Saturday, September 17, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
May I kill it?
As for the seed that fell on rich soil, they are the ones who, when they have heard the word, embrace it with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance.
Don’t we all long for this fruitful soil inside ourselves? I do. Others don’t. Can I accept this, and learn to live in the world Jesus describes, where some of us humans “embrace and persevere with a generous and good heart” and some of us humans … don’t?
In Psalm 139 David says he was “fearfully and wonderfully made.” But are we all? I think God has nothing to do with anything else. Babies might be born with deep defect, but God’s touch is on those babies too. I only have eyes for you, She sings. Each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made.
Babies grow up in all kinds of households, with all kinds of mothers. Attachment to an alien host isn’t so good for any child, but it happens. Then throughout her life various poisons of upbringing spring forth in unpredictable unintentional horrors. The child is helpless to understand or change. She is acting out what feels like a curse.
The devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts that they may not believe and be saved.
God walked through the forest of Eden calling out, “Adam, where are you?” But Adam hid, because he and Eve had listened to the devil second-guessing God, and even joined him.
“I was naked and ashamed, and so I hid.”
“Who told you that you were naked!”
And now, as always, we walk through the forest of our lives, avoiding God rather than seeking him out. We’re in trouble, stark naked we are. But we don’t want him to know.
Some seed fell on the path and was trampled, and the birds of the sky ate it up.
Couldn’t I please be that seed? Then I no longer have to hide, or discern who is God and who is the Devil, or find clothes to wear, or wait for the next unimaginable horror to deck me in my life. Knock me down. Pummel me. Punish me and not even care.
How about if I don’t care first?
Recovery from abuse requires a paradigm shift. You don’t win a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. There has never been anything easy about life, and escape or avoidance doesn’t work.
What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. It is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible. It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious. It is sown weak; it is raised powerful. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. The first man, Adam, became a living being, the last Adam a life-giving spirit.
In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis watches an angel offer to break off a red lizard living on a “Ghost”:
May I kill it?
How can I tell you to kill it?
I cannot kill it against your will. Have I your permission?
Damn and blast you! Do what you like? God help me! (pp. 106-115)
The lizard dies. The ghost turns into a man. But then …
Am I right in thinking the Lizard really turned into the stallion?
Aye. But it was killed first. Ye’ll not forget that part of the story?”
I realize I want to quote the whole rest of the chapter, and then the part of the chapter that comes before this story, and I realize I cannot, but that you, the reader, must find it and read it for yourself. There is no better story in all the books on all the shelves of all the libraries in the created world.
 (1 Corinthians 15, Psalm 56, Luke 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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