Friday 5 August 2011

The Door You Carry With You

I followed up the door sermon with the kids. This time I took them beyond the idea of Jesus as the door into God's house/room by carrying the door with me. So when I went through the door (just a couple of louvre doors I had lying around) I took one of them with me. I made two points:

1. Doors normally stay in place, you leave them behind until you want to exit. With Jesus, I said, you never leave him behind and he isn't the way out.

2. This means that wherever you are, you can enter God's room through Jesus the door.



Wednesday 3 August 2011

Do You Really Want God? (Quote)

From Inward/Outward


"Do you really want to live your lives, every moment of your lives in God's Presence? Do you long for God, crave God? Do you sing and dance within yourselves, as you glory in God's love? Have you set yourselves to be God's, and only God's, walking every moment in holy obedience? I know I am talking like an old-time evangelist. But I can't help that, nor dare I restrain myself and get prim and conventional. We have too long been prim and restrained.
 "The fires of the love of God, of our love toward God and God's love toward us, are very hot."Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength." Do we really do it? Is love steadfastly directed toward God, in our minds, all day long? Do we live in the steady peace of God, a peace down at the very depths of our souls, where all strain is gone and God is already victor over the world, already victor over our weaknesses?
 "This life, this abiding, enduring peace that never fails, this serene power and unhurried conquest--inward conquest over ourselves, outward conquest over the world--is meant to be ours. It is life that is freed from strain and anxiety and hurry, for something of the Cosmic Patience of God becomes ours." (Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion)

Monday 1 August 2011

Presence and the Near-Life Experience


The wisdom of the great spiritual writers is that we human beings are too often not present to our own lives. We are in the past or the future, or too tired or distracted, angry or in denial about reality.  I said to the St John's students recently that if they disbelieve me they should try to see how many seconds they can be present to their lives before some thought, feeling or other distraction intrudes. I said if they lasted 7 seconds they would be doing well.

The older we get the harder it becomes to switch from living outside our lives to living in them. We become calcified in our distractedness and the habit of living elsewhere than right now. A near-death experience can shake us up. Sometimes people 'find' God after a near-death experience. It is my experience that the near-death experience shakes us up not only because we could have died, but because we gain a new sense of the beauty, meaning and sheer goodness of  every moment of life. And although this new sense might only be temporary (because to live in the present and break old habits takes spiritual discipline) it remains evidence, I think, of the truth in the original insight itself, we are not present to our own life. And it is not just near-death experiences that lead people to grasp the sheer gift of life, but the process of dying itself. Sometimes people acquire a sense of the goodness and giftedness of life, their own waste of the gift, and can even move into receiving the gift of real livingness in a moment, as they move to death. (Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is a fictional account of just such a movement.)

There is also a parallel here with the complaint that God is absent in our lives. "I prayed but it didn't make any difference, and I didn't feel God's presence ... I don't think God exists."  Is there perhaps a parallel here with our absence from life? We think that life is dull and boring, or that it will begin when ... or that my life would be great if only such and such hadn't happened...  But what if, as Ron Rolheiser says, the fault of absence, both in terms of our lives and in our sense of God's presence in our lives, is on our side? It is easy to live as though God does not exist just as it is easy to live unaware of the life waiting to be lived!

See also Leunig's cartoon entitled " a Near-Death Experience (see picture above).