What if we realized that meditating on the Word of God was not merely a cerebral activity of just cognitively recollecting heady theology to oneself? What if we realized that it involved stepping out of the narrow, restrictive, and suffocating perimeters of our own mundane storyline and stepping into a world with a pulsing and absorbing plotline of God's drama-saturated blockbuster, while being accompanied by a gripping soundtrack that beautifully reverberated and amplified the deep, wordless satisfaction of being immersed in the Greatest Story ever written?
"Words have a life. The Word of God is a living and powerful thing. Powerful. Living. Something living has a movement to it."
-Dallas Willard
(1:06 - 1:20)
If we realized this dimension of alive-and-moving scriptural meditation, where the Word of God has a live and pulsing movement in its interactive dynamic due to it truly having a life of its own, we'd be on the cutting edge of the Lord's greatest weapon against a mundane and miserable existence.
Persevering for your special instructions is excruciating Lord. It hurts. It burns. It's longer than I signed up for. I don't know how much longer I can persevere for this. Many in my situation would have quit one way or another already. This uniquely tailored perseverance trial is grueling, agonizing for my soul at times. Lord, I hope it comes to an end soon. I don't know if what's in me can continue any longer for this. I need your fuel.
So moving. My eyes dampened with water emerging from the ocean springs of the heart on several occasions. My soul gave slow-motion awe-filled applause multiple times for the courage of the hero. Profound admiration for his Hulk-like muscles of integrity to his convictions that held strong to his unshakable convictions. Convictions that refused to bow down to agonizing external pressures constantly lacerating at him on all sides to compromise. Refusing no matter what. Such a person is extremely rare in the West. Extremely.
"Not only was the Teacher wise, but also he imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. The Teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true."
-Ecclesiastes 12:9-10
There is immense spiritual importance in "finding just the right words" to express life-transforming wisdom. If wisdom touches the soul of a person, and the soul of a person is touched by art, then beautified verbal artistry can touch the soul in ways that scientific and technical verbiage cannot. A computer will never be able to construct beautiful and wise sayings phrased with soul-sourced aesthetic eloquence. There will always be Smartphones. There will never be Wisephones.
An excerpt from a footnote from my Old Testament professor's book Old Testament Theology: Divine Call and Human Response really hits home on this point:
"Israel's wisdom traditions viewed aesthetic concerns as extremely important.... Along with the aesthetics of practical organization noted in 1 Kgs 10:4-5, wisdom prized artistry of expression (see Eccl 12:9-10). Wisdom, in part, consisted of the ability to match wise content with forms of expression that themselves displayed wisdom. The sages communicated their wisdom with rhetorical and aesthetic power so as to move the receptive hearer closer to the ideals they wished to communicate. For example, Wisdom literature typically exhibits a fascinating use of words and sounds and creative use of language, much of which, unfortunately, is lost in translation. it frequently uses rhyming, assonance, and word play... Similarly, several texts are written as alphabetic or acrostic poems, i.e., poems in which each line begins with a letter of the alphabet, in consecutive order (Prov 2; 31:10-31). Wisdom also uses numerical sayings... a wide variety of figures of speech, and most especially powerful and creative metaphors. Sometimes these metaphors are sufficiently imprecise so as to provoke creative thought (e.g., "The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life," Prov 14:27). At other times they may be profoundly sensory and visceral (e.g., Prov. 10:26: "As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, / So is the sluggard to them that send him")."
-John Kessler
Thank God for modern day Solomons like C.S. Lewis, who can use careful, thoughtful, and aesthetic word choice to beautifully paint spiritual Mona Lisas of wisdom in people's imaginations.
"In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the consolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret which also pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordworth had gone back to those moments of the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The book or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of at tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
-C.S. Lewis
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Man, just look that that discernment. Sharp deep leveled perception. With so much confidence thrown in his assertion of the other's hidden identity. Having the accuracy of his thrown assertion hitting right on target by virtue of him missing. Assured that the true nature of the man in front of him is struck bullseye by the very act of his evasion. It is only when Barry Allen finds out that he has elusively pinned himself down that he is able to put his finger on the the accuracy of the thrown assertion, causing his secret identity to flash open before his very eyes. That's something even the fastest man alive can't dodge.
Man.
