The Light in the Woods

#21 – THE LIGHT IN THE WOODS – APRIL 2007

© Aubri Dennison 2007

4/1/07 Reflections            The discussion as to whether we are justified by faith or by works, to me, misses the level on which it should be investigated. If by justification we mean “how we appear in the eyes of God”, then there’s no reason faith and works can’t operate together. In the same way, we discuss the letter of the law and the spirit of the law and how we need to follow one or the other. In Jesus’ time, just as in our own time, the letter of the law had become so fussy at the hands of man, that it was just about impossible to comply with. Jesus tried to explain that the spirit of the law was not only more compatible with God’s real purpose, but that in following it this way we are doing more than if we confined ourselves only to the rituals and dogmas that had come to dominate. Jesus was then as today’s mystics are – trying to infuse the will of God into our actions instead of the dictates of man.

Jesus re-examined Old Testament laws because people were just getting by in their own minds by sinning just as long as they were keeping the denatured law. Much of Gospel showed Jesus releasing men from the wrong-mindedness of the execution of Old Testament law in favor of obeying the law as it is written on the heart – a more strict and all-encompassing discipline. Doing this brings about union with God which doesn’t allow us to hide behind ritual in order to be complaint, for when we judge ourselves with the judgment of God, we view our sins as God does.

Adam’s sin bound us all; Jesus crucifixion loosed us all. It’s up to us to stay loosed – to avoid sin in order to be pleasing to God. The function of the law is to teach us that what we feel in our hearts is not right is truly not right; without knowing sin we would be free to sin, even if our consciences bothered us, for we could claim ignorance. But if we know God we know the right way to Him. One of the best ways to examine good and evil is to see how it affected the history of man’s relationship with God. The Bible is this history, and reading it provides us the catalyst to weigh the good and bad we recognize in our hearts and in the actions of others.

4/3/07 Reflections                Every three months without fail, I pick up a new daily devotional booklet from the church in town. Every morning I read from it, and from other favorite devotionals, like clockwork. This is my time of day to get in touch with God and hopefully, take some thought with me through the day, which keeps me aware of the presence of God I depend on. The end of last month I checked at the church, and no new devotional booklets had arrived. This is a big deal for me because the ice was going out on our lake and I was getting ready to be confined on the island until the ice was gone and I could travel again by boat. If I didn’t get a copy now I would have to do without this mainstay for weeks. Added to that was that this had to happen at Easter time, when the story and lesson of Christ’s passion would be taken up – in my remote situation, I count on my reading to participate in this experience. Also, I’d just made a nice leather book cover especially to fit this type of devotional, and the first time I get to set a new book in it, there’s no book available. Don’t laugh 00 this kind of things brings me great comfort and satisfaction when all goes well, and great mental confusion when it doesn’t.

Today I thought: Just because my devotional reading is a good thing doesn’t negate the fact that it’s become a ritual that enslaves me with its out-of-proportion importance. God should be my greatest focus, and what can be said of my faith if I don’t take this opportunity to reflect on how my greatest guidance comes from God Himself? He will not let me lack anything I need, and if I need something more than His guidance, not matter how righteous, I’m misleading myself.

4/4/07 Insights from Prayer           Today as I thanked God for allowing my dog’s bad cough to finally get better, I realized how small are the things we want, and how God grants them even though they have little to do with His great plan. It’s hard for us to strike a balance between what we need and what we want, and yet it’s so important for our relationship with God. What’s even harder for us to do is further separate our wants into the things we want which won’t harm our relationship with god, and the things that will draw us away from the one thing that should be important to us. Thankfully, we can have God’s help in this.

