The Dangerous Grace of the Cross

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Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
I am only beginning to explore this journey that is Lent.  This season was not a part of my faith tradition growing up, but it seems to be growing more popular among evangelicals these days.
Lent
This long season of Lent is not a frivolous sort of giving up as it appeared to a fairly oblivious teenage self (fasting from M&M’s anyone?) but a giving up for the purpose of giving away.  It is a period of self-denial in order to become more unified with the Spirit of Christ.
It is a difficult thing to be unified with Jesus.
Gazing into the eyes of Christ for too long has frightening consequences.
When you stare at the cross, you find yourself looking at your own death, at your sin and its just consequence.  You come face to face with all of the spiritual deformities that are in your own soul and find yourself tempted to turn away from the harsh reflection.
Crucified with Christ
When you gaze at Christ crucified for these forty days that are Lent, you are pulled close to the grace and forgiveness of your death finished for you.  But it is a dangerous grace.
This grace is one that does not leave you unfinished.  It is a grace that purges and renews.
The purpose of Lent is to awaken in you a sense of your own sin, your guilt for your sin, and your sorrow over your sin.
The purpose of Lent is to awaken “the sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins.  To (awaken) or to motivate the works of love and the work for justice that one does out of the gratitude for the forgiveness of one’s sins.” (Edna Hong in Bread and Wine) 
Awakening
This grace can only be approached at the end of Lent.
It is a long journey, these forty days.
It is a necessary journey, one that fights the apathy and smugness of this world in which we often find it easy to spot deformities in the souls of others and find it also easy to turn away from the crippled places of our own souls.
Yet we do not travel this path of Lent alone.
God’s Spirit Himself travels with us, maneuvering us down this steep path that ends at the foot of the cross.
As we stand at the foot of the cross, stripped of our illusions about ourselves, we gaze at the battered and broken body of the One who came to rescue us.
This body of Jesus that is our grace.  This grace that brings fire.  This fire that purges and cleanses and does not consume but instead resurrects us into a new self.
Gaze at the Cross
It is beautiful, this amazing and dangerous grace.
Dangerous Grace
When through fiery trials your pathway shall lie
My grace all sufficient shall be your supply.
The flame shall not hurt you, my only design
Your dross to consume and your gold to refine.
How Firm a Foundation

edited from the archives

Credit to Edna Hong and Walter Wangerin in Bread and Wine for many of the ideas in this post.

Photography is copyright Made Sacred 2018

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The Eclipse of God

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

 

 

One dark night, God the Son pleaded with God the Father
and was answered by silence.
silence
cries
One dark afternoon, God the Son cried out to God the Father
and was answered by the turning of His back.
rejection
The Father rejected the Son and the Son experienced “the dark night of the soul, in which everything that makes life something living withers away, and in which hope vanishes.” (Jurgen Moltmann)
For the parents who have just lost their child
For the girl who has just been raped
For the man who has just lost his job
For the woman who is drowning in loneliness
the only answer to your cry of Why? Why, oh God, why? is not a because
it is an experience.
Lent
The reality of whatever makes you feel what Martin Buber calls the eclipse of God can only be answered by the reality experienced by Jesus.
“‘For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you.'” (Jurgen Moltmann)
The Jesus whose cry was met with silence, the Jesus who was rejected by God, He is the friend to whom we can confide everything because He has suffered everything that has happened to us.
And more.
eclipse of God
reality of Christ
For into our unanswered cry to God, He came.
He came and entered into the darkness and the suffering to be with us.
He came as a brother to sit with us in our fears, our weeping, our brokenness.
He came as a mother to reclaim His own. “Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you.
“He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn His face from us, however much we turn our face from Him.” (Peter Kreeft)
It is the truth Corrie ten Boom spoke from the hell of a Nazi death camp, “No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still.”
And because He came, He can answer our cry with His reality.
after the eclipse
reality of the resurrection
He can answer our reality with the experience of His reality that no matter how dark the eclipse of God, it is always followed by the blinding dawn of the resurrection.

Art Credits: The Three Crosses by Rembrandt; Resurrection by Luca Giordano; Der Engel öffnet das Grab Christi by Benjamin Gerrisz Cuyp; all photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2018