But the Lord said to Samuel, "do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." Then Jesse called Abinadab and had him pass in front of Samuel. But Samuel said, "The Lord has not chosen this one either." Jesse then had Shamah pass by, but Samuel said, "Nor has the Lord chosen this one." Jesse had seven of his sons pass before Samuel, but Samuel said to him, "The Lord has not chosen these." So he asked Jesse, "Are these all the sons you have?" "There is still the youngest," Jesse answered, "but he is tending the sheep." Samuel said, "Send for him; we will not sit down until he arrives." So he sent and had him brought in. He was ruddy, with a fine appearance and handsome features. Then the Lord said, "Rise and anoint him; he is the one."
-1 Samuel 16:7-12
1 Kings 3:9, 1 Kings 3:16-28, Malachi 3:18, Mark 2:8, John 7:24, 1 Corinthians 12:10, Philippians 1:9-10, Hebrews 5:14
"God is sovereign and in total control of your life." "God loves you immensely and unconditionally, even when you sin doing the most embarrassing sins you can imagine." "God allows everything to happen in your life for your good, even the things that make your soul ache."
Merely grasping these truths with our head through sermons or inductive Bible studies fails to have them penetrate and sink far down into the oceanic depths of our souls.
It takes seemingly harsh trials and hardship-ridden circumstances to create the opportunities to have them deeply etched into our bones.
Just cognitively pondering them to try to impress them into us is like using a ballpoint pen to write something on our skin. The impression of the ink only lasts for a few hours or a few days at most. Then it is gone.
In order for these truths to be permanently carved into our being, it requires something more intense. It requires suffering circumstances where one spiritually bleeds. The Holy Spirit can then use the spiritual blood that has been bled from uniquely characterized hardships as tattoo ink and tattoo the truth of God onto the soul's cornea. This happens as the soul meditates on these truths of God in the uniquely engineered circumstances that God custom tailors to cultivate the growth he desires in his myopic child. Oh, it can be painful like a physical tattoo. But after the operation, it's well worth it and the result is spiritual vision, on an intuitive level, that has innately divine perception in its eyesight. This happens because divine truth has been deeply engraved into the very constitution of the soul's being.
It's a challenge to keep God's story experientially
"thick" in our lives. It's so easy for his narrative to feel so thin
and seemingly absent in our day to day experience to the point where it's
functionally non-existent.
I was so blessed this past week to attend an event that was
full of snapshots of what God is doing around the world this moment. Egypt.
Pakistan. China. Germany. Iran. Syria. Saudi Arabia. The stories being told truly
leave the listener in awe of God's story. The type of drama we see unfolding in
the Book of Acts is unfolding all around the world right now outside of North
America. We're just blinded by CNN. Don't get me wrong. For the
most part, they're reporting facts and figures. But they just get a few isolated
notes here and there while completely missing the grand melody and symphony of
God's story that ties all the music together. The major news stations skim the
surface and miss the underlying pulse pumping through the internal veins of
God's drama.
I got to sit for a couple hours in a spiritual IMAX theatre
during this event, hearing concrete stories of what God and his fully immersed
protagonists are doing in his story. I learned that a few months before
the Syrian civil war started in 2011, many Syrian missionaries were warned to
leave the country because of the impending civil war yet initially refused to
leave because they wanted to urgently preach the Gospel and save as many lives
as they could at the risk of their own lives (later they ended up leaving due
to political reasons outside of their control). I am so challenged and in
awe-full respect for Christians who are being persecuted by ISIS jihadists who
refuse to renounce their faith even though their children are being tortured
and killed right in front of their eyes. They belong in the hall of fame of
God's saints with the greatest honour deserved amongst our spiritual kin. I also learned
that there have been former ISIS soldiers coming to know Jesus through dreams
and visions of him as well as encountering the love of Middle East Christians. Then, there's huge numbers of Christians in
the East as well as the Middle East willing to rise up amidst the nightmarish
conditions they're persecuted in. Hearing all this stuff makes me feel like a
small Hobbit hearing of all these races rising up to battle Sauron together and
save the world.
