Nielsen’s Nook

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. [1]

These lines of Eliot give me pause to ponder. Many changes have come in life and many that I have longed for have eluded me. A hardened unbelieving retirement age man told me one time that he did not have any regrets towards the end of his life. What sort of devil can so numb our souls that we become indifferent to the sense of loss and regret that grows up around us, great weeds in our aging garden?

I watch my little girl play in the sprinklers, make mud volcanoes, and sprinkle music power on me. Flashes of the once-before short like a fused bulb across my weathered memory. Ah, when time was free and naivety had thrown its blissful cloak across the mud puddle.

There was something tranquil about the moment. It wasn’t important that we were in our back yard. It wasn’t important that we were together on a Saturday or otherwise. The warming peace that comes, even now while writing, is that of simple communion, just being together. Contentment, I think, is the obscene key to unlocking love.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. [2]

I’m 34 and I’ve got regrets. Places I should have gone. Things I should have studied. Holes that I can’t seem to circumscribe. And yet, if I understand Eliot here, the exploration is not sailing away from our regrets, but moving through them.

For me, I am sure that I will never mature past the Cross, where in Jesus’ perfect sacrifice, God passes over and forgives all for which I have regret. The Eucharist is a cross-shaped celebration of life in Jesus, where all the holes are circumscribed. It is a time when I confess my sins, taste the goodness of God, and hear the Gospel of grace proclaimed over me in thought, word, and deed. In the stillness there is a reposed reminder that I am aboard a Great Ship that continues moving Christward as it has for millennia. In dying I am raised, indeed my end is my beginning.

[1] Eliot, T.S. East Coker, V.190-201.

[2] Eliot, T.S. East Coker, V.202-209.

Whether I kneel or stand or sit in prayer
I am not caught in time nor held in space,
But, thrust beyond this posture, I am where
Time and eternity are face to face;
Infinity and space meet in this place
Where crossbar and upright hold the One
In agony and in all Love’s embrace.
The power in helplessness which was begun
When all the brilliance of the flaming sun
Contained itself in the small confines of a child
Now comes to me in this strange action done
In mystery. Break time, break space, O wild
And lovely power. Break me: thus am I dead,
Am resurrected now in wine and bread.
Madeleine L’Engle
as found in the book A Widening Light: Poems of the Incarnation

HT: Mike & Rachel Vendsel

On earth men dream, therefore, while they’re awake,
Some in good faith, and some deceitfully;
Of guilt and shame the greater share these take.

Ye on the earth, in your philosophy,
Are not for long content to tread one path,
Enamoured of vain show and subtlety.

Yet even this in Heaven stirs less wrath
Than when God’s holy Word is misconstrued,
Or when supremacy it no more hath.

Ye little think how great the cost in blood
To sow it through the world, how pleasing he
Who humbly bides by Scripture as he should.

All men, to show their ingenuity,
Contrive their own inventions — these they preach;
The Gospel is passed over silently.

…

So that the silly sheep, all unaware,
Come home from pasture fed on emptiness;
No harm they see, no less of guilt they bear.

Christ His Apostles did not thus address:
Go forth, preach idle stories to all men,
But taught them His true doctrine to profess.

Forth with His shield the Apostles sally then,
None other than His word their lips escapes,
This only is the lance they wield amain.

But nowadays men preach with jokes and japes,
And if they raise a laugh, their crowd cowls all swell
With pride - they ask no more, the jackanapes.

…

That’s how St Anthony doth feed his pig,
And many others too, more pig-like still,
Paying with currency not worth a fig.

…

The Primal Light the whole irradiates,
And is received therein as many ways
As there are splendours wherewithal it mates.

Since, then, affection waits upon the gaze
And its intensity, diversely bright
Therein the sweets of love now glow, now blaze.

Consider well the breadth, behold the height
Of His eternal Goodness, seeing that o’er
So many mirrors It doth shed Its light,

Yet One abideth as It was before.

__________

Dante, Alighieri. The Divine Comedy III: Paridiso, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (London: Penguin Books, 2004), Canto XXIX, lines 82-145, pages 311-13.

There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies blow. [1]

If you’re like me when you read just those two lines of poetry you probably spent as much energy if not more trying to fight off ridiculous images of flowers growing out of the pores of a woman’s face as you did trying to imagine what Thomas Campion was actually describing in his poem, There Is A Garden in Her Face.

Dorothy Sayers, a colleague of C. S. Lewis, quotes Campion in making the point that the modern day person generally has great difficulty with poetry, figures and symbols. We don’t like them because they ask more of us than we have the faculties to appreciate. We tend to like the things that can be measured and then exhausted; yet, poets and prophets have given us figures and symbols that move us beyond ourselves - to something beyond the maximum.

