I recently added a new page to becomingflame.com – Pages on Love – a listing of all posts where love is a significant theme. You’ll see a variety of perspectives coming from all sorts of angles. I hope you enjoy the new page and find some measure of encouragement from the posts listed there.
Don’t forget the similar pages on hope and prayer:
Grace and peace to you…
dw
Faith is a way of waiting – never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “Delay”
There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy things lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them.
But faith waits even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing left worth waiting for.
Faith waits – for the opening of a door, the sound of footsteps in the hall, that beloved voice delayed, delayed so long that there are times when you all but give up hope of ever hearing it.
And when at moments you think you do hear it (if only faintly, from far away) the question is:
Can it possibly be, impossibly be, that one voice of all voices?
False choices
The next following hard on the heels of the last
Made by a desperate imposter self
Desperate for anything to distract
From its emptiness, its nakedness
False choices
Exchanging dopamine poofs
For the overwhelming reality
There is a real soul in there
Dying to be known and loved
Dying to hear the One Voice
Calling softly, tenderly
Come home, come home
I’m waiting for you
I will wait
Grace and peace to you…
dw
Photo by dw
We too easily assume that we are our real selves, and that our choices are really the ones we want to make…
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, “Conscience, Freedom, and Prayer”
Our choices are too often dictated by our false selves.
Hence I do not find in myself the power to be happy merely by doing what I like.
On the contrary, if I do nothing except what pleases my own fancy I will be miserable almost all the time.
I don’t know enough about brain chemistry to say anything much about it. But I understand that we can easily become like trapped rats poking whatever button we can find that results in a little dopamine poof. And then another. And then another, bigger poof. Each poof producing in our brains what we associate with pleasure. Followed by a lack of pleasure. Followed by looking for that button again. And, can we poke it a little harder and get a little bigger poof this time?
I have been that trapped rat. I have family members who were those trapped rats who I hope and pray found mercy and relief when they left the earth that had become to them a maze with no way out and all the buttons no longer sufficient.
We have thriving industries that depend on our false selves making the choices for us. Until we no longer have any power to choose anything but what we have become addicted to, perfect consumers.
God in heaven, be merciful to us, guide us to our true selves, to choices that don’t go poof.
Jesus, you came that we might have joy, abundantly, not dependent on dopamine and the pleasure pulses it gives. Inclusive of pleasure, yes; thank you. Requiring pleasure, no; thank you. Joy no one can take from us, not ‘like the world gives’. Thank you.
Grace and peace to you…
dw
Photo by dw
I think it is hope that lies at our hearts and hope that finally brings us all here.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “Hope”
Hope that in spite of all the devastating evidence to the contrary, the ground we stand on is holy ground because Christ walked here and walks here still.
Hope that we are known, each one of us, by name, and that out of the burning moments of our lives he will call us by our names to the lives he would have us live and the selves he would have us become.
Hope that into the secret grief and pain and bewilderment of each of us and of our world he will come at last to heal and to save.
Hope that we can become who we were meant to be – is there a higher hope?
The God of the universe offers it – is any hope more sure?
Grace and peace to you…
dw
Photo by dw
If you want to read more about hope and this blog, check these out:
Pages on Hope
About
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, “Conscience, Freedom, and Prayer”
Selfishness is doomed to frustration, centered as it is upon a lie.
To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god.
This from Thomas Merton brings to mind words of Jesus:
If your first concern is to look after yourself, you’ll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you’ll find both yourself and me.
Matthew 10:39, Peterson, Eugene H.. The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language . The Navigators. Kindle Edition.
You might be more familiar with the words this way:
Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Harper Bibles. NRSV Bible with the Apocrypha (Kindle Location 75096). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
I don’t even know where to start. Which strand of thoughts, of the many, do I pick up and try to pull from the knotted mess that’s there?
One is about the rampant corruption in politics in our country and around the world…bending all things to the will of powerful people.
Another is about the kind of economics that steals from the poor and gives to the already-wealthy…selfishness.
Another is about the stockpiling of weaponry, both nationally and individually…first concern is to look after yourself.
Another is about speech and how we choose to use it…exclusively for ourselves.
Each of these threads gets and deserves plenty of air time in our public discourse.
But I’m holding back the temptation to enter the fray.
Because maybe I need to start, to remember as best I can always to start, with the thread of my inner life.
The tragic and tragically flawed little god in there who rants and raves at even the smallest inconvenience daring to cross it’s path.
That spews all the correct answers to all the important questions and deserves accolades commensurate with this great wisdom, greater even than Solomon’s.
That can’t seem to go a day without chocolate of just the right darkness or coffee made from just the right bean brewed in just the right way.
Maybe that is the thread I should start with.
Maybe that little tyrant needs to be reminded about the quotes from Merton and Matthew first.
Before it commences tying all the other threads together into a tangle made in it’s own image.
Grace and peace to you…
dw
Door photo by dw
becoming flame 