Growing Old Ain't For Sissies

Number Nineteen
Prayer: A List or a Listening?

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, I think he gave them a pattern, not a formula. The pattern began with something that may not be too shocking to us today but was earthshaking to them. He told them to address Jehovah God as “Our Father.” Since Moses’ time the Hebrews had been very careful in the way they addressed God. Getting it wrong was dangerous, even possibly fatal. In all of the Old Testament there is nothing to suggest the people of God were free to address Him as Father.

In addressing the Father there was an order of priority expressed:

First: His name, His kingdom, and His will.

Then: Our bread, our trespasses, our temptations.

Reflecting on my own prayer life and that of others I know, and the endless stream of books on prayer that clog the shelves of the local Religious Items Stores, I see two things that stand out. The first is that we generally get the priorities turned around and start with our stuff, then, sometimes, get around to His stuff. The second is that we usually come with a list.

We are much taken with the prayer of Jabez (1 Chronicles 4.10), a prayer that pleads for MY blessing, MY borders, MY prosperity and success, and MY safety and freedom from pain. We are little taken with the tax collector’s prayer (Luke 18.13): “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” When we think of praying, we seldom think of God’s commandment given at the transfiguration (Matthew 17.5), “This is My beloved Son, LISTEN TO HIM.”

In the Lord’s prayer, listening is not explicit, but it is there. When I pray, “Hallowed be Thy name,” I need to listen quietly to what the Spirit says about how that can happen and where it should happen and what I might do to make it happen - here, now. When I pray, “Thy kingdom come,” I need to stop and hear Him tell me what that means and how I can align myself with that coming. When I pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” I need to listen to hear what His will is for me, and how I can be obedient to that will today.

Theophan the recluse said,

“To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever present, all seeing, within you.”

Along these same lines, Henri Nouwen says, in “The Way of the Heart,”

“Our mind is busy with oughts…” while “The heart instructs us on what is. The renewing of our minds takes place through our hearts.”

The drawing below is an attempt to illustrate something I began doing as part of my prayer life in 1986 and have continued, with less constancy than I would like, ever since.



I imagine my mind as a book-lined room. There are three walls completely covered with books on shelves and the overflow has collected on the floor. At one end of the room there is a comfortable chair near a west-facing window. I have spent many hours in that chair reading, with the light coming, properly, over my left shoulder.

As the day wears into evening, the light begins to fail. The room begins to cool and at the other end, through a doorway at the top of a curving stair, a warm glow becomes discernible. As the sun sets, I get up out of the chair and cross the room to the glowing doorway. I can see the descending stair curves to the left and seems to grow brighter as it goes down.

I step through the arched doorway onto a broad top step. It is fine silver with a slightly rough surface, almost like pewter. Across its front edge at my feet is a large word inlaid in the surface, like “apples of gold in settings of silver.” The word is Love. Love, the power of God that moves me to seek the good of another without expectation of reward. I pause there with my thoughts and then the light and the warmth beckon me downward to the next step.

Joy is its word – that feeling that rises in the soul when we know that God is in charge and is working out all things, “for good to those who love God … the called according to His purpose.”

Another step down to Peace. Peace, the harmony of a soul or a community informed, at every point, by its awareness of God. Here I pause to pray, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The next step is Patience. The light is getting brighter and the air is getting warmer and I am anxious to get to the bottom – just the place to stop and consider the need today for persons who are willing and able to bear pains and trials without complaint, to manifest forbearance under provocation or strain. Patience is the willingness to bear or wait when you most definitely would rather do something.

The next step in line bears the word Kindness. The gold letters glowing against the silver tread like old gold coins, smooth from use. The sheen of old coins is the product of their rubbing together in a way that enhances them all. Everyone knows what kindness is without needing a dictionary, but few practice the empathy and sympathy that under girds the acts of one who is kind. Kindness, like the gold coins, becomes more beautiful with use.

The sixth step, Goodness, fits well next to Kindness. I am not by nature good – no one is. Good is a very broad word, but the bottom line is this – goodness in a person is conformity to the moral order of the universe. God is the source of that moral order and any goodness his creatures exhibit is the product of His gracious giving and working in their lives.

Number seven is Faithfulness – a long obedience in the same direction. I am not called to be successful, but to be faithful.

