Hope you have recovered well. That is a miserable experience. I had a friend recently who had a similar problem, and it turned out he had a congenital bowel malrotation with a midgut volvulus.(Lay terms, his guts were made backward, and some of them twisted like a balloon toy). Anyway, not a fun time.
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I wouldn’t volunteer for it, given the opportunity. 
And I guess there is a 20% recurrence rate.
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(162) Facing Both Ways
Is there not many a Christian who, having begun to deny himself, yet spends much strength in the vain and evil endeavour to accommodate matters between Christ and the dear Self–seeking to save that which so he must certainly lose–in how different a way from that in which the Master would have him lose it! It is one thing to have the loved self devoured of hell in hate and horror and disappointment; another to yield it to conscious possession by the living God himself, who will raise it then first and only to its true individuality, freedom, and life. With its cause within it, then, indeed, it shall be saved!–how then should it but live!
As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: “Self-Denial ”.
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(163) The Careless Soul
The careless soul receives the Father’s gifts as if it were a way things had of dropping into his hand. He thus grants himself a slave, dependent on chance and his own blundering endeavour–yet is he ever complaining, as if some one were accountable for the checks which meet him at every turn. For the good that comes to him, he gives no thanks–who is there to thank? at the disappointments that befall him he grumbles–there must be some one to blame!
As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: “Self-Denial ”.
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I’ve admired many of MacDonald’s sentiments but I can’t or at least won’t follow him here.
The last two quotes reinforce my impression that there is too much self denial in Christianity, as if the only thing that mattered was a state of affairs which obtains only after your life is over. I feel that is wrong in my bones. Life flows and no part of it is disposable, most certainly not that part which is most tangible. I would never trade what is present for what is hypothetical. It isn’t in my nature and I’m most grateful for that nature. This isn’t a simple preference for hedonism. There is much else besides that in the option of choosing embodied experience over abstract hypothetical contingencies.
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And then there’s the hedonism which does not exclude the rest of reality, this life and the next. It’s knowable now and there is nothing hypothetical about it. Ears to hear and all that.
Reality and life now to the fullest.
I think I understand what you are saying, at least in part, Mark. If the only thing Christians, or anyone with some sort of theistic belief, focus on is “the sweet by and by”, then yes; I agree with you. And there is plenty of that.
MacDonald has been hard for me to take at times, too, but I think for different reasons. This part not so much, because I think he is talking about what Christians should be focusing on, and that is a reciprocal loving relationship with God through Jesus, as well as demonstration of that love to others now – both as a result of that relationship with God and out of obedience to him. Not as a fearful drudgery, but as an overflow of the love that we have experienced ourselves.
Because we are not naturally loving, we’ve been shown how and told to do it.
I think about the ways I’m aware of that you and Lia show (have been showing) love for and to each other, and that it costs you both something. It’s not for some future reward but for the reward now of doing the loving and being in that loving relationship.
That’s my take from these bits from MacDonald.
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Plenty of that with Jesus and Paul too. “If Christ is not risen, we are to be most pitied of all people.” For the joy set before him, he was able to endure grotesque suffering.
Kierkegaard looked forward to an intimate friendship with his beloved Regina in the life to come.
Pilgrims for whom the world was not worthy.
And yet we pray for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. That his kingdom would come. A kingdom that is now and not yet.
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Yes, that. And it is knowable now, not “hypothetically”, and enjoyable. The factual accounts which I am wont to repeat are evidence of those who do indeed know, and I am among them. History is replete with us.
(And some of the evidence is just plain fun. SBO? Not so much. 
But at least I know to whom I’m thankful.)
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(164) There Is No Merit in It
In the main we love because we cannot help it. There is no merit in it: how should there be in any love?–but neither is it selfish. There are many who confound righteousness with merit, and think there is nothing righteous where there is nothing meritorious. ‘If it makes you happy to love,’ they say, ‘where is your merit? It is only selfishness!’ There is no merit, I reply, yet the love that is born in us is our salvation from selfishness. It is of the very essence of righteousness. Because a thing is joyful, it does not follow that I do it for the joy of it; yet when the joy is in others, the joy is pure. That certain joys should be joys, is the very denial of selfishness. The man would be a demoniacally selfish man, whom love itself did not make joyful.
As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: “Self-Denial ”.
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Nice of you to include this.
Which, in the context of the discussion I was having with Mark, is what I was addressing in my entire reply to Mark. While focusing on Mark’s frequently-stated concerns about Christians focused on an unknown future, while ignoring the known present.
