A man was concentrating hard, prayerfully concerned about his family. There were five of them, he and his family, all at various stages of life. Like anyone else, the family was not so different from others in the sense that they each had struggles of their own.
He was reaching out to God with his heart and mind, hoping for solace, for not only himself, in his concerns, but for the his family: the object of his concerns.
In hopes of relief from his weary mind, he went into his yard and walked around in the morning light.
The Bible tells us that there is nothing better than to lay down one’s life for his friends, but here he has invested, not his life, but his emotional well-being, leading him to a perplexed countenance. But here, too, he was prayerful and carried his cares to the Lord.
Suddenly there came a bird to nearby tree branch in the man’s yard, and the bird sang briefly.
“There you are Lord”, said the man.
Lost in culture and centuries of enforced church doctrine, is the concept of different levels of heaven. Peter and Paul each had writings about varying levels of heaven, and again, today, the concept is lost, exorcised from the consciousness of the church.
In Paul’s writing he noted a man caught up in the “third heaven”, who wasn’t sure at the time if he were alive or dead. He was having an experience, likely in the province of the mind or soul. Paul notes this as an experience of the Gospel and the Living God. Consider, as a side note, that this was before clearly established church doctrine, during a time when varying ideas circulated, even before some of the infamous heretics of the early church era.
Calling it being “caught up in the third heaven”, the text indicates an experience of God, a mystical experience that befuddled the mind, but encompassed and utilized the spirit—the person seeming out of body, and possibly even unaware of time and space. This is just as Thomas Merton defines Christian Mysticism as trying to reach to God with the spirit, instead of the mind.
Just as the world gets in the way of some good deeds and good intentions, for whatever reason, established doctrine, centuries ago, stamped-out some of those stray concepts. Here we are told so much in the so-called “secular world”, via capitalism and cultural items shared with various religions and forms of governments, that a thoughtful person can scarcely catch a moment of reverence of God, beyond an hour or two in a church service.
Doctrine is, at best, a pathway to God, but at worst it can seem like a locked doorway that blocks us from egress towards God, locking us into ritual and rote, “vain repetitions” more than the experiential Joy and Peace that can be accessed by earnest religion. We could become quite lost in all the rules and minutia that, while living a good life, we do not live our best life, in the full light of realizing the Lord’s grace.
And even that much can become empty, or even an object or dread, perhaps even boring as the believer goes through repetitive motions of corporate worship without any inner-prayer life, without the spirit or the consciousness taking time for reverence or communion with God.
Think on, pray on, lest we become like Paul, sinking below the waves.
Like that concerned man in the lines above, we look to creation, sometimes, natural formations for a revelation of God.
We know God to be the chief architect, the grand designer and the physical builder of everything that is. As science marches on, men observe and research ever-increasing layers of complexity, and even the most learned of them marvel at God’s handiwork.
No comments:
Post a Comment