Number eight is Gentleness. Gentleness is Patience, Kindness, and Goodness in action.

The last step is Self-control. An orderly person of a rational bent would want to put it at the top of the stairs, but on a practical level, the fruits of the Spirit are gifts that grow, not the products of rigid self-government. Self-control is that inner reminder of the proper place of self in things when I interact with others. In a sense it is the golden chain on which all these other fruits are strung.

From the bottom step I move into a new place. I am in a room with a circular floor roughly 15 feet in diameter. The walls curve away and up and back down to a point at the center. It is the inside of a three dimensional schematic heart. The walls and the floor are “pure gold, like transparent glass.”

I move to the center of the room, stand, kneel, then stretch full length face down on the warm floor – it is quiet but I can hear the “silent thunder of the Lord of Hosts.”

Eventually He speaks to me, bringing to mind His Word that I have heard, His children, my family, and the world. I rise and see, in the transparent gold walls, holographic images of those who concern Him, and those I have brought with me who concern me. I walk slowly around the room, seeing what He wants me to see, hearing what He wants me to hear, praying as He wants me to pray.

And then the time is ended. I am back in the world with new orders from my Master, new strength for the challenges of the day, new appreciation for the limitless grace of a limitless God in Jesus Christ.

Christmas
Number Eighteen
Songs For A Starry Night


FRAGMENT:
LOVE SONGS FROM THE END OF TIME

The Shepherds

Around the fire
We weave our tales
Beneath bright stars
And comet trails.


The Father

I am the Lord
All down the years
Of rising hopes
And sinking fears.


The Son

Promised first
In Eden's gloom
I've quit at last
The virgin's womb.


The Angels

The final act
Has now begun
Go forth and worship
God's young Son.

Glory! Alleluia!
Shalom has come to earth
We sing Him highest praises
And mark his lowly birth.


The Parents

Long we whispered and wondered
And wept in the dark of the night
It was worth it all in the end
For this Son in whom we delight.


The Shepherds

Now we have seen Him and know
We'll tell it to all far and wide
Tonight we have worshiped the Groom
Who looks for his heavenly Bride.


The Mother

Deep within my heart
The One who counts my tears
Has placed his gentle Word
And conquered all my fears.

Jerry Sweers
7/92
079





These verses from the 7th chapter of the Book of Daniel make a fitting encore:

“I kept looking
Until thrones were set up,
And the Ancient of Days took up His seat;
His vesture was like white snow
And the hair of His head like pure wool.
His throne was ablaze with flames,
Its wheels were a burning fire.
A river of fire was flowing
And coming out from before Him;
Thousands upon thousands were attending Him,
And myriads upon myriads were standing before Him;
The court sat,
And the books were opened.”

And then –

“I kept looking in the night visions,
And behold, with clouds of heaven
One like a Son of Man was coming,
And He came up to the Ancient of Days
And was presented before Him.
And to Him was given dominion,
Glory and a kingdom,
That all the peoples, nations and men of every language
Might serve Him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
Which will not pass away;
And His kingdom is one
Which will not be destroyed.”

Amen!

Number Seventeen
Centering

Here is a tanka that was written after reading a book by the Quaker Thomas R. Kelly entitled “A Testament of Devotion.” Kelly was born in 1893 and died suddenly of a heart attack in 1941. In Douglas V. Steere’s biographical memoir introducing this book of Kelly’s writings, he says Kelly lived an “adequate life…a life which had grasped intuitively the whole nature of things, and had seen and felt and refocused itself to this whole.”

This is an old book and probably on my list of the ten that have meant most to me over the years. Harper and Row published it in 1941. When I am looking for an old book, the first place I look is ABEBOOKS.COM. I have never gone to them looking for something, no matter how obscure, and been disappointed. They are well organized and their secure site functions quickly and smoothly.

In “The Light Within” Thomas Kelly, speaking of God's presence, wrote:

“Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is in our hearts, pressing upon our timeworn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto itself.” It is a place where “the light of Eternity burns still and bright.”

If there is ever a time when we need to refocus, it is in the Christmas season when the background noise of doing business gets so loud a person can hardly think.



CENTERING

Sweet eternity
Lines the chambers of the heart,
Glowing like old gold
In bright Shekinah burning.
Still, undimmed, unending Light.

