Loving what God gives us

I am sure we ought to love God in our lives and in all the blessings he sends us. We should trust him in our lives, so that when our time comes, but not before, we may go to him in love and trust and joy. But, speaking frankly, to long for the transcendent when you are in your wife’s arms is, to put it mildly, a lack of taste, and it is certainly not what God expects of us. We ought to find God and love him in the blessings he sends us. If he pleases to grant us some overwhelming earthly bliss, we ought not to try and be more religious than God himself. For then we should spoil that bliss by our presumption and arrogance; we should be letting our religious fantasies run riot and refusing to be satisfied with what he gives. Once a man has found God in his earthly bliss and has thanked him for it, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to remind himself that these earthly pleasures are only transitory, and that it is good for him to accustom himself to the idea of eternity….

I am sure we honor God more if we gratefully accept the life he gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, grieving deeply and sincerely when we have belittled or thrown away any of the precious things of life (some people grumble at such behavior and say it is bourgeois to be so weak and sensitive) than we do if we are insensitive towards the blessings of life, and therefore equally insensitive towards pain.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Reality never repeats

I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, ‘H. is dead,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’ It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’ 

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. 

Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook! ‘Things on this side are not so different after all.’ There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored. 

And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air. 

From A Grief Observed by C S Lewis

We shall not weary...

We contend, and we contend relentlessly, for the dignity of the human person, of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God, destined from eternity for eternity—every human person, no matter how weak or how strong, no matter how young or how old, no matter how productive or how burdensome, no matter how welcome or how inconvenient. Nobody is a nobody; nobody is unwanted. All are wanted by God, and therefore to be respected, protected, and cherished by us.

We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until all the elderly who have run life’s course are protected against despair and abandonment, protected by the rule of law and the bonds of love. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every young woman is given the help she needs to recognize the problem of pregnancy as the gift of life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, as we stand guard at the entrance gates and the exit gates of life, and at every step along way of life, bearing witness in word and deed to the dignity of the human person—of every human person.

Against the encroaching shadows of the culture of death, against forces commanding immense power and wealth, against the perverse doctrine that a woman’s dignity depends upon her right to destroy her child, against what St. Paul calls the principalities and powers of the present time, this convention renews our resolve that we shall not weary, we shall not rest, until the culture of life is reflected in the rule of law and lived in the law of love.

Extract from Richard John Neuhaus speaking at the National Right to Life Committee, July 5, 2008. 

Moving on...

If any of us were to be asked, do you want to stay here on earth, or would you like to move into a bigger, better, brighter world we would probably answer that, even with earthly anxieties and problems, we would rather stay on earth than move into an uncertain future. But, like the child, we have no choice. At a time, not of our choosing, we make the transition from this world into eternity. From our earthly perspective this moment looks like, loss, parting, separation, it looks and feels like death. But the one who has died is encountering the fullness of God’s life and love, and is being offered this life for eternity.

Fr John O'Connor, on his blog Food for Faith

The end of the world

A lengthy extract from P T Forsyth's The Justification of God, pages 75-7. 

 

This great, and righteous, and blessed goal then—what is it? We speak of the end of the world. But (it has been said) in any great sense of the word world, it can have no end. Our deeper views of creation, and of the relation of the creature to the Creator, do not allow us to think of the universe as an external and mechanical product of His, which He could destroy and make another. The existence of the universe is too closely bound up with the being of God for that its life is the immanence of the Transcendent. It does not emerge into Eternity, which is not simply a beyond. The infinite is the content of a finite which holds of the Eternal. The world belongs to God in a deeper sense than being His property. The body is not but the property of the soul. The world holds of God. It cannot therefore have an end, as it had no beginning, in the popular sense of the words; it has a consummation. The universe is not a mere phase of the Infinite which passes like a vapour. It is not a mere parenthesis otiose to an eternal context. It is not a mere scaffolding, not a mere collapsible tent. We cannot strictly speak of the end of the world; we can only speak of the end of certain worlds within the world. Stardust is still a constituent of the world. Extinct suns still have a place in systems. And extinct systems may mean a re-adjustment of the balance of power in space, but they need not mean the winding-up oft he universe.

When we do speak of the end of the world, we really mean the end of man. And, if there be a redemption at all, that end is neither in dust nor fire. The end of Humanity can but mean the return of man to God, in free worship, humble service, and intelligent communion. It means the consummation of the souls that began as His natural creatures and end as redeemed sons. For spiritual personality is a growth through the creative discipline of life, and especially through its tragedies. The supreme tragedy becomes, in the Cross of Christ, the vehicle of the eternal Redemption, and the Source of the New Creation. Man’s end is not dissolution but Eternity, an active communion in the Life divine. A communion it is, and no mere immersion. It is ‘not mere fusion in the Divine, which, for a being like man, would be  extinction. And no mere endless existence could be a true end for man. It could be no consummation. Immortality is much more than just going on. Were it not more it would be the burden of Tithonus.  Eternity is not duration. The true end is the completion of that schooling of soul, will, and person which earthly life divinely means, and which for God’s side is constant new creation and its joy. It is perfect and active union with God’s active Will, the barter of its love, and its secure intercommunion. It is the surrender to God, not of our personality,not of our existence as persons, but of our person, of our egoism as persons; for the living God is God of the living not of the dead. It is a kingdom of souls as ends that realise themselves, though only in the gift of the Spirit, which descends upon us rather than mounts through us. We face here a great paradox. By grace it is given souls to have life in themselves. The great end, therefore, is not even an immortality sentimentalised—a metaphysical, rational, and credible immortality sentimentalised; but it is a moral realm of persons made perfect on a universal and eternal scale by the gift of a holy God. It is the self-realisation of the Holy. It is the Divine Commedia on the scale of all existence. To the whole of Humanity, with faith and hope eclipsed by world catastrophe, the infinite and most merciful Majesty yet says, ‘Fear not, little flock, it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.’ And, ‘Si quis amavit novit quid haec vox clamat.’ *

The chief cause of our being unhinged by catastrophe is twofold. First, that we have drawn our faith from the order of the world instead of its crisis, from the integrity of the moral order rather than from the tragedy of its recovery in the Cross. And, even if we start there, the second error is that we have been more engrossed with the ill we are saved from than with Him who saves us, and the Kingdom for which we are saved. We are more taken up with the wrongs so many men have to bear than with the wrong God has to bear from us all—God who yet atones and redeems in giving us a Kingdom which is always His in reality and ours in reversion. It is not as if God first redeemed, and, having thus prepared the ground, brought in the Kingdom; but He redeemed us by bringing in the Kingdom, and setting it up in eternal righteousness and Eternal Life. The Cross of Christ is not the preliminary of the Kingdom; it is the Kingdom breaking in. It is not the clearing of the site for the heavenly city; it is the city itself

descending out of heaven from God. 

 

*The Latin phrase Forsyth quotes seems a little obscure. According to the rough online translation it means; If anyone knows the sound of this voice and he loved. Presumably that needs to be translated into actual English as something along the lines of: If anyone knows the sound of this voice, he loves it. I'm open to a better interpretation. Forsyth, as usual, gives no indication where the line comes from, and Google seems to indicate that he's the only person quoting it. Again, it would be interesting to know its origin.

Waking Up

Waking up is hard to do
But once we see
How deep the suffering goes
How high the purpose of human beings
Created in the image of the Creator
What is sleep, but settling for so much less?
What is sleep, but surrendering to a tiny, lazy savior?
What is sleep, but biding time in such boredom
That eternity becomes bad news?

Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma
"A blessing for wakefulness" in catapult magazine