Timing.
Such a crucial element.
This entry is for me now.
August 6
"Satan's seduction of our heart always comes in the form of a story that offers us greater control through knowing good and evil rather than the unknowns of relationship." --The Sacred Romance Wow!
Questions to pose and consider from my John Eldredge reading:
Are you finished trying to arrange for a safe life?
Can you give up your resignation to life as it stands to embrace something larger, more elusive, more unpredictable but infinately more hopeful?
Will you step into a relationship with me that could be dangerous because it is relationship delivered by the hands of the Wildest of Lovers--God Himself?
If we risk spiritual communion now, could we learn even here, in this life span, how we are "in His image" not simply as islands alone, but as part of a Triune God?
"I will go before you and level the mountains;
I will break down gates of bronze
and cut through bars of iron.
I will give you the treasures of darkness,
riches stored in secret places,
so that you may know that I am the Lord,
the God of Israel, who summons you by name." --Isaiah 45
And this was spoken by God, not to a holy man, but to a powerful man.
A man who was not following God...said to draw him. So this is a journey of the heart, after all. Not simply a line to walk between good and evil,sifting everything with politics and doctrine and calling that holy work. Instead, God is calling us to walk away from "less-wild lovers that have become part of our identity, embrace our nakedness, and trust in his goodness." --Sacred Romance
But the risk of looking for the treasure in the darkness, the riches stored in secret places: getting lost again in that dark in the form of addiction to those things that give immediate relief, a taste of transcendence so close, yet not to be touched, because it is not in itself the treasure.
How do you prescribe thirst for yourself, standing beside a less-than-eternal well, yet still a well--and not drink?
Can you accept a season that is designed to simply make you acquainted with thirst?
Such is the beauty, the nobility of the fast.
The Christ said his disciples did not fast because he was with them, but that they would fast...when longing for him was a part of their lives. Does anyone long for Christ anymore? Do they fast for that reason?
But why must it be so, that the "less-than-eternal well be attached to our desire for eternal intimate communion with God and each other in the midst of Paradise?" Risky, God, to make it so...
But if we stand at that well together, even gaze into its waters, and yet accept thirst willingly, we are on a most intimate thread of the image of God. WE are become the society who tastes God's deepest longing for a Bride that he is unwilling to force to anything until she begs it, for love does not force, nor is it self-indulgent.
G.K. Chesterton says, "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God."
I turn my heart off and get busy.
You turn to your addiction and get busy.
We can not by sheer willpower do anything else.
But if we hold fast to the "aching abyss" of our hearts in a dance together, then real transcedence may even yet come.
Will we "hold our hearts out hopefully in partial emptiness in a way that allows desire to be rekindled?"
As we blaze a trail along the "road less traveled" between discipline and desire can we find that "treasure of finally ceasing from being half-hearted creatures?"
Only there can we begin to receive the mystery of "ecstasies yet to come" as we embrace the mystery of being the Beloved.
Is it time for this?
Are our hearts weary of the familiar and indulgent?
Christ stands and invites, but it is strange language to us.
It sounds too much like words that have used us and consumed us in the past, left us alone and exposed.
So we mortgage our hearts to less wild lovers.
Dear God.
Seven years ago I wrote these words. They merely piqued my interest then.
It was not time for them yet.
But seven years allows a lot of burrowing deep.
And now I feel life's circumstances opening holes in the atmosphere of my soul, and I look up at them. And they are awash with the ache of "yet to come's."
Nevertheless, I do not turn my face away. And I do not fear.
Alongside Saint John at the close of his vision of the apocalypse, I say:
"Even so, Lord Jesus...Come."
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