Why Don't We Confront?

Why don't we confront when errant ways we see?
Reasons rampant litter the path.
Who knows the motives, walked the path of erring friend?
It may not be error after all, sight being what it is.

But there's little knowing without asking.

No one wants the pained response, the indignation, the affront.
We grieve for others but leave be because it is hard to confront.

But at what cost?

We have all erred painfully in life. Why did no one speak up?
For me I know now I was headstrong, self-willed, 

preoccupied with my own way. 

No one wanted to tell me how wrong I was.

Do I have the love, especially with the young, to pray and wait
and then when it is right, sit down and listen? And then, maybe,

after listening long:

“Can you hear an alternate opinion?
I am concerned where this may lead.
I made a similar step when I was young:
here is what happened."

There is no substitute most of the time for relationship.
Most cannot hear well if they do no know you on some level.
But all are begging for clear direction. And caring.

Clear and caring is what they will thank you for.

And would-be confronters will mostly remain silent unless
they think it will be worth it.

It is the story of life. We don't listen, and those who could help,
won't. Why should they? 

Love is the only reason; love willing to bear the pain of rejection.

Help me, Lord.

Passing Comment on Sexual Values

I was raised within a context that believed sex before marriage was immoral. Happily, I aligned my life with that, found a good woman with similar outlook, and we've been married for 35 years, two children. We are both moderately educated within a very traditional religious context, and we continue within that today. Our marriage is very real with all the normal difficulties, accompanied with increasing joy and goodness as the years pass.

Nearing 60 now I more and more think of the fixed things one must have, the markers that define how life is to be lived. Sexual values are ever-implicit in those questions, if not central. I think it would help us to at least ask if saving sex for marriage could be healthy, would come closer to maintaining the right kind of respect for one another. It doesn't have to be some sort of nutty notion as it is often caricatured. After all, it would be hard to blame the sexual morass of our day on those who think sex belongs within, and only within, committed monogamous marriage where you throw away the key and give yourself for one another and your children.

I don't pretend this is an easy discussion or that living one's life that way in youth is easy. But it might be easier than the alternative. My peer group and those I had learned to honor kept me on that path. And of course there is this underlying ordering called religion that informed and encouraged. In many ways politics is the new religion and it simply can't go deep enough to save us.

I wonder if the fixed idea of saving sex for marriage might save both, and is a key part of saving us all

A Verse for Tuesday

Ship

I am a ship, unknowing,
Seeing nil but trusting

waters deep will bear me up --

the trough will not consume.

I am a ship, unheeding;

smashing waves that shiver

timbers deep within my soul,

protected -- who can tell?

T'would break or flounder, dying;

pieces float, but vessel --

never seen again above,

the raging waves devour.

But Captain calls me upward,

Failing boat upholding;

Heedless, hapless -- never thwart

His mighty saving hand.

Dark: A Musing Out My Window

“The gods sleep,” they say. “The earth can't see the sun where I am and thus the gods, too, are dark.” In this we equate whatever is most and greatest with what we see. God equals natural phenomena, one-and-same with it. This view is old as time, the earthy end of the gnostic see-saw, telling us the summum bonum is found always au naturale and whatever within responds to it is fully material, for there is nothing else. Sun worship, body worship, sex worship: all on a plate and offered up to all-in-all as what is seen and known as known. If the earth sleeps, so does god and nothing watches, for rocks don't see. We know this. The earth tells us.

Somewhere we conceive the opposite end, gnostics' claim that knowledge knows all, mind is everything and nothing is ever asleep, a natural response of its own assertion. Only mind can be and we know mind is greater than matter. There's something more than meat – a spirit really – that consumes all, transcending flesh and rocks and brains. The highest is not found in things or sense: they, instead, are second order, even bad. For thinking of them makes them subject and mind will win the day and tell us all things. Science worship, word worship, thought worship, information colossus-king, all offered up as highest good, the all-seeing eye all the time. The University tells us.

God – the living God -- asserts Himself, not in power nor mind, but in weakness and love, transcending both. He is uni-verse, three-in-one, the impossible pulling together of body and spirit in a Baby. And so it ever is. Our bodies make a baby and we marvel, pagan-like, at the miracle. God becomes a baby and our mind breaks, refuses to believe. God is Spirit and God in Christ takes the see-saw, holds it still, beckons us dismount and live. We worship in spirit and in truth. God is not the world and He does not view it askance. He loves the world, His own creation. And He is ever alive. We respond to Him in kind because we are His, and He never sleeps.

The night outside my window is real, as is the darkness in some broken soul, or in a forlorn prisoner or distraught child in war-torn countryside. Though I am at peace, I wonder about all things, and about all I imagine to know: such is the human lot. “God stepped out on space,” the poet said, “and made Him a man.” That is me – that is all of us. And in the dark, He is there. Because He never sleeps, I can.

“He watching over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps.”

Live Again

I walked and prayed and told the Lord the things He didn't know:
my plans to take the way I knew was His, my hopes that He would be near.
I knew the path I took and well my prayers affirmed --
until I stopped, and sudden knew my ears were dull.

One seldom hears when speaking out and mind made up can scarce unmake.
Without listening.

My steps ended. I sat and heard:
"Stop. Let go. Be done with your own way.
Your doing is undoing all I meant to be and do
in my good way of twists and turns and time.
You run -- or walk -- ahead and pray. Good for you.
But have you listened? 

"Listen now, heed my voice, and live again."

COLD RAIN by Jerry Walls

Sometimes on us the past
Falls hard like freezing rain,
Mingles with our tears,
and reignites our pain.
The rain falls even on
The just and the unjust,
Both promise and caution
For those who live by trust.
For he who made the rain,
Fell once beneath its blows;
By his stripes he healed
Everything that grows.
All tears must be gone,
Where his kingdom has come;
What's past no more can hold
The future for ransom.
(Matthew 5:45; Isaiah 53:5; Revelation 21:4)

Reflecting on Order and Quiet and Knowing God

Certainly the inscrutable nature of God is real. As well as His simplicity. And it seems, maybe, the order of a monastery, at least in the ideal, is an effort to arrange our real human lives as simply and plainly and orderly as possible so the seeking of the transcendent, necessarily inscrutable nature of God does not completely ruin us.

The contrast between us and God is off the charts. Is this why we are to live quietly and go about our business, why the east has this beautiful doctrine of apophaticism -- "We know what is not true of God but positive assertions we handle with great care -- all but complete silence?"

Perhaps this is why the ordering of quietness opens the door to awareness of God. Quietness, even when occurring naturally, gives room for the (to us) impossibly infinite God to be known in some small measure. And to know God in the smallest of ways is larger than a life. Busy-ness wars against such a thing, though certainly diligence does not, for it is the same kind of ordering I am searching to understand.