This seems to be true in the way we approach church and worship, in the way we order our lives, in the way we think about happiness and fulfillment, and particularly in the way we think of and relate to Jesus, our Lord. Writing to those who misunderstood the figures in Dante’s Paradiso, his work on Heaven, Sayers writes:

… one of the results of having substituted a philosophy of becoming for a philosophy of being is that the very notion of an achieved happiness has become not merely inconceivable but actually repugnant to us. Timelessness, or eternity, like Heaven itself, passes man’s understanding.2]

What Sayers writes about Paridiso applies to our approach to Romans 12:1-2 with its figures and symbols. In lusting after the measurable and exhaustible we have begun to think of the Christian faith in such terms. We have reduced Christianity down to mere propositions and steps and functions. The consequence is that the way we think about God, Christ, his Cross and even ourselves has become frozen still, comatose, even demonstrating a spiritual rigormortis of sorts.

The Pattern of Eternal Irruption into Paul’s Life

Many of us come to the Apostle Paul’s writings and we resonate with the structure of his argumentation. But let us not forget that Paul wrote as an Apostle not because he studied hard enough or tried harder than anybody else, but because God in His mysterious providence was pleased to irrupt into the Apostle Paul’s life and change everything here and now with a view towards eternity.

We are given that paradigm at the beginning of his Epistle to the Romans where Paul reminds us that he is a servant of Jesus set apart for the gospel of God

… concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh ⁴ and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, (Rom 1:3-4, NRSV)

God had come to earth in the flesh of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. In his perfect human life, Jesus lifted his new humanity to a place so great that sinners clutching to our failed depravity cannot imagine or measure or exhaust it. He has lifted us back to a place of integration and fellowship with God in himself.

Jesus Christ, Paul reminds us, was declared with power to be the Son of God on account of his resurrection from the dead, which demonstrated his life before the grave as perfect.

But resurrections don’t happen all the time do they? Scripture teaches us that all but a few resurrections will happen at the end of time, when Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, will judge the living and the dead.

Paul is telling us that something of the future has broken into the past and changed everything.

[1] Campion, Thomas. Campion’s Works. Percival Vivian, Ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. 178. Quoted in Dorothy L. Sayers “Introduction” to Dante’s Paradiso, (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 28.
[2] Sayers, 28.

In my pilgrimage presently the Lord has my heart grieving over the fracturedness of the Church of Christ and the splinteredness of the fracturedness.  When Dante enters the intellectual Heaven of the Sun, where the great doctors of the Church have discourse, he then concludes that their perspectives of the truth, their partial truths have resolved into the One Truth. ¹ In light of this I wonder, just how much of the division and canibalism in Christ’s Church is not due to some Jack and Jill sort of arrogance that we can see all sides of even small things.  If all things are created to tell us something of the Creator then might we not do well to include more mystery in our thinking and contemplation.  Allowing for the ineffable is at least a component of spiritual health.

For low among the dunces is his place
    Who hastens to accept or to reject
    With no distinction made ‘twixt case and case;

Thence come rash judgments, mostly incorrect
    And prejudiced, and stubborn all the more
    That self-conceit shackles the intellect.

Worse than in vain does any quit the shore
    To fish for truth, the fisher’s art unknowing -
    He’ll not return the man he was before;

…

No one should ever be too self-assured
    In judgement, like a farmer reckoning
    His gains before the corn-crop is matured,

For I have seen the briar a prickly thing
    And tough the winter throug, and on its tip
    Bearing the very rose at close of spring;

And once I saw, her whole long ocean-trip
    Safe done, a vessel wrecked upon the bar,
    And down she went, that swift and stately ship.

Let Jack and Jill not think they see so far
    That, seeing this man pious, that a thief,
    They see them such as in God’s sight they are,

For one may rise, the other come to grief.²

__________

¹ Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy III: Paradise. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds. (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 21.

² _____., Canto XIII, 115-123, 130-142.

“These are the two messages of the entire Gospel: the message of faith and the message of love—through faith before God, through love before or toward one’s neighbor. Here, therefore, he will treat of two kinds of people who sin against love. In the first place, there are the hypocrites, who do the most harm by feigning love. Many seem to have love but do not have it. The fanatics are people of this kind. They wish, ask, and strive for the complete destruction of their opponents. Meanwhile, however, they preach love. Thus the greatest murderers are sometimes concealed under the guise of love and piety.”¹

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.²

¹ Luther’s Works: The Catholic Epistles, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, Luther’s Works, vol. 30 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 274.

¹Wilde, Oscar. The Ballad of Reading Gaol. http://www.bibliomania.com/0/2/57/104/frameset.html, complete version.

