“Vengeance is mine,” He says: with a right understanding of it, we might as well pray for God’s vengeance as for His forgiveness; that vengeance is, to destroy the sin–to make the sinner abjure and hate it; nor is there any satisfaction in a vengeance that seeks or effects less. The man himself must turn against himself, and so be for himself. if nothing else will do, then hellfire; if less will do, whatever brings repentance and self-repudiation, is god’s repayment. Friends, if any prayer are offered against us; if the vengeance of God be cried out for, because of some wrong you or I have done, god grant us His vengeance! Let us not think that we shall get off!
~George MacDonald, God’s Vengeance
George MacDonald
Author: C. S. Lewis
A friend of mine recently wrote a summary blog article that I believe captures the usefulness of Hell in the process of personal sanctification and its horrible necessity by our demand.
I recently signed myself up to be slapped about the face 2 or 3 nights a week. I am learning as much as I can from each smack and surprise wallop to my cheeks, after all this corporal wisdom does not come free.
But it has quickly surpassed a “get the most slap for the buck” responsibility; I really think I need to learn something new about my stance in life and relation to others… plus it just feels good to be taught by a confident instructor.
I have been threatening for years to start down the path of becoming a ninja, well now is the time… and Bruce Lee is my teacher.
I finally walked all the way to my local dojo; which is about a block and a half from my house… my neighborhood just gets more awesome every time I choose to discover it.
Waiting at the Ambrose Academy was Rocco Ambrose (Sibok, or Teacher), with a confident, ready smile and lighting fast (yet gentle) smacks to the face. Wing Chun Do is the class, but humility and surprise is the teacher.
I am just now starting to realize how many years I have been treading water in so many do-it-yourself learning environments. Modern life can be horribly insulating and our tools of ready information retrieval continue to subtly trick us into thinking we do not need people anymore to learn anything.
Sure, I could fire up youtube and watch countless hours of horribly produced (and a few decently produced) instructional seminars on martial arts… but nothing will ever come close to the pleasant satisfaction of trying to punch Sibok Ambrose and have him block my feeble attempt and deliver three consecutive chops to my neck and face before I have the time to blink.
The isolation and disembodied culture of the emerging e-learning universe can not lay a finger on this type of experience. It’s like being parched and trying to drink an old bucket of jello compared to the fresh water of a live teacher.
You’re too stiff, loosen up… how are you going to be able to react to anything when you are so stiff…
~Sibok Ambrose
I could read this in a book or watch it as a lesson in a video, but until I have to practice against an embodied attempt to punch me in the face… this is the sort of wisdom that my person simply cannot absorb in any sort of significant capacity.
Maybe that is something of what Jesus was getting at with His personal analogy to that of Living Water… there is a well of religion that we return to out of necessity, and if we are paying attention we may actually be able to meet in person the source of all wisdom and life sustaining power.
13Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
This is the sort of thing that makes Christianity a difficult, perhaps impossible, experience to enter into on our own power.
When I was growing up in the church there was a constant emphasis on having a deep and abiding “Relationship with Christ”. More often than not, this advice would spin me down the mental pathways of trying to conjure a special imaginary friend named “jesus”.
These mental games of trying to create a person out of my conscience, random searchings for evidence of The Holy Spirit, and aftermath providence interpretations of God’s plan for my life composed my personal integration of the Trinity.
But is it real? Was any of it real?
These are the moments of honest inquiry that can completely shipwreck a make believe faith… as they should.
To be honest, it can still leave me feeling queezy when contemplated.
To say Thou art God, without knowing what the Thou means–of what use is it? God is a name only, except we know God.
~George MacDonald, The Knowledge of God
He who does that which he sees, shall understand, he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness…. It is he that runneth that shall read, and no other. It is not intended by the speaker of the parables that any other should know intellectually what, known but intellectually, would be for his injury–what, grasped, perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the wayside.
I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.
Good people… have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God upon the strength of this saying… Happily for such, the assurance to which they would give the name of faith generally fails them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stand and waits…
But to put God to the question in any other way than by saying, “What will though have me to do?” is an attempt to compel God to declare Himself, or to hasten His work… The man is therein dissociating himself from God so far that, instead of acting by the divine will from within, he acts in God’s face, as it were, to see what He will do. Man’s first business is, “What does God want me to do?”, not “What will God do if I do so and so?”
It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to have, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated.
~George MacDonald, Spiritual Murder
George MacDonald
Author: C. S. Lewis
22But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother[a]will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,[b]’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakable may remain: He is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life…
That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”
I am in love again, seems to happen about once a year… and usually by surprise. The less I know going in, the better it is. I have had my disappointments, so it is true that I am a bit jaded. But all it takes is one great night and I am all in again.
Something similar happened to me about 10 years ago. Walking through the parking lot afterward, I knew something special happened, but I could not quite describe it… merely enjoy it and relive it in my mind and later conversations with friends. Well, I did return for subsequent reunions, maybe a dozen or so in public… and who knows how many in private…
A few months ago something of promise along the same lines occurred… but it was mostly hype and in hindsight I had to admit it was pretty juvenile… much like my experiences of 10 years ago. But this time, entering into the reality of someones mind was more than entertaining… it was by far the best movie watching experience of this year, and I am in love with movies all over again.
