Musings: Notes From My Daybook

I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the market place as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap; on a cross-roads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and Latin and in Greek . . . ; at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died and that is what he died about. And that is where churchmen should be and what churchmen should be about.

--George MacLeod, Only One Way Left: Church Prospect (Iona Community, 1956): 38.

My spare moments the past couple of days has had me reading from German influences. First, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor. A group at church is currently reading his work, Life Together. Life Together reflects his brief term as a director of an illegal seminary in pre-WWII Germany. Bonhoeffer boils down to some basic essentials in terms of developing a robust spiritual life.

Moving back three hundred years is the work of Philip Jacob Spener. Again, from the Lutherans we find some of the early strands of the pietist movement. I'm rereading his work Pia Desideria and thinking of rewriting a paper that is now 20 years old on Spener's reflection on how to spur spiritual vitality in the churches. Reading something from the 1600's does create some challenges in terms of what it might mean for today. But Spener does have something strong going for him--a deep conviction about the necessity that faith must emerge from the heart.

Third, though he isn't, strictly speaking German, Reinhold Niebuhr, certainly is rooted in German heritage. Looking for material to encourage young ministers, I was reminded of Niebuhr's Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Leaves is Neibuhr's published "diary" of his 13 years of ministry before he headed to New York City and a career in academia. I found my old first edition and reread his words I was immediately taken back to some of my own first discoveries about what it means to be in the "ministry"--complete with the challenges, the ambiguities, and those moments of joy.

Three dead guys. One clear passion from all three. Vibrant Christians, vibrant Christianity that transcends the trappings of religion and announces God's inbreaking reality.

Thomas Merton offers some basic and sane instruction: "Meditation is not merely the intellectual effort to master certain ideas about God or even to impress upon our minds the mysteries of our Catholic faith. Conceptual knowledge of religious truth has a definite place in our life, and that place is an important one. Study plays an essential part in the life of prayer. The spiritual life needs strong intellectual foundations. The study of theology is a necessary accompaniment to a life of meditation. But meditation itself is not"study" and is not a purely intellectual activity. The purpose of meditation is not merely to acquire or to deepen objective and speculative knowledge of God and of the truth revealed by him."

“There is no mode of life in the world more pleasing and more full of delight than continual conversation with God.” --Brother Lawrence

I think this statement, if true, highlights the primacy of prayer. But if we live lives satiated with possession and activity we may well never allow a hunger for the divine to develop. I'm afraid that too many of us are being entertained by shadow figures on a wall, then God longs to put on a broadway musical.

O Thou good Omnipotent, who so cares for every one of us, as if you cared for him alone; and so for all, as if all were but one! Blessed is the man who loves you, and his friend in you, and his enemy for you. I behold how some things pass away that others may replace them, but you never depart. O God, my Father, supremely good, Beauty of all things beautiful, to you will I intrust whatsoever I have received from you, and so shall I lose nothing. You made me for yourself, and my heart is restless until it repose in you. --Augustine (d. 430)

To love others, even enemies, for God's sake is a deep calling and reverses all of my natural tendencies to see others from my own, limited, biased, point of view. Such reordering of priorities meets me on today's journey--where phones' ring and people beckon. And though I can recognize the value of giving back all that I receive from God so that I lose nothing, I also recognize that such a commitment begins in the way in which I relate to my neighbor.

The thing about faith is that it refuses to be placed in neat compartmentalized cabinets. Like a vine with many canes that spread in every direction, living the Christian faith is rooted in one thing--the practice of love.