Light, More Light, Continued (Controversies #12)

Maybe you have to be able to remember life in the '50s, but isn't it interesting how the way we treat Halloween has changed over the decades? When I was a child, it was one day. We could wear costumes to school--maybe only for the afternoon; I don't quite remember. Kids went home for lunch in those days! We went trick-or-treating, after dark, in our immediate neighborhoods, sans adults, and collected a modest yet generous bag of candy. The unofficial cutoff age was twelve. That was all there was to it.

Now, Halloween is as much for adults as for children, and it goes all month long. People put lights on their houses, graveyards on their lawns, dress the part for weeks. A quick search of Halloween events in my area includes haunted houses, pub crawls, a vampire circus (whatever exactly that means), and something called Dominion of Terror. Just fun, you say? But it gets much darker. Witches observe Samhain through such practices as divination and lighting fires to guide the souls of the dead. Communities from our local Light! More Light! university (prior reference here) go down to the riverside on October 31 to perform pagan rituals. 

This is not your grandma's Halloween. I'm not saying the darker aspects weren't always there, but given room, they've gotten bolder. Somehow, I think the fable of The Camel and the Tent applies.

If it's just fun, why is it directly traceable to the ancient Celtic ritual of scaring off ghosts? Does that sound like something Christ would have sanctioned? If not, it's not for us, and to dabble in it is a compromise. As so often happened in the early church, Pope Gregory may have tried to pretty things up by making November 1 All Saints' Day, but Samhain's resulting new name--All Hallows Eve--didn't change its essence or substance. Every single time syncretism (the attempt to blend pagan and Godly worship) appears in Scripture, God rejects it. What we may not realize is that when Aaron made the golden calf and said, "Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD," he didn't mean the calf. The word LORD appears in small caps, which designates the name Yahweh. Rather than completely replace the true God, Aaron was trying to worship Him with an idol. We know how that turned out. Christianizing pagan practice doesn't work with God, and though we can't claim today that absolutely none of our Christian observances have no pagan ties at all, that's no excuse for taking part in something as blatant as Halloween. 

Decorate your homes and yards with all the beautiful bounty of the season, but let's eschew the dead stuff. Christ, the Light of the World, has come that we may have life, and life more abundant.  

Giving Jesus the Highest Place

 A father, shortly before he died, was reviewing a life well lived with his grown daughter. "I regret, though," he said, "that a personal faith in God isn't part of your life." (I believe that was yet another seed sown, and she will come to know Him.) The exchange got me thinking about the messages my Boomer generation caught about God as we were growing up. In our small town, we were probably 80% Catholic and 20% Protestant; the people who didn't attend church at all were few and perhaps disinclined to admit it. (On every block were multiple homes containing families with anywhere from six to twelve children, usually with three to four bedrooms and one bathroom for everyone. My husband, until he was seven, shared a tiny bedroom with all five of his siblings. And this wasn't only the Catholics. Fun times!) Regarding the attitudes we picked up during childhood, I recall the following:

--God was going to punish you if you weren't a good boy or girl

--God's default state was "angry"

--God was very far away

--Whether you went to heaven or hell depended on your good deeds outweighing your bad

--If you had actual faith in God, beyond going to church and filling your pew on Sundays, that was fine, but let's not go off the deep end

Your faith was a part of your life. Maybe it was represented by the orange wedge in the pie chart above, or even the red. The blue, though--except for clergy, that would have been too extreme. Too heavenly minded and no earthly good. Too "Holy Joe" and not enough beer. At best, the comment might have been, "She's kind of weird." 

But I don't believe any of this is a correct view. Life isn't a pie cut into varying sections marked "family," "job," "hobbies," "home maintenance," "finances," and "God." Because that model portrays everything else about your life as lying outside God's purview. If He isn't God of all those other things, what exactly is He God of? Where does the "God section" overlap anything that's most important to you? No, the truth is, faith in God (through Jesus) is the umbrella over our lives under which everything else falls. Our families, jobs, hobbies, home maintenance, finances, and whatever else, are all subject to His will, the Holy Spirit's leading, bathed in prayer, and conducted according to His word and ways. "If He's not Lord of all, He's not Lord at all," is a true truism, and though we won't perfect that in this life (and there's grace for that), the view we need to take is that the components of our lives are under Him, not next to Him. 

So my prayer is that, through Christ, the father's daughter will go exceedingly abundantly above all her father asked or thought. That she won't make Jesus just a part of her life, but that He'll be her covering over all. 

Musings

 

Christ's death proves the need for Christ's death; were it not necessary, God would not have required it. 