Inception = Near Perfect, but I will settle for amazing…
Inception
Artist: WaterTower Music
Ok, give me a few more days to back down from the infatuation… but this film really is good.
It’s true, I am a big fan of the first (only) Matrix film and I do consider it a modern-day masterpiece. So anything that takes the best elements of that story / film and re-meshes them into a retelling that has even deeper philosophical / spiritual relevancy scores very well with the shape of my film appreciating palette.
Avatar was a fun ride, and I do love big robots… but in the end I do believe its environmental charm is shallow and its neon 3D beauty will be fleeting.
Inception mashes up something better, by taking the very best visuals and metaphors of The Matrix and intertwining them with the emotional / psychological quandaries of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind into a package that is not only entertaining, but I do believe chock full of poignant commentary on the life of the mind, what it means to be human, the context of relationships as defining reality, and the search for authenticity.
When a film imaginatively invites me into exploring the reality of my own relational and spiritual issues; I am initially delighted, then horribly uncomfortable, but in the end… thankful.
It is when we are most aware of the factitude of things that we are most aware of our need of God, and most able to trust in Him… The recognition of inexorable reality in any shape, or kind, or way, tends to rouse the soul to the yet more real, to its relations with higher and deeper existence. it is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good. All who dream life instead of living it, require some similar shock.
It is a human soul still, and wretched in the midst of all that whiskey can do for it. From the pit of hell it cries out. So long as there is that which can sin, it is a man. And the prayer of misery carries its own justification, when the sober petitions of the self-righteous and the unkind are rejected. He who forgives not is not forgiven, and the prayer of the Pharisee is as the weary beating of the surf of hell, while the cry of a soul out of its fire sets the heartstrings of love trembling.
~George Macdonald, Dipsomania
George MacDonald
Author: C. S. Lewis
The obvious addictions make for an easy classification of “functional” and “dysfunctional” people. The most serious addictions are always the ones buried the deepest, the Pharisee’s addiction to his or her own pride is actually a much worse prison of dysfunction… but so much more difficult to diagnose… easier to smell perhaps.
The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride–just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains (rash) cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
There are those who in their very first seeking of it are nearer to the Kingdom of heaven than many who have for years believed themselves of it. In the former there is more of the mind of Jesus, and when He calls them they recognize Him at once and go after him; while the others examine Him from head to foot, and finding Him not sufficiently like the Jesus of their conception, turn their backs and go to church or chapel or chamber to kneel before a vague from mingled of tradition and fancy.
~George MacDonald, A Hard saying
George MacDonald
Author: C. S. Lewis
My friends who know me best have told me that one of my favorite statements is…
I am trying not to over-analyze this, but…
…and upon making that apologetic preface, I then go on to over-analyze the bejeezus (possible pun of blasphemy intended) out of whatever the focus of my current intellectual obsession is. Seems to go hand in hand with this quote as well…
He who does that which he sees, shall understand, he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness…. It is he that runneth that shall read, and no other. It is not intended by the speaker of the parables that any other should know intellectually what, known but intellectually, would be for his injury–what, grasped, perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the wayside.
~George MacDonald, The Way of Understanding
These reproofs are certainly taken at a personal level initially, but I think they do start to extend to our ways of knowing in general. Discussions of pedagogy often seem to circle around the effort of balancing the knowing that comes from intellectual abstraction with that of practical doing. If you are trained your entire life to learn by cognitive analysis, it is only natural that you would approach your spiritual life in much the same way.
Habits of doing can free someone from even the temptation for inappropriate analysis. And in that, I do believe MacDonald’s rebuke towards putting church, chapel, chamber, and tradition at the end of our spiritual life instead of the beginning is important.
The heart of man cannot hoard. His brain or his hand may gather into its box and hoard, but the moment the thing has passed into the box, the heart has lost it and is hungry again. If a man would have, it is the Giver he must have;… Therefore all that He makes must be free to come and go through the heart of His child; he can enjoy it only as it passes, can enjoy only its life, its soul, its vision, its meaning, not itself.
~George MacDonald, Hoarding
George MacDonald
Author: C. S. Lewis
Again MacDonald presents me with what seems to be an undeniable timeless truth. Something I may have known to be true for years, but never heard it presented so well.
What is the heart? It is still a question of mystery. Is it constructed in the mind as a vital configuration of transcendent desires that intertwines our thought life with the physical world?
Still, it remains somehow distinct from our brain or our hand. Demands something that neither can fully posses or even appreciate.
Do you think the work God gives us to do is never easy? Jesus says His yoke is easy, His burden is light. People sometimes refuse to do God’s work just because it is easy. This is sometimes because they cannot believe that easy work is His work; but there may be a very bad pride in it… Some, again ,accept it with half a heart and do it with half a hand. But however easy any work may be, it cannot be well done without taking thought about it. And such people, instead of taking thought about their work, generally take thought about the morrow, in which no work can be done any more than in yesterday.
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