Or perhaps simply to what we do not (possibly cannot) know what. Whatever it is that steps back that all else may become what or who it will but which cares to relate to that which it has made room for so that it could fulfill its capacity for relationally. And we by making room in our interiority to wonder about the other beyond ourselves gain every bit as much. God, if there be one, benefits as much as we do by the connection.
When I posted on atheist sites I sometimes did so under the monicker “whateverist”. Some took that to indicate an identification with cynical indifference but it was always about allegiance to what is more, whatever that should turn out to be.
It absolutely should. God made us for himself – he is not woo that evolved from the material cosmos who communicates and wonderfully interacts with us whom he has marvelously evolved for no reason.
Thanks. Yes, I think that is what we are both talking about. Whereas I usually agree with MacDonald, I hesitate to go where he is so firm that he criticizes others–and usually he doesn’t do it harshly, recognizing that God is a parent who is much kinder than we are. I agree that it takes maturity (beyond me) to recognize that there is no true outsider–we are all needing some sort of correction, but God also knows where we’re coming from, so He knows how to do it like a parent.
Hence again the importance of our being childlike and existentially enjoying the moment (not that all moments are easy to enjoy). Piper, whom some eschew and understandably, gets is right though when he says the chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him, and not just incidentally thanking our ‘adult’ Father for the things he has given us to enjoy. “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”
Yes. (I intentionally switched the order of those quotes. ; - )
And continuing reading… there are children explicitly again in your next reply.
It helps to have experience that God is a trustworthy Father, not to mention others’ factual testimonies that he is, in the Bible and through the centuries and including today. The latter is really the starting place since we cannot generate reciprocated bilateral interaction with God upon demand. Thankfulness and trust need to appear on the scene, and recognition of his sovereignty. One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp about eucharisteo starts hard with the death of her toddler sister in their farmyard when Ann was only five. Theodicy is difficult!
That doesn’t sound like the Jesus I read about in the Gospels, so I guess I’m not a very mature, steadfast Christian indeed (although sometimes my deeds might tend to affirm that).
Here’s another quote from “The Baron’s Apprenticeship”:
“He’ll be a great man someday!” she laughed, with a little quiver of the mouth
“He’s a good man now,” answered the smith. “As long as a son of mine can look every man in the face, I don’t care whether it be great or small he is.”
“But wouldn’t it be better still if he could look God in the face?”
“You’re right there, my pretty dove!” replied the old man; “only a body can’t say everything out in one breath. But you’re right, you are right!” he went on. “I remember well the time when I thought I had nothing to be ashamed of; but the time came when I was ashamed of; but the time came when I was ashamed of many things, and I’d done nothing worse in the meantime either! When a man first gets a peep inside himself, he sees things he didn’t look to see–and they stagger him a bit!”
There are moods of such satisfaction in God that a man may feel as if nothing were left to pray for, as if he had but to wait with patience for what the Lord would work; there are moods of such hungering desire, that petition is crushed into an inarticulate crying; and there is a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for everything. This last is the very essence of prayer, though not petition. It is possible for a man, not indeed to believe in God, but to believe that there is a God, and yet not desire to enter into communion with him; but he that prays and does not faint will come to recognize that to talk with God is more than to have all prayers granted–that it is the end of all prayer, granted or refused. And he who seeks the Father more than anything he can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.
Yeah - I really like the blacksmith. MacDonald packs a lot of great lines and profound thoughts into the mouths of his spiritually wizened characters in their humble (or so it is thought) circumstances.
Even such as ask amiss may sometimes have their prayers answered. The Father will never give the child a stone that asks for bread; but I am not sure that he will never give the child a stone that asks for a stone. If the Father say, ‘My child, that is a stone; it is no bread;’ and the child answer, ‘I am sure it is bread; I want it;’ may it not be well he should try his bread?
…perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is necessary to its arrival. To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our consciousness is to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf whence it issues: in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With his holy influence, with his own presence, the one thing for which most earnestly we cry, he may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that he is answering our request–has answered it, and is visiting his child.
Thanks. I am grateful for these insights on prayer–I guess I had had a bit of chronologic snobbery, not realizing how much people in the 19th century (and earlier) wondered why we even pray. He’s certainly surpassed me in his musings about reasons.
A comparable thing actually happened to me: my short excursion to med school (at the age of 43… I always have to throw that in ; - ). I thought I wanted it, I was given multiple providential confirmations in my going (things that just don’t happen normally… not entirely unlike Maggie’s and Rich Stearns’), I crashed (a difficult providence), but then another series of things (‘co-instants’) confirmed my leaving and which rescued me. (One of those co-instants was also a very helpful and surprising providence to a young Christian couple as well as myself.) The timings and placings of several were not much short of startling, if any. So I am glad and thankful I was given the stone I wanted.
(I certainly did not ask for kidney cancer, but I’m glad and thankful I was ‘given’ it as most regulars here know: my nephrectomy.)
Or perhaps another way of looking at it is that God might have a miraculous capability of taking the stones we’ve asked for (and after we’ve realized their true nature) … and ends up turning those stones into bread in ways that never occured to us. A dangerous thought, I know. One should never try to justify or rationalize away potentially evil choices we’re considering.
That’s not another way of looking at for me. Might have?! That’s exactly the way I look at it and that’s exactly what he did. I’m interested in doxologizing him, and he turned something difficult into something cool… and in several ways that never would have occurred to me. There’s a CCM song* that says he turns pain into gain. I don’t see any dangerous thoughts – it’s not like I had been idolizing going, which would have been evil. And of course, we should never tempt God by presuming he’ll bail us out of the consequences of evil that we’ve done or might do, but he is a good and strong Father. So I can’t see your last two sentences in the picture at all in this narrative. (Asking for a stone instead of bread isn’t evil in itself. It may not be too wise, and it certainly isn’t clever if what you really need is bread. )
*When I was composing this on my iPad, I was leaving the text entry field by tapping the V-shaped grapheme in the upper right corner that collapses it. By a quirk in the Discourse GUI in the portrait mode, if you retract the virtual keyboard first before collapsing the text entry area, it takes you way up page in the thread.
Anyway, all that was to say, speaking of CCM songs, it took me right to my post three weeks ago about the Laura Story song that I frequently refer to, about praying for blessings and sometimes what we get are difficulties (difficulties by which we can sometimes glorify God, rejoicing in the cool ways he providentially intervenes getting us out of them):
Of course, no prayer for any revenge that would gratify the selfishness of our nature, a thing to be burned out of us by the fire of God, needs think to be heard. Be sure, when the Lord prayed his Father to forgive those who crucified him, he uttered his own wish and his Father’s will at once: God will never punish according to the abstract abomination of sin, as if men knew what they were doing. ‘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 hell-fire; if less will do, whatever brings repentance and self-repudiation, is God’s repayment.
Friends, if any prayers 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!
Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. It was not for our understandings, but our will, that Christ came. 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. He has not that in him which can understand that kind. The gospel itself, and in it the parables of the Truth, are to be understood only by those who walk by what they find. 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 knowing intellectually he would imagine he had 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.
From MacDonald’s sermon: “The Last Farthing”
…Which will be the source of 108 through 118
Sadly, the pendulum can swing too far in the opposite direction. Years ago, and I may still have the book, I saw a chart of church history which pictured a pendulum swinging back and forth between various movements of intellectualism and emotionalism (or non-intellectualism if you prefer).
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