Tag Archives: knowledge

A Still Small Voice

Posted on December 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

Elijah in JerusalemI’ve been rereading for review Michael O’Brien’s Elijah in Jerusalem released in August by Ignatius Press. The story has seamlessly woven into my Advent readings from Isaiah and Revelation which focus on similar themes about the End-Times. The tribulations are great, the plagues horrific, death rides the world. In the midst of these apocalyptic themes, we see the Prophet Elijah, returning as one of two last witnesses to warn the Anti-Christ. He is humble. He can hear the still small voice of God.

Today we recall the End-Times and Christ’s Second Coming as we prepare for the celebration of his First Coming at Christmas. In both preparations, we must face judgment. We must clean out our hearts to be worthy to receive him at Christmas and to kneel before him at the Judgment. In both senses, these Advent scrubbings are made easier when we consider Christ is not only judge but loving redeemer, the Way, Truth, and Light. We are moved by love not fear, by the desire to be more like him, more in him, more a part of him.

It is this dependency, this trust, this smallness that is at the heart of confession and absolution. It is in the not-knowing that we find rest, not in the knowing. 

I often wondered about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Why were Adam and Eve punished for desiring knowledge of Good and Evil? To be sure, they were disobedient which is reason enough to be sent out of Eden. But why that particular tree? Don’t we want that kind of discernment? 

Our Father Elijah in O’Brien’s novel wrestles with an aspect of this problem. He wants clear instructions. He wants to know. His heart is eager to do God’s will, he fasts, prays, goes without sleep. But there are times when God is silent. Our Father Elijah cannot hear the still small voice that the Prophet Elijah of Scripture had heard on the mountain and Elijah himself had heard earlier. Our Father Elijah becomes despondent. Why has the Spirit left him? What is he to do next? Did he misread his earlier instructions? Wasn’t he supposed to leave Ephesus and journey to Jerusalem to confront a man who many thought the messiah and others thought the Anti-Christ? Weren’t he and Enoch, his companion, to be the two witnesses mentioned in Scripture? Was he having grandiose ideas of their true mission? 

The doubts assail him. He doesn’t know what to do. He finally realizes that his demand for answers, his need for control, is in itself the obstacle. His need to know – to eat of that fruit – is preventing him from hearing God’s voice. Only in his humility, his trust, can he hear God’s voice and truly know, so that he can take the next step, do God’s will. 

Father Elijah is a Carmelite monk, an order founded on Mount Carmel, the traditional home of the Prophet Elijah. The Prophet Elijah of the Old Testament retreated to a mountain to pray:

And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind n earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.  (I Kings 19:11,12)

Our Father Elijah must learn to hear this still small voice as his namesake had done. He must seek a humility that opens his ears to hear. Being gifted with a keen intellect, the challenge is great to accept this cloud of unknowing, one embraced by Christian mystics going back to St. Augustine of Hippo. 

Unknowing. A difficult desire. I love the old hymn’s refrain: “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” I have often thought that the best cure for stress, anxiety, and depression is simply to trust in God. We still must plan, work, learn, organize, and arrange our lives. But at the end of the day, when we have done our perceived duty (the conscience of love), meeting the demands of family, faith, friends, vocation, we can release from prison any anxiety that remains.

We pray the Psalms and read the lessons for Morning and Evening Prayer. We pray an Our Father and a Glory Be. We invoke Our Lady with “Hail Mary, blessed art thou…”, we pray for others by name and intention, and for ourselves that we not lose the humility that will open our ears to God’s voice.  “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). We quiet our hearts and minds. We listen to the words of the Creed on our lips, the Te Deum, the Jubilate Deo, the Venite. We then take our rest in the heart of God, in the palm of his hand. All anxiety flees, banished by humility.

On this Third Sunday in Advent, Gaudete Sunday (Gow-day-tay Sunday), meaning Rejoice Sunday, we sing an introit of joy: 

Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete… Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Philippians 4:4–6; Psalm 85 (84):1 

We light the rose candle amidst the purple penitential candles nesting in their Advent greens, and we consider Heaven, having faced Death and Judgment on Advent One and Two. We await Christ’s advent at Christmas, his advent in our hearts and bodies in the Eucharist, and his Second Coming in Judgment. The way to Heaven is narrow we are told, rather like the eye of a needle. We need to be small enough and humble enough to cling to Christ as he rises us up, to enter Heaven with him. 