1/84
036

Here is a good prayer to say upon waking these busy days:

Lord Jesus Christ
Be at home
In my heart
Today!

Number Sixteen
Christmas Visit To The House Of Mammon

The "haiku" is a poem of three lines containing seventeen syllables in all; the three lines contain, respectively, five, seven, and five syllables. No consideration of meter or rhyme enters into the technique of such a poem, only the rather stark progression of syllables adding up to an image that implies far more than it says.

Here is a sample I wrote some years ago:

Against a lowering sky
Pine trees raise green arms in praise -
Four sisters singing.

The Japanese would let it go at that but I have always felt the need for a title. Maybe I am not the poet Buson was, or Basho. Or, perhaps, I do not have the faith they had that the reader will give adequate time and attention to the effort of reading and understanding the poem. This one is called "Father's Day At Foothill Baptist." Sometimes when a preacher is deadly dull and goes overlong, writing a haiku is a nice diversion. I have written more than one in church.

The "Tanka" is a poem of five lines containing 31 syllables. The first three lines are exactly like the haiku, and there are two additional lines of seven syllables each. This tanka is the product of another late visit to the mall at Christmas.



CHRISTMAS VISIT
TO THE HOUSE OF MAMMON

Muzak croons Noel
To the shuffling, sneakered feet,
Plastic psalms rising
In soft gleam of twinkling lights.
A horror of great darkness.

1/82
028

If you are thinking the last three postings are not in the proper spirit of the season, take heart, there are better times ahead. As Frederick Buechner has said, "The Good News was Bad News before it was Good News." The Bad News comes to a person when "the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled upon one another. That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably. And when the man's laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear." (A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy)

Men go to great lengths to ignore this burden. They have built themselves a little spot on the last ledge above the abyss and expend amazing amounts of time and effort trying to isolate their little corner of darkness from the light. But they fail. Jesus came as "The Sunrise from on high, to shine upon those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." (Luke 1.78-79). The Good News is that this Jesus can lift the destroying burden from the mind, give beauty for ashes, and praise for the spirit of heaviness.

In a way, each Christmas recapitulates the first Christmas. The God of our American December has become Mammon, with Gluttony and Greed as his prophets. Each December his grip strengthens and the darkness deepens. But in the end, the Sunrise comes, and the pit at the bottom of the world is flooded with light.

Number Fifteen
High Noon At Fayette Mall

In the late 1930s and through the 1940s, the Christmas seasons in Michigan and Illinois were good times. There was snow and decorations and food and gifts. And for all of us, a public annual reminder of the incarnation – that once upon a time, “…the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

The ubiquitous Diversity Thought Police of the Barbarian Elites have pretty much managed to eliminate any mention of the Prince of Peace during the public celebrations of His birthday. If you are a Wiccan Witch you can now open in prayer at the Chesterfield County (Virginia) Board of Supervisors meeting. But heaven help you if you try to sneak Jesus Christ into your public prayers. One of the ways my wife and I have sought to preserve the good memories of these childhood Christmases is to carefully avoid any trips to the mall after Thanksgiving.

My wife is a joyous giver of gifts. She keeps and eye out all the time for “just the right thing” for Torunn or Connor or Colette Joy (and 7 more grandkids plus various heirs and assigns). We have to be careful to label and store these things bought well ahead of time. Once we found one several years later, having missed it at the time and bought another gift. My wife’s habit is a good one though. It spreads the cost of giving across the year. It allows more thought for each gift. But best of all, it delivers us from the need to go to the mall during the “Christmas Shopping Season.” These days we do less at Christmas and pay more attention to birthdays. But what we must do in the fall gets done by mail or on-line. I keep in shape physically just hauling the catalogues from the mailbox.

When we were children Santa Claus brought the Christmas shopping season to the local department stores the day after Thanksgiving. Over the years the merchants have pushed this back and back until today it is rapidly approaching the day after Halloween. Since Halloween has become a major commercial holiday ($10,000,000 or more this year), it will probably serve as a pretty good barrier to this trend – it might be twenty-five years or more before the Christmas shopping season starts the day after the 4th of July.