The Tension in Desiring Solitude

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I am nearing the end of this first year of a two year long journey through my Spiritual Formation course of study.  It has already been a difficult and beautiful journey.
Aren’t most beautiful things in life also difficult?
Hard Beauty
In my most recent class I learned much about solitude and silence. I recently wrote a piece that shared a little of what I learned; I’d like to share a bit more today.
As a part of this class, I read a book by Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart. Perhaps you are already familiar with his writings, but this was my first Nouwen book. I am already hungry for more.
He placed great emphasis on what must be the origin of our words, which spoke deeply to my own writer’s heart. His stress on carrying our solitude, silence, and prayer out into the world around us spoke deeply to my mother’s heart.
I want very much to take what I learn through these classes and allow it to permeate my writing.
I want desperately to take what I learn through these classes and allow it to permeate my parenting. 
Let the Little Ones Thirst
Nouwen writes that our words must be birthed out of silence, in the same manner as God’s Word.
The Word of God is born out of the eternal silence of God, and it is to this Word out of silence that we want to be witnesses.
This is my prayer and my hope, that my words will be witness to the Word. I am learning that for my words to have meaning, for them to bear fruit, they must come from a place of solitude and silence.
Words out of Silence
My tendency, like many other writers, is toward verbosity. I love language, love how words work and play together, love to craft a sentence in just the right way. Often I err on the side of long-windedness.
Nouwen, again, writes directly about this tendency:
As ministers our greatest temptation is toward too many words. They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit.
I am intrigued by the idea that too many words weaken our faith.
Perhaps convicted is a better word than intrigued.
I am convicted by the thought that when I am not certain of my own convictions regarding this huge, holy, and terrifying God of ours, I write more than I ought in an attempt to enshroud my doubts in eloquent language.
Words out of Solitude
I am convicted by the thought that when I am doubtful of the Holy Spirit’s ability to reach someone’s heart, I pour out my own words in an attempt, as ridiculous as it is, to be the Holy Spirit myself.
Nouwen speaks, it seems, directly to me:
Sometimes it seems that our many words are more an expression of our doubt than of our faith. It is as if we are not sure that God’s Spirit can touch the hearts of people: we have to help him out and, with many words, convince others of his power. But it is precisely this wordy unbelief that quenches the fire.
I am convicted by my own “wordy unbelief”.
Nouwen unequivocally writes that solitude and silence and prayer must result in a greater compassion towards those whom God has placed in our little piece of the world.
As a mother who stays home to school her children, this profoundly moves my heart. I understand that my children need my presence in their daily lives, and I desire that my children know God, that they thirst for Him. It is difficult sometimes to trust that leaving them for a period to spend wilderness time with God is in their best interest.
Parenting out of Solitude
Nouwen’s emphasis on the service aspect of wilderness time is helping my heart to agree with my mind:
Compassion is the fruit of solitude and the basis of all ministry. The purification and transformation that take place in solitude manifest themselves in compassion.
Nouwen also writes of the way our world creates for us a false identity.
He says that we fall into the world’s version of best because we want to be perceived in a certain way by those around us. He teaches me that solitude (and silence and prayer) is the way in which I encounter a God who loves me enough to offer me a new self. It is this new self that has the capacity for having compassion on the broken people around me.
It is in this solitude that we become compassionate people, deeply aware of our solidarity in brokenness with all of humanity and ready to reach out to anyone in need.
It is in the wilderness that I become deeply aware of my solidarity with my children, with my husband, with my neighbors.
I am quite often a prideful and self-righteous person, and I desperately need this “solitude that molds self-righteous people into gentle, caring, forgiving persons who are so deeply convinced of their own sinfulness and so fully aware of God’s even greater mercy that their life itself becomes ministry.”
I need to become more gentle; I need my very life to become ministry. Everyone around me needs this too.
I am far from understanding all of this, far from being able to put it all into practice. 
Yet I will continue reading as I struggle to understand the importance of wilderness time, as I search for what it looks like to spend long stretches of time alone with God.
I will continue to seek ways to put these ideas into practice, even with little ones running around my feet.
Will you continue to join me in this journey?

Value in Our Lenten Suffering

I am relaxing with my family away from the internet this week. To follow last week’s post on Lenten suffering, I have pulled this related post from the archives. Read, be blessed, and go enjoy your own family and friends.
To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

 

Where in the world but in Christianity?
Where in the world could you find a premise about life that ekes value out of suffering?
Beginning
Beginning
Suffering happens. There is no denying this. But to find value in this suffering that is common to us all?
The ancient Jews had come to understand this.
Isaiah. Jeremiah. Daniel. The Psalms.
This theory of the way life works finds its fulfillment in Jesus, of course.
…He learned obedience through what He suffered. And being made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.
To be made perfect.
This is our goal, our telos, or vision of life toward which our whole being is aimed.
To bring glory to God and to be God’s rulers on earth.
How? By being made like Jesus.
And it is our obedience in the middle of our suffering that brings this about.
Whether we are suffering from what others have done to us, whether we are suffering from grief or pain, whether we are simply suffering because our faithful lives are out of step with the people and powers of this world, when we are obedient in this suffering, we are made like Jesus.
Middle of Suffering
Middle of Suffering
Obedience in little things, every day, is practice for the urgent things, the catastrophes.
Obedience daily prepares us, is the only thing that can prepare us, for obedience in suffering
We celebrate in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces patience, patience produces a well-formed character, and a character like that produces hope.
Middle of Suffering
Middle of Suffering
Our hope is for the glory of God.
His glory is both the divine stewardship of this earth entrusted to us and the return of His presence to His people after our long exile.
Our hope is to be made like Jesus.
To be made perfect, as He is perfect.
End as it was created to be
End as it was created to be
This is the value in our suffering.
This is what makes it all worth it in the end.
Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.

Art credit: All photographs are mine, copyright Made Sacred 2018

God’s Lenten Love

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

 

Lent is a time of self-denial, a time of sacrifice.
Lent
self-denial
Lent is a time of giving up, a time of letting go.
Lent is a time of death.
death
sacrifice
Perhaps it seems strange that a God Who claims to be Love would ask for His beloved to practice such harsh disciplines.
The difficulty often lies in our idea of love.
We see love as sweet and soft, as gift giving and hugs, as making someone happy.
God’s love, however, is a fiery love.
fiery love
fierce love
God’s love is a love that cares so fiercely about His beloved’s joy that He refuses to leave anything in His beloved that might diminish that joy.
God Who is love asks us to die to ourselves because He knows that you cannot have glory without suffering.
He knows from experience that you cannot have resurrection without death.
Lenten love
letting go
Lent has already begun, but it is not too late to begin practicing how to die to yourself.
Fast for a meal or two; give up television for an evening. Use that time to read God’s words and pray.
Set aside thirty minutes to practice solitude and silence. Go somewhere you can be completely alone and try to still your mind and listen to God.
These habits take practice, so start small.
giving up
Let God’s Spirit teach you how to deny yourself, to give up, to sacrifice.
resurrection
Learn how to die.
Only then can God give you His resurrection.
Lent
Learn how to Lent, and God will give you Easter.

all photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2018