Increased prayer is a necessary component of any calling. 

Waiting is holding oneself in reserve for a later time. 

Witchcraft is as rebellion because both are unlawful control. 

Light, More Light (Controversies #11)

 

This is the motto of a local university, punctuated Light! More Light! It's accompanied by a Latin phrase, veritas est lux, which means "truth is light." And isn't that right? Don't we want light, more light?

I'm not sure we do. With due respect, I'm not sure they do. 

I recall advice received from a former literary agent that I should write darker. The market wants darker. Soon, there were more, newer industry whispers--not from my agent, but in general: We want unlikable narrators. Morally gray narrators. Darker themes. Ambiguous outcomes. And then, one that shocked me a little: we don't want redemption stories. Wow. Tell me you don't want life without telling me you don't want life. 

Without redemption, we are plumb out of life.

In other words, in a sense that goes far beyond literature, tell me you don't want Jesus without telling me you don't want Jesus. You don't want the Redeemer. You don't want the Light of the World.

This taste for darkness shows up a lot of places. Fashion is one. We have witchy vibes, grunge, goth, punk, death rock--not all of it the current height of popularity, but none of it completely gone, either, and none of it that didn't leave its mark on what came after. We have an increase in mental illness that is more than just compassionately doing away with stigmas and helping people get treatment; in some cases it becomes almost a badge to wear and worse than that, an identity that ensnares the person (subconsciously, they don't know who they'd be without it) and may even bring accusations of bigotry against those who think they aren't okay as they are. And without getting explicit, let me just say that sex has gotten a whole lot darker than when I was coming of age, with influences that today's younger generation may not realize originate from porn. We can't expect the darkness around us to shed light. Darkness makes dark. 

Many say we are entering days of clear good versus evil. Perhaps so, but I'm more apt to think of it as light versus dark. The problem here is that "God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5, NAS). All of this clamor for dark is a clamor for less of God. People with an affinity for darkness may say they don't want sweet, or nice, or everything tied up in a happy bow at the end. To the extent they mean they don't want a truth-denying Pollyanna-ish approach to life, or a narrative that is falsely saccharine and ignores life's difficulties, they have an excellent point. But the real motive for seeking darkness is given in John 3:19-21, spoken by Jesus Himself: 

"This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God" (NIV).

If the choice is between light and dark, I choose light. But we can't have light without the Light of the World. With our eyes fixed on Jesus, I pray more and more of us will truly be able to cry, "Light! More Light!"

Grace and Perfection

I had a new thought the other day about grace. We often hear it defined as "unmerited favor," and that's not too bad a way to encapsulate its meaning, though it does cause me some inward nerdy moments. (If something must be specified as "unmerited favor," does this mean "merited" is an expected connotation of the word "favor"; surely not?) So to me this is a quickie definition for ease in grasping the concept, especially in reference to salvation by grace, but not one I'm willing to settle on. 

For one thing, grace also has a power component. Paul wrote, "But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me" (2 Corinthians 12:9 NIV). Though that's the verse I know best, there are others that put a slightly different spin on grace. For example, "And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work" (2 Corinthians 9:8 NKJV). Here, grace has a supply component. Similar is 1 Corinthians 15:10--"But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them--yet not I, but the grace of God that was within me." These verses credit grace as a force or equipping that increases one's capacity to act or to bear up under something. As if God extends an extra ability for moments when we need it.

After scratching around in my notebook (concerning this and related words such as favor and mercy), here is my current definition: 

Grace: kind allowance or empowerment, free and unearned, extended to another to accommodate, mitigate, or cover their human limitations, without shaming, judging, or calling them out.

But now, to get around to that new thought I had the other day, which is that grace and perfectionism are pretty close opposites. I'm not sure I'd thought of those two qualities or standards as an opposing pair before. If I give grace, am I not sending the message that I don't demand perfectionism? If God gives grace, isn't He saying He knows we can't do anything on our own (much less do it perfectly) without His supply?

When we bestow grace, we bear with one another in love, cover over a multitude of sins (not sweep them under the carpet but forgive them)--in other words, come much closer to loving our neighbor as ourselves. And to loving ourselves. For ourselves or our loved ones who may suffer from perfectionistic tendencies, the best antidote may be grace.  

Apple Harvest

The reason everyone thinks Eve ate an apple is that apples are this tempting. 

Apple harvest: the unsung autumn holiday.

#itsnotallpumpkinspice 🍎🍏 😊

Handprints

 Little Tommy visited my grandmother one day,

precious only child of her sister's precious only child,

exploring corner and cushion in his two-year-old way,

gazing into the china hutch at gleaming treasures within,

leaving two perfect handprints on the glass.

