Saturday, July 13, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
I know every hair on your head, my son
Small things undermine my confidence and optimism. The groundhog, well if you read yesterday’s devotion, you know about him. Them. Friday I saw my doctor with stable lab results, but he worries about them devolving and wants to protect my kidneys. The meds he wants me to take cost much more than I expected. I feel overcome with sadness, exhaustion and anxiety.
Listening to sermons by George MacDonald remind me to not get so caught up in all of this. He was on an uncomfortable physical footing all his life, and his health did not improve beyond a certain point. His mother, two brothers and three of his children died of tuberculosis.
Family finances too, left much to be desired. His wisdom didn’t translate well to those Calvinist folks who congregated in his churches, and once his salary was suddenly cut in half. I imagine he often felt overcome with sadness, exhaustion and anxiety.
George MacDonald wrote himself through his ego-laden emotions. I am doing that too, just right now. I will have to deal with drugs and groundhogs later today. In the meantime I find myself praying as I write.
Here’s something James Finley wrote about prayer:
In prayer we journey forward to our origin. We close our eyes in prayer and open them in the pristine moment of creation. We open our eyes to find God, his hands still smeared with clay, hovering over us, breathing into us his own divine life, smiling to see in us a reflection of himself. We go to our place of prayer confident that in prayer we transcend both place and time. In prayer, distinctions like outside and inside, past and future, no longer apply. (Palace of Nowhere, p. 5)
Today the lectionary begins exploring Isaiah, great poet of the Bible, and it begins with his call out of his own life into the life God made for him, where “distinctions like outside and inside, past and future, no longer apply.” And I’ve never imagined Isaiah was the only one whose eyes were opened to see the seraphim. Me too, and you, we see angels, don’t we? In the fog between thoughts, there be angels.
At the sound of their cry the frame of the door shook and the house was filled with smoke. And I said, “Woe is me, I am undone! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips.”
Yes, that’s me too, and you also, if you will have it. Being undone is just the thing. Hold on, though, because God doesn’t let up.
One of the seraphim flew at me, holding an ember from the altar, and he touched my mouth with it and said, “See, now this has touched your lips, and your wickedness is removed.”
John of the Cross writes of enduring the fire of God, as your soul becomes a “living flame.”
The soul is purged and prepared for union with the divine light just as the wood is prepared for transformation into the fire. Fire, when applied to wood, first dehumidifies it; dispelling all moisture and making it give off any water it contains. Then it gradually turns the wood black, makes it dark and ugly and even causes it to emit a bad odor. By drying out the wood, the fire brings to light and expels all those ugly and dark accidents which are contrary to fire.
Finally, by heating and enkindling it from without, the fire transforms the wood into itself and makes it as beautiful as it is itself. Once transformed, the wood no longer has any activity or passivity of its own, except for its weight and its quantity which is denser than the fire. For it possesses the properties and performs the actions of fire: it is dry and it dries, it is hot and it gives off heat; it is brilliant and it illumines; and it is also light, much lighter than before. It is the fire that produces all these properties in the wood.
The fire cleanses, the fire transforms. The fire is hot and it burns. Burns me up, eventually, if I’m tied to a stake. The metaphor is mostly unbearable.
But Isaiah bore it.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” And I spoke. “Here I am,” I said. “Send me!”
I wonder what came next for Isaiah. I mean, God must have been pleased at Isaiah’s offer? Honeycakes and wine? A soft cushion? Perfect health and efficient cleaning up after groundhogs never to be seen again?
One thing I know. We were not created to live in sadness, fear and anxiety. The world we have made for ourselves is not the place we were created for. My unhappiness induces me to create something else that might at last make me happy. I was, the Bible tells me created in the image of God, and that means to be a creator just like him.
Regarding this, here’s a caution from James Finley.
The crux of the matter is that we cannot be like God without God. We cannot be like God by usurping God’s transcendent sovereignty in a spiritual coup that violates God’s will. We cannot take our deepest self, which is a gift from God, and wrench it from God’s hands to claim it as a coveted possession.
Any expression of self-proclaimed likeness to God is forbidden us, not because it breaks some law arbitrarily decreed by God, but because such an action is tantamount to a fundamental, death-dealing, ontological lie.
We are not God. We are not our own origin, nor are we our own ultimate fulfillment. To claim to be so is a suicidal act that wounds our faith relationship with the living God and replaces it with a futile faith in a self that can never exist. (Palace of Nowhere, p. 8)
There is an ageless joust going on, I believe, but not between me and God. My maker. That joust is between the devil and the Father, and even if I’m invited to watch I’m not sure I want to waste the time.
God wins.
(Isaiah 6, Psalm 93, 1 Peter 4, Matthew 10)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
