The Saint

I read about it in the newspaper.

It shocked and saddened me.

An older priest in a local church in Normandy was brutally murdered in the church.

I know he is with the Lord, comforted, beyond pain and suffering and fear. But…

“Thou shall not commit murder”, says the Lord God. It is a sin to kill.

I sit with a lot of mixed emotions: I weep for the local church, the people who knew the old priest. I feel for the ones who are left behind, in fear and confusion, in the bewildering feelings of sorrow, rage, and fear.

I know the IS-crowd want war. They want to provoke reactions; but we belong to Christ, the One who conquered death. No, we will not fight on their terms. We will ask the King of heaven, the King of this Universe, to act on our behalf. He is mighty.

The unfathomable is that Jesus died for us while we were yet sinners; He died to rescue the perpetrators, the evildoers.  It is almost unethical! But such is the love of God.

We will not, we refuse, to be enticed to hatred. We know the better way: we live in forgiveness, and all our feelings we take to Him.  He has shown us what love is, in Christ Jesus. He has given us new life and a new relationship with God. We go to Him. There we may pour out our hearts – our anger, our spite and malice… For, yes, we are fully able to have such reactions. But, as we bring it before the risen Lord, and confess all which is in our hearts – all we know of – he is there. He sustains us.

I am at peace.

wild flowers for saint Jacques

Individualism:

 

Perhaps it is not the ultimate expression of personal self,

 perhaps it is not the goal of autonomy,

 perhaps it is not freedom to make your own choices in your own world…

no, perhaps individualism is a much misunderstood ideal, one that carries with it the burden of loneliness, alienation, and fragmentation.

The times I live in hail individualism, as the tool to reach the top, as the means to ‘stand out in the crowd’.  I have some questions: If the race to the top is a competitive race, will not only the first one to reach the summit count?  If there is one winner, what about the rest? After all, the rest is the vast majority. The hype about being one who ’stands out in the crowd’ also needs a justification. If you clearly are different from the majority, you may represent a counter-trend, a rebel, a protester, or you may be someone who does not fit in well in the social setting. On the other hand, you may be a leader. So, if you are a leader, whom do you lead?

I suppose the term ‘communism’ has too many connotations to political ideologies to have any communicative value, but in essence, I think any individual functions in relation, in community. We have a responsibility towards each other in all settings of life, with whomever we meet. The level of involvement is different from person to person, or even from time to time, but we function constructively in community.

“Love the Lord your God with all you might, with all your strength and all you heart. And love your neighbour as yourself.”

In these words we have the essence of individuality and community, individualism and communism (in a non-Marxist/Leninist usage). For any one person, the relationship to God, a love-based relationship is the necessary starting point for relating to others and to self. This essential relationship confirms the individual being, and it does it in such a way that it is not rooted in and depended on the individual itself. There is a fundamental freedom in this.

            Love your fellow human being, as you love yourself. Again, the main core is a relationship between people, the I and the other. I am not defined in relations to myself, and not by what I do, but by who I am to the other. It is not the utility of my being, what I can do for the other, or what I can produce in society, which gives me worth – it is the simple fact that I love and receive love which sustains me.

            And what is love? In this context I admit that doing good things is in the picture. But if I have no love, then I am nothing. If I present great stuff, but have no love, I am nothing.

I do not believe in individualism. I believe in God, whose very nature is triune relational and yet one. I am an individual, but always in relations, with God and with my fellows.

Then We Have Tea.

As often is the case when I read philosophical texts, I wonder if I understand them. Presently I am reading “Time and the Other” by Emanuel Levinas.

What he grapples with is not complicated to me; it deals with coming into existence, of time and of being. There is a sense of a fleeting description of what is, or coming into being, and this – to me, at least, - counters the efforts to all-encompassing systems of thought, like the ones introduced by Hegel, for instance. 

I know we cannot know all things; and we always live with a sense of eternity, both in space and time. I am, and I am blissfully limited, but because I take that as a point of departure, I have no need to order my world into neat categories, no need to capture the totality of things. I have a God-given eternity perspective, and that is something I cannot control. Perhaps the naturalistic mindset produces the need for complete comprehension and systems which will necessarily be fully coherent in interdependence, since all there is is in the material world.

Levinas talks about a moment when something comes into existence, becomes an existant. And this moment he names a ‘hypostasis’. He mentions that time comes into existence at the time when someone or something also enters this hypostasis. He has God in the picture, but we are not at this point talking about the creation by God’s hands. That is a different matter; but he is talking about something and someone having a real being in this world, and this being there is fully justified.

I thought to myself: Levinas shared these thoughts first in a lecture series in Paris in 1946/47; how are his expressions reflecting the aftermath of the Holocaust? And then I wondered about the sense of existence in time, and coming into existence in time, which is a fleeting moment, as a form of reaction to the large and complex systems of German thinkers. For life is more. Our being in this world extends to eternity. We cannot fathom life and meaning in limited categories.