"You didn't wipe them off!" I exclaimed when I visited her myself,

picturing the way my mother would rush in 

with ammonia water and a rag,

clucking her tongue and rubbing the marks away.

"By and by it will happen," said my grandmother, unfussed.

"But for now, when I see the handprints, I think of little Tommy, 

and I smile."

I never met little Tommy, this second cousin,

but wherever he is, he's a senior now, like me.

Had my grandmother erased his handprints, 

I would have no story,

would not remember he existed.

Had my grandmother erased his handprints, 

I would not have known that chill of almost-connection, 

inexplicable fascination with proof he'd been here.

Passed this way. Just missed me. Was real.

For the rest of my visit, whenever I passed the china hutch, 

I paused to stand at the perfect angle

so I could see those handprints on the glass.

If human handprints on worldly treasures are memorable,

what of divine handprints on my poor body of clay?

Lord, when You touch me, leave your prints.

Leave them so that even others can know 

Your hands were on me,

can feel that chill of almost-connection,

of inexplicable fascination explained in Christ.

Leave Your handprints on me, Lord,

so that those who stand at the perfect angle

can see them and know You're real. 

Joy and Happiness

 

In college, I met an introverted, pensive musician named Joy--a name I'd always liked. "I hate it," she said. "Adults are always telling me to smile and act happy, because my name is Joy." Which is one reason that when naming my own children I never reached for the "virtue" names. Perhaps they are too prescriptive, too easily taken for labels or even pronouncements. 

Christians are fond of saying that joy and happiness are two different things, and I don't disagree, but I believe there's a ton of overlap. "Happy" isn't always the shallow "happenstance" emotion some want to dismiss it as; Bible translations vary on whether they render the Greek makarios from Jesus' sermon on the mount as "happy" or "blessed," and the Greek word means "supremely blessed," "fortunate," "well off," "blessed," or "happy." In God's economy, being supremely blessed isn't a shallow, worldly, temporary, or despised thing. "Happy" isn't necessarily joy's feeble, undesirable imitation.

However, joy is a fruit of the Spirit, and what does it mean, exactly? That is, how does it surpass happiness, as we claim it does? This question causes me to ponder how (and if) I'm allowing the Spirit to produce this fruit through me. How is it expressed? 

Personally, I find joy to be a quiet, inward gladness and wellbeing that because of Jesus Christ all is secure in the long run and for the future. In that sense, unhappiness at present circumstances can't drive out real joy; even when the joy is hard to find, it has not disappeared and will be felt again. Joy is like an inner glow of rightness, assurance, okayness, stability, gratitude, a sense of God active in your life right now, and while it doesn't demand we squeal and jump up and down, or even smile, I find that when it wells up I often want to move my body. Perhaps happiness is more about now and joy more about horizons or a steady state. Perhaps joy is more a condition or position than an emotion? 

Perhaps my friend Joy being asked to act "happy" was troubling to her because joy and happiness were being conflated. And because she was being reduced to a smile and a cheerful chirp. What I do know is that her soulful, melancholy bent was not at all in conflict with her potential for true, and lasting, joy. 

A Tidbit About Bible Translations

It's good to read different Bible translations once in a while, because the language in differing versions can spark entire new investigations as to meaning. Even at times, maybe give you quite a shock.

Many of us are familiar with the verse that says "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). The entire verse, from the NIV, reads, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding." But just the other day, I read a verse from my 2015 Amplified version that made me laugh out loud:

The beginning of wisdom is: Get wisdom! (Proverbs 4:7)

Why did I laugh? It surprised and delighted me, because I never saw it stated this baldly before, complete with exclamation mark. My NIV says, "Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom." The NKJV says, "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore, get wisdom." While faithful translations, these just don't have the same effect. I also laughed because it appears to be a paradox or circular loop, yet we know it's neither, but a deliberate literary choice for emphasis and perhaps even humorous effect. The third reason I laughed is that I didn't know there were two discrete biblical statements about how to get wisdom (fear God, and just plain get wisdom). It's this language that revealed that truth to me. The entire Amplified translation, with its included bracketed material, says this: 

The beginning of wisdom is: Get [skillful and Godly] wisdom [it is preeminent]!

And fortunately, we can receive Godly wisdom for the asking, according to James 1:5, so Lord, we ask You for the wisdom that marks the beginning of wisdom, and Your help and presence as we start on the path to seeking it all our days. 

Amen.