Once in a while we have broken our rule and gone to the mall in the midst of the rush. We have immediately come home and repented in sackcloth and ashes. This poem was written as I sat on a bench in the mall waiting for my spouse to accomplish a last minute mission.

FAYETTE MALL -
HIGH NOON

They come, they go
Some fast, most slow,
To look, to buy, to lust, to sigh.
And all the while
The Muzak thrums
And rattles with
Unbidden drums
Above the throng
Of murmuring voices
Busy, busy,
Making choices.

The mall is one of the friendliest places,
The people are really great -
They're joking and laughing and feeding their faces,
And seven of ten are way overweight.
Widebodies abound
Built close to the ground
With thighs like great oak stumps,
With spouses and kin,
And none of them thin,
They head for the food court in clumps.

(If you could take
The extra weight
From the people
Who stroll through the mall,
For every ten
You'd get five more,
Every one of them
Six feet tall.)

One out of three
Is as big as a house
With two big kids
And one big spouse -
They rumble and shake
Like a small earthquake
As they make for the pizza stall
Where salt and sugar and gallons of grease
Are sold to the people
Who stroll through the mall.

Jerry Sweers
8/94
085

The other day we saw a good word on a church sign in Danville:

“There was only one Christmas, all the rest are anniversaries.”

Number Fourteen

If you will recall Number Two, “Driving Miss Daisy Crazy – A Primer For New Lexington Drivers,” you will remember that Circle 4 is a partially limited access freeway around the city. It is hard, especially for relatively new residents, to go anywhere in Lexington without using it. At Christmas time, it becomes an even greater challenge than usual. Here is a small prayer inspired by this challenge.


PRAYER FOR PILGRIMS

A Brief Invocation to be said by Pilgrims
On Circle 4 at any time of the day or night.

From the
Dazed,
Disoriented,
Dozing, and
Demented,

As we eternally cruise
The way of the circle,

Oh Merciful Lord
Deliver us!

May
Their blind eyes be opened,
Their deaf ears be unstopped,
Their cell phones be scrambled,
Their make-up be crooked,
Their lights be green,
Their turns be timely,

And still small voices scream
into all their ears,

“GET ON WITH IT!”

6/99
089

Wine
Number Thirteen


Here are a few selected quotes for the context of this reflection:

GOD, through His prophet MOSES regarding tithes in Deuteronomy 14.22-26;
�You shall surely tithe all the produce from what you sow, which comes out of the field every year. You shall eat in the presence of the LORD your God, at the place where He chooses to establish His name, the tithe of your grain, your new wine, your oil, and the firstborn of your herd and your flock, so that you may learn to fear the LORD your God always. If the distance is so great for you that you are not able to bring the tithe, since the place where the LORD your God chooses to set His name is too far away from you when the LORD your God blesses you, then you shall exchange it for money, and bind the money in your hand and go to the place which the LORD your God chooses. You may spend the money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen, or sheep, or wine, or strong drink, or whatever your heart desires; and there you shall eat in the presence of the LORD your God and rejoice, you and your house.�

KING SOLOMON�S advice for this life;
�Go then, eat your bread in happiness and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for God has already approved your works.� Ecclesiastes 9.7

JESUS, to his disciples at the last Passover meal he ate with them;
�I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in My Father�s kingdom.� Matthew 26.29

The APOSTLE PAUL to Timothy;
��use a little wine for your stomach and the frequency of your ailments.� 1 Timothy 5.23

ROBERT FARRAR CAPON in �The Supper of the Lamb� a theological cookbook;

�Do you see what that means? In a general way we concede that God made the world out of joy: He didn't need it; He just thought it was a good thing. But if you confine His activity in creation to the beginning only, you lose most of the joy in the subsequent shuffle of history. Sure, it was good back then, you say, but since then, we've been eating leftovers. How much better a world it becomes when you see Him creating at all times and at every time; when you see that the preserving of the old in being is just as much creation as the bringing of the new out of nothing. Each thing, at every moment, becomes the delight of His hand, the apple of His eye. The bloom of yeast (saccharomyces ellipsoideus) lies upon the grape skins year after year because He likes it; C6Hlz06=2CzH50H+2COz (fermentation produced by the glucose and fructose in the grapes and the yeast on the skins) is a dependable process because, every September, He says, That was nice; do it again.�


