Saving Ourselves

People soon realise that, as persons, they are crippled or their growth is stunted  in some way. They often turn to exercise to correct their physical state in the hope that the outcome will also be that their hearts are no longer stony, their minds not so bound to the world around them, and their emotions not so disordered.

Many others take up self-improvement programs. I've been invited to join such a group, called "Discover Your Potential". It runs over five Saturdays, from 9am-1pm and the cost is US$500. The participants are told that the investment of time and money will enable them to:

• improve your quality of life
• learn how to work with your mind to adopt positive thinking
• gain insight into your conditioning and beliefs, why you do the things you do and how you can change them
• learn why you have the results you have right now and how you can improve them 
• learn how to love yourself, appreciate yourself and build up self confidence
• Learn how to work with Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)
• learn how to interact with others in a positive way, understand their motives and behavior
• understand your impact on others
• learn to manage your energy better
• learn how to meditate, how to live in the now, and how to reflect on nature in order to be able to understand yourself
• learn how to use affirmations & visualizations
• learn how to use the Law of Attraction to manifest your desires and goals
• find your passion in life
• experience happiness and piece of mind

All this seems like reinventing the wheel. "Know thyself!" is attributed to a wise Greek of the 6th Century BC. Buddhism and Catholicism have long fostered that deep meditation that produces peace, and a lifestyle that is disciplined, positively-oriented and thereby fulfilling, despite all manner of problems on the way.

Christians know another factor is involved, too, in a happy life - a close relationship with the person who made it all possible, the person who is God. That orientation beyond ourselves, that life lived with the guidance of our Creator, is the most successful way, the direct way  to the fullness of life. A relationship with the person who is God is also the quickest way to break from the  aggressive consumerism that snares our hearts and minds in its deadly traps of materialism and selfishness. God is the source of peace, and the gospels acknowledge that, given the community's experience of  the promised peace, joy, and fullness of life.   

The Queen as Messenger of Joy

In her 2011 Christmas message the Queen gave striking testimony to the role Jesus can play in our lives. She spoke of the many instances of difficulty families and nations had encountered during the previous year. Then she gave her splendid testimony, such that I have not seen previously. The Queen concluded her message with these words of witness:

Finding hope in adversity is one of the themes of Christmas. Jesus was born into a world full of fear. The angels came to frightened shepherds with hope in their voices: 'Fear not', they urged, 'we bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
'For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.'
Although we are capable of great acts of kindness, history teaches us that we sometimes need saving from ourselves - from our recklessness or our greed.
God sent into the world a unique person - neither a philosopher nor a general, important though they are, but a Saviour, with the power to forgive.
Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God's love.
In the last verse of this beautiful carol, O Little Town Of Bethlehem, there's a prayer:
O Holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us we pray.
Cast out our sin
And enter in.
Be born in us today.
It is my prayer that on this Christmas day we might all find room in our lives for the message of the angels and for the love of God through Christ our Lord.
I wish you all a very happy Christmas."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16328899

Entering into thankfulness

At Christmas, many surprises of a good kind await a person living in a state of alertness to all that life can deliver from the hands of the natural world and from the generosity of the people around us. However, despite all that makes the going hard, we can find peace, even joy. Here are two poems that explore the necessary deep-seated spirit.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

     From Collected Poems (North Point Press) 1985

Sabbaths 1998, VII

There is a place you can go
where you are quiet,
a place of water and the light

on the water. Trees are there,
leaves, and the light
on leaves moved by air.

Birds, singing, move
among leaves, in leaf shadow.
After many years you have come

to no thought of these,
but they are themselves
your thoughts. There seems to be

little to say, less and less.
Here they are. Here you are.
Here as though gone.

None of us stays, but in the hush
where each leaf in the speech
of leaves is a sufficient syllable

the passing light finds out
surpassing freedom of its way.

