Month: April 2012

God is not nice

On By Charis PsalloIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

God is not nice. God is love, God is good, God is kind, but he is not nice. I mean nice in the sense of being easy-going, live-and-let-live, and inoffensive.

I just put the paska dough (Easter bread) at the back of the stove to rest after kneading it. Since the kids left home I rarely bake bread any more. This week we are awaiting a prized visit from the boys and their families, so I’m making paska, as part of our traditional Easter celebration.

As I was kneading it I remembered baking bread with my grandmother. I would become tired of mashing and rolling the little piece she gave me. I would look at the clock and ask how long we had to keep doing this. She said, “Just keep pushing it around until it pushes back.”

Kneading activates the elastic quality of the gluten.

“The bread’s muscles,” Grandma said. “If you don’t knead it the bread will be crumbly and your sandwich will fall apart and your toast won’t come out of the toaster in one piece.”

Today as I wrestled with a massive amount of dough (to make enough loaves to send home with the kids) for some reason I thought of Jacob wrestling with God’s messenger (perhaps a christophany). A “nice” god doesn’t dislocate a guy’s hip to catch his attention.

I’ve watched teens play pranks on each other when they are trying to get someone’s attention. Poking, tickling, wrestling, teasing –they’re all awkward excuses for contact (and a frequent source of embarrassing memories later in life). Now they poke each other on Facebook, often with equally blush-inducing results.

A new bride told me the story of her young husband waking her early in the morning by tickling her nose with a feather. “Who does that?” she demanded indignantly.

“Um… your lover?” I suggested.

Sometimes it takes a while to work out the language.

God tickles and pokes us too. He teases, leaves love notes and gifts and reminders that he desires our attention. I’ve discovered he has a marvelous sense of humour. Have you ever noticed that people falling in love (at least in the movies) sooner or later start playing chase and hide-and-seek? You want me? Come and get me! teehee

It’s about relationship.

When the situation becomes more serious, if we have not listened to his subtle hints, he will push us –and push hard. He will push us to the point of utter frustration until we push back. He loves us too much to be easy-going and inoffensive –particularly when he sees us speeding headlong into disaster. The irritations of life can also be messages that the Lover of our souls wants us to engage with him.

This is not a passive relationship where we accept everything circumstance fatalistically -what I thought for so long was “responding with grace” or “bearing my cross.” Faith cannot develop muscle without a little necessary roughness.

Do you want a blessing, Jacob? How badly do you want it? Enough to fight for it?

How much do we desire to know God? Enough to get mad at him, to chase him down, to beat on his chest and demand he communicate with us? Strong faith is not the possession of those who have no doubts. True faith belongs to those willing to push back, to wrestle until they have an answer.

The Master said: “These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their hearts aren’t in it.

Because they act like they’re worshiping me but don’t mean it,

I’m going to step in and shock them awake,

astonish them,

stand them on their ears.

The wise ones who had it all figured out will be exposed as fools.

The smart people who thought they knew everything will turn out to know nothing.” Isaiah 29:13-14 The Message paraphrase.

Pursue God. Push back. He wants to be found –and he will risk offending us if necessary.

Reflections

On By Charis PsalloIn Mountains, Trees and forests, WaterLeave a comment

At present we are men looking at puzzling reflections in a mirror. The time will come when we shall see reality whole and face to face! At present all I know is a little fraction of the truth, but the time will come when I shall know it as fully as God now knows me!

In this life we have three great lasting qualities—faith, hope and love. But the greatest of them is love.

1 Corinthians 13 Phillips translation

On By Charis PsalloIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Posted by Alan Hirsch on Facebook:

“The war is at an end – even though here and there troops are still shooting, because they have not heard anything yet about the capitulation. The game is won, even though the player can still play a few further moves. Actually he is already mated. The clock has run down, even though the pendulum still swings a few times this way and that. It is in this interim space that we are living: the old is past, behold it has all become new. The Easter message tells us that our enemies, sin, the curse and death, are beaten. Ultimately they can no longer start mischief. They still behave as though the game were not decided, the battle not fought; we must still reckon with them, but fundamentally we must cease to fear them any more. If you have heard the Easter message, you can no longer run around with a tragic face and lead the humourless existence of a man who has no hope. One thing still holds, and only this one thing is really serious, that Jesus is the Victor. A seriousness that would look back past this, like Lot’s wife, is not Christian seriousness. It may be burning behind – and truly it is burning – but we have to look, not at it, but at the other fact, that we are invited and summoned to take seriously the victory of God’s glory in this man Jesus and to be joyful in Him. Then we may live in thankfulness and not in fear.”

– Karl Barth

Aaaaargh

On By Charis PsalloIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

So the guy sitting at the desk on the other side of the wall from me says, “If you don’t feel like throwing your computer out the window twice a day you’re not working hard enough.” Contemplating throwing him out the window with the computer.

Naaa. He bought me the computer and taught me to use it. And unlike the computer he’s good at a whole bunch of other stuff. I’ll keep him.

