The Light in the Woods

12/4/09 Reflections           Quietism believes that we merely exist. Everything we truly need is gdiven to us. We have no responsibility other than to God. World affairs must be ignored, and the risk of contamination thereby avoided. Self-annihilation brings perfection, which is enough in its own right. It’s just one person and God – everything else might as well be non-existent.

It’s a radical mysticism, even though “radical” seems contradictory to everything Quietist. In every principle above, there is merit and truth. But as a whole theology, Quietism doesn’t add up. It’s too much like the way we would like life to be – a utopia without the provision that if God wants us to be active for others we could comply. And if we can’t comply to God’s desires, we are certainly no mystics.

I would love to feel justified in a life of total contemplation and isolation; to have absolutely no other responsibility. I would be content to know that in complete passivity I am pleasing God; I could easily enjoy living in blissful abandon. The trouble is, as much as the world can turn without me, I must make myself available and ready to be active when and how God wants me to. That is an inseparable part of abandoning my will to God – the acceptance that His will might be to use my action for a greater good.

So while I agree with the Quietist premise and would like to live a Quietist life, I could never get past the intuition that though God doesn’t need my co-operation, He wants it. It’s in this way we honor Him, for it isn’t enough to abandon ourselves to Him if we will not abandon our abandonment should He ask us for that as well.

One of the first insights of mysticism is that God wants to be asked for His favors. Without this attribute of God’s, intercessory prayer and works on behalf of others would make no sense, as we’re aware that God is capable of anything He desires without our input. We couldn’t even honor God if He didn’t feel the need to be loved by us. So Quietism doesn’t sit well because it takes mysticism further than it should go. In the same way as God wants us to ask for favors He would have given us anyway, He asks us to love Him and honor Him in our care for others, even though He has no needs and is capable of caring for His children Himself. Mysticism is an unequivocal “Yes” to God’s desires; Quietism limits what those desires can entail to what can be done passively. That sounds like “No” to me.

6/21/09 Insights from Prayer           How do I worship God? I worship Him when I praise Him; that is all He needs to channel His grace to me. How do I praise Him?

I praise Him when I count to ten before speaking out in anger. I praise Him when I defend someone who is the victim of gossip. He must smile when I put a dollar in a beggar’s cup, look longingly at His rainbow, swim in the ocean and think of His mightiness, buy a gift, lie in bed sick and pray for recovery, read a book to a child, plant grass seed. All these things are praise to God if I am willing to live in His presence by doing His will.

There’s something in the Bible that makes me cringe every time I read of it. In Revelation there are these 24 elders, and when something momentous happens the 24 elders immediately fall down before the throne and worship. Right or wrong, whatever it is in the makeup of western society, when we see people fall down in worship, we instantly think “brainwashed, cultists with no independent thoughts.” But because it’s in the Bible, our churches need to ritualize worship some way similar without making the general populace feel uncomfortable.

No wonder secularism is taking over the West. No matter how we spin it, worship of God is linked in our minds with human degradation. Maybe we’ve watched too many Hollywood renditions of third-world ritualism – worship by ritual begins to seem faintly backward. We don’t like to think of ourselves as inferior beings with sinful natures. To heighten our sense of atonement, churches emphasize our sinful nature, but they stop short of making us fall prostrate before a throne. We won’t do it – it seems phony. Before too long it may all seem phony – bowing our heads, folding our hands in prayer, being on our knees after the age of eight, carrying around a Bible, discussing our religious thoughts, uttering God’s name outside of profanity, attending church, going to confession.

I’m not making a judgment call — if you are comfortable doing these things you have found your path. I’m merely stating that spiritual persons that don’tfeel comfortable doing these things are no less spiritual for that. They in fact have an advantage because the privateness of their worship underscores the individual nature of a right-relationship with God; one that does not need to be showcased and therefore is open to genuineness. Behind the closed door of your spirit you are free to be as humble and obedient as you feel.

I wouldn’t argue with the objection that a true believer ought to be willing to go outside of their comfort zone if required. I’m just skeptical of how often God requires this and to what extent does it go on before it becomes ego-driven. I do not and never will, unless told to directly by God, believe that evangelizing others into Christianity is a requirement for entry into heaven, yet I would do it whenever inspired to by God’s Holy Spirit.