JOHN CALVIN in his �Institutes of Christian Religion,� III, XIX, 9;
�We are nowhere forbidden to laugh, or be satisfied with food, or to annex new possessions to those already enjoyed by ourselves or our ancestors, or to be delighted with music, or to drink wine.�

INCREASE MATHER in �Wo to Drunkards�:
�Drink is in itself a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan, the wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil.�

C.S. LEWIS:
�My happiest hours are often spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs�or else sitting up till the small hours in someone�s college rooms, talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea and pipes.�


Until I was 18, I attended a GARB (General Association of Regular Baptists) church in western Michigan. To say the GARB was conservative would be an understatement. In my church we eschewed the filthy five: dancing, smoking, drinking, card playing, and movie going. In those days being a Baptist teenager explained a number of things easily. When asked to a movie or a dance, I could say, �No thank you, I'm a Baptist you know,� and that explained it all.

When I moved from high school to Wheaton College, the filthy five moved with me. Wheaton students and faculty had to sign a pledge to abstain from these things. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since 1956. Recently I saw pictures of Wheaton students taking dance lessons so they would not embarrass themselves at the first dance soon to be held on campus. After a three-year study by a blue ribbon committee of board, faculty and students, Wheaton has updated its pledge � it is now called a covenant.

To my wife, whose father taught at Wheaton 50 years, this is a compromise that will grease the slippery slope into secularism. She has lots of good reasons for her feelings about this, but I don�t share them. This is not unusual � it has made our marriage of almost 50 years a wonderful thing.

For me, it is a change long overdue. The Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College, Illinois, houses a major research collection of the books and papers of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. These writers are well known for their impact on contemporary literature and Christian thought. Together they produced over four hundred books including novels, drama, poetry, fantasy, children's books, and Christian treatises. Overall, the Wade Center has more than 11,000 volumes including first editions and critical works. Other holdings on the seven authors include letters, manuscripts, audio and videotapes, artwork, dissertations, periodicals, photographs, and related materials. Any of these resources may be studied in the quiet surroundings of the Kilby Reading Room.

Wheaton is famous for its C.S. Lewis collection. Before the Wheaton Covenant was updated, Lewis would have been run out of town on a rail had he come to Wheaton to teach and tried sitting around with students, beer and pipes. He still couldn�t do it in college rooms but the local pub would now be OK. For me it is gratifying to see that finally Wheaton is no longer going beyond what is written in some of these things.

As Christians we have two general tendencies that are always pressing for expression:

1. Aristotle said, �It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most human beings live only for the gratification of it.� We are never quite satisfied with what is written in the Word of God. We study it, and try to understand it, and try to be obedient to what we understand, but we seldom stop there. In spite of the warning in the last chapter of The Apocalypse of John, we just have to add to it. Somehow God hasn�t given us enough to keep our neighbors in line. The result is often that it is harder to get into the local church than into the kingdom of God.
2. We are forever trying to fill in the blanks. Between the �absolute sovereignty of God� and the �true free will of man,� God has written �Mystery.� We are not satisfied with that. We have to delete �mystery� and fill in the blank with our own explanation of how these two things can both be true. Between �Chosen from before the foundation of the world,� and �Whosoever will may come,� God has written �Mystery.� We have been busy for almost 2,000 years arguing about what explanation to put in that blank. We just cannot believe Deuteronomy 29.29: �The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law.�

Here is a Haiku to end this reflection:



WINE

In each shining drop,
Fruit of silent, patient years -
Sun, sand, root and vine.

Jerry Sweers
9/83

Number Twelve
Dana Gioia

Last spring I came across a little poem that stuck in my mind – one I wish I had written. It lodged there like a grain of sand in an oyster, irritating just enough to produce something nice in the end. The poem (Uncle Andy in #7) was the eventual fruit of this grain of sand.

Here is the poem:

CURRICULUM VITAE

The future shrinks
Whether the past
Is well or badly spent.

We shape our lives
Although the forms
Are never what we meant.

Dana Gioia wrote this little poem. I had never heard of him before. If you are interested in him, a google will get you more than you ever want to know. Below are a few facts to start you out.

