Kindle a Dark Night in Your Soul

Al W. and me in a Java House in Nairobi.

Before I went to teach in Kenya some Redeemer friends gave me a gift for my trip. It was a Kindle. Thank you again - I continue to use it!

I purchased (for only $3) St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. I'd read it before, but decided to get this inexpensive version for my Kindle. Plus, I would be teaching a class for RMS graduates St John's Dark Night when I returned home.

The "dark night of the soul" does not mean "going through a hard time." Rather, it's about nondiscursive epistemology. For example, in the Prologue to Dark Night John writes:

“In darkness and concealment, My house being now at rest. In the happy night, when none saw me, Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide save that which burned in my heart. This light guided me more surely than the light of noonday to the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me – A place where none appeared. ” (Prologue, 423-32)

These poetic words anticipate what is to come. The soul moves toward God, who is known in "darkness." The "lights" of the senses and reason and logic are left behind. For John this is necessary since God cannot be adequately known via our human powers of experiencing and knowing. As this "dark knowing" happens, it is a "happy night." One's "house" is at rest.

This is "dark knowledge." Such knowledge is relationally (not metaphysically) unitive, as the distance between knowing subject and sought-after Object is removed. Concerning religious epistemology, Dark Night expresses a mystical vision of what it means to know God.

When Praying, Pause (Prayer Summer)

Sterling State Park, Monroe

Melissa, one of our Prayer Summer partners, sent me this e-mail:

"I read I Samuel 3:9-10 today which talks about The Lord speaking to Samuel. There is a devotional quote by Paul Tournier that I thought summed up prayer summer. It is this: "Instead of making our requests of God, it is good sometimes to ask God what He wants of us, then to pause and let His spirit speak to our hearts."

Two ideas in this quote struck me:
1. Asking God what He wants - its not always about me and what I can get from God.
2. Pausing to let Him speak - This is so foreign to my nature since I have been a willing participant in the rat race that finds fault in pausing."

Prayer and Thankfulness (Prayer Summer)

Thankfulness is a core attitude of prayer. Thankfulness and rejoicing are not conditional on one's circumstances, but are "in Christ" attitudes (Philippians 4:4-7).

Preaching on Philippians 4:1-7 this Sunday

This Sunday at Redeemer we'll look at these beautiful verses, which ultimately are about corporate rejoicing, praying, thanksgiving, peace, and unity.

4 Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, dear friends!

2 I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. 3 Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.

4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Prayer and Questioning (Prayer Summer)

When we engage in a life of prayer we will have more questions, and questions of a different kind. This is because our relationship with God is no longer theoretical but experientially real.

Prayer and the Army of God's Protection (Prayer Summer)

Green Lake Conference Center, Wisconsin

D, one of our Prayer Summer partners, writes: 

"In my alone time with God He is showing me that I must lean on Him especially now. He knows what I am going through. He understands the heartbreak and the pain of what is going on right now in my life. When I am alone with God I feel this incredible peace and comfort, even in the mist of not understanding why certain things are happening.  He is teaching me that He is in control of All things and that I am going to have to trust Him."

I'm thinking much about the peace of God this week, especially since I'm preaching on Philippians 4:4-7 this coming Sunday. In these verses we have four admonitions plus a promise:

1. Rejoice in the Lord always (there's that ubiquitous Pauline word "in" again)
2. Let your gentleness be evident to all
3. Don't be anxious about anything
4. Pray in every situation, with thanksgiving

Do such things, and "the peace of God, which transcends understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus."

The word "guard" is a military term. Ben Witherington writes: 

"Since the city of Philippi was at that time guarded by a Roman garrison, the metaphor would have been easily understood and appreciated by the Philippian readers. Paul is talking about a consequence of praying with thanksgiving. A sense of God’s presence, peace, wholeness comes over the one praying, stilling and reassuring the heart about things and thus removing anxiety." (Witherington, Paul's Letter to the Philippians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary)

D, who is going through a difficult time in her life, is deepening her prayer life. She is experiencing the peace of God enveloping her like an army of God's protection, as God has promised.

Prayer & Withdrawing From the Narcotic of Busyness (Prayer Summer)

Detroit

Prayer is talking with God about what he and I are doing together. It is in prayer that we receive our "to do" list. Our "doing" emerges out of our "being-with-God."

If this is not the case, then our doing is mostly, if not entirely, irrelevant and inauthentic. This is because our doing is not directed and unguided, except by the self or the voices of this world or that other, dark voice.

This is a challenge for those of immersed situated in the frenetic soup of Western culture. In our culture we are defined by function, and not by relationship. We are defined by our situatedness on the tribal totem pole, AKA the honor-shame hierarchy. On this totem pole of striving who we are is what we achieve.