The point of it all is that once I am blessed to enter into a right-relationship with God, I am able to discern His will and would have His help in carrying it out.  I don’t need anything else, and God does not need anything else from me. Living the presence of God, I will do what He asks, and nothing He asks will feel degrading or uncomfortable no matter how it seems to others.  In His wisdom God may test me, change my mind, or lead me in ways I don’t understand or would rather not go. At least my praise will be genuine, my worship appropriate, and my works God-directed; all because instead of following a church I am following God’s design for me as an individual. To those who say: How can you be sure? I answer: If God is capable of leading me astray when I humbly ask for His guidance, then all believers are hopelessly deceived and we should all settle for secularism.

All faith is based on divine inspiration, and the moment this seems to stop is the moment we realize our worship and praise has not been sincere enough for God’s grace to attend to us. We need to go back to the basics – the point where it’s just God and me enjoying each other’s presence and straightening things out between us. This presence is what makes me praise God, and my praise is the worship He seeks.

6/16/09 Inspirations           Why do we take offense at the rule of God? Because we love control; because we live in a world where human beings dominate. When we are constantly reminded of our rule over the Earth, it’s easy to lose sight of how we got this privilege in the first place. After having lost the perspective of the man/God relationship, we become so used to having things our way it’s hard to go back.

Mystics spend their lives going back. They know what’s in human nature to forget – that real freedom is to allow yourself to be controlled by God. How can abandonment of your will to God’s desires be freedom? Because God’s desires are for what’s good for you, and allowing the Almighty the responsibility of guiding your free will is the sure and easy path to joy. How marvelously free we are when God takes over our work and our responsibilities. Instead of striving under our own power, we are able to coast under God’s. Ever after, our work goes lightly because we are boosted along by the presence of God at all times. Whatever difficulties we face we are given the ability to handle.

So we shouldn’t take offense at the rule of God – it’s given out of love and designed to lead us safely home. It’s amazing that people will object to God’s “intrusion” into their lives, then will docilely follow the crowd at the first sign of peer pressure.

As for me, I will gladly accept God as the control of my life. I’m aware that this is the only way to get what I want. Why would I settle for something less sure and more difficult – my autonomy? It means nothing to me if by it I lose my relationship with God.

4/14/09 Insights from Study             Mysticism does not fly in the face of scripture in the way some would have you believe. Anytime scripture mentions the work of the Holy Spirit in man, it’s talking about mysticism. The Holy Spirit is the power of God working through His creatures and His creations. The Holy Spirit indwelling in man is promised over and over, and how this would show up in God’s plan was predicted many times and evidenced throughout the Bible. The actual words used by the Holy Spirit to individuals visited by Him can not always be found in the Bible, but the Bible is clear in it’s teaching — that the Holy Spirit would be clear in His teaching.

Where fundamentalism and Christian Mysticism part company is that fundamentalism rests solely on the very words of the Bible with no new input acknowledged, while Mysticism allows inspirational work of the Holy Spirit in the individual as a valid way that God speaks His mind to us.

It doesn’t help that the true meaning of Mysticism has been clouded by people using the term incorrectly when speaking of the paranormal and secular self-help, and also by people, especially those in the media, who use the term “mysticism” when they mean “mysterious”.

Fundamentalists also do not like the doctrine that there are many paths to God. To them, the law is clear and all that’s needed is obedience. But “many paths” spoken of in Mysticism doesn’t mean we’re free pick and choose what we want to obey so much as that God has a role for us in His plan and He doesn’t work with us all in the same way.

Mysticism, which is a process, often gets blamed for beliefs that diverge from Biblical interpretations. But when you are on fire for the Holy Spirit it would be just as unBiblical to ignore His offerings as to deny God’s purpose in Him.  I think if the devotional aspect of mysticism were better understood there would be less objection to it. We just give our whole selves to God and are at peace because we hold Him in our hearts as we go about our daily tasks. We pray, but we contemplate as well. We read scripture, but we read as well the testimony of those who have received God’s enlightenment throughout history. We tend to be individualistic, but as long as we’re following virtue and love, we feel sure our guidance is holy.

In short, the devotion of mysticism is honest of itself. Like anything else, those who profess it are not perfect. But this can be said of any spiritual doctrine, dogma, or process.  We shouldn’t fault the faith for the sins of the faithful. And we shouldn’t miss out on the beautiful gifts of the Holy Spirit from fear of deception. Protection from deception is one of those gifts.

