Professional Documents
Culture Documents
We are sometimes
tempted to attribute their special powers and success to their
circumstances, times, parents, and teachers. But there is a deeper
and more satisfactory explanation. Adopting the words of the
forerunner, men have nothing that they have not received from
heaven, by the direct appointment and decree of God.
F. B. Meyer
I met one of my best friends on the day she learned that she had
less than six months to live. No life should be lived without one such
friend. For only when edges of life are clearly marked, does
friendship celebrate all its gifts with understanding. Our friendship
knew no single day of ease or levity. It contained no midnight card
parties, ski excursions, or holiday cruises.
Her name was Anne, and while-by her own confession-her last
months were far from morose, she spent her days “sorting”. With
Anne’s short life-span, we had time to contemplate and enjoy only
the absolute essentials of our relationship. The dial of the clock’s
finality moved with hands so swift that things cheap and temporary
held no fascination.
Anne was physically beautiful. She had spent a great deal of her life
maximizing that beauty with cosmetics. Her skin was ivory and
warm. But things visceral and inward go wrong. Down where creams
and oils cannot penetrate, the body must sometimes reckon with
strong judgments. Then the deep issues of life hold final sway over
all things surface.
Most of us dress our Christian faith in an ill-fitting discipleship that,
like a cheap suit, leaves us uncomfortable most of our lives. Among
our friends at church we struggle to keep our reputation for
godliness bannered forth. We would like to appear to be like Jesus
without the discipline of really being like him. Reading several dozen
fill-in-the-blanks self-help manuals, we talk ourselves into a spiritual
reputation we have never really earned. We continue to live on the
surface, only talking of the deeper life. I delivered the eulogy at
Anne’s funeral, and I was overwhelmed by a need to tell more of her
walk with Christ than it was possible to tell. At the center of all she
had become, he affair with Christ defied communication. So it is with
all thing deep.
Hambre de interioridad
“Nobody?” he asked.
The heart is a plan door, yet its airy frame opens on majestic vistas
of reality. It would seem that the opposite is true. Are not the
vaulting thunderheads above the craggy mountains a better place to
seek him than the earthy doorways of our soul? No, for natural
vastness inspires, but it rarely results in an intimate togetherness
with God. The rapture we feel standing before the Grand Canyon is
more likely to erupt in a shout than in a conversation. The soaring
galaxies are more prone to cause us to take our eyes from heaven
and ask, “Father, are you there?” The best answers never come
from beyond us. Why? Because God best declares himself from
within us.
God becomes visible to those who look for him in the right place.
Therefore, no eye-no literal eye-can see him! No ear can hear him!
No ear can hear him! No mind can conceive him! He hides his
vastness only in the deepest dimensions of our inner existence.
"¿Nadie?", preguntó.
Sabía lo que intentaba decir. Conocía esas palabras: tan grande, tan
hermoso, tan grande. Es lo que siento cada vez que me encuentro
con Dios. Me acuesto a dormir, pero no rezo "al Señor que guarde
mi alma". En cambio, acecho una mayor inmensidad en un ritual
casi nocturno de euforia. Sus bendiciones pululan a mi alrededor en
una maravillosa ligereza de ser. Es un extraño insomnio patrocinado
por la pura alegría. Mi mente al principio comienza a salpicar a
través de un pequeño riachuelo de la gracia de Dios. Poco a poco el
arroyo crece... ¡y Gloria in excelsis! Estoy en un océano demasiado
ancho para medirlo, demasiado profundo para comprenderlo. Estoy
delirantemente a la deriva en el mar de su interminable ser. Sin
embargo, siempre salgo a este océano desde la pequeña cabeza de
playa de mi corazón. Me sorprende que en el centro de mi alma de
marea baja tenga un acceso tan inmediato a los vastos océanos de
su presencia.
First Corinthians 2:10 contains one little word that lunges at us with
challenge: “But God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. The Spirit
searches all things, eve the deep things of God.”
The apostle uses the word bathos for “deep” here. This is the
symbol that I want to keep central in this book.