I miss this kind of environment. It's been around a year
since I was in one. I miss my spirit being energized like this. In narrative therapy
language, these kinds of atmospheres "thicken" the story of God in
one's consciousness with magnetically charged suspense. It reminds me that falling
in the middle of the electric drama of what God is doing in the world is like falling
right in the middle of a spiritual Avengers movie. A lot of the times there is a constant edge of
your seat tension of good versus evil with hot projectiles flying heavily on
both sides. Here, one feels wholly alive to a divine purpose drenched with
holy adrenaline. Hearing epic testimonies of God's counterplot that constantly
foils Satan's agenda surges Spirit-filled energy through one's very bodily
fibres. The narrative recipe of the cliffhanging uncertainty of events, suspense-filled
outcomes, and consecutive game-changing shifts in the plotline delivers deeply
satisfying soul food. This is a story with a setting that feels like every
square inch of the atmosphere is saturated with the dynamic tension
of Good vs Evil.
Oh, what a joy and challenge to maintain the thickness of
God's grand story in the theatre of one's soul. The soul hungers for such a
story. However, many times, the soul forgets this hunger as well as the content
of what it was created to hunger for. Hence the North American epidemic of soul
anorexia.
There is a universe of a difference between using one's mind to understand the soul versus using one's soul to understand the soul. For the soul has its own realm of experience, nonlinear developmental stages, and mysterious growth patterns that don't follow the neatly linear and logical conceptions of the mind.
To really understand the phrase "love your God with all your soul", the mind's cognitive analysis of the text is severely limited and will only get so far. One needs to experience the phrase with one's own soul in order to soulfully get it. The cognition alone, from the shores of its rationality, can only snorkel a stone's throw into the oceanic depths of the soul. The depths are reserved for another type of being.
Unlike empty parrot-talk//God ensnares-ma-thoughts//with a paradox//that's compared-to-top//the piercing glare-of-hawks//my thoughts prepare-ta-stop//and I'm aware-of-God//cuz he touches souls like a pair-of-socks
"Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task." - 1 Timothy 3:1
The nobleness of taking on the trying challenges of spiritual leadership. The honour of its weighty responsibility.
Not noble in the eyes of the world. Oh no. Not honourable in the carnal dimensions of reality. Oh no. But noble and honourable in that other reality next door to this one. Noble and honourable in the dimension that lies behind the curtain of this one.
Words cannot fully capture this nobleness and honour. But music can aid in capturing its nonverbal, inuitively grasped realities that are sometimes mystically sensed. From time to time, a divinely accessed sixth sense is given by the King whom one is serving that is opened to capture the melody of Kingdom Honour.
"It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honourable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God"
-1 Thessalonians 4:3-5
About a year ago, I started to read this book called Embracing the Body by Tara Owens. There are a couple reasons why. The first was that my spiritual direction supervisor recommended it to me. The second was that the author was actually a graduate of Tyndale Seminary, the seminary I graduated from. I'm really thankful that I read it. It's one of those books that has a very original outlook on age-old Christian topics with very unique wisdom.
Through the book, as well as studying Christian psychology for a while, I am now convinced that with respect to the journey of sanctification, us Christians really need to "embrace" our body. We need to befriend it. Be kind to it. Listen to it. Care for it (Ephesians 5:29). "Get to know it". Basically, treat it courteously as if it's an autonomous person (although technically speaking, it's a part of us).
Years ago, before I came across this perspective, I was just exposed to the well-intentioned Christian advice (whether consciously or subconsciously given) to just suppress your body's desires if they cause spiritual trouble for you. Bluntly speaking, it doesn't work in the long-run. I'm starting to think it doesn't even really work that much in the mid-run. Sometimes, not even in the short-run.
However, with this alternative view of "relationally training" one's body, things get much more messy. The body's composition is not totally systematic and structured in its "raw desires". They're not "logical" the way things are in one's prefrontal cortex. Training the body's desires is a totally different realm compared to training one's cognitive thoughts. People who aren't open to mystery and the unknown may have a lot of trouble befriending their body. But I'm convinced it has to be done to overcome blockages in one's sanctification journey.
