

At the centre of my need for Christ is the recognition that I do fail often, I fall, I falter even when I do not fall, and in the words of the old general confession of the Church of England: ‘I have done those things which I ought not to have done, and I have not done those things which I ought to have done, and there is no health in me’; without my Lord’s help, there is no hope. I am weak, but if I lean on him, I can be strong.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my life,
and without You, I am without fervor.

How often is there ‘fervor’ in my faith? How often does it become something apart from the rest of my life? I read my Bible, I pray, I go to church. But is there a fervor there, or is it a routine? I know the truth in this verse from Padre Pio, for there is no fervor without him.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my light,
and without You, I am in darkness.

Of the the names of God, that he is eternal light is the one which means the most to me. When the darkness seems complete, when it threatens to overwhelm me, I light a candle before my statue of the Blessed Virgin, and then I am not afraid. Light will overcome the darkness.

Stay with me, Lord, to show me Your will.

How easily I forget his will when I leave church, or when I leave my prayers. What a weakness it is, how much at that point I feel the sin of Adam and Eve. How tempted I am to rely on my own will – though it is frail and feeble. If he stays with me, I go straight.

Stay with me, Lord, so that I hear Your voice
and follow You.

That still, small voice beneath the storms of life; it is there always – if I will just make the place and the silence where I can hear it. How tempting our modern world is with its instant access to noise. If I listen I can try to follow; I do not always succeed. But If I can’t hear, I hear only the devices and desires of my own heart.

Stay with me, Lord, for I desire to love You
very much, and always be in Your company.

I want to love God, always, but I am forgetful and sinful and I don’t do as I want to do; but if he is with me and I am in his company, I am conformed to him.

Stay with me, Lord, if You wish me to be faithful to You.

If Padre Pio can confess that, it emboldens me – for I forget so easily, and I am unfaithful so easily too. I confess my weakness and ask for forgiveness.

Stay with me, Lord, for as poor as my soul is,
I want it to be a place of consolation for You, a nest of love.

I am made to know God and to love him, so my soul longs for him and apart from him is desolate and without consolation.

Stay with me, Jesus, for it is getting late and the day is coming to a close, and life passes;
death, judgment, eternity approaches. It is necessary to renew my strength,
so that I will not stop along the way and for that, I need You.
It is getting late and death approaches,
I fear the darkness, the temptations, the dryness, the cross, the sorrows.
O how I need You, my Jesus, in this night of exile!

This valley of tears, this place of exile, where we sit by the waters of Babylon and mourn – darkness, temptation, dryness and sorrows – all can be healed only by the Cross – but how much I fear that Cross, that my strength will not be equal. I pray for strength to bear the burdens, but my faith is weak. My strength is in him.

Stay with me tonight, Jesus, in life with all its dangers. I need You.

How often is that my night prayer. Only he saves from the perils and dangers of the night, and if I feel him with me I can sleep, and hope to wake refreshed to do his work.

Let me recognize You as Your disciples did at the breaking of the bread,
so that the Eucharistic Communion be the Light which disperses the darkness,
the force which sustains me, the unique joy of my heart.

That captures exquisitely the sublime joy of receiving the Lord at the Eucharistic feast. At that moment I am lost, and happily lost, to the world. For a brief, but timeless moment. I am one with him – as I hope to be at the end of all earthly things.

Stay with me, Lord, because at the hour of my death, I want to remain united to You,
if not by communion, at least by grace and love.

At the last we can none of us escape the consequence of the sins of our first parents, and we are all heirs to death. But if we can die in him, we shall rise in him too.

Stay with me, Jesus, I do not ask for divine consolation, because I do not merit it,
but the gift of Your Presence, oh yes, I ask this of You!

There is no health in me, and if I were to get my just deserts, then how awful my fate; but his presence is consolation here on earth and hope hereafter.

Stay with me, Lord, for it is You alone I look for, Your Love, Your Grace, Your Will, Your Heart,
Your Spirit, because I love You and ask no other reward but to love You more and more.

In Him, his love, his grace, his sacred heart, alone is hope to be found. In Him I am brave, and as I know Him more, I love Him more.

With a firm love, I will love You with all my heart while on earth
and continue to love You perfectly during all eternity. Amen.

My will may fail, my actions fall short, my body be frail, but love will triumph – feeling the love, his love, which drew me to him, draws from me love in return. In that is my hope of salvation – that he knows how much I love him and will forgive my transgressions for the sake of Jesus Christ, in whose name alone is salvation to be found.

