HEAVEN BREAKING THROUGH

William Law, an eighteenth-century English cleric, wrote, “All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor of precious stones, is nothing else but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world.”


This quote reminds us that God is present in his world. 
May he give us the grace to see with the eye of our heart, the wonders of his presence.
And in return may we worship.

GRACE THAT DEFIES LOGIC

 Bono of Irish rock band U2 (you knew that anyway) has said, “Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.”

He also sung:

Grace
She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name
Grace
It's a name for a girl
It's also a thought that changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything
Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition

What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things

CREATION IS SPLENDID !

John Calvin, sixteenth-century theologian and reformer, wrote, “The creation is quite like a spacious and splendid house, provided and filled with the most exquisite and the most abundant furnishings. Everything in it tells us of God.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY - MLK

January 15, 1929, Marin Luther King was born in Atlanta, Georgia...in 1983 - the third Monday in January was made a bank holiday in the USA - to celebrate the great civil rights leader.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached, “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, that rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”


May we be ever conscious of our dreams and creative to see them fulfilled, remembering that so often they come with a price.

BLESS THE OTHER

I was talking to a good pastor friend who told me recently that there was going to be a Mosque built in his town. he was horrified by this and even more so when he received a visit from the Iman who asked him to bless the Mosque. My pastor friend was outraged by this request and emphatically turned it down. He told me that no way was he going to go and bless the Mosque.
I asked him why not? I went on to say that it would be good to bless the people who will attend the Mosque. I was simply suggesting that it's on God's heart to bless, to want the best for every human being on this planet. So as a follower of Jesus we may also want to bless, to love those who may be different from ourselves.

I read an article in January/February's edition of Third Way magazine http://www.thirdwaymagazine.co.uk/ entitled Pillars of Faith, where the journalist recounted an amazing story from Egypt. On Christmas Eve a church in Alexandria was bombed by Islamic extremists killing twenty-five people. The Egyptian entrepreneur Mohamed El Sawy called on his fellow Muslims to act as protecting shields outside churches as Mass was celebrated. The campaign was backed by a journalist who created a symbol of a crescent and a cross combined as a sign of unity between the two communities.
Thousands responded to the call. 'I'm here to tell all my coptic brothers that Muslims and Christians are an inseparable pillar of Egypt's texture' said one attendee. 'Copts have to know that we will share any pains or threats they go through'.

The article testifies to authentic brotherhood, when one is prepared to share the pains or threats of the other. In this case we see the demonstration of the love of God seen in the other, the Muslim.
Here, the Muslim is compelled to bless his Christian brothers.
That completely blows away our Western Christian caricature of our Muslim brother.
Yes the other becomes our (br)other when we reach out to him in love.

May God grant us the grace to bless,
for the sake of His Kingdom.

GOD, MY DANCING PARTNER

“God, you were here all along, and I never knew it” (Genesis 28:16), says Jacob on awakening from his stone pillow.


I came across this verse last week and I was blow away by the fact that God is here, right now in our world, culture, city, home, skin,...and we so easily forget this wonderful reality...
maybe it's because we are unable to 'see'...
maybe it's because we only expect to meet with God in the 'holy' place of Church...
maybe it's because we're so busy that we no longer take the time to be still and actively 'wait' for Him...


Here's Richard Rohr's take on this verse:

The essential religious experience is that you are being “known through” more than knowing anything in particular yourself. Yet despite this difference, it will feel like true knowing. This new way of knowing can be called contemplation, nondualistic thinking, or “third-eye” seeing. Such prayer, such seeing, takes away your anxiety about figuring it all out fully for yourself, or needing to be right about your formulations.

At this point, God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not so afraid of making mistakes. You know even those will be used in your favor. At that point you also have awakened from your stone pillow, and you know with a new clarity what you partly knew all along!

I love the idea of God being more that a static noun or dogma or conclusion...

God is so much more, and the relational aspect of His nature is marvelous...

I can't dance to save my life...

so the image of God as my dancing partner who doesn't scold me when I take the wrong step or tread on his toes is comforting...

Here's a quote from the late GK Chesterton:

Poetry is sane

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite seam and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get heaven into his head. And it is his head that splits.

GK Chesterton

Orthodoxy

Meditation and the Virus of Perfectionism

Came across an interesting article in the Financial Times (Christmas eve) on meditation - yes that's interesting in itself. The journalist interviewed Laurence Freeman, a benedictine monk and catholic priest. He's the director of the World Community for Christian Meditation http://www.wccm.org/

On my 40th birthday i was given a book by Laurence (Jesus, the teacher within) - i tried reading it (that was almost 10 years ago) and couldn't get into it. A couple of years ago I picked it up again and enjoyed the read. He was at Greenbelt Festival 2 years ago http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/ - he spoke about Christian Meditation and taught some of the techniques. From then on I've practiced meditation (on and off)...it's a great way of entering into the present.

Here's a couple of quotes from the article:

“What people really mean when they say they can’t find time to meditate is that they can’t manage their time or good intentions. It’s a bit like New Year resolutions. But the biggest barrier is perfectionism.”