4/10/07 Insights from Study              God wants diverse paths, as long as we watch out that false teachings don’t rub off on us. But guard which teachings are heresy and which are blessed manifestations of God’s desires which you don’t follow. Something isn’t a sin, or even wrong-minded, just because it’s a different path than the one you take. Exclusiveness if OK only when a truly sinful worldview attempts to creep into our lives. Exclusiveness is not OK when we use it to keep other valid paths away from those you want on your own path. If the path leads to God, it is valid – it gets its validation from God, not from the wants and needs of men, even men who love God. Better we should look on all who love God as a starting point; from there submit that each way has the same goal, and having the goal of God, is so much better than the other camp. After all, it’s an essential part of faith that if one honestly tries to do as God asks, He will help them do right and keep them from going wrong. Instead of alienating those who have divergent, emergent means – not worrying that some other faction will get the followers (and their tithes) than you seek for your own denomination – try to accept God’s mysterious ways. Make yourself known for what you do best, and bring it to God in love and humility; He will use it to the best benefit – just as He will use the talents of those who do something else better. By accepting other paths, we can pool our talents towards the common goal. I’m talking to everyone who is guilty of exclusion of believers – from radical Muslims who want to kill those on other paths to the same God, to evangelicals who call Catholics non-Christians. You are not pleasing God if you direct your efforts against other believers, even if you think you’re being “holy” in how you do it.

4/13/07 Insights from Study            Mysticism if often criticized as a method that panders to self; as a religion of the self-toward society that is the cause of all the distress in our world. While this criticism is mostly directed a New Age occult followings, it also takes aim at Christian Mysticism because, to some, meditation is a method of self-worship. Those who fear the human need to seek divine guidance for oneself display a lack of trust in God that belies their own faith. The fear is that if someone strives for awareness of self they’ll succumb to worship of self-actualization – the state where self becomes more important than God. In actuality, since God’s law is written on our hearts, honest meditation results in awareness of our faults and weaknesses – an awareness that paves the way for abandonment to God’s wishes, not abandonment of God’s moral imperative. If you have a biblical worldview and not the self-centered worldview of postmodern liberalism, then you have nothing to fear from Christian Mysticism. And if “self” is a main consideration in the culture war of today, Christian Mysticism is right to address it and direct it toward it’s place in a God-centered belief system. To those who are seeking self-satisfaction, there’s no attraction to telling them they’re wrong that that’s that – mysticism takes that powerful seeking and uses it to instruct the seeker. When he sees that self-inspection leads to abandonment of will to almighty God, and that this in turn leads to the satisfaction he seeks, then the same goal is reached. If all is vanity, we might as well use that need to bring about the holy result.

4/20/07 Inspirations               There’s plenty of choice available to us from within the framework of infused morality – it’s not as if by conceding the presence of right and wrong we are relegated to the confines of an inability to participate in our lives. If God had wanted to micro-manage our lives, He would not have created our free wills along with us, or allowed us to choose sin. The fact that He did provide us with our free will and does allow there to be consequences of exercising it, proves that inside the master plan is a loving, encouraging God who is not to blame for your sins and the disasters they bring. If you get rights, you also get responsibilities. Subjecting one’s will to the master plan doesn’t mean we’re prohibited from advancing our own causes with our own choices. We are, in fact, freer to concentrate on the day-to-day running of our lives when we have the moral framework already worked out for us. The very idea that I would want the burden of reasoning out my own realities before I could act is supremely silly. We can’t help but to know right from wrong – that’s a gift from the Creator, and it’s a good thing for us and for those around us. To insist that we ourselves are the arbiters of morality just for the sake of human pride is a stupid and self-defeating mistake. And when that mistake is foisted on me and the society in which I and my heirs have to function, you bet your morality, or lack of it, is my business. Your sin impacts me greatly – I don’t get a pass just because it’s you and not me that believes morals are relative to the individual. This worldview puts me and everyone else in danger, and your “I’m not hurting anyone” attitude shows exactly why God gifted us with moral imperatives in the first place.

4/24/07 Insights from Prayer          God gives gifts to all His creation – some in one way and some in another. No one has cause to be jealous of anyone else, because God gives each of us precisely what he needs at the time he should have it – and beyond that we don’t really need to go.

4/24/07 Reflections                We could have a beautiful banquet table loaded with nature’s fruits and vegetables and grains and meat – and still go in search of junk food. We want gratification over sustenance, delight over satisfaction. What the junk food provides is over and above what God desires for us, and our pursuit of it is relentless.