Poet, critic, and best-selling anthologist, Dana Gioia is one of America’s leading contemporary men of letters. Winner of the American Book Award, Gioia is internationally recognized for his role in reviving rhyme, meter, and narrative in contemporary poetry. An influential critic, he has combined populist ideals and high standards to bring poetry to a broader audience.

Gioia (pronounced JOY-A) was born of Italian and Mexican descent in Los Angeles in 1950. The first member of his family to attend college, he received a B.A. from Stanford University. Before returning to Stanford to earn an M.B.A., he completed an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard University where he studied with the poets Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop.

In 1977 he moved to New York to begin a career in business. For fifteen years Gioia worked as a business executive, eventually becoming a Vice President of General Foods. Writing at night and on weekends, he also established a major literary reputation. In 1992 he left business to become a full-time writer.


There are three things I like about Gioia:

1. He is attempting to deliver us from the wasteland of free verse. Free verse is not all bad, but its apparent lack of formal rules makes it possible for a legion of illiterates to pump it out and call it poetry. My son recently asked me, “Do you really need rules to write poetry?” I told him that not until you have gone through the discipline of learning the rules do you know enough to break them effectively.
2. He is Catholic. I am not sure how much this means but it gives some zip to reason #3.
3. He is the man President Bush appointed to head the National Endowment For The Arts – to cut off taxpayer funding of the sick puppies who mix excrement and urine with sacred objects and call it art.

As far as the Gioia poem goes, shaping our lives is something well worth thinking about. My wife accuses me of oversimplifying things from time to time. I guess I do. I often divide things into two parts. When I think about how we shape our lives, I see two fundamentally different ways we do it – from the outside in and from the inside out.

The merchants of the world spend billions of dollars every year convincing us that what we do to the outside will make us what we want to be. They tell us we can design the outside and the inside will follow along (Or, at least, it won’t matter as much). And they have millions of products, at good prices, to help us with that designing. “Clothes make the man.” Your house at Lazy Acres “Will display your lifestyle to everyone who passes by.” Take care, “You are what you eat.” Dye your hair, lose weight, tattoo your ankle, pierce your navel, cap your teeth, trade in your old car, computer, wife, etc., and you will become the person of your dreams.

The preachers of the world, at least a few of them, have a different view of things. They say, “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.” Then, sadly, most of them follow up with a list of outward things to do to prove you are following their advice. And most of these things have to do with conforming to the outward behavior patterns of the proper church member and supporting the church in the proper ways.

The preacher may start with “the inner life” but he soon becomes uncomfortable and defaults to “being in attendance at all the scheduled meetings.”

Perhaps there is some truth in both perspectives – we probably can learn something from both Martha Stewart and Mother Teresa. But if we really wish to shape our lives in a way that will be reasonably close to “what we meant,” there is only one way – obedience to the God Who is there and Who has spoken and with Whom we have to do. Nothing Jesus ever did or said undercut the truth of God’s Word to his people in Deuteronomy 34.4:

YOU SHALL FOLLOW THE LORD YOUR GOD AND FEAR HIM; AND YOU SHALL KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS, LISTEN TO HIS VOICE, AND CLING TO HIM.

It is a paradox that the most self-absorbed generation in history has absolutely no notion at all of what the inner life is, or even that there is such a thing. The outside is tanned and buffed and polished, molded, amended and enhanced, while the inside is a wasteland of emptiness. Not only does God not live there, no one lives there. When you knock on the heart of a Bobo (Bourgeois bohemian) all you get is a hollow ring.

“Bobo” is the name given by David Brooks to the current ruling elites in his popular book, “Bobos in Paradise.” A Bobo someone who has succumbed to the illusion that God is dead, that man is self-sufficient, that civilization gets better with every human impulse it unleashes, and with every traditional restraint it overthrows. His worldview is libertarian and he is dogmatically obsessed with unconstrained “choice” regarding such things as abortion, eugenically improving the unborn, euthanasia and anything else he feels will redesign the human race into something more acceptable to himself and his friends.

I have waxed overlong. Here are some books on the inner life:

The Testament of Devotion, by Thomas R. Kelly
Celebration of Discipline, by Richard Foster
Making All Things New, by Henri Nouwen
The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas A. Kempis
Hallowed Be This House/The Splendor Of the Ordinary, by Thomas Howard
The Sacred Romance, by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge