Praise God for the Mountain

The mountain of life encompasses all things and all people, personally and globally.  It is a busy place, and it has existed throughout human history.  Some people never attempt to climb it, and glimpse it only through their peripheral vision.  Some people climb it partially, and then stop either at a grassy meadow or when confronted with a wild boar.  Some climb it to the top.  What do they see there?  Do they continue to look upward?  Is the next step onto a cloud?  Does the door of Heaven open?

There was a time when I could not accept all the flora and fauna of the mountain.  I did not see the grassy meadow as illusory happiness or the wild boar as an opportunity for victory.  I often slid down on loose rocks, and it dazed me.  But, that uneven terrain prompted me to cling to the firm plants and to find the solid though narrow pathway toward my journey’s end.  As I rest for a moment by a pond, there are fish swimming in it and butterflies dancing around it.   I see a corn field and an apple orchard higher up.  The air does not get thinner as I climb higher, and the landscape is not bleak and barren, but fruitfulness abounds. 

Yet, I must climb farther.  Pray for me, if you are a friend or fellow wayfarer.  For, many are called but few are chosen.  Pray for me, because it is a long fall down to the bottom again.  Forgive me, if you can.  If you cannot, then take my candlesticks to light your way and to testify of God’s grace.  Let us all go onward and upward.  Let us repent and ascend each day that we awake and thank God for the mountain until….until….

A Way of Being

Most people conduct their lives according to patterns.  People develop ways of perception and actions, ways to cope with and survive in the world, and these ways are not always in alignment with their Christian beliefs.  I know, because I am guilty of this myself.  Generally, it has been an unconscious process.  In other words, I was not always aware of the discrepancy between my behavior and my beliefs.  I was aware sometimes, however, and I felt confusion within myself and a certain helplessness to conduct my life in any other way.  There were some issues of morality and ethics in which I felt that sharp sword of Christian values, but there were other equally important areas of everyday coping in which the need for relief from stress eventually dulled my senses and eroded some of my values.

Indeed, the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.  No creature is concealed from him, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account.

Hebrews 4: 12-13

People live and work under so much stress that discernment of the reflections and thoughts of one’s own heart becomes extremely difficult.  It is not that people are aggressively sinful, but perhaps negligently so.  The primary focus is on survival in a complicated if not hostile world, with a secondary or supportive focus on spirituality.  Rather than spirituality as a transformational event or process, some level of spirituality is somehow balanced into one’s way of being and pattern of survival in the world.

As I have gotten older, and as I have been able to separate myself somewhat from the 9-to-5 workday world, my past way of being has become more exposed to my eyes.  There are things for which I must render an account, things done before the eyes of God and the saints, things which I minimized, and things which I boldly did because I lacked awareness—and I lacked awareness because I lacked true spiritual transformation. I did not conscientiously follow Christ, but believed in Him at a distance. 

There was an incident recently in which I regressed to an old way of coping.  You might call it a temptation, an experiment, a decrease in vigilance, or a moment of irrationality.  It was a mistake.  I regret it.  But, it enabled me to experience the contrast in reality between my old way of coping and my current quest to focus primarily on the spiritual life.  My old pattern was no longer functional in practice (though always dysfunctional in nature) and, in fact, it was an obstacle to living effectively (as opposed to coping with and surviving in the world) in the word of God. 

Feast of Peter and Paul

Hymn of Praise to
Saint Peter and Saint Paul

Unlearned and learned but equal in spirit
And in the love of God, as strong as angels,
Peter a simple man, Paul educated,
Both illumined by the grace of the Spirit,
Two flaming candles, unquenchable candles,
Towering and beautiful, two brilliant stars
Traversed the earth and spread the light.
Nothing did they take, to men they gave all,
Completely poor, the world they enriched,
Prisoners and servants, conquered the entire world,
With the teaching of Christ, enriched the world,
With a new weapon, conquered the entire world:
By humility and peace and meekness blessed,
By prayer and fasting and mercy powerful.
When to them, that stormy day, arrived the stormy night,
Bloodthirsty Nero, their life cut short.
But when the ruler of the world, a command issued
And to suffering, gave over Peter and Paul,
The world was theirs and not his [Nero's] anymore,
By death, the apostles gained the Kingdom.

(Source: The Prologue of Ohrid)

 

Loving My Enemies

Who are my enemies?  My enemies are mainly from the past, ghosts that haunt my mind and blur my vision of the here and now.  Moreover, my enemies placed themselves in that category.  It was they, not I, who declared war.  They won the war.  That is, the career wars for business profits and social dominance, and the Christian wars of doctrinal correctness over love of the individual.   You would think they would  be happy conquerors, but they are never happy unless they have objects of hatred or righteous outrage.  Can love have a positive impact on such people?

“You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.  For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?  Do not the tax collectors do the same?  And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that?  So be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Matthew 5: 43-48

What if people, whether enemies or strangers, do not want my love?  Perhaps my love is so inadequate that it cannot make a difference.  Or, perhaps the difference is not immediately noticeable, or not noticeable to me.  Often, it seems that all I can do for people is to pray for them.  I do not always have the opportunity to show assertive or proactive love, especially regarding former colleagues and acquaintances.  Moreover, some of these people are now deceased. 

Loving one’s enemies seems to be a here-and-now condition or state.  I think that is why my enemies from the past haunt me.  Although I never retaliated against them and I always contributed as a team player within employment structures, I never confidently loved my enemies—not in that perfect manner as the Bible instructs.  In fact, I often avoided them on the social level.  At the time, it seemed like the best way to survive and to maintain any semblance of peaceful relations.  Perhaps, to offer no resistance is not always passive, but a positive way to prevent unproductive conflict, false victories, and unnecessary victimization.

If prayer, in addition to or in the place of active love, is acceptable, then I can still try to bring good out of those past situations.  There is still time to be what I should have been.  However, what about my enemies themselves?  Do they have a responsibility toward me?  Is there a meeting place?  I believe, among Christian enemies (an unfortunate term), there are two or three who pray for me.  I believe some past conflicts were largely due to cultural misunderstandings and spiritual immaturity, and not to outright hatred.  I believe they, like myself, have grown and gained a greater biblical perspective on life and a closer walk with Christ—even if at the eleventh hour.

The Most Unenviable

There used to be children known as ragamuffins.  Anyway, that was what my mother called them when I was growing up.  It was a polite term for white trash.  They were the most unenviable class of people, living in poverty and sloth from generation to generation.  My mother and other PTA ladies would take boxes of winter coats and new shoes to the ragamuffins so that they could attend school.

Yes, they went to school and rode on the school bus with other children whose parents owned farms, machinery, cars, kitchen appliances and a television.  That was how I met Joanne.  We shared a seat on the bus, the three of us together: Joanne on the aisle, me in the middle, and my younger sister at the window.  The ragamuffins were like untouchables in the school yard, but somehow it was safe for Joanne and I to talk on the bus before the prejudices officially began at the ring of the school bell.

When I started the sixth grade, Joanne was not on the bus.  My mother later told me that Joanne’s parents took her out of school because they needed her to care for her younger siblings.  Things like that happened in those days and nobody felt any concern.  Nobody investigated.  It was just a secret fact of life.  Joanne’s education had ended and she would never return to school.  Still later, my mother told me that Joanne’s older brother had become a glue sniffer.  In the agricultural areas, glue was the drug of choice.  Boys used to build model airplanes and ships as a hobby.  Anyone could go to any 5-and-10 cent store and buy a tube of airplane glue. 

I never saw Joanne again.  I knew where she lived—on a ramshackle homestead where the goats roamed as they pleased.  I could imagine her there, washing clothes and cooking meals, while I went to school in my pleated wool skirts and carrying my own set of colored pencils.  Despite our differences, Joanne was my childhood twin of the spirit.  We were responsible girls, serious, not carefree like the other girls, and yet we had a vision of life beyond the dirt roads and over the hilltops.  That was what we talked about on the school bus—our hopes and dreams.  

I do not know if Joanne was able to break her chains of generational poverty, or if she started having children around age fourteen.  My mother never told me.  Joanne ceased to be a topic.  If she began a life of successive pregnancies, I know this—her children went to school beyond the fifth grade.  That chain, at least, was broken.  Joanne was a strong girl, and I believe she became an even stronger woman.  If I ever get to Heaven, then let me see Joanne there and crowned for her selflessness and perseverance.

A Good Conscience

There are some Christians who are convinced within their own mind that they will enter the Kingdom of Heaven upon their death.  They regard conversion or salvation as a once-and-for-all-time occurrence, or a guarantee, which cannot be revoked and which requires no further investment of oneself.  Although they quote biblical verses to support this view, this mode of thinking seems open to egotism and delusion.  We know, of course, that followers of Christ are capable of falling from grace—Judas is a prime example.  Thomas à Kempis wrote about the difference between presumption and a good conscience.

No man safely rejoiceth but he who hath the testimony of a good conscience within himself.  The boldness of the saints was always full of the fear of God.  Nor were they the less earnest and humble in themselves, because they shone forth with great virtues and grace.  But the boldness of wicked men springeth from pride and presumption, and at the last turneth to their own confusion.  Never promise thyself security in this life, howsoever good a monk or devout a solitary thou seemest.

Thomas à Kempis, Book 1, Chap. 20: 3

We are to trust in God, no matter what our level of sinfulness or holiness.  Even the saints lived in the fear of God and never presumed automatic entrance to the Kingdom.  We cannot fully know the mind of God, and we often do not see the breadth and depth of our own sins.  We may have been baptized, but that does not indicate a good conscience from that point forward.  Acquisition of the virtues and repentance of sins would seem to be a daily process, the outcome of which might be a clean conscience at the end of each day (as opposed to unbearable burdens of guilt and shame, or as opposed to a self-satisfied feeling of specialness). Even so, we must rely directly on Christ for our salvation—the thief on the cross is a prime example.

“Prayer for All Conditions of Men”

Prayer for All Conditions of Men

O God, the Creator and Preserver of all mankind, we humbly beseech thee for all sorts and conditions of men; that thou wouldest be pleased to make Thy ways known unto them, Thy saving health unto all nations. More especially we pray for Thy holy Church universal; that it may be so guided and governed by Thy good Spirit, that all who profess and call themselves Christians maybe led into the way of truth, and hold the faith in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life. Finally, we commend to Thy fatherly goodness all those who are any ways afflicted, or distressed, in mind, body, or estate; that it may please Thee to comfort and relieve them, according to their several necessities; giving them patience under their sufferings, and a happy issue out of all their afflictions. And this we beg for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

(Source: Liturgica.com)