4/1/09 Reflections                Every time I try to turn the meaning of intercessory prayer over in my mind, I end up getting more and more confused. This means that I’m definitely using my own selfish reasoning and that God has still not chosen to enlighten me. He enlightens me to do intercessory prayer, but doesn’t let me in on the theology of how it works. It’s something I don’t know and this drives me crazy because I feel like somewhere within intercessory prayer is God’s design for me. I want so much to be a tool in God’s hands, but a tool can’t call out to the carpenter, or an instrument out to the musician.

Do I pray for others so that God will say “Well, if she thinks this person deserves it, I will change my plan in order to accommodate her”?  No, God is unchanging; His plan exists in eternity.

Do I pray for others in order to make a better world? Who is to say the world will be better if I get what I want? It’s all about what God wants, and He doesn’t need me to tell Him what He wants.

Do I pray for others so that they will begin to pray for themselves? There again, if God wanted that He would make it happen without me.

Do I pray for others so I can feel good about myself? No, most of the time I end up feeling like nothing but a usurper of glory.

Although I haven’t experienced the inspiration that affirms what I suspect, I feel I might be moved to pray on the behalf of total strangers because this act is a gift of grace given to me as part of my spiritual development. I pray for others out of obedience to God. There’s no other explanation because none is needed – a gift is a gift and there’s no need to belittle it by questioning the motives of its giver.

My best course is to remember that since we’re all children of God there is no such thing as a total stranger; that what I do for someone else I do for me, and I know it pleases God when I benefit. I’m not my brother’s keeper; I’m my brother. And my brother is me – when I pray for him I’m praying for myself. The more others are seized by an awareness of God’s grace, the more gifted I am. The closer the world gets to the acceptance of divine love and purpose, the sooner the world will no longer be needed and this imperfection can end. When I pray for others, no matter what the outward manifestation of their need, I am actually petitioning for global glorification of God – the state in which we can finally all live with God again the way He created for us.

If I remain confused about how it fits into God’s plan for me to ask for His intervention on behalf of someone else, at least I can keep the big picture in mind, and pray from within the cloud of unknowing just because God asks.

1/17/09 Insights from Prayer          History has been filled with brave hearts who can go against convention in order to gather God’s children to the place God wants them to be. Convention changes; societies change. But God does not change, and those that follow Him without fail are always in demand – never so much so than when they must be martyred to a popular thinking that goes against God’s wishes.

Many have learned God’s truth from God’s Spirit, but most of these, while taking God’s will into their own hearts, fall short of passing along this mystery to others. But there are those few who are so humble, so obedient, so willing, that they can go against the prevailing powers of man, speaking the truth as God gives it to them.  It takes great humility to bring this about, because persons willing to do this cannot concern themselves with anyone’s opinion but God’s. Their mission is bigger than their reputation.  To be this way requires great personal insight in the first place, followed by that special grace of compassion that makes one care very much about the rest of God’s people so as to urge them to seek this same divine favor.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to be heard through the barrier of humanism and the ostracizing of spirituality. But God’s will always wins, and He never fails to instill in us all the need for spiritual awakening. This need, no matter how buried by worldliness, always lies tantalizingly close to the surface, calling to the spirit for recognition. All it takes is a glance toward the person who isn’t content to let their spirituality be hidden and yet holds it close to themselves like a treasure.

We want you to want the peace we have. We want you to envy our joy. Be jealous enough to seek what we have for yourself. And when you have it, don’t be afraid to wear your love for God in public. You will instruct without saying a word, because all you need to convey is a desire to hear the Real Teacher.

In response to the ravages of group politics, I want to belong to the counterculture of individual spirituality. If society must collapse in order for the choice of Godliness to shine through the ashes, then I’m willing to suffer fools gladly. People are sheep and will follow where it’s easiest to go. I’m willing to be the black sheep that wanders away, but wanders away in order to seek the True Shepherd. I don’t mind being an outcast alone with my God – in fact I cherish that above all else. I may be on the outside of society, but I’m not looking in longingly. I’m comfortable out here because what seems cold and boring to others is warm and inviting to me. But I do care about you on the inside, and if you should look out and see I’m happy and in peace, you might want to turn around and look from my perspective at the party you’re enjoying. If that seed of doubt is planted in your spirit, my work is done and you can expect God to take over completely.