 And so the Church cradles us through the year, teaching us how to grow toward Heaven, with its seasons of penitence and joy. We are of the world and not of the world, living fully within creation yet knowing we are destined for something even greater and more glorious: Heaven.

And so we do indeed rejoice.

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Flying High

Posted on July 19, 2015 | Leave a comment

birdSitting in our backyard recently, sipping after-dinner tea and gazing at the pale sky that settles over our golden California hills on a summer evening, I watched a white bird leave the top of an oak and pause in midair, fluttering his wings. He was “treading” air, as one treads water, in a sense, stationary. He resumed his flight but soon paused again, fluttering his whiteness into the soft light. 

Two or three of these birds visit each year, on the way to somewhere, from somewhere. The flying stuns me, and I marvel at God’s creation, so delicate, so powerful, so smart. We had a cockatiel once that lived a good deal of her life on my shoulder, grooming my ear and stroking my hair with her beak. To see such feathers and eyes and beak, close up is to see our Creator, to see his loving genius, his useful and intelligent beauty. My cat, with her white ruff and black back, her twitching ears and whiskers, her pink nose, her claws protruding from perfect pink pads, is another vision of God’s remarkable creation, the detailed complexity of life. (I’m not so happy with the  house ants I battle in these dry months, so I admit being selective in my love, but even ants have their intricacies.) 

Dorothy L. Sayers wrote of the artist as creator in the same way that God is creator. We have minds that reflect our Maker. Our imaginations fly into new realms, pausing to flutter in the air, creating as God creates every second. To see a newborn is to see God’s beauty and goodness. To feel the kick of a child in the womb is to be a part of the miracle of life, a unique and wondrous collection of cells housing a unique and wondrous soul, one born of God’s own fluttering white vision. How precious we are, each and every one of us, from womb to grave, and how loved we are by he who breathed life into us. 

Someone wrote that we have within us entire ecosystems, and doctors know this as do nurses and others who work with our bodies. The complexity within is staggering in its constant changing, growing, dying, healing. 

Edward Rothstein in his Wall Street Journal review of Philip T. Hoffman’s new book, Why Did Europe Conquer the World, profoundly answers the title’s question. While it is true, as Mr. Hoffman argues, that the West conquered more than 84% of the world because of better weapons, it might be more useful and accurate to consider why they had better weapons and why they wanted to conquer in the first place: 

“Building a better gun requires a grasp of physical principles and a certain flexibility of mind – being able to apply those principles in new ways. Innovation is thus in part a scientific enterprise and a product of the same impulses that shaped the Western Renaissance… explorations… were not undertaken just to attain power and riches; they reflected a desire to illuminate the unknown, to comprehend the universe and map its qualities, to discover not just novelties but fundamental principles.” 

Explorations require innovations. Innovations lead to explorations. The New Horizon spacecraft is presently exploring Pluto and our Solar System. Did we send this craft on its long journey in order to attain power and riches? Perhaps gain does underlie our desire. But more powerful is the impulse, the need, even the compulsion, to explore and map and understand who we are as creatures and the world – the universe – in which we find ourselves living. “We are a species of explorers,” said string theorist Brian Greene, professor of physics at Columbia. “What gets us fired up are unexplored lands…” And of course those new lands are within and without, in language and art as well as geography. Those new lands include interior worlds, sensory worlds, all we think and all we feel and all we sense. We want to explore them all. 

I agree with Mr. Rothstein and Dr. Greene, but I would go further. Why do we explore? Why do we innovate? Where does this desire come from? Why do we get “fired up”? 

We are in-spired, breathed upon by God. It is no coincidence that the earliest scientific advances, indeed the very scientific method, came from churchmen, from monks peering through telescopes atop church steeples. Monks cleared the swamps of Europe and advanced agriculture. The impulse to know and to map that knowledge was a religious impulse planted by our Creator, as a reflection of his own impulse to create.

But to fly like Icarus too close to the sun is deadly. To disobey God and eat forbidden fruit is deadly. Likewise, science without God is deadly. To fly high is good, inspired by his breath, fluttering in place, pausing to consider moral law and our place in creation. We are creatures of our Creator, and we mirror him. We are destined to create and not destroy, to build and not tear down, to love and not to hate. To fly high, alone, without pausing to reflect, is dangerous. 

And so it is good to be reminded that the Western world was built on the desire to explore other realms, a desire informed by the goodness and love of God. New Horizons is a product of the mind of the West, the mind of our maker.