Preface

A poem I jotted down today during a break between sessions on a staff retreat. I have been studying Deuteronomy for a sermon series I am preaching at an area church and was overwhelmed at the manifold ways in which my own heart breaks the first commandment to have no other gods before the LORD. I was amazed at oft quoted verses in 2 Chronicles, “If my people, who are called by my name, will turn to me … I will heal their land…”. The problem with preaching that as a call to repentance is that it glosses over the fact that Israel, the original audience, never turned to God and yet salvation from God is bigger than they imagined. Often God takes us into desert places not to punish us but to reveal more of himself to us. Then we become complacent because of the great blessing of his presence and the process starts over again. Ezekiel 8 teaches us that God is one who goes into exile with his people, into Babylon. While Babylon has historically been the symbol of apostasy, it is not so here. It is the desert place of discipline where God reveals himself to his people even in the context of great suffering. If that is where Jesus is, then that is where I want to be. I don’t want to be like those Ezekiel rebukes who remain smug at home in Jerusalem, failing to recognize that the Glory of the LORD had left the temple and gone into Babylon with His people whom He disciplined.

Thank you for silence
a most rare and precious jewel
that fills the room with angst and awe.
A subtle gray light growing hot white.

As it illumines, my heart falls faint,
lunging, longing that the bulb would fuse
and in the darkness still and noisy
might I, in my sin, bemuse
its hiddenness and stealth.

But oh God! would you drag me out to Babylon,
for I, your son, am want to turn.
Burst these bonds of religion-steel cast
that bind my heart in pious farce.

At least in Babylon, hands now free to embrace
you, my Lord - to yourself exile me.
My many gods crushed and hubris rent
from these hands that formed countless idols,
hewn from the quarries of Old Man bent
deep in deviance and divorce.

But you, O Lord! have renewed.
You have become my last and lasting word
that redefines and reforms - even suffering.

Oh that Babylon would be mine
if more of you would be had there.
In humiliation might I find the Humble One.

In suffering the dross is dropped.
In the desert place the God of Abraham
would in my heart and soul and mind
be finally unstopped.

“Crown him with many crowns,” up our voices ring.
The resplendent gold and gems circumscribed
The regal head eternally divine.

Preembodied hands, willfully took up
The majestic glory of divine right,
Laying down, his golden crown, to become.

To enter into time and space, walking
Grace among his created-own he moved
With kindred care, emptied of heav’nly wealth.

He came low to raise us high. We replied
By circumscribing Adam’s thorny curse
Around his perfect head, hanging him dead.

The God who became man now bled the ground,
With red compassion true. His curséd crown
Pressing our God-unlikeness to the grave.

Alone this curséd crown of thorn and brier
remains entombed where Perfection once laid
His regal head, no longer dead, but raised.

Will Nielsen
Februrary 8, 2006

This is a fine meditation for those who would understand the gravity of their sin and the magnanimity of their savior.

From Psalm 130, written by Martin Luther (1523), melody by Martin Luther (1524).

From the depths of woe I raise to thee
the voice of lamentation;
Lord, turn a gracious ear to me
and hear my supplication:
if thou iniquities dost mark,
our secret sins and misdeeds dark,
O who shall stand before thee?

To wash away the crimson stain,
grace, grace alone availeth;
our works, alas! are all in vain;
in much the best life faileth:
no man can glory in thy sight,
all must alike confess thy might,
and live alone by mercy.

Therefore my trust is in the Lord,
and not in my own merit;
on him my soul shall rest, his Word
upholds my fainting spirit:
his promised mercy is my fort,
my comfort and my sweet support;
I wait for it with patience.

What though I wait the live-long night,
and not in mine own merit;
my heart still trusteth in his might;
it doubteth not nor feareth:
do thus, O ye of Israel’s seed,
ye of the Spirit born indeed;
and wait till God appeareth.

Though great our sins and sore our woes,
his grace much more aboundeth;
his helping love no limit knows,
our utmost need it soundeth.
Our Shepherd good and true is he,
who will at last his Israel free
from all their sins and sorrow.

May the Lord bless you and keep you,
That faithfulness will mark all your ways,
That in the small and slim design
You will obey the Lord sublime.

May the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
That loveliness might be redefined in Him:
Beauty that is without measure -
An all surpassing treasure.

And may He be gracious unto you,
Who apart from Him can do nothing,
Who even in your rebellion against Him
Require His lifegiving Spirit to sin.

May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you
as a child of His covenant, forever true,
as one adopted out of the blackest dark
In love, on a journey of liberty, embark!

And may He give you peace -
Not appeasement that is a vapor mist
Nor blind hope that there’s something better still
But eternal peace who is Christ that never fails.