Thank you for reading my thoughts – and I’d be so interested in knowing yours.

 

 

 

Along the Watchtower

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Blogging, Faith

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My thanks to Neo for his kind remarks about the blog – and to all the contributors and commentators. In a way it would have been better had I called it ‘Noah’s ark’ in which, you will recall, all manner of creatures were collected. It doesn’t surprise me that some people find writer x or y an odd ‘fit’ with the others – we came together on no more advanced principle than that people who felt some kind of affinity to this place and wanted to write were welcome to do so.

As Neo reminds us, there have been ups and downs, and what with attempted censorship, my illness and people popping in and out, the wonder is we’re still here. I looked back at some of the earlier posts, and felt quite nostalgic at some of the bloggers who have come and gone since then, including some of our contributors. No one will, I hope, mind if I pay an especial tribute to Geoffrey Sales, who at times kept the blog going all by himself. I hope, too, no one will feel slighted if I pay a heartfelt tribute to Chalcedon451 who has kept the ship afloat despite his own heavy workload.

This place remains what it began as – namely a place where those who take Christianity seriously, can read a variety of views on our Faith. It is one of the few places where Roman Catholicism on the edge of Sedevacantism to evangelical Protestantism on the edge of California can be encountered in the same place. This can cause discomfort, but if we cannot bear to read views which differ from our own, the Internet offers many refuges. This is not and was never meant to be a ‘safe space’. My own views are too eclectic to satisfy traditionalists or liberals; I don’t claim that makes me ‘right’, but it may make me not atypical of a certain type of Anglican. I am grateful to those commentators who put up with my enthusiasms, and for those who want to read their party line, well they are as free to write it up as I am – as this is a Christian and not a denominational blog.

This place exists to allow Christians of all persuasions to express their views. It is not about syncretism – no one is required to abjure any view they hold – but it is about toleration – which can be ironic given the intolerance Christians have shown in the past – and even now. But at our best, we witness to the Truth of a God who is Love, and who through that love reached out to us though we were lost in chains of sin, and who suffered, died, was buried and rose again so that through him we should have the prospect of eternal life.

We are, all of us, on a pilgrimage, and now we see as through a glass darkly, and even the wisest of us (especially, perhaps the wisest of us who understands this) sees but glimpses of the Divine and the Infinite. But we have His light which leads us on. If parts of it gleam fitfully here, that is as much as we can hope for.

In what he wrote yesterday Neo referred to the vicissitudes of the past four years from my own point of view, and I am sure that each of us here has had their own. But the small community gathered here has persevered – and if it be His will, will continue.

The Kingdom of God

26 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Anglicanism, Bible, Faith, Reading the BIble

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The week of Christian unity can undo any progress made toward its main aim by one meeting – or so I find, and have found again last week. It was the turn of our local Catholic church this year to host a ‘service’ and a discussion. The service was the usual pap, which is about all one can expect on such occasions, but the ‘discussion’ was quite something else. As we’d all been looking at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus, the local priest begun by examining what ‘we mean when we say the Kingdom of God?’ Up piped one of his flock (who I was later told was something called an Extraordinary Eucharistic Minister – that was hardly the most extraordinary thing about her as it happened) to tell is in the tone of voice such women reserve for men, children and other idiots with whom a harsh fate forces them to consort, that ‘of course we should realise it is not a real kingdom, in those days they knew no better.’ As far as I could follow, she seemed to thing that the Kingdom of Heaven would be a participatory democracy. The priest asked if anyone had anything to say. What follows is what I had to say.

In the first place, it takes a degree of Biblical illiteracy of epic proportions to imagine that the Hebrews ‘knew no better’. God had not given them a king, and did not want them to have one, he yielded only when they insisted; the experiment did not end well. So the idea that a people who were ruled by Judges knew ‘no better than that’ holds no water. There is not much sign that the Jews of the Second Temple era thought a great deal of kingship – they had only to look at the people to whom God had given that office to know what He thought of it.

In the second place, there is not the slightest trace in the New Testament that God thinks that anything like participatory democracy is a good idea, of that it is modelled on the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus taught us to pray that God’s will be done ‘on earth as it is in heaven’; it would take a modern liberal Christian to find in that the idea that some kind of majority will should rule. Paul tells us the body is made up of many parts – but it needs a head. The early Church had elders who governed on behalf of all. They were not monarchs, God alone was King, but they were the servants of the King. Jesus will come again in glory – and he will judge the living and the dead; we are not told that there will be jury of our peers and an appeal system.

In the third place, the habit of assuming that we, in our time, know better than those who lived before us hardly stands up to examination. If the climate change alarmists are right, industrialisation has wrecked the planet; if they are not, most of our rulers are fools who have fallen for the biggest fraud in history: either way, our civilization’s superior wisdom seems suspect. Any ‘civilization’ that allows and encourages the slaughter of million of infants in the womb is really a form of barbarism.

In conclusion, Jesus meant what he said – heaven is a Kingdom with God as King and Judge. If we wish to argue the toss with him, there is a nice lake of fire which we will be welcome to share with all those who still think that having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we really are as wise as God.

How did it go down? If I tell you that most of those present were liberal Anglicans and Tablet reading Catholics, you can imagine.

Listening to God

23 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Anglicanism, Blogging, Catholic Tradition, Faith, poetry

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Now that my health seems up to doing things without my feeling as though a ten ton truck has hit me after the slightest exertion, I’ve told Chalcedon and Neo that they can stand down from their ‘Saturday Jess’ duties. I’d like to thank them, not least Neo who delved through the back posts to great effect, and also Steve Brown, whose idea it was. I found it interesting to read, because it was almost like reading what someone else had written. They charted an odd trajectory. When I started AATW, a few of the idiots who had trolled me elsewhere tried to post comments saying that it was obvious where it was going – at some point there would be an announcement that I had become a Roman Catholic. As early though, as July of 2012 (only a few months after I started) I set up camp on what I called Mt Nebo – where I’ve remained.

My Anglicanism is of the Catholic variety, and where I worship we kneel at the altar and receive communion on the tongue, we pray the Rosary, and on Thursdays we have an hour’s eucharistic adoration; my priest understands my Marian veneration and shares it. I have not been given the signal to cross the Tiber, and so I remain in Canterbury, fully acknowledging everything we have inherited from the first Roman mission of St Augustine, but also taking on board the older, Celtic Christianity which came here under the Romans, and the insights and gifts of the Reformers. Without George Herbert, John Keble, T.S. Eliot and R.S. Thomas, my life would be infinitely the poorer, and in their lines I trace the spirit which moves the Anglicanism of my heart – and my faith is one of the heart, as well as the head. We pray, and we might expect an answer, after all it is a conversation with God, but sometimes it seems otherwise, as answer comes there none. As a Welsh Anglican, I find it is R.S. Thomas who describes this best for me in his poem, Nuclear:

“It’s not that he can’t speak;
who created languages
but God? Nor that he won’t;
to say that is to imply
malice. It is just that
he doesn’t, or does so at times
when we are not listening, in
ways we have yet to recognise
as speech”

In one of his early poems, the beautiful and moving In a country Church, RST describes perfectly what can happen when you open yourself to that realisation – that God speaks to us in ways we need to become attuned to:

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

Who could see love in that broken and battered body on the bloody Cross? Who would have looked to such a place for redemption? Yet that is what God is telling us, that is where we must look, there is no other place.

The best reflection on my own journey as a Christian is this from RST’s Pilgrimages:

It is I
who ask. Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that in times
like these and for one like me
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?

The answer God gives to the question of man’s suffering takes the form of the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

And for those who want to her RST reading one of his great poems which says so much about my homeland, here’s a treat.

Faithfulness

09 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Faith, Homilies

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Sometimes we overlook the obvious. We can be so intent on trying to be the best Christian we can that we forget that we are that when we do quite simple things; I can exercise my discipleship quite effectively in doing my daily round, if I do it in the spirit of God; my everyday life should be infused with my spiritual life, not in some way apart from it.

There is here part of the constant temptation of a form of gnostic Manicheism where we separate out the things of the spirit from those of the flesh and imagine that all the latter are filthy and all the former pure; but we are in the flesh for a reason, and we ought not to forget that in his Incarnation, Our Lord sanctifies this sinful flesh. It is true that for the sake of convenience the Fathers often spoke about the flesh in opposition to the things of the Spirit, but they did not mean us to take things literally – our faith is a call to the sanctification of the flesh – and we shall be resurrected bodily, we shall not be disembodied spirits. We’re not going to be floating around on any cloud strumming a harp, we’re going to be living in God’s world the way God wanted it to be from the beginning, so we’d best get started on the process as soon as possible.

If I confess, I would say that I do not always give God the priority he should have, but I hope that in the things I do for other folk, I do it in his name, and in wanting to do the best I can, I reflect that; if a thing’s worth doing, as my old mum used to say, it’s worth doing properly.

