September 23, 2003

Good morning,

I awoke this morning feeling a little crummy. Groggy from having taken a herbal sleep medication, achy from weight training on Sunday, plus additional aches that I blamed on eating little tea sandwiches and a couple of squares last night, and two hefty Nanaimo bars at the parish picnic on Sunday. I find that I feel much better if I avoid eating sugary desserts and wheat, and that when I start eating these things, it's hard to stop. A bit of carbohydrate addiction there. But, it's also interesting to observe how my thoughts start to tell me that I'm helpless now against future overeating (a lie!), and a vague sense of being enslaved to these appetites. The verse "Whosoever commiteth sin is the servant of sin." (John 8:34) comes to mind. Yet, then I asked myself, is it a sin to occasionally enjoy a sweet dessert? Or, is it, in my case, simply something that is unwise, or not beneficial? Am I passing a kind of verdict on myself by expecting that I will be punished physically for indulging and lo and behold I have the aches and pains and the eventual headache because I believe I shall? I wrestle with these things as I explore "moderation", or "self-control" one of the gifts of the Spirit that tends to elude me. Yet, I am a child of God, and believing the promises of Christ and the new nature He has given me, I see that self-control is a fruit of living by the Spirit as much as love, joy, peace, patience and so on. (Galatians 5:22-23) In the King James Version, self-control or moderation is called temperance.

I noticed I had to fight with myself to get started in the prayers. I had "sinned" and therefore I was separated from God and there wasn't much point in going through the motions because I felt so sluggish and achy. How we punish ourselves, no? The readings in the last couple of days have been about the wall of separation being torn down, about how it is by grace we are saved, through faith and not of ourselves, it is the gift of God. (See Ephesians 2). If I held onto the belief that my "works" of watching what I ate, or even my "works" of having a disciplined prayer life could somehow get between me and God's gift of grace if I failed to keep up my self-imposed "works" and call the failure "sin". What we've been reading in the letters of Paul is how it all depends only on our believing. If I believe in my works, or in the failure of my works, I am believing wrongly. I am not accepting the gift of God's grace. It is through believing that we are not only saved, but sanctified, and, just as the old poster about free love "Free your mind and your ......will follow" talked about how belief would affect behavior, so does our belief in Christ's finished work for us on the Cross affect our behavior and the way we reflect Christ's love in our words and actions.

While still feeling crummy this morning, my first impulse was to just do the readings, and maybe do them off the computer using my own convenient hyperlinks. But no, I decided to use my own analogy of jumping into the bracing cold water of a swimming pool or ocean and do the whole Morning Prayer, using the Plainsong Psalter. I decided to choose to praise God, even though I didn't feel like it. I decided to choose to believe that my physical state was subject to what I had put into my body. ("...and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them....Mark 16:18)

And? It was wonderful. The same way that the water, while cool, refreshes you when you immerse yourself. Now, I confess, I took a couple of Advil with my vitamins, but the joy and the freedom came before the pills could possibly have kicked in.

Check out this website, www.liturgica.com for some heavenly music to help prepare your spirit for worship.

I went to a book launch last night and observed the people, thinking I ought to spend some time practicing writing descriptions of people in a couple of sentences. One of the reasons why I write what I see around my garden, or what I hear or smell while sitting next to my open window, is for writing practice and for training my senses to be acute and in tune. It's also a wonderful way to experience the present and the Presence of God in a sacramental, embodied way, to really understand that the universe is God's handiwork and that Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us.

One woman there had a high round forehead and soft lips that made her profile resemble those benevolent tropical fish that have lips. Her head though was egg-shaped and her thin blonde hair was almost the same color as her skin. She wore glasses and a kind expression, and her body continued the theme of ovals and rounded softness.

Another woman was extremely thin, her shoulders straight and angular, her knees knobby and her flat shoes looking like canoes after her trim little calves. Her tanned skin bore many lines, and her sharp, straight nose came right out of her rather low forehead the way Michelangelo's David's nose does. Her deep seat brown eyes glittered under heavy eyebrows. Her thick dark hair had strands of gray in it and she wore it tied back from her triangular face.

Still another wore her gray hair in a simple, wash and wear style of slightly assymetrical bangs that formed a modified and probably expensive version of a bowl cut. Also thin, she resembled the proverbial alumna of ivy league schools or the formerly known Seven Sisters women's colleges in the United States. Her mouth was a little crooked when she spoke. Earnest, attractive, understated, the kind of educated woman who would on principle probably rarely if ever wear any make-up.

I felt a little like someone from another planet at this event. It made me think about such things as the masks that people wear and the bundle of fears and insecurities that most people carry behind those public personas. As I've been thinking about congruence lately and how wonderful it is to have everything lined up, inside and out, it got me thinking about how incongruent most of us are, how untransparent we are because we have ugly thoughts and nasty little feelings and fears that we feel we need to hide. Yet a perceptive person can see them nonetheless. A perceptive person can sometimes pick them up, as if they form an atmosphere or miasma around them.

From the second lesson this morning, I leave you with this wonderful prayer of St. Paul's. (Ephesians 3:

14 For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
15 Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,
16 That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man;
17 That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,
18 May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height;
19 And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.
20 Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us,
21 Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.



So I pray that you might be strengthened in your inner, true, God-given nature, a nature that you can appropriate into your life by believing that God has granted it to you. He has rooted and grounded you in love. I pray that you will grasp with your mind the above verses and lay hold of them, and choose to believe them despite all the evidence that your senses or old thought patterns try to throw up against them. These words are true. These words about Christ's love will never pass away. He can do above all that we ask or think.....and you have that same power working in you that raised Jesus from the dead. Above all, may you know His love today.....and pass it along to someone. If you lay hold of your new identity, you no longer have to fear what is revealed about the "old man", the old identity most of us spend so much time hiding behind pleasant masks. You can enjoy the Light burning up the false and the dead in you, even though your old self is going to feel like its dying......your new life in Christ will allow you to be seen, bright and shining as you really are in Him, Christ will be that treasure in us that we hold as jars of clay.