Whether I understand what Emanuel Levinas wants to say or not, may not be the only value of reading his works. He makes me ponder, think, read some, fall asleep while reading, rereading the same paragraph time and again. In addition, he sets some of my own thought processes afloat. He makes me ponder my own existence and worth.

And I ponder God, who is not far from any of us, and always available in Christ Jesus.

Then we have tea.

come, join

What does it mean for life?

I want to be true in what I express, and try to convey the reality and down to earth life lessons from the realm of God. 

The question: “How do I live as a Christian?” comes up from time to time, and I have responded boldly many a time, but always with the expectation that the one I interact with is a Christian. How else would he talk about living the Christian life?

The connection between the living God, His Word, and the human experience has been one aspect of the inquiry. In what way do we connect? To what extent is there a human factor?

In my basic understanding of theology there is no human factor; it is all by God. Still the question arises: yes, but how does it connect to my world, my experience, my mind and heart?

The connection is through words; through language, and through the fullness of human experience – we react as complete beings, with mind, heart and soul.  We are not apart from our senses in anything we interact with. How can there not be a point of connection?

God is the one who causes the connect, and He is the one who conveys the content –it is all an act of God, and we do interact with the call, the challenge, the conviction, the surrender.

We are given a new Spirit, the Spirit of God, who is not I and my spirit – no fusion takes place, but the Holy Spirit has a separate existence in me.

Nicodemus was one who was well versed in the Scriptures, who knew much of history and tradition; but he did not know about the new, fundamental change, which any person needs to undergo, in order to live a life with God: in Christ we have access to this new life.

Anyone, who like Nicodemus, seeks to live the Christian life without this fundamental change, will necessarily become exhausted, and self-searching, turning into self to see where the source of life is – and he will not really find it. It is not there. 

The source of life is in Christ Jesus: and again the challenge to come before him, the Lord of the Universe, the Lord of life is essential. Jesus is Lord, and he is Saviour. Only through Him can we enter into a relationship to God

For some of us this is obvious, for we can witness it in our own lives. It is not folly, nor due to ignorance and any simplistic tradition of ‘just believe, do not think’. For anyone this is truth; but to surrender to Christ is a challenge for the ones who fear they may lose their intellectual integrity. It is a greater challenge in life to be strong and to be gifted, for the need for comprehension hinders the step in faith. Faith is not blind, but fear may cause a rather blurry vision.

Many are they who have a mind with great capacity who fully trust the Lord of Life, Jesus Christ, and live in fullness of their intellectual and mental capacities. No one has ever become limited in the scope of being human, expressing the human mind and doing research into their field of study because they are Christians. Rather, on the contrary – they have a sense of freedom, a scope of reality which may go beyond this material world, in their comprehension of what is real.

The Lord of Life, Jesus Christ, is my Lord, and I am challenged to surrender to and adhere to the words and commands He gives.  Why do I call this good, and voluntarily submit? I do, because his words and commands are good. They challenge my sins; they free me in forgiveness; for Christ Jesus is a Living Lord. In the relationship with Him in prayer, I can live. And, believe me, this is a truly blessed life. I am not lying.

As you have read through all these words, I have a question: Have you dared surrender to Christ, or are you trying your best to adhere to the standards of Christian living, spending much your energies in doing so, and still wondering if it is enough? The truth is: you can only live a Christian life by the Spirit of God, and his His power and strength.  Anything else is folly.

I think I am down to earth – but perhaps it is better to say: I am closer to heaven, and that is where the real world has its fundament. At least what it means for life is beyond this temporal sphere, as well, since we are looking into eternity.

True Life

I listened to a young man’s testimony tonight.

He is Jewish and he believes in Jesus as his Messiah, and through Him he has forgiveness for sins, and eternal life..

God answers when you pray.

God revealed himself to this young man in the Word, in visions and through people - 

Both he and his wife were seeking truth about life, and they ventured into Orthodox Judaism for some time. One day he was challenged by a believer in Jesus to read the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible. For, as he said, Orthodox Jews do not read the Bible. They are studying the Talmud. Even when the Bible texts are read in the synagogue, the deliberations are not necessarily related to the bible texts.

I knew this. Of course I did.

So, he was challenged to read the Bible, and he and his wife made it a race to see who could finish first. But when he came to Isaiah 53, he was full of questions. What was this really about?  He went to his friend and asked. And this friend had impatiently waited for 9 months to tell about it; so they talked, read, talked some more about Jesus, and how he is a fulfillment of Isaiah 53. They read in the New Testament…and sometime during that evening, he prayed Jesus to reveal himself to him, and he did. He became a believer in Jesus, just like his friend.

But how should he tell his wife?

He pondered it – and he did tell – but she was unimpressed. She found him overly exited, and figured it would pass. When you go from death to life, it does not pass.  He gave her a new testament to read for herself. At the time he was in the military service in Israel, and he was away for a couple of weeks.

He came home, and found her in the living room, in tears. She had just read the Gospel according to Matthew. What is wrong, he wondered, and she said: “This is such a beautiful man: why has nobody told me about him before?”