September 22, 2006

• i drove in our rented car–our really, really  nice renal car, driving through a really really nice subdivision…imagining what it would be like to live like that…it is a whole different life. and sometimes…i want it. the seat was so comfortable…it has a CD player (ohh, ahhh!) and digital everything. the houses so clean with perfect grass and everything white that is supposed to be white…how do you balance being happy for the people who have that, being content with what you have, and then seeing the people who have nothing?

  i want to close my eyes

  and make all the problems go away

  i want to tell everyone

  that now is just not the time

  i am too full of issues to deal with more

  maybe they should take a number

  and wait in line

  They are hurting

  smile while draining

  laugh while dying

  wondering how to get

  through the day

  i have my own problems

  and feel bad i even notice them

  with so much more around

  ***

  i’ve been reading “The Great Divorce” it was sorta confusing at first, but then i got into it. There is a short part about a man who was a great artist who dies and visits heaven. He wants so much to paint it, but the guide/angel/whatever he is says that it would be useless, because the only reason his paintings on earth were so good was because they captured a glimpse of heaven. now in heaven, a picture would only diminish the real thing. He says that someday, after the man has learned, there would be things that he could see and paint that would reveal things only he could–not not yet. so he grumblingly asks when he can paint…(read on)

  “The Spirit broke into laughter. “DOn’t you see you’ll never paint at all if that’s what you’re thinking about?” “What do you mean?” “Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country…you are forgetting…how you first began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about the light.” “Oh, that was ages ago,” said the Ghost. “one grows out of that…one becomes more and more interested in paint for it’s own sake.” “One does, indeed. i also have had to recover from that. it was all a snare. ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the thing till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. They sink lower–become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.”

   

  wow. i feel like that is like church…we’ve made it a “cause” instead of an “effect” of our personal relationship with God. I did a Bible study for my kids at the center about why we go to church. and turned to the proverbial text of Hebrews 10:25. It doesn’t say we go to church to learn about God–it says to exhort each other. not that we can’t  learn about God…but church is the natural outcome of our relationships with God–coming together to worship Him and tell Him and others that we are stopping our “busy life” to put aside ourselves and simply say He is worthy. and to be with others who are doing that. to share what God has done while we were away that week. i feel like so often we (me included) grab on to “church” and are strangling it, forcing it to be the thing that tells us we are “okay” and not have to face the fact that we’re a wreck–begging it to tell us we are spiritual enough. the thing we check off our “Christian duty” list for the week. the way to “grab the hem of heaven.” has it become a spiritual drug to get our spiritual “fix?”

  Questions that have been making me think. so i share them. gotta go back to when i loved painting as a means of telling about the light. Because i loved and was consumed by the Light. don’t worry–nothing dramatic…i am still going to church and loving it:). i just need to bring the right heart with me.

  more from “the Great Divorce:”

  “Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this county: but none will rise again until it has been buried.” “Keats was wrong, then, when he said he was certain of the holiness of the heart’s affections.” “i doubt he knew clearly what he meant. There is but one good; that is God. everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. and the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels.”

  “I am in love…yes, now i love truly (in heaven).” “You mean, you did not love me truly in the old days (says her earthly lover)?” “Only in a poor sort of way. i have asked you to forgive me. there was a little real love in it. but what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. in the main i loved you for my own sake: because i needed you.” “And now! now, you need me no more?” “of course not! what needs could i have, now that i have all? i am full now, not empty. i am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. You shall be the same. come and see. We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.”

  learning how to love is a great adventure. perhaps the greatest of all adventures.

   

  • 12:00 pm
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