A big example is the issue of the human body's natural sex drive. God has designed our bodies, of both genders, to have sex drives. Simply speaking, we have biological sex organs, hence our body naturally produces biological drives for sex. Our bodies had sex drives even before the fall in the Garden of Eden. That means that our body's sex drives are inherently holy, not unholy. It is just cultivated lust that is sinful. Now, it can get really messy to concretely extricate one's God-given holy and sacred sex drive from one's cultivated lust. But philosophically, there should be a very clear distinction for the Christian. It takes existential discernment, listening to one's body, phenomenological observation, and a patient process of befriending it (like interacting with people from a foreign race who speak a different language) to concretely sense the difference between the two. And over time, one begins to sense what is different instinctually.
During the process of befriending one's God-given sexual desires, one can then "train" and "tame" them in a relational context. This is different from just putting a straight-jacket from a psychiatric ward on it. Just like a "naturally bubbly" friend who has been corrupted with dopamine-addicted substance abuse in one's system, one is to love and help train one's friend in weaning off oneself from unnatural dopamine-filled drugs by relationally being there with him/her in the process. Get rid of the drugs, but keep the friend and his/her natural "bubblyness". This is similar to getting rid of the cultivated lust, but keeping the natural God-given sex drive. The God-given sex drive simply desires intimate connection with another human being. I don't have the time to get into all the details of what this does or does not entail, but it can be done for singles too. Embracing the Body by Tara Owens explains how this can be done pretty well.
This whole topic reminds me of the movie How to Train Your Dragon. I loved this movie. In this movie, Hiccup, the main character, is in a world where all the humans are afraid of the dragons, and just want to simply kill them without really knowing who or what they are because they seem to pose a threat. This similar to "conservative" Evangelical circles that have good intentions in "suppressing" and "killing" one's "raw-like" sex drive (particularly if one is single). It doesn't work on a deep level, and it's actually harmful from a perspective of holistic health. In this movie, Hiccup goes against the grain of his culture's attitude and begins to "get to know" the dragon (which can represent the God-given bodily drives, such as hunger, fight or flight, and sex). The dragon, "toothless", is damaged in his tail, so he can't fly properly. In a touching way, Hiccup and Toothless become friends after being initially distant and cautious of one another.
Afterwards, Hiccup helps heal Toothless' damaged tail with a human design of his. Literally, they each provide their own flap of the flying tail wings which are both needed in order for both of them to fly together.
Then, they "train" to fly together. It was actually really beautiful to watch. Hiccup needed Toothless, and Toothless needed Hiccup to fly. Both could not do it alone. This process of "training" and "taming" is really relevant to our topic here, where our human spirit needs to "befriend", "train", and "tame" our bodily drives in order to holistically take off with flying colours.
Yes, it gets messy to love, train, and tame one's raw bodily desires. There are bumps, bruises, and blunders on the way. But the Holy Spirit watches and assists over this whole process from the beginning all the way until those previously "raw" desires no longer have spiritual rabies. When the sinful rabies are gone, our body can actually become a friend who can be loved. Not loved in a worldly way of love, but loved in the same way that a married Christian would love one's spouse with the love of God (Ephesians 5:28-29).
In the true biblical view, sexual purity with one's body involves being friends with it.
I'm coming to realize that good, rich, and deep conversations are what life is really about.
Yet, few people know how to have a really good one. I think part of the reason may be that people have different definitions of "good conversations" whether consciously or subconsciously. For some people, they want conversations that are funny. Others want something excitatory. Others want to just talk about fluff. Others simply just want to fill in the silence which they feel is unbearable.
I don't think good, rich, and deep conversations can be exhaustively defined. However, I think one way to discern whether one has just experienced one is by intuitively sensing how deep the satisfaction was. I'm learning that deep soul satisfaction comes from a resonance and "deep aliveness" that one feels in one's depths where one can say "Yes. This is what I was made for, for reasons I do not fully understand yet just know by my soul's conviction."
"There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it. There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal."
-Henri Nouwen
Man, oh man. The Abyss. This black hole of the soul. Meant for heaven. Yet felt on earth. It awaits for fulfilment in the next life. Yet its hungers so palpable in this lifetime. It points to eternity, but its dissatisfaction in being incomplete is sensed in our dimensions of time and space. It is easily smothered by distractions, by dopamine, by worldly things. Even by some things in the Church. But at the end of the day, it's there. To not acknowledge it results in not coming to terms with the deepest part of one's being. To acknowledge it results in recognizing the profound dissatisfaction of being incomplete in the depths of the Self, waiting to meet one's Creator in heaven face to face.
