THE SPIRITUAL COMBAT

One Amazon order at a time, my bookshelf has filled…three times.  

Three bookcases filled with spiritual classics produces a tremendous pressure on a person who grew up learning to “finish your dinner.  Eat what you put on your plate.”  With food, I learned always to consider carefully how much I thought I could eat…and then serve less than that.  I could always go back for more.  That worked with food.

For books?  You can rightly assume that I have not read every single book in my three bookcases.  It’s not that I don’t try.  In fact, just halfway through reading book one, I am tantalized with book two and open its cover.  With books one and two underway, I can’t resist the new book that just arrived and crack it open.  Then, trying to complete even one of the three books, I carry the pile around the house and in the car, looking for quiet times when I can concentrate on reading a few pages.

The only reward that keeps me from despair are the life journeys I enjoy with tremendous people of faith and their wisdom and inspiration.  It is a conversation across the centuries with the man who began the monastic movement, with the young woman who teaches me to be content with my smallness, and with the man and woman who were each compelled to save one suffering person…and thus have saved thousands.

Not only the books, but the people who wrote them, inspire me.  And I want them to inspire others.

Unfortunately, books no longer reign supreme.  They share the stage with American Idol, News Action Alerts, the theater’s latest blockbuster, YouTube, Facebook…Twitter.  People who were once patient enough to read Moby Dick now want you to wrap up your point in 140 characters.  An entire civilization twitters back and forth over trivial pursuits.

Slowly, born of three separate plans, an idea germinated to bring order to my life.

Firstly, I pulled the plug…on the outside world.  On Sundays, I turned my back on the electronic universe…I-Phone, television, computers, and any other temptation that required a battery or an outlet.  Amazed at the time made available for other pursuits, beginning with my proverbial stack of three books, I luxuriated in silence and reading.

Secondly, I went on a diet…a book diet.  Inspired by a Carmelite nun, I quit buying books and gave attention to the treasures I already had.  This young nun, with all the quiet time in the world to read, had only six books on her shelf.  Six.  I scanned the titles on my shelf.  Did I really need to read them all?  If I had to choose six…could I choose six?  If not, I could certainly downsize.

Thirdly, I demanded more…of less.  Intent on making it through one book to get to the next, I was embarrassed that a week after finishing a book I loved, I was scarcely able to remember what I had read.  The words on the page went through my eyes, passing so quickly through my mind that they never had time to settle into my heart.  This was not the point of reading a book.  Especially wisdom books written by saints.

Three plans converged one day as I scribbled notes for remembrance from the book I was reading.  Fearing that all my good reading would result in forgetting what I read, I decided to become a serious student under the direction of this wise man.  I would slow down, contemplate the advice he offered in chapter one, and write a reflection on it.  Time didn’t matter.  It was no longer about getting to the end.  It was about gaining insight from him and applying it to my life.

I welcome you to join me.            

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Copyright 2017.  All Rights Reserved.

Quote:  Faith is the soul riding at anchor.  –Henry Wheeler Shaw (Josh Billings)

Pansies and petunias were in full bloom throughout the city.  In only one more month the hot Phoenix sun would burn them dry.  I was late.  I began work to restore my garden with only two weeks left in the prime spring season.  This was just the kind of urgency to show off my dual talents:  organization and perseverance.

I grabbed shovels and rakes just as the sun came up each morning and worked until the pink glow of sunset faded to gray.  Body muscles surprised by any kind of exercise at all retaliated with full-blown pain.  I burned them into submission under the pulsing heat of a hot shower each night.  

At the nursery, I avoided the final packs of pansies and sought out summer flowers and vegetables suitable for our six month dry sauna climate.  I knew I could catch up on the growing season if I checked the nursery each morning for new shipments, picking out tomato and pepper transplants four to six inches high, mature but not yet root bound in their tiny plastic pots.

I hunted down hidden shady spots for basil and cilantro seeds, hoping to coax out some late spring herbs.  With no time to spare, I planted all the yellow squash seeds in the packet.  Heaven knows, we didn’t need that many plants, but there was no time to replant if they didn’t sprout.  Best go for broke.

For ten days I planted seeds and flowers with great expectation. The smell of moist soil in the morning confirmed the success of repairs to our water system.  In the next week, I watered, paced, and surveyed my handiwork.  It felt good to invite visitors to walk through a garden of color and order.

Now came the hard part.  What talent I had for organizing and executing the Great Garden Recovery was equally matched by my greater weakness:  a short attention span.  Just as seeds sprouted and plants started to thrive, competing interests started working to pull me away from the garden.

Concerts, writers meetings, lunches with friends, books to read, stories to write, dinner to make, son’s trumpet lessons, shopping trips with daughter, e-mail…Moment by moment, day by day, I was tempted to turn my attention out of the garden and leave my precious plants to fend for themselves.  Meanwhile, in total dependence, the plants in my garden waited for me to guard their welfare with daily loyalty and care.  

