Category: Making things whole

Healing the slow way (2)

When it’s curtains for you, pull yourself together

157/365 On the Mend 060609I find it helpful to start at the end.

If ‘healing’ postpones your final dismantling by a few months or decades, it’s good, but it’s not that good.

Of course it is good: if someone dies aged 5 or 15 or 25, we feel very differently than if they’re tipped out of the wheelbarrow at 65 or 85 or 105. Putting back the evil day is an extremely good thing.

I prefer to think, though, that the real blessing of getting physically healed (especially, nearly dying and getting a let off) is what you go on to think and do. If you think wonderful, I’m back to my indestructible self, that’s the wrong lesson.

The right lesson is that now you’ve been awakened to the reality of your upcoming mortality, you can do something about it.

Like:

  • Say everything good that needs saying to your loved ones
  • Make peace with your enemies
  • Get your affairs in order
  • Sort out the God-and-eternity business in your head and your soul
  • Gratefully relish each ‘bright blessed day’, and ‘dark sacred night’.

Do that, and you can walk hereafter with a lovely light tread on the earth, enjoying it absolutely more than ever and determinedly not getting your feet stuck in muddy glops of anger, fury, malice, bitterness, vengefulness or cynicism.

 

Healing the slow way (1)

Longer, higher, wider and deeper than the other sort?

157/365 On the Mend 060609This is so fascinating.  Part of our scenery as Christians is the dramatic, instanteous healing: the funeral is interrupted; the withered arm regrows; the woman bent doubled straightens up. Jesus did these kinds of things; I’ve interviewed missionaries who’ve also done them.

I haven’t looked on YouTube recently but I suppose there are plenty of videos there of the blind seeing and the deaf hearing.

Yet I feel these are the tips of the healing iceberg. They are the edited highlights, the signs. They are spectacular geysers in the overflowing goodness of God; but the real miracle is not the geyser, it’s the irrigation of the whole land.

Worse, If you think the dramatic, instanteous stuff is the normal operation of God’s healing power, you are setting up to hurt yourself and others.

Typical scene: some Christian meeting is going on and they start praying for the sick. Febrile atmosphere. Poor disabled schmuck is pushed up to be prayed for; is prayed for; nothing much happens; everybody tries to forget about it and move on. I’ve had this done to me, and I’ve seen it done to others.

And we have to do better than this.

I want to explore this over coming posts in the next few weeks. Alas I only I have one piece, my own, in the jigsaw. Please add more pieces if you can.

In praise of dogged

We all know people like this: unfailingly courteous. Hard-working. Persistently kind. Steady. Thorough. They are like pillars who hold up the organizations we work in.

Somewhere else in the building is the rodent scurrying of chatter, gossip, five-year-plans, radical upheaval, ambition, people making their mark, all passing by with the lifespan of hamsters while the pillars go on holding up the roof.

Our labrador Mabel, who died recently after 14 wonderfully dogged years just being a dog.

(I saw a quote: ‘Reform! Reform! Aren’t things bad enough already?’)

The odd thing about the steady people is that they don’t feel they’ve achieved anything. All they did was go to work, raise their families, pay their bills; nothing spectacular or charismatic or epoch-making or history-shaping or world-changing.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. George Elliot, Middlemarch (with which the book ends).

The fractal God

It’s all the same to him

first fractalIf you find something that has a pattern and you crank up the magnification and see the same pattern, you’ve found a fractal — an object that’s self-similar at different scales.

Nature is full of them. Tree branches fork the same way when they are the size of trunks or the size of twigs. Rivers split the same way into deltas and streams and trickles. All broccoli is roughly fractal but there is an insanely fractal variety called Romanesco, ideal for feeding to mathematicians. Snowflakes are fractal.

‘Fractal’ is a helpful lens for looking at God and God-stuff. For example:

Parables of the Kingdom are fractal. When Christ taught about the Kingdom of God being like a mustard seed that grew to be a great plant, what was he talking about? A word that grips the heart? A change of behaviour that influences a community? A mass-movement that changes a continent? All of them. Parables are true at many different scales, because all are curated by the same God.

Faithfulness is fractal. God shepherds our whole lives, and our tiniest moments. It is, therefore, worth praying for something as big as a whole good life, and as fleeting as a car-parking space. Both are an appeal to the kindness of God, just at different scales.

His mercy is fractal. Of course he cares for the whole flock, but he also puts his coat on and heads out for the lost sheep; scale doesn’t come into it. He values the lost teddy bear as much as the lost Bible translation.

Transformation is fractal. The resurrection of Christ (which from our perspective happened at a single point in history and at a certain location) is the same sort of thing as the re-creation of the whole Universe. The essence is the same, the scale is different. And in our current setting, small-scale victories have a place in his purposes just as large-scale ones do.

His peace is fractal. Our anxieties exist at many different scales. Sometimes, for example, we suffer big and small losses at the same time. And sometimes God seems to deal with the wrong scale at the wrong time. Little gifts from him give testimony to his intricate touch; at the same time the big things, the things that really matter, seem to be all unfixed. It’s natural to resent this, but in another way we should welcome God mending the small things as a reminder that he also has the big things in hand.

His pleasure is fractal.  I don’t think God is more pleased by 25000 people worshipping in a tent as he is by one person’s act of quiet submission or patience. He possibly nudges the angels to point it out either way. ‘Look at my servant Job!’