Deep is the dwelling place of God. Deep is the character of the
ocean. Hold the metaphor for a moment and savor its lesson ahead
of time. For deep is where the noisy, trashy surface of the ocean
gets quiet and serene. No sound breaks the awesome silence of the
ocean’s heart. Most Christians, however, spend their lives being
whipped tumultuously through the surface circumstances of their
days. Their frothy lifestyles mark the surface nature of their live. Yet
those who plumb the deep things of God discover true peace for the
first time.
In some ways what we were all seeing looked the same. But my wife
and I literally sunburned our backs in our surface study of the reef,
while our son plumbed its wonders.
There were other differences in the day. Our son had spent many
years learning to go deep. Deep requires years of practice. Deep
cannot be achieved instantly upon the first dive. The equalizing of
pressure in the head and facial sinuses must be developed
gradually, for going deep can be dangerous, even fatal.
The issue is going deep. Deep reveals the reality of God. Yet the
snorkelers can use the language of divers, for the metaphors pass
close. But they are not the same. It is odd that this state of reality
lies so near us. It is utterly accessible, yet only a few ever know it or
pass its gates with any regularity. Prayer is the gleaming doorway to
the depths.
Though sometimes we may doubt that prayer really does any good.
Sometimes we’re angry with God in our hearts, and our refusal to
pray is our way of saying, “I’ll fix Him. I won’t pray”. How much
wiser we would be to shuck our temper tantrums and head directly
into the depths.
In the depths of real inwardness lies the treasure. There is little use
bragging where we thing we are in Christ. Hungering for a Christ-
conformity is the treasure.
The word bathos gives its Greek form to the word “bathysphere.” A
bathysphere is a steel-walled diving bell in which oceanographers,
armed against the crushing pressure of the sea, may safely descend
and study the depths. Not only is the ocean depth quiet and still, it
hides a wondrous mystery. Consider the bathysphere scientists who
descend into the heart of the ocean. There is a passionate curiosity
in such souls. They must unravel mysteries! Or, if they cannot
unravel them, they must bask in them until utter transcendence
washes them with the only reality that can satisfy them. Hushed by
the watery vastness, they learn a splendor they can never
communicate to snorkelers. The inscrutable glories of the deep
cannot be described to those hooked on the safety of shallowness.
“For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the
man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts
of God except the Spirit of God. We have not is from God, that we
may understand what God has freely given us” (1 Corinthians 2:11-
12). Let our ordinary senses bring us to discovery. Let them confess
their shortcomings. Let the ear be shamed by rich silence. Let the
eye discover what can’t be seen. Let the mind be challenged by the
inscrutable wall of the mystery of godliness. Let us see his
significance by turning from our insignificance. Our smallness then
becomes our glory! Nay, rather his glory. We have tasted the deep
and our interest in the shallows is gone forever.
We just keep filling our lives with the same old appetite for spiritual
expression, rarely stretching ourselves or expanding or horizons.
But the way of the depths is better. When we reach for God in love,
and God reaches back, he meet us deep in the center of our
existence, where “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has
conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”
Always to be expected.
-O happy chance!-
La vida disciplinada
Siempre es de esperar.
-Juan de la Cruz
Gregorio Magno
“It is not for my profit that I am here; it is to serve and obey the will
of my master.”
“No, but he sees me, and takes pleasure in seeing me where he has
put me.”
“Would you not like to have movement so that you could go nearer
to him?”
“No, for I am where my master has placed me, and his good
pleasure is the unique contentment of my being.”
Francis de Sales
Appetite is a life sign. Healthy people get hungry. Our appetites can
at last define us. Christians are to be people who hunger and thirst
for righteousness (Matthew 5:6). In other words, Christians are to be
defined as people who are hungry for God. They are hungry to
please Christ. Martyrs are not necessarily those who are hungry to
die. They are merely souls with an excessive appetite to please
Christ. They would rather please him by having to die than
disappoint him by selling out on key issues of obedience.
BAM! There it is! All fun gone, every second helping done away with.
Every grasping desire supplanted with charity. Every sexual fantasy
stabbed with moral integrity. Yield to self-denial and marriage
endures, for no mates ever cheat. No banker ever embezzles. No
addictions ever occur.
"Pero no lo ves."
Francisco de Sales