Risks of Faith :: Advent’s Love

  • December 5, 2017
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  • Park Forum

Reflection: Risks of Faith :: Advent’s Love
The Park Forum

It is God’s love for us, not ours for him, that is the context for faith. Our ability to love God is imperfect—though spiritual disciplines and the rhythms of community can shape them greatly, as C.S. Lewis explains in Mere Christianity:

People are often worried. They are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.

Lewis isn’t deceived—“go and do it” only works until you can’t, or simply don’t—then what becomes of faith? He continues:

On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.

Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’

He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

There is no faith without risk, and no reward in heaven for returning spiritual armor without dents. The armor of God is to protect believers as we apply our faith in a broken world—will not our hearts grow weary? The gospel is that Christ has succeeded where we have failed.

We do not shrink back because we are inconsistent in our love for God—we take risks of faith because God is relentless in his love for us.

Listen: It Came Upon A Midnight Clear by Ella Fitzgerald (3:20)

The Greeting
Into your hands I commend my spirit, for you have redeemed me, O Lord, O God of truth. — Psalm 31.5

– From Christmastide: Prayers for Advent Through Epiphany from The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
2 Chronicles 5-6.11 (Listen – 9:47)
1 John 4 (Listen – 2:58)

The Gift of Service :: Advent’s Love

  • December 4, 2017
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  • Park Forum

Reflection: The Gift of Service :: Advent’s Love
The Park Forum

The story of Christ’s birth is the story of giving. Christ humbled himself. He was familiar with financial tension (his family lived at the sustenance level). He knew the pressures of vocation, and of working one job though he was designed for another—the Messiah was a carpenter for well over a decade. He gave himself to obedience, even to the point of death.

The words of Scripture instruct us to live as Christ lived, and draw models for Christian living from those that came before us. One such person to examine is Wenceslas I, the Duke of Bohemia, who later became a king and a saint. Ed Masters, writing for Regina Magazine, chronicles Wenceslas’ reputation:

He was generous to and provided support for the needs of the indigent, the widows and orphans. He bought freedom for slaves and even visited prisoners during the night, giving them alms and listening to their concerns as well as exhorting them to leave their former ways of life behind and to repent of their crimes. He was known to have carried wood on his back in the middle of the night to those that needed it for fuel and assisted at the funerals of the poor.

The saint was memorialized in the 1853 song, “Good King Wenceslas,” which celebrates the power of following the footsteps of a holy man. The fourth verse opens with the king’s page weakening as they press into the night to serve a poor man in the snow:

“Sire, the night is darker now
And the wind blows stronger
Fails my heart, I know not how,
I can go no longer.”
“Mark my footsteps, my good page
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly.”
In his master’s steps he trod
Where the snow lay dinted
Heat was in the very sod
Which the Saint had printed.

Wenceslas did not walk under his own strength; the king was often found at night praying in the church. His gifts of service were expressions of Christ’s ultimate gift—something our service to others can bring to life this holiday season.

Listen: Good King Wenceslas by Downhere (3:03)

The Morning Psalm
Great are the deeds of the Lord! They are studied by all who delight in them. — Psalm 111.2

– From Christmastide: Prayers for Advent Through Epiphany from The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
2 Chronicles 3-4 (Listen – 5:42)
1 John 3 (Listen – 4:41)

Restful Meditations :: Advent’s Hope

  • December 1, 2017
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  • Park Forum

Reflection: Restful Meditations :: Advent’s Hope
The Park Forum

Focusing our hearts on Christ, the hope of Advent, expands the holiday experience beyond mere merriness. In the gospel our hearts find rest from pain and hope for renewal.

“Jesus, my feet are dirty,” prayed Origen in the third century. “Come even as a slave to me, pour water into your bowl, come and wash my feet. In asking such a thing I know I am overbold, but I dread what was threatened when you said to me, ‘If I do not wash your feet I have no fellowship with you.’ Wash my feet then, because I long for your companionship.”

Origen’s prayer captures the spirit of Advent: looking back at Christ’s work on our behalf, looking forward at the completion of his fellowship, and longing for his presence and power today.
Another third century prayer, an anonymous Syriac Christmas liturgy, gives words to this hope:

The radiance of the Father’s splendor, the Father’s visible image, Jesus Christ our God, peerless among counselors, Prince of Peace, Father of the world to come, the model after which Adam was formed, for our sakes became like a slave: in the womb of Mary the virgin, without assistance from any man, he took flesh.

Enable us, Lord, to reach the end of this luminous feast in peace, forsaking all idle words, acting virtuously, shunning our passions, and raising ourselves above the things of this world.
Bless your church, which you brought into being long ago and attached to yourself through your own life-giving blood…

Bless your servants, whose trust is all in you; bless all Christian souls, the sick, those tormented by evil spirits, and those who have asked us to pray for them.

Show yourself as merciful as you are rich in grace; save and preserve us; enable us to obtain those good things to come which will never know an end.

May we celebrate your glorious birth, and the Father who sent you to redeem us, and your Spirit, the Giver of life, now and forever, age after age. Amen.

Christ, may our hearts find their rest in you, the hope of Advent.

Listen: Greensleves by Vince Guaraldi Trio.

The Refrain for the Morning Lessons
For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. — 2 Corinthians 4.6

– From Christmastide: Prayers for Advent Through Epiphany from The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
1 Chronicles 29 (Listen – 5:50)
2Peter 3 (Listen – 3:21)

Today’s Readings
2 Chronicles 1 (Listen – 2:47) 1 John 1 (Listen – 6:18)
2 Chronicles 2 (Listen – 3:41) 1 John 2 (Listen – 3:02)

Saved by Mercy :: Tolkien’s Letters

  • December 31, 2015
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  • Park Forum
By J.R.R. Tolkien

If you re-read all the passages dealing with Frodo and the Ring, I think you will see that not only was it quite impossible for him to surrender the Ring, in act or will, especially at its point of maximum power, but that this failure was adumbrated from far back.

He was honored because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and had then done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do. He (and the Cause) were saved—by Mercy : by the supreme value and efficacy of Pity and forgiveness of injury.

1 Corinthians 10.12-13 may not at first sight seem to fit – unless ‘bearing temptation’ is taken to mean resisting it while still a free agent in normal command of the will. I think rather of the mysterious last petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. A petition against something that cannot happen is unmeaning.

There exists the possibility of being placed in positions beyond one’s power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility and mercy) of the sacrificial person.

I did not ‘arrange’ the deliverance in this case: it again follows the logic of the story. (Gollum had had his chance of repentance, and of returning generosity with love; and had fallen off the knife-edge.)

No, Frodo ‘failed.’ It is possible that once the ring was destroyed he had little recollection of the last scene. But one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however ‘good’; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us.

*Excerpt from the draft of a letter to Miss J. Bum, July, 26 1956. From The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner Books, 2000).

Today’s Reading
2 Chronicles 36 (Listen – 4:26)
Revelation 22 (Listen – 3:59)

 

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How to be Married to your Soul Mate :: Tolkien’s Letters

  • December 30, 2015
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  • Park Forum

By J.R.R. Tolkien

The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification.

No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that—even those brought up ‘in the Church.’

When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. And of course they are, as a rule, quite right: they did make a mistake.

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.

Only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were ‘destined’ for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life.

In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an un-fallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean heart, and fidelity of will

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.

*Abridged from a letter to Michael Tolkien, March 6-8, 1941. From The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner Books, 2000).

Today’s Reading
2 Chronicles 35 (Listen – 5:25)
Revelation 21 (Listen – 4:34)

 

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