I’m reminded of my debt to the Lord for his unswerving love and devotion.  Loyalty is the great protector of life.  God is loyal to us.  How I would wilt and fade if it weren’t for His ever-present love!

And what an honor it is to sing His praise each and every day!  Today’s song of love is not meant to last forever.  It is a renewable gift, received daily from God and owed back to him with loyal devotion.

Scripture:   My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast; I will sing and make music. Awake, my soul! Awake, harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn.  I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations; I will sing of you among the peoples.  [Psa 57:7-9]

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Meditations:  In the Garden
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Copyright 2017.  All Rights Reserved.

When Vic and I bought our dilapidated Victorian house, all of our friends knew where our time and money would be going.  They were right…fifteen years marked off not by seasons or holidays, but by home-improvements.

What they didn’t know, though, was that my heart really wasn’t tied to the house that would demand such devotion.  My heart belonged outside in the yard, even more run-down than the house.  Oleander bushes around the back yard were no more than stands of tall dried sticks.  At least they hid the sorry truth of our yard from neighbors, a full expanse of packed, hard dirt, a vast brown wasteland.

Move-in day was simple for us as young marrieds in our first home.  We set our clothes in the closets and carried in our dining room table and chairs.  Move-in finished!  Excitedly, we grabbed our remaining small wad of money and drove to the nursery, making our first home-improvement purchase, trees.

Trees wouldn’t care how bad the house looked.  They would grow undaunted by the list of tasks demanding our attention.  We could survive without tile in the kitchen or curtains on the windows, but we absolutely needed trees.  And grass, a flower garden, a vegetable garden, a hose, a drip irrigation system, lawn sprinklers, and monkey vines to grow over the new trellis and up onto the peaks of the roof.

Almost immediately after we planted and mulched the last tree, Vic arrived home with two long 4×4 posts, a stack of lumber, a pile of used red brick and a sack of cement.  “What’s that?”  I asked.  His answer, “A patio.”  I had no idea!

One year later, plus ten more stacks and piles of lumber and bricks, an electrician, planter beds, and an overhead drip and mister system for twelve pots of hanging ferns and spider plants, there it was.  We had our Mexican brick patio.  It doubled the square footage of our house.

Meanwhile, inside the house, we hung curtains, patched cracks in the walls, put up a new ceiling in each bedroom as soon as falling plaster made it necessary, and rewired the house to eliminate the fire hazards of ancient cloth covered wires dangling across attic beams.  We refinished wood floors and installed new bathroom fixtures.  But the improvement projects that really mattered most to us were the ones that took us outside.

We slept inside the house.  But we lived outside on the patio.  We grilled, we hosted neighborhood garage sales, we entertained with volleyball, and we sat swinging on the porch swing, just ‘hanging out,’ breathing in misted air and watching new fern fronds grow.

Improvements on the inside of the house soon were merely ways of moving the outside in:  a skylight over the bathtub, an enlarged kitchen window looking out over the ferns on the Mexican patio, and French doors from our bedroom directly out to a separate, smaller redwood deck patio with a gurgling fountain.

Fifteen years after planting our first tree, I think of the early Jewish nation traveling with tents, living under God’s sky.  I know they suffered terrible heat and suffocating dust storms.  Insects slept with them.  No, life wasn’t easy.   But life had its rewards.

I wonder how much of God’s beautiful house do we no longer “see,” living inside the permanent homes of comfort we’ve built?  How many conversations with God never happen because we don’t have a tree overhead and a bed of grass to lie in?

Oh, to hear the wind pushing at the side of a tent!  Oh, to hear the clear call of the birds, “Come out!”  Oh, to live unfettered outside in the house God built for us with His own hands, looking up to the majesty of the house God holds for us one day.

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Meditations:  In the Garden
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Copyright 2013.  All Rights Reserved.

It is a day just like all the others before …

You raise up in bed, turn and drop your legs over the side and onto the floor.  How can you know that you will come back to this spot at the end of the day a changed person?  Nothing will ever be the same.  Ever.

On this page…and the many pages to follow…in the coming weeks and months…this day and the many that have passed by since will be shared by the survivor…me.

If I have anything of value to say…it owes much to the love that has changed…and continues to change me…from the arrogant, self-righteous person I used to be…to the semi-arrogant, semi-self-righteous person I am still struggling to control, manage, and change.  Join me in the battle.  At the very least, you will feel much better about your own struggles.

Thanks for dropping in today.  I hope you will check back in with me in the days ahead.

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WHAT’S NEW

December, 2013:  The Lord’s Prayer

• Do you say debts, sins or trespasses?  What difference does it make?
• What does this prayer sound like in Aramaic, the language of Biblical times?
• Who was the Singing Nun?
• Did you know American Indians translated the Lord’s Prayer into sign?
• Where can I find remembrances and keepsakes of this prayer for myself, my home and my friends?