The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.
~ Brennan Manning
Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind. Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them. And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning. If I had said, “I will speak thus,” I would have betrayed the generation of Your children. But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end. Truly You set them in slippery places; You make them fall to ruin. How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when You rouse Yourself, You despise them as phantoms. When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward You. Nevertheless, I am continually with You; You hold my right hand. You guide me with Your counsel, and afterward You will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides You. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For behold, those who are far from You shall perish; You put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to You. But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all Your works.
~ Psalm 73
Oh beloved, it is true.
He will, if we ask Him, do exactly what we ask. Somewhere, we realized that He really was (and is, and will be) the very thing we seek. But, what we don’t realize in the equation is that there is so much of us in the way, that we can barely see Him. Said more simply: we don’t have a little skin in the game. We have a hunk of flesh so large as to be a mountain that must be climbed.
And so, as we begin the crushing climb to the very mountain of G_d; and have no doubt, this range is still in view, even above the enormous bulge of our own selfish wills, we look off to the sides, and behind. And, for moments (sometime much too long) we gaze at the people laughing at us in our climb. They are mocking the choices that we make to keep going up the slope. And the demons that prompt them guffaw as we slip and slide back down the hill at times.
Somehow though; even through the bilge that chokes our vision. We see up the hill. Just over the peak of our rotting flesh, and well beyond the laughter of those down in the valley of not even trying, we see a House. And this House is exactly where we want to go.
We know it deeper than our bones.
We take one look back down the hill. We see tracks. We see the umpteen times we slid back down the slippery slope of self. But mostly, we now see the people down in the valley for what they are. They are exactly as we are without Him. They are beasts. They are us. And, we are them.
Can we see it?
The only way out of the mess is to keep climbing. However, the climb (this ascent of Mount Carmel, as St. John of The Cross has called it) is not merely to avoid the destruction that we could easily choose; and that most do.
No, the climb is to get what we have always wanted.
We want a large Life.
We want Hope.
We want Home.
We want to be known.
We want to be heard.
We want to be received.
We want to be real.
We want to be free.
We want a completely different state of being.
And, as is often the case, we see examples in the natural that give us insight into the realest part of existence: The Spiritual. Matter, when properly energized can enter into a state called a plasma. Plasma states are highly energized, but there is a balance of the charges of particles, and plasmas can conduct great amounts of energy without losing their state. The way that plasmas get to be plasmas? The negatively charged electrons are overwhelmed into a balance by the positively charged ions in the system.
Oh G_d! I want to live the plasma life.
Do you? Or would you guffaw at us fools as we climb into the higher state of energy which He is calling us to?
So, is your negative flesh, pulling you away from where you want to go? It happens. All to often. However, there is a way up the mountain – and Home. Let go of the negative stuff. Just let it go. And let the positive strength of His Right Hand, pull you up the mountain.
Tonight is your night. Time to let go of the negative stuff, and get up that next range!
Nothing is more opposed to God than pride, for self-deification is concealed in it, its own nothingness or sin. Thus more than anything humility is acceptable to God, which considers itself nothing, and attributes all goodness, honor, and glory to God alone. Pride does not accept grace, because it is full of itself, while humility easily accepts grace, because it is free from itself, and from all that is created. God creates out of nothing. As long as we think that we can offer something of ourselves, He does not begin His work in us. Humility is the salt of virtue. As salt gives flavor to food, so humility gives perfection to virtue. Without salt, food goes bad easily, and without humility, virtue is easily spoiled by pride, vainglory, impatience – and it perishes. There is a humility which a man gains by his own struggles: knowing his own insufficiency, accusing himself for his failings, not allowing himself to judge others. And there is a humility into which God leads a man through the things that happen to him: allowing him to experience afflictions, humiliations, and deprivations.
~St. Philaret of Moscow