Modern man is used to being the measure of all things, and highly resistant to any idea to the contrary. He, and he alone, will decide what the standards are and how he will fulfill them. This is not the Christian point of view. When I was a lad I had a view that God was watching everything I did. Childish, you might think, but it saved me from going astray a time or four, and I’ve tended to stick with it; it’s a good protection. I still ask myself would I do whatever it is I am tempted to do if God could see me, because, of course, He is the Just Judge, He is the ultimate arbiter and to HIm and Him  alone will I answer. If the answer if at all doubtful, then the policy is don’t do it. I remember that the earliest Christians made a public confession, and there’s something to be said for that I think, at least as an attitude of mind.

I can speak, of course, only for myself, but I find living on some elevated, higher plane hard. It’s good for me to try, and I have a period of meditative prayer every day, but golly Moses (as my old mum, again, used to say) I don’t find it comes easy. I went through a period as a young man when, because of that, I felt a failure as a Christian, with the consequence that I tended to forget the obvious – which was that everything I did witnessed to the hope that was within me, and to forget that because I was a failure at ‘higher end’ Christian practices was foolish, as it effectively meant throwing out the baby with the bath-water.

We should never forget to do the good just because we can’t always (or ever sometimes) do our best. if we are faithful in the small things, we shall, one day, by his Grace, find we have been faithful in the big ones too. Amen.

Seeking the kingdom?

28 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Bible, Faith

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There was an implication in my last one that the sort of faith I was fed in my youth, concentrating as it did on the fear of God and with its image of the Father as a stern but just judge, was not one which, when the winds of change hit, turned to have deep roots. That may, of course, just have been my view, but I don’t think it was; I think, though, it was superficial. For those who just went because it was ‘the thing to do’, that was what they came with and took away. But it wasn’t true for all of us. Some of us may have come for that, or because of that, but we acquired something else in the process – and that can best be called the ‘new spirit’ of which the New Testament speaks. Christ’s living word evangelised us.

I sometimes think that the way our faith is taught focusses too much on the two great festivals – Easter and Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the Resurrection and the Incarnation are not vitally important – but I am saying that are not everything. Catholics now, I think, number Sundays outside festivals as ‘in ordinary time’. I don’t know the derivation of that, but don’t like what (perhaps wrongly) I take to be the implication. For me, studying and reflecting on Christ’s mission during the Incarnation and before the Resurrection were what struck deep roots. Luke hit home hardest.

In Luke I encountered a Saviour who reached out to the marginalised and the sinner, indeed to those marginalised by their sins, and who prayed and told me prayer was important. So I tried to do the same, and the prayer mattered more than I could have known. I’d come to prayer as part of the code – we asked God for things, and we praised him. The Lord’s prayer apart, I found it hard, still do. I am not good with extempore prayer – and that helped me. It was in the silences when I had given up struggling to find words that there was a still, small voice to be heard. So I developed my own habit of being silent and just being there with God. I recall once telling a friend this, and he described it as ‘like sunbathing’  I’ll take his word, we don’t get enough sun in these parts, though we get plenty of the other stuff in which you can really bathe; but it expresses it well enough. It is a suffusing of God’s presence. Jesus told us he must preach the good news of the Kingdom (Lk 4:23) – and that Kingdom was not in the future, it was now – or could be.

The Spirit gives life, we are told, but there was a condition – that could happen only once Jesus had died for us (Lk7.39b). The Kingdom of God is what happens when the Spirit comes, or so it seemed, and seems still, to me. God is love, and light, and in that love we are loved, and by that light we are lit.

Only on reflection did it occur to me that this was my own out working of the doctrine of the Trinity. Concentration on the Father alone gave an unbalanced and shallow faith, only through the Son and the Spirit could balance be found and the deep wellsprings of faith be tapped. That being so, I stayed where I was because it was where God in fullness was. I know that for others that fullness is, they say, found in their churches. I’ve nothing against that, and indeed, once I had come to it myself, I renounced denominational rivalry. If a fellow believes he’s found the fullness of the Trinity in his church, I am glad for him – or her. And long before it became a suspect phrase, ‘who am I to judge?’ was on my lips. Not as a refuge in relativism, but as a surrender to the infinity of God’s mercy. These things are too high for me, I know only that me and my house serve the Lord God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is the Trinity which deepened and balanced my faith and which struck roots which have withstood the tempests. I’ve a sense it’s so for all believers, so I let the theologians argue – and go away to a quiet place where that still, small voice is found – and I thank God for his mercies.