A Christmas Meditation

This is a brief excerpt from Augustine's Confessions as he ponders the meaning of Jeremiah 23:24 which says, "Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord." (my emphasis)

[1.3] (all the "you"s are referring to God) "Do heaven and earth, then, contain the whole of you, since you fill them? Or, when once you have filled them, is some part of you left over because they are too small to hold you? If this is so, when you have filled heaven and earth, does that part of you which remains flow over to some other place? Or is it that you have no need to be contained by anything, because you contain all things in yourself and fill them by reason of the very fact that you contain them? For the things which you fill by containing them do not sustain and support you as a water-vessel supports the liquid which fills it. Even if they were broken to pieces, you would not flow out of them and away. And when you pour yourself out over us, you were not drawn down to us but draw us up to yourself; you are not scattered away, but you gather us together.

"You fill all things, but do you fill them with your whole self? Or is it that the whole of creation is too small to hold you and therefore holds only a part of you? And is this same part of you present in all things at once, or do different things contain different parts of you, greater or smaller according to their size? Does this mean that one part of you is greater and another smaller? Or are you present entirely everywhere at once, and no single thing contains the whole of you?"

There's no doubt that trying to wrap one's mind around the immensity of God is an exercise in futility!

... and this mind-bogglingly BIG God became a human baby...

On Servant Leadership

A good word from Brother Francis:

"'I came not to be served but to serve' (Mt. 20:28) says the Lord. Those who are appointed to rule over others may not boast of their position any more than if they were to be assigned to the duty of washing their brothers' feet. And if they are more disturbed about the possibility of losing their position than they would be about losing the duty of foot-washing, they will expose their souls to great danger."

The Greater Good

Recently I ran across this quote by John Cassian (360-435 AD) which I found interesting:

"There is a great difference between those who put out the fire of sin within themselves by fear of hell or hope of future reward and those who from the feeling of divine love have a horror of sin itself and of uncleanliness and keep hold of the virtue of purity simply from the love and longing for purity. They look for no reward from a promise for the future, but delighted with the knowledge of good things present, do everything not from regard to punishment but from delight in virtue. ... it is a much greater thing to be unwilling to forsake good for good's own sake than it is to withhold consent from evil for fear of evil. For in the former case the good is voluntary, but in the latter it is constrained either by fear of punishment or by greed of reward and more or less violently forced out of a reluctant party. Those who abstain from the allurements of sin owing to fear will, whenever the obstacle of fear is removed, once more return to what they love and so will not gain any permanent stability in good."

Spiritual Sweet Tooth?

Do you have a sweet tooth?

How about a spiritual sweet tooth?

If you pay attention to the sidebar on this blog you may have noticed that over the past number of months I've been reading through a bunch of Christian classics. There's a cool little series of books called "Upper Room Spiritual Classics" (see them: here) that takes selected portions of Christian Classics and compiles them into nice little books of about 100 pages. They're cheap, easy to read, and I find them interesting because it's cool to see how people viewed their relationship with God throughout the centuries.

One of the books I finished recently was selected writings of the Spanish Carmelite, John of the Cross. I actually didn't really connect with much of what he had to say (when you're reading stuff written in the 1500s by a Spanish Catholic mystic in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition you want to have your filters up maybe a little more than usual!): I found that some of they ways he used scripture was questionable and that he leaned more toward philosophy than theology than I would like. Nonetheless, I couldn't question his sincerity.

Anyway, one thing that did strike me, particularly because of today's post-modern emphasis on personal experience, was his criticism of what he called a spiritual sweet

tooth.

The major theme of his writings that I picked up was the need to imitate Christ in self-denial. I think he takes this theme to questionable extremes but was intrigued when he noted that often people convert to Christianity for selfish reasons (again, remember that he was writing during the Spanish Inquisition... people would convert to Christianity [Catholicism] in order to save their hide). Even beyond this, he says that people who are constantly searching (no matter how legitimately) for a fresh experience with God are usually doing so for personal benefit/pleasure rather than out of a desire to imitate Christ... who always practice self-denial rather than self-gratification.

He says of this attitude of self-serving spirituality: "Such an attitude is not the hallmark of self-denial and nakedness of spirit but the indication of a spiritual sweet tooth" (pg 37).

As I said before, I think this connects within our own context of post-modernism. In many ways Church is seen in a consumeristic way: "if I don't experience God in a way that I like I'll move on to the next church... and the next church until I find what I want."

You see people who become worship junkies... even worship connoisseurs moving from one religious experience to the next seeking their next spiritual fix.

"A person makes progress only by imitating Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one goes to the Father but through him, as he states himself in Saint John. Accordingly, I would not consider any spirituality worthwhile that wants to walk in sweetness and ease and run from the imitation of Christ" (pg. 38).

I think this is a much needed challenge for many of us today.