True prayer is not the achievement of anything. This is one reason people don't pray; viz., because it seems to be "doing nothing." The need to achieve and accomplish as fulfillment of our personal being is deep within us. James Houston writes:

"These conscious and unconscious drives work against a spirit of prayer, where we seek God's will rather than our own, and where we need to be still and listen to God rather than pump ourselves full of the narcotic of busyness." (Houston, The Transforming Power of Prayer: Deepening Your Friendship with God, 45) This is busyness as a drug that masks the symptoms of a diseased soul. It palliates, but does not cure.

What is the cure? It's found in a verse like Psalm 62, in its entirety. Here are verses 1-2:

 ¹ Truly my soul finds rest in God;
my salvation comes from him.
² Truly he is my rock and my salvation;
he is my fortress, I will never be shaken.

Houston writes: These words "are death to a spirit of self-importance and restless ambition. Sometimes we cannot stand to listen to such a radically different message when the world is seducing us to listen to its own claims." (Ib.)

In true prayer we lay aside a competitive spirit. We place ourself in a spiritual position to be won over by God.

William Lane Craig Featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education

I was so pleased to see my friend Bill Craig featured in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education. See Nathan Schneider's "The New Theist: How William Lane Craig Became Christian Philosophy's Boldest Apostle." Linda and I were friends with Bill and his wife-to-be Jan. I sang in their wedding, and once wrote a song about their car they had named "Abijam."

I remember when Bill was preparing to take the Graduate Record Exam in philosophy. I was doing my undergraduate degree in philosophy at Northern Illinois University. Bill asked me what I thought of him reading F.C. Copleston's A History of Philosophy as he approached the GRE. I had Copleston's complete set and thought it a good idea. I am certain Bill aced the exam.

Schneider's entire essay is worth the read, as it talks about Bill's broad philosophical brilliance as well as the state of philosophers who are Christian theists today. Schneider writes:

"Any given debate about the existence of God or some related topic reveals the tremendous intellectual labor Craig has undertaken to that end. In addition to his two master's degrees and philosophy Ph.D. under [British philosopher John] Hick, he spent the early 1980s acquiring a further doctorate in theology at the University of Munich, where he studied the reliability of the source texts about the resurrection of Jesus [under the brilliant Wolfhart Pannenberg]. He has published more than 100 articles in philosophy and theology journals. The result is a person (verging on machine) who cannot only hold his own against fellow analytic philosophers on matters such as the possibility of an infinite regress and the nature of time, but who can also spar with physicists on the first milliseconds of the universe and with biblical scholars on the provenance of particular passages in New Testament Greek."

Prayer - Making a New Beginning (Prayer Summer)

July 1, 2013.

This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
- Psalm 118:24

To the 400+ doing Prayer Summer with me:

I am so thankful you are joining me in this.

Today begins month #2 of PS. Since every day of life is another opportunity to reconnect with God, why not  make this day a new beginning in your prayer life.

Relationships, to be real, must be sustained. "Use it or lose it," it says in the book of Hezekiah. Learning prayer and a praying life is like learning to speak a foreign language. If we use the language daily we grow in it, over time. It is the same with prayer, since a praying life is a life in deep relationship with God.

Focus on today. On now.

When will you spend meaningful, sustained time with God today, just you and God? Identify this. Make an appointment to conference with God today. Write it in your datebook.

Make a new beginning today.

The Gospel According to 'Me" (Passive Nihilism)

In the nytimes recent "The Gospel According to 'Me'" Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster write about America's cult of self-worship. The more "nones" we have we would expect to see a turn to "me." They write:

"Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest."

People are moving from the idea of God to the idea of self. (See Christian Smith's helpful work on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism - see here, and here.) 

Surely Critchley and Webster are correct when they observe:

"A postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work."

The goal of human life is personal well-being, rather than a collective endeavor towards a greater good. "The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma."

The American Dream is now one of "pure psychological transformation." Critchley and Webster call this "passive nihilism." This is an this is an ethic of personal authenticity, "at the heart of which is a profound selfishness and callous disregard of others. As the ever-wise Buddha says, “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”" 

An uncritical brainwashed "authenticity" leads to a "deep cynicism." (We see this in the self-made "Eckhart Tolle's (not his real name) silly, money-making The Power of Now (yes, I did read it... :(  )

Sadly, a lot of church culture is marketing itself this way. Critchley and Webster write:

"When the values of Judeo-Christian morality have been given a monetary and psychological incarnation — as in credit, debt, trust, faith and fidelity — can they exist as values? Is the prosperous self the only God in which we believe in a radically inauthentic world?"

Ironically the uncritical zombielike (flesh-without-spirit) humanity of today is becoming more and more inauthentic in its none-ish staggering towards the Oz of the false self.