4/24/07 Presentations        If you watch nature long enough you realize that the war among a species and the war between the species is the normal order. Why are we surprised that conflict is as inherent in humans as it is in the rest of God’s creatures? We need to face it that because mankind chose sin, nature must also reflect the conflict mode of life. Real life isn’t at all like the Disney version, and man will never be at peace in this world. What’s left for us to direct is our own response to the conflict. We don’t have to give our encouragement to the power struggle even if we have to live amid it. We can chose to distance ourselves from it in the hope that if we let it pass by it won’t just go harass someone else, but see that it can get what it wants without harassing anybody at all. Two mergansers were minding their own business, diving and fishing in front of my window, when all of a sudden without warning they made for shore – safely up on the rocks and out of the water. I couldn’t figure out this behavior until, sure enough, a loon surfaced quietly and suddenly where the ducks had been. God tell us that what we have need of He provides. There were plenty of fish in the lake for both species. The loon fishes in the middle of the lake and the mergansers were more adapted to tool along the shoreline. It wasn’t necessary for the loon to continue to harass the mergansers, or for the mergansers to retaliate. So they went their separate ways and God continued to provide for them. But for humans, who have a choice, too often this situation would turn into a war of wills and escalate into something of a loss for both sides. Instead of going about doing what God wills, we do what we will, and that usually means taking something away from someone else in order to get more than we need. Mysticism is the place for those who are willing to go against their nature by abandoning self-will to God-will, and trusting that by doing so God will provide and protect. But we can also defend ourselves, by encouraging others into a situation where everyone wins. Each struggle provides this situation, if the two extremes don’t insist on having their way and so can’t accept the compromise. In nature there’s no such debate – there is conflict only when necessary. Otherwise, each self-interest merely distances itself from other self-interests. God is constantly showing us His preferred way in the observable workings of nature. If we can preserve that standard in our human world, maybe we can get closer to life the way God wills it. Natural creatures don’t have choice in this, so to observe them is to see how things really are. Some are the eaters and some are the eaten, and it’s not pretty. But it’s the way God has ordered it, and He’s ordered it this way for our benefit. As humans, we’ve been given a free will and special relationship with the Creator – love. This ensures that in the natural world, we as much as possible are the eaters and not the eaten, because we have God’s protection. But we also have a consciousness of our duty to treat other humans as equals, and other creatures as God-given.

4/24/07 Insights from Study            Original sin was necessary; the transformation from angel to Satan was necessary; the evolution of human nature towards self-regard was necessary – all were necessary in order to make God’s strength in us necessary. It’s in the seeking of this strength that we come to ask God to fix things for us. As an answer we come to know that He already has; that when we claim our salvation, all that went before on earth will be as nothing. For in heaven there is no evil, no sin, no self, no weakness, no needs, no cares. The satisfaction of our desire for God is the culmination of creation. How much better off we all would be if we made this holy desire our one and only need here on earth!

4/29/07 Insights from Prayer          When I see how many religions there are I have to marvel over the complicity of God’s plan. When I see those who are anti-religion exclaim over the brutality and sorrow religion has caused, I marvel that they still see mankind as sinless and progressive. When I see the many and varied Christian denominations I marvel that anyone can see it as good that believers are willing to turn their spirituality over to church institutions. How can so many diverse and divergent beliefs feel right to us? Because we aren’t concentrating on belief in God, but belief in our beliefs. We’ve taken adoration of God into the political arena because we like to belong to a group, to be validated by some one else, and to feel indignant when our group is persecuted. All we do, believers and non-believers, is deal with each other – person to person, group against group. I prefer to deal with God – God gives me this right and ability and responsibility, and helps me every step of the way. Why would I want to allow anyone or anything to come between me and God? Can any human being or institution do better than God in instructing, correcting, helping or encouraging me? I’m not saying others cannot benefit from church affiliation – I’m just saying I don’t need it. And I’m well aware that churches are powerful in ministry to others, and for that I’m grateful. But I also believe God calls us individually, and if I’m devout He will allow me to serve others in another way. Mysticism is a bit of an enigma – everyone is a mystic in that each person holds God within himself and yet very few are called by God to pursue the mystic process to the end. But if you are called to this, you receive God himself as you instructor – the demands are great and the rewards are great.