Of course God works in fractal way, exercising the same attention with  the very small and the very great. Since he is infinite, all the scales probably look much the same to him.

Towards making peace in the culture wars

doveSome interesting facts1:

  1. 56m abortions each year on earth, one in four pregnancies.
  2. Moral instruction or legal hassle doesn’t work. Countries where abortion is against the law don’t lead the league tables for the fewest abortions. Surprise, surprise, the law is good for making us know our guilt; not good at making us good.
  3. Free access to contraception and advice helps a bit. That may be why the UK’s rate is one in five pregnancies, not one in four. It could be made better all over the world. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers could congregate in that space and work together to improve our societies.
  4. Killing our unborn is (surely obviously) a symptom, not a problem,  and the problem is that we’re all broken, and the solution is meeting the kindness of God.

Here comes the sun

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes

SunriseI welcomed the chance recently to dig around and ask the question  “what (actually) is the Kingdom of God?” If you had to answer a quiz about it, what would you say? Here are five things.

  1. It’s wrapped up with the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus and him sending the Holy Spirit. His death fixed things up between us and God. His resurrection was the first drop of new wine into the old wineskins of the world, and it broke a tomb. His Ascension was his coronation. Sending the Spirit to revolutionize human lives was his first act in office.
  2. It’s now and not yet.  It’s breaking in among but this is just the first installment. The rest is yet to come. So we enjoy peace now which is an appetizer for the peace that will break over the whole world at the end the age.
  3. It’s internal and external. It’s about transformed hearts and revolutionizing society. It weaves together the quietist and the activist strands of the Christian faith.
  4. It grows. Like a mustard seed or yeast, tiny but resolute, it can be poisoned, stamped out, wiped out, set back, but it keeps coming.
  5. It comes in and through weakness. Hence the Beatitudes: ‘Happy are you who are spiritually bankrupt.’

‘They did not wait for his plans to unfold’

Bad, very bad.

CIMG2561.JPG

Psalm 106: vv 12-13:

‘Then they believed his promises

and sang his praise

‘But they soon forgot what he had done

And did not wait for his plans to unfold.’
Enough said.

The (second) greatest story ever told

A Christmas CarolI only re-read one book every year (apart from the Bible). I have an audio version of A Christmas Carol and I listen to it every Christmas season without fail. It’s huge fun and it’s about repentance.  What more could you want?

It’s also interesting for two other reasons:

  1. It’s nearly perfect. For me A Christmas Carol is the textbook for popular storytelling. Everything opened up at the beginning is resolved at the end. Everything is vivid and passionate. The dramatic tension never stops, building like a symphony through scene after perfect scene to the final explosion and the shattering and remaking of Scrooge.
  2. It shows how a novelist can change culture. All of us in the West draw on this text when we think about Christmas. Dickens edited the world by scribbling stories. He’s a reminder of why people should write; in a story-dominated world, culture is jerked and pulled across the stage by the story-tellers. If you want Christmas to be about something other than snow and the wretched jingle of sleighbells-something like a gleeful, subversive transformation of an old sinner–write a book.

My novel Paradise isn’t about Christmas. But it is subversive and is supposed to be funny.  A recent Amazon review from someone who described herself as an “extremely liberal atheist” was kind enough to say “Truly excellent! … I can’t wait to read his next work.” Which was nice. Courtesy of internet bookshops, I’ve been able to make Paradise a free download. Happy Christmas.

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Rowing a boat alone across a lake

Behold the terror and the joy

 

Lonely BoatingImagine rowing a boat on your own across a lake. The fears and joys are yours alone.

We are always alone. People may sit by our fireplaces–as it were–over many wonderful evenings and years. They may hug us and hold us, accepting each other as completely as two humans can.

But no-one knows us quite fully or quite truthfully. There are always veils. We are not entirely as we present ourselves, even to those we love the most.

Thanks to faith in Christ, though, I’ve discovered I’m never alone.

When I’m rowing alone across a lake, also known as living, Christ knows with me all the terror and the joy. Other loves may kindly watch, from the shore or other boats. Other loves may cheer and blow kisses. But he knows it all and we share it together.

 

O come, O come, Emmanuel

Recently I spent two weeks reading through 900 pages of the prayer handbook Operation World. (I was preparing the text for conversion to a phone app: exciting project.)

Operation World is basically the most gigantic prayer list every compiled. Prayer points are suggested for each country and there are thousands of them.

Reading Operation World over just a few days is an exhausting experience. So much need. So many places and points for prayer.

Many countries and peoples are still owed the gospel, and we in the church have been slow coming up with the goods.

A few countries, have, if anything been punched drunk by repeated visits of short-term missionary teams; not exactly over-evangelized but at a certain level exploited.

Corruption, power seeking, divisions? Apathy, defeat, retreat? Immorality? Idolatry? Take your pick. It seems to be everywhere. Everywhere needs good teaching, disciples being formed, the Spirit stirring. Everywhere needs leadership training and student work and children’s work.

It’s exhausting.

How to make sense of it, this spraying, kicking hosepipe of need? I was puzzling over this when I remembered the prayer at the very end of the Bible, which is also perhaps the simplest prayer in the Bible.

Come, Lord Jesus. Into every situation. Into every heart. One day, in power to usher in a new world. O come, O come, Emmanuel.

(This title is an edited and occasionally updated version of the 2010 version, with about 600 fewer pages, which–full disclosure–I helped edit.)