Growing into the Truth We Speak

I admit it. I'm a bit of a mailing list junkie. I have joined quite a number of daily/weekly/monthly email lists, and I receive a great number of wonderful things by email every day - scriptures and prayers, jokes, a Garfield comic strip, cultural commentary from a Christian perspective, and these wonderful bits of writing from Henri Nouwen.

The following quote appeared in my mailbox on June 21st, under the same title that I have used for this post:

Can we only speak when we are fully living what we are saying? If all our words had to cover all our actions, we would be doomed to permanent silence! Sometimes we are called to proclaim God's love even when we are not yet fully able to live it. Does that mean we are hypocrites? Only when our own words no longer call us to conversion. Nobody completely lives up to his or her own ideals and visions. But by proclaiming our ideals and visions with great conviction and great humility, we may gradually grow into the truth we speak. As long as we know that our lives always will speak louder than our words, we can trust that our words will remain humble.

I have wrestled often in recent months with some of the ideas that Nouwen so succintly discusses here. I have often had the opportunity to speak with friends and aquaintances, to share their lives and challenge them to new things in their relationship with Jesus. And yet, I have struggled with the opportunities as they have come about.

My life has not been a model of many good things in the last few years. Yes, I still profess Christ - I cling to him more desperately than ever before. But, at the same time, I devote less time to "getting to know him" than I ever have. I am woefully undisciplined at spending time in scripture and in prayer. I attend church and bible study as much for the social interaction as the spiritual value. And, more foten than not, I manufacture the "experience" and the "feelings" necessary to appear engaged during times of worship.

I have been greatly convicted in recent days of the lack of time that I have devoted to the faith that I claim is of central importance to my daily existence. I have often wondered if my own brokenness should disqualify me from offering challenges to those around me. And yet, I keep encountering needy people - people who I can understand because of my own neediness. People to whom I can offer a listening ear and the advice of experience. And yet, I feel hypocritical for offering "answers" when I have so few of my own.

Nouwen's words encouraged me - only when my words stop creating the sense of dis-ease within my own soul, that calls it to conversion, to deeper relationship with Christ, do they stop having value. My prayer is this - that I will never be so "together" that I fail to feel the guilt of knowing that the advice I offer is advice that I am woefully unable and unqualified to live and to dispense, without the grace of Christ.

Invitation to Engage

Okay, well... I'm tired of only my own thoughts on this page. If you read this (and at least a few people must, because the hit counter doesn't include me, and it seems to be going up), then I want to invite you to engage with me. I'd love to have a good written debate/discussion.

If I haven't written about a topic that's interesting to you, drop me an email at lpippus@telus.net with a topic that would be interesting. Share your experiences, tell me what the quotes I seem to be collecting here make you think about. Mostly, stop lurking!

With all that said, I'm going to continue blogging either way. I just thought it might be fun to engage in a bit of discussion once in a while!

G.K. Chesterton on Sanity and Reason

Last week I promised a favorite quote of mine from the writings of G.K. Chesteron. I came across the following quote in Brian McLaren's book, A Generous Orthodoxy, on page 67, in the chapter titled "Why I Am Mystical/Poetic." I found Chesterton's words to be both greatly amusing, and at the same time surprisingly profound. He writes:

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do...Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine...He was damned by John Calvin...Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion...The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits...The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason...Materialists and madmen never have doubts...Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have the mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

Three Days Left

My crazy workaholic stretch is coming to an end, and I am extremely grateful. It's starting to catch up to me - my brain is starting to refuse to take in new information. About three this afternoon, towards the end of another full day at my new job, my brain started to shut down. But, I only have three more days of work, and then I get a day off! I can't wait for Tuesday! I think I'll probably sleep and watch television all day.

My brain is so fried that I was willing to venture out in the rain storm tonight to rent a couple of comedies and stop at the grocery store to purchase supplies to supplement cravings. So, a bubble bath and a novel, followed by chocolate and a comedy are on my list of "brain resting" activities for the evening.

Random List

This is another one of my random conglomeration entries. This time, I present, Lisa's current list of "must see/listen/reads":

• If you haven't read a book entitled Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by a woman named Anne Lamott, you're missing out. Lamott is everything I don't quite know what to make of in a Christian. She is a liberal, feminist, peace activist, rabidly anti-George Bush author, who happens to have some incredibly profound thoughts on a life of faith. Her book includes such profound tidbits as "Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare." (pg. 47-48)
• If you tend to skip the first pages of a book - the ones with copyrights, prefaces, and dedications, and you STILL (after my stunning endorsement in the previous paragraph) haven't read Anne Lamott's book, check out the poem by Lisel Mueller that Lamott uses as the opener for her book. The poem, titled "Monet Refuses the Operation" can be found here.
• If you're looking for something to listen to, I've been recently enjoying the following albums: Jann Arden - Greatest Hurts: The Best of Jann Arden; Ray Charles - Genius Loves Company; The Essential Simon & Garfunkel; Starfield - Tumbling After; Rascal Flatts - Feels Like Today; The Garden State Soundtrack (particularly track 12 - "Let Go" by Frou Frou); and Michael Buble - It's Time.
• If you're looking for something to watch that's both funny and poignant at turns, pick up M*A*S*H* season eight on DVD. I admit that I'm inexplicably addicted to this show, and now own all of the first eight seasons on either video or DVD, but there's something that I find so refreshing in this television show. I laugh until I cry, and then I cry because the messages of the show seem so relevant to this modern world that is so continually besieged by violence and war. If M*A*S*H* isn't quite your speed, I watched Garden State again this week, and found it as profound as I did the first time I saw it.
• For a completely ridiculous novel (this one is like a really sappy chick flick in book form, but with spiritual truths thrown in), pick up Sisterchicks do the Hula by Robin Jones Gunn.

Okay, that's it. I've run out of things to recommend. These are the things I've read/listened to/watched in the last two or three weeks. The list will change soon, and I'll no doubt be inspired to post something new. I have a great quote by G. K. Chesterton, but I think I'll probably put that in a separate post, on a separate day. So, happy reading, listening and watching.