— Wendell Berry

                 From Given (Showemaker & Hoard) 2005

For more about Wendell Berry’s view of life, see

 http://www.amazon.com/Wendell-Berry-Religion-Heavens-Earthly/dp/0813125553#reader_0813125553

Christmas and gratitude

The English writer G.K. Chesterton had powerful sense of gratitude that become stronger the older he got.  Here is what he wrote about day-to-day thankfulness:

What has happened to me has been the very reverse of what appears to be the experience of most of my friends.  Instead of dwindling to a point, Santa Claus has grown larger and larger in my life until he fills almost the whole of it.  It happened in this way.  As a child I was faced with a phenomenon requiring explanation.  I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking.  I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it.  I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them.  I had not even been good—far from it.  And the explanation was that a certain being whom people called Santa Claus was benevolently disposed toward me…What we believed was that a certain benevolent agency did give us those toys for nothing.  And, as I say, I believe it still.  I have merely extended the idea.  Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking: now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.  Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea.  Once I though it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking.  Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside: it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic goodwill.

http://www.gratefulness.org/readings/dsr_chesterton.htm
See also the movie at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDMoiEkyuQ

Biblical Insights into Our Condition

The account in Genesis 3 of the fall of humans from their state of joyful peace in the garden of paradise has Eve tempted by the serpent who urges her to eat of the forbidden tree of knowledge - "You will be like gods, knowing good and evil". The drama asserts that "the core of sin is the attempt to replace God as the determiner of morality". The International Bible Commentary (1998) goes on: "Eve understood the command of God clearly enough. But both she and her husband desire to be like God, and agree to the sin. They are immediately aware of their lost innocence and the new strength of their sexual passions as they find themselves naked. Now they are indeed more knowledgeable..., but it is the 'practical' knowledge of sin's effects and its power in human actions".

This mysterious incident recognises that human nature is disfigured, but a person is not demeaned, and much of the Bible tells of individuals and the privileged nation being held to account for failure to uphold their responsibilities as humans. Also, they have retained an intimate relationship with their Maker. That is borne out in Psalm 130, the De profundis, used by Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire, among others, because of  its vivid depiction of a life in the depths of an evil of the person's own making. The Commentary says here, "There is an interesting link established between [God's] forgiveness and fear: rather than the anger of the Lord it is divine goodness that should give rise in us a fear of offending God".

A third insight into the continued intimate relationship with our Maker is provided by Psalm 137, where the first line goes "Beside the streams of Babylon we sat and wept...", inspiring many artistic works, even into the 21st Century. The psalm focuses on the period of exile in Babylon. The Commentary offers this insight:

The ending of the psalm contains a famous and furious curse on the enemies of Israel. [Further,] a cruel beatitude is reserved for anyone who will avenge Israel by striking at Babylon and smashing its little ones against a rock. This embittered and rhetorical cry that ends the psalm is, however, an appeal to the divine judgment and should be interpreted in the light of the other 'imprecatory' psalms such as 58 and 109. It is a manifestation of the tragedy and despair of an oppressed people but also of the enfleshment of God's word in the emotions and historical experiences of humanity.

Wild Flowers

I enjoy looking at woodprints of wildlife because they draw the eye to every little detail of what the artist is focusing on. Recently I have taken delight in the work of the artist whose piece I have displayed here.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (United States, born Japan, 1889-1953), Wild Flowers, 1922, pen and ink, ink and wash on paper, 17 5/8 x 12 inches. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Gift of William E. Hill, 1959.17.
http://www.einspruch.com/journal/2010/08/16/the-lanes-whom-you-loved-is-not-here

   Another piece that attracted my interest is this, the source of which I have not been able to track down, but which expresses a clear Chinese spirit. Upon discovering the cricket, the heart gives a leap for joy.  

With every beat of the wing

Among the weeds at the side of small lake in Binh Duong province, Vietnam, colourful flowers stand out. And, yes, there's the equivalent of a bumble bee heading for the source of its own well-being. (My photo)