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Darkness no Darkness

Posted on March 2, 2014 | 3 comments

It has struck me lately how separate we human beings are from other creation. And we are so small. The world was here before I came, and it will be here after I leave. We have little impact upon nature, although we like to think we control it and even harm it. In the end nature shall have the last word, and we can see its random and unfeeling power in hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, drought, fire, tornadoes. But man is proud and self-deceiving.

We anthropomorphize the natural world  giving flora and fauna human qualities. We think of a lion as a big sweet cat, yet he mauls and destroys. Nature gives us joy; we love the mountains and the seas, and we want our love to be returned. But it isn’t, except for, of course, by some domesticated animals, and it is uncertain what sort of love they have for us.

That I find myself in this world, so foreign and so lovely and so dangerous, points to a master of design. That I delight in its beauty and power, its awe-fullness, is not by chance. That I long to walk its forest paths and sleep under its stars and feel the sun on my skin is not by random design. I think we love creation as a reflection of the Creator. We are drawn to him through his works; we yearn, we long for him, and thus his world. The good news is, of course, with the coming of God the Son among us, we know that our Creator loves us in return; he yearns and longs for us.

Sometimes I sense another, an “other,” world alongside ours, as though separated by a sheet of glass. St. Paul writes that he sees God “through a glass darkly,” glass thought to be more a mirror or reflection as well as a window to God – not our kind of glass window. We do see, sense, God around us, if we have eyes to see. We are children, and when we grow up we shall see clearly. But for now, God is here, present, and I know that his spirit, through my Baptism, dwells within me.

But he is not just a God within, an idea that grew into heresy in the last century. He is outside us as well, working in our world. He exists apart from me. He is not conjured by my imagination, my desires, although he has planted such desires in my heart. 

But seeing and knowing isn’t everything, and the Epistle for today, St. Paul’s definition of love, says it perfectly, poetically. I tried to shorten it, but just couldn’t, every word being of immense importance and beauty:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (I Corinthians 13)

St. Paul brings me back to the heart of the matter: love. We long to know, to see, but we are nothing without love.

Today’s Gospel, on this Sunday before Ash Wednesday, Quinquagesima, tells how Christ healed a blind man who was begging on the side of the road. The man had great faith, and he cried out to Jesus to have mercy upon him. Jesus healed him because of his faith.

There is a link between faith and seeing through the glass, seeing the reflection of God in the world around us. In Raymond Raynes’ Darkness no Darkness, hopefully our next American Church Union release, he speaks of giving oneself up to Christ, allowing him to remold and redirect us. It is this kind of free-fall faith that allows us to be healed. We stand with the blind man on the side of the road and we cry, Lord have mercy upon me. Our Lord turns and heals us because of our faith. When our eyes are opened, what do we see? We see love.

The title of Father Raynes’ book of meditations, Darkness no Darkness, comes from Psalm 139, one of my favorite memory passages: 

O Lord, thou hast searched me out, and known me. Thou knowest my down-sitting, and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts long before.
2   Thou art about my path, and about my bed; and art acquainted with all my ways.
3   For lo, there is not a word in my tongue, but thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.
4   Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
5   Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me; I cannot attain unto it.
6   Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit? or whither shall I go then from thy presence?
7   If I climb up into heaven, thou art there; if I go down to hell, thou art there also.
8   If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea;
9   Even there also shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
10 If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me; then shall my night be turned to day.
11 Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day; the darkness and light to thee are both alike.
12 For my reins are thine; thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.
13 I will give thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.
14 My bones are not hid from thee, though I be made secretly, and fashioned beneath in the earth.
15 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in thy book were all my members written;
16 Which day by day were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
 

Again, I could not condense this, for here the Psalmist so long ago saw that knowing and loving are linked together by God in his love for us, in his intimate knowledge of each of us. He knows and loves us in the womb. He sees our hearts. Darkness is no darkness, for the night is as clear as the day. And we see. We see Love.

We approach the ashes of Lent, the burning of the Palm Sunday palms and the marking of the charred cross upon our foreheads, a cross that will burn our minds and hearts for forty days. We recall that our flesh came from dust and will return to dust.

This Lent 2014 I shall try to memorize Corinthians 13, engrafting the words onto my mind and heart. Hopefully, faithfully, I shall sound less like a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Hopefully, faithfully, I shall see through the glass to Our Lord himself. Hopefully, faithfully, I shall be healed and shall see… God.

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