I wonder how Mark’s concerns, if taken to heart by “the” church, in the context of Christian faith, could transform the way the church is present now on the earth and what different impact it would have here and now?
I wonder what SK had to say about finitude in contrast to the infinite, which of the two is higher, and which of the two is a matter of faith. How he would classify his thoughts about Regine in the context of questions of finitude and the infinite?
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Kant could be held up as the poster child for that sentiment. MacDonald is once more in my good graces and I’ll try to remember the next time he seems to be veering off the track on one side it may well be for dramatic effect when re enters on the other.
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This seems timely following that:
I guess I needed to enjoy the beauty of the cliffs of Dover today and be reminded of seeing them from the air. Rats.
(And not merely needs, but wants and desires. Of course, desiring God is not a bad idea, because guess what you get then.)
@Kendel: Thanks for prompting me a while back to figure out how to turn an image into a link. 
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(165) Faith
Do you ask, ‘What is faith in him?’ I answer, The leaving of your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of his and him; the leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and doing as he tells you . I can find no words strong enough to serve for the weight of this necessity–this obedience. It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ. The work of Christ is not the Working Christ, any more than the clothing of Christ is the body of Christ. If the woman who touched the hem of his garment had trusted in the garment and not in him who wore it, would she have been healed? And the reason that so many who believe about Christ rather than in him, get the comfort they do, is that, touching thus the mere hem of his garment, they cannot help believing a little in the live man inside the garment.
As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: The Truth in Jesus. [165-167]
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There is a distinction to be made between believers and believists. That’s why there are so many severe warnings from Jesus and in the epistles – even in the early church there were ‘mere professors’.
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(166) The Misguided
Instead of so knowing Christ that they have him in them saving them, they lie wasting themselves in soul-sickening self-examination as to whether they are believers, whether they are really trusting in the atonement, whether they are truly sorry for their sins–the way to madness of the brain, and despair of the heart. Some even ponder the imponderable-- whether they are of the elect, whether they have an interest in the blood shed for sin, whether theirs is a saving faith–when all the time the man who died for them is waiting to begin to save them from every evil–and first from this self which is consuming them with trouble about its salvation; he will set them free, and take them home to the bosom of the Father–if only they will mind what he says to them–which is the beginning, middle, and end of faith. If, instead of searching into the mysteries of corruption in their own charnel-houses, they would but awake and arise from the dead, and come out into the light which Christ is waiting to give them, he would begin at once to fill them with the fulness of God.
‘But I do not know how to awake and arise!’
I will tell you:–Get up, and do something the master tells you; so make yourself his disciple at once.
As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: The Truth in Jesus.
The above includes more than Lewis chose to … and so leading directly into tomorrow’s selection.
It seems to me that there are many today who don’t even rise so far as to reach what MacDonald here describes as “the Misguided”. There are many who brashly already “know” that they are of the elect. And for them rise up from that to be able to even just agonize as to whether or not they are truly believers might actually bring them one step closer to the realm of becoming actual disciples that MacDonald so urges.
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What a good morning of reading today! I finished reading Fear and Trembling (in the book, after having also listened to most parts many times for support/reinforcement) just now, and then your quote.
In both pieces the resolution was “the thing”!
I like MacDonald’s practicality. Get off your rear, and pick one of the many things Christ told you to do. Start doing it. Behave like a disciple to be a disciple.
Oh, wow. I don’t think I know them. Maybe I”m desensitized. Anyone who knows they’re elect, knows it because of their faith in and dependence on Jesus for their salvation - what could one possibly be proud about; everything about the state is humiliating, until one gets to grace, which has nothing to do with our “goodness.”
Thanks though, Merv, for the reminder that it’s so easy to present as a prideful jerk, even easier to be one.
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Which can be now and still not yet 
Glad to hear you finished FT, and that it was rewarding! I’m reading Betz’s article, and am taken aback by how indebted Kierkegaard was to Hamann. Quotes shall be forthcoming, God willing.
Gardiner talks about this in the OUP VSI on sk. It’s not uncommon for one great thinker to have been greatly influenced by predecessors. So, this doesn’t surprise me. It should be interesting to learn what SK took from Hamann and how he used it.
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Does Gardiner write about Hamann? I should like to listen to that when it becomes available. Backhouse’s lectures were my primary introduction to Kierkegaard, and searching his book now, he makes no mention of Hamann.
Hamann deserves more credit here and for possibily being the one who awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber. If not directly affecting, he doubtless made an impression as an early, albeit ironic, reader of Hume in Konigsberg.