The Vocal Competition

On By Charis PsalloIn Poetry, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Valley United Church, 2:30 p.m, Recital Class, Contestant 1

Quivering lace-dripped lonely dove

vaulted from the five-wire cage

to soar in apostle-painted sun,

you lean with syllabic sincerity

as your blue eyes weep black-eyed grief.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,

a long ways from home

Your unlined face mourns

three century old parting

Bist du bei mir

geh ich mit Freuden*

and virgin passion pleasures

nodding grey heads

Quella fiamma

che m’accende**

Gathered in your beating breast

the sainted air transfigures

in profound angelic pronouncements.

Ave Maria

gratia plena***

until the judge

grounds your flight

with pencil point

Damp-palmed you settle, restless,

on the uncompromising pew,

despising the grace

in contestants two and five and eight

Oh hungry sacrificial dove,

why sing for blood

when you can

sing for love?

*If you are with me I go with joy –J.S. Bach

**That flame which sets me on fire –Benedetto Marcello

***Hail Mary full of grace

A Gold Shirt

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers2 Comments

blue jay ch IMG_5799

Mom said I sang a lot when I was a little kid. My favourite song was apparently “Que Sera, Sera” which I belted out in my bold three-year old voice from the backseat of Daddy’s cavernous Olds. Since I am now officially closer to one hundred years old than three, what will-be-will-be, at least on this green earth, has probably mostly already been –and it’s been mostly good.

I also remember singing something about a “blue bird of happiness.” I found the actual lyrics today. The chorus goes like this:

Be like I, hold your head up high,

Till you find a bluebird of happiness.

You will find greater peace of mind

Knowing there’s a bluebird of happiness.

And when he sings to you,

Though you’re deep in blue,

You will see a ray of light creep through,

And so remember this, life is no abyss,

Somewhere there’s a bluebird of happiness.

Happiness, crappiness.

I was crying with my friend a while ago. It was the anniversary of the death of her little girl. She showed me pictures of her little one’s last day. There sat a disheveled version of my friend in a rocking chair. Her boyish husband stood beside her, stunned-faced, hand on her shoulder, as they tried to gaze into Lily’s eyes which were closing for the last time. The child was still connected to tubes; you could see a nurse’s hand on the edge of the frame supporting them. Not exactly a blue bird moment.

My friend’s blue bird, like all flighted birds, done flyed away. She has no desire to pursue happiness right now. Their pursuit of happiness was a journey that led to an abyss where the chirping blue bird, flitting high and out of reach in his very own personal sunbeam, mocks her.

Your story may be equally painful. The devil has an uncanny ability to custom-make horror and toy with our fears.

I wonder if we fear disappointment more than pain.

Hope can hurt –hurt too much to risk raising that flag again sometimes. I didn’t dare unfurl that one for nearly twenty years myself. If I saw a “ray of light creep through” I just ignored it as one more creep.

Yet Jesus promised joy and a peace that passes understanding when we trust him. Well, I kind of ignored him for a long time, but when I was finished my dark night of the pout, he was still waiting, willing to talk. Nothing else was working so I decided to listen. I read, in the book of James in the Bible:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

Pure joy? You’ve got to be kidding!

I began to wonder if there is a difference between happiness and joy. Nowhere does God guarantee happiness all the time, but he does promise joy in the midst of trials. It seems to me that while happiness might drop by for a visit, joy is willing to move in.

So I asked, “What is joy?”

I think I am beginning to see it. Joy is wearing a gold shirt.

Remember the first Star Trek shows? I’m not allowed to forget. My husband spent weeks taping them all, then bought the boxed DVD set anyhow. He puts them on, turns up the volume, and promptly takes a nap on the couch. I’m the one who can recite the dialogue. The actors in the red shirts seldom came back for a second episode. It is much easier to feed those characters, for whom we have developed no fondness, to the aliens. But we loved our Captain Kirk and his emotion-free sidekick, Spock. Week after week they faced the perils of where-no-man-has-gone-before. Week after week their lives hung by a half-blasted plasma conduit or dangled by a thread of non-linear inspiration until Scottie swooped in –all Deus ex machina and beamed them out of there. We could breathe again.

How could we survive the tension?

Because we knew that our beloved characters were played by actors who had a contract until at least the end of the season –or even longer in the case of syndicated Star Trek spin-offs that still play out during hubby’s nap time.

This is the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness is sunbeams and singing blue birds, and lo-cal non-fat lactose-free ice cream that tastes just like the extra creamy cookie dough stuff.

Joy is the excitement of hanging over a cliff all summer until the opening show of the new season when we know, we just know, that God has a creative solution in his script. Joy is the anticipation of seeing how he’s going to get us out of this one. Real joy is seeing the big picture, the reeeeeeeaaaaaally big picture on the really big screen of eternity, knowing that we have a contract with the Producer/Director. He gave everything for this relationship because he has a vision for character development that goes way beyond this season. It goes on forever.

I saw my friend smile the other day, when she talked about Lily in heaven.

See the big picture. Joy. It’s exciting really.

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