Freeman warms to this theme. “Perfectionism is like a virus. In religion, it can lead to fundamentalism and self-loathing. The secular equivalent is success. If you only judge yourself by success – of your job, your marriage, your children, even – you are setting yourself up for failure or a sense of inadequacy. Learning to meditate, you have to unlearn perfection and the need for success.”

read the entire article :

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/b5c16414-265c-11e1-85fb-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1iacLRRlj

I think that this is a big challenge for us, our society insists that we need to succeed - or else we're losers - and the church/religious organizations imply that we need to be perfect (in order to be accepted by God and included into the religious community...

we're already accepted by God...just accept his acceptance and stop trying to be perfect...

As Augustin put it "Love God and do what you want!"...

Christian Meditation could help ?

Our Raison D'Être

sometimes we make life, and our raison d'être complicated;

here's a quote that simplifies the reason for our existence:

Twentieth-century Jesuit Alfred Delp wrote, “If through one man’s life there is a little more love and kindness, a little more light and truth in the world, then he will not have lived in vain.”

I appreciated this post from the Evangelical Alliance, Friday night Theology e-mail:

Pressed for time

Is it really 2012? Is it me, or does time seem to fly by faster with each passing year?

New Year is often seen as an opportunity to reflect upon life in very general terms. Marking a common point of reference for the closure of the old and the opening of the new, we get to take stock, take the pulse of our lives, and assess what we have achieved or not achieved. This self-analysis can take the form of measuring happiness, or wealth, or relationships, or career etc. Although there is no doubt that it can be a helpful exercise to pause and review life, it is worth remembering that it can also sustain an unhealthy preoccupation with the problem of ‘progress’. For most people in the West, progress is assumed as being natural and inevitable. As the idea that today is better than yesterday just because it’s today, it derives from the idea that human nature is essentially good and even perfectible – despite what every history book tells us to the contrary.

As a pale copy, a counterfeit of the teleology of the Kingdom of God, it could be said that this idea of human progress points to a deeper, more fundamental problem that we all have with regard to time itself. Namely, that we are all conscious to varying degrees that it is slipping away from us, and that there is nothing that we can do about it.

Perhaps most significantly, we fail to see time as a consequence of sin. We forget that, prior to Adam and Eve falling, time was infinite. The Book of Genesis recounts seasons as cycles, but they are without an end. Our failure to remember this obvious truth has profound implications for our relationships with God and with each other.

Most notably, despite that fact that we all have the same hours in a day, we feel increasingly pressed for time. Seldom attributed to our human condition, this underlying anxiety is a powerful driver for all human behaviour. We may well be wired for the infinite, but we have become so accustomed to the finite that we assume it as the norm.

The writer of Ecclesiastes observes that there is a time for everything, and also that God has placed eternity in the hearts of all (Ecclesiastes 3). Outside of Christ, this apparent mismatch between the reality of the passing years and a God-given inner desire for infinity can present us with deep anxieties. Giving us a felt need to cram our lives with activity and achievement – and to leave a legacy, it fuels ambition and disturbs the peace.

Today, it seems that many of us are now so thoroughly disconnected from eternity, that we struggle to imagine an alternative to our three score years and ten. Once, while selling one house and buying another, I found myself without a mortgage for about six weeks. I was disturbed by how unburdened and liberated I felt. Time operates in a similar subconscious way. Paul’s prescription is clear: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4: 18)

For the Christian, time is so yesterday – it’s so last year. We are promised, in the renewal of all things, not only a restoration of our place in the infinite but also a foretaste of it now. The Kingdom of Jesus is a non-time reality that has a real-time effect. When and where this Kingdom breaks in, there is a taste of eternity. Our role is to preview this new life in words and deeds – unhurried, with the light of eternity switched on.

“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 2: 1-3)

Time is not against us, it’s on our side – so Happy New Year.

Dave Landrum, director of advocacy, Evangelical Alliance

Time certainly is flying by - seemingly accelerating at greater velocity as the years pass by; it's encouraging when we look at the larger picture of life, put it in perspective in relation to eternity and the Kingdom of God .

and rise to its challenges and enter its joys.

Time is on our side.

WHY CAN'T WE CHANGE THE SYSTEM ?

Yes, why can't we change the system? or Why should we change the system?

The year 2011 saw many system changes, the Arab Spring, Libya, Egypt...

we don't no the extent of these changes or where they will lead; but changes

there have been, that's for sure!

Many of us would like to see a fairer, more egalitarian system...

but what stops us from actually taking the plunge and start heading towards the new world that

we dream of ?

Kester Brewin in his book 'Signs of Emergence' suggests 3 reasons;

1. The system is too big, too complicated, too advanced - it's gone too far

2. We'll pay a financial price, we'll be worse off and therefore won't enjoy our current lifestyle

3. If you 'do' step out of line, people will mock you

We've seen that the system as we know it is beginning to crack, to show signs of weakness...the current crisis is proof of this...we may be worse off if we start to act more justly and more humanely...but can we trust the current system?...people may mock us but at the same time there seems to be an undercurrent of discontent (to put it mildly) and as those around us also seek a new way - maybe they be attracted to a new lifestyle that goes against the current 'system' of greed, money, looking after number one...

Why can't we change the system? Hey?

DREAMING OF A BETTER PLACE

Looking back over last year i've experienced some personal encouragements...and disappointments...

but i'd like to believe that this year will be a year where divine inspired imagination will be ignited and fleshed out...

that our dreams of a better place unfold into a gradual realization...

As we follow the leadings the hope-giver and sustainer,

Happy New year !