Monthly Archives: March 2015

Daily Riches: The Fast that Pleases God (Larry Norman)

Posted on by under Fasting, Loving Well, Social Justice, The Poor and Disenfranchised

“You kill a black man at midnight just for talking to your daughter
then you make his wife your mistress and you leave her without water,
and the sheet you wear upon your face is the sheet your children sleep on
at every meal you say a prayer you don’t believe but still you keep on. …

You are far across the ocean in a war that’s not your own
and while you’re winning theirs you’re gonna lose the one at home.
do you really think the only way to bring about the peace
is to sacrifice your children and kill all your enemies?…

Well, my phone is tapped and my lips are chapped from whispering through the fence.
You know every move I make or is that just coincidence?
Will you try to make my way of life a little less like jail,
if I promise to make tapes and slides and send them through the mail? …

You say all men are equal, all men are brothers, then why are the rich more equal than others?
Don’t ask me for answers I’ve only got one
that a man leaves his darkness when he follows the Son.”
Larry Norman, “The Great American Novel” in Only Visiting this Planet (1972)

 “I will tell you the kind of fast I want:
Free the people you have put in prison unfairly and undo their chains.
Free those to whom you are unfair and stop their hard labor.
Share your food with the hungry and bring poor, homeless people into your own homes.
When you see someone who has no clothes, give him yours, and don’t refuse to help your own relatives.
Then your light will shine like the dawn … Your God will walk before you …
You will cry out, and [Yahweh] will say, ‘Here I am.’”
Isaiah 58:6-9

Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Do you see yourself in any of the sins mentioned by Norman? by Isaiah?
  • How could God’s people really be so oblivious to their sin – fasting and oppressing others simultaneously? Does this happen today?
  • Notice how central caring for the powerless is for God. Is that central for you? If not, why not?

Abba, may caring for the powerless be at the heart of my following of the Son.

For More: for they shall be fed, ed. Ronald J. Sider

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow my blog, and share it. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

Daily Riches: Uncomprehended Mystery and Unquenchable Light (Thomas Merton, Robert Russell, David Augsburger, Martin Buber, Walter Chalmers Smith)

Posted on by under Embracing Losses and Limits, Faith and Doubt, Humility, Mystery

“The division between Believer and Unbeliever ceases to be so crystal clear. It is not that some are all right and others are all wrong: all are bound to seek in honest perplexity. Everybody is an Unbeliever more or less! Only when this fact is fully experienced, accepted and lived with, does one become fit to hear the simple message of the Gospel – or any other religious teaching. The religious problem of the twentieth century is not understandable if we regard it only as a problem of Unbelievers and of atheists. It is also and perhaps chiefly a problem of Believers. The faith that has grown cold is not only the faith that the Unbeliever has lost but the faith that the Believer has kept. This faith has too often become rigid, or complex, sentimental, foolish, or impertinent. It has lost itself in imaginings and unrealities, dispersed itself in pontifical and organization routines, or evaporated in activism and loose talk.” Thomas Merton

“I am … reminded of the humility of those early theologians who knew that when we seek to speak of God we do so only out of the glimmers of understanding that sparkle amid the vast background of uncomprehended mystery, a mystery that nevertheless shines in nature and in the human spirit with unquenchable light.” Robert J. Russell

“Since nothing we intend is ever faultless, and nothing we attempt ever without error, and nothing we achieve without some measure of finitude and fallibility we call humanness, we are saved by forgiveness.” David Augsburger

“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”  Martin Buber

“Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes”
Walter Chalmers Smith

“We all stumble in many ways.” James 3:2

Moving From Head to Heart

  • Do you have the humility that comes with knowing how much about God is “hid from your eyes?” That in some ways you’re an “unbeliever” too?
  • Has your faith become “rigid, or complex, sentimental, foolish, or impertinent? Has it “dispersed itself in … organization routines, or evaporated in activism and loose talk?” Has it become cold? Could you be suffering from your “own false image of God?”
  • In spite of it all, can you be “saved by forgiveness?”

Abba, thank you for your constant forgiveness.

For More: Faith and Violence by Thomas Merton

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow my blog, and share it. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

Daily Riches: Living Out Wholeness (Parker Palmer, Florida Scott-Maxwell, J. I. Packer, Julian of Norwich)

Posted on by under God's Grace, Humility, Wholeness and Brokenness

“I am that to which I gave short shrift and that to which I attended. I am my descent into darkness and my arising into light, my betrayals and my fidelities, my failures and my successes. I am my ignorance and my insight, my doubts and my convictions, my fears and my hopes. … Wholeness does not mean perfection: It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” Parker Palmer

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done … you are fierce with reality.” Florida Scott-Maxwell

“Having made us, he knows our weaknesses – our fear, our self-pity, our self-regarding anger, our moral paralysis, our randomness, our indiscipline, our suicidal self-loathing. As gently as a shepherd taking up a lamb out of the brambles or a mother taking her infant to her breast, he will take us up and work with us – not to indulge our egoism, however, but to cure it. We must realize that we are in the hands of the Great Physcian, who goal it is, not to make us comfortable invalids, but to restore us to moral health and wholeness. And we must understand that his principal method of treating us, his petulant patients, is hard and constant exercise in a world which under his providence becomes a moral and spiritual gymnasium for us.”  J. I. Packer

“The weakness which is serviceable is the weakness which seeks the aid of a physician.” Bernard of Clairvaux

“until we all reach unity in the faith
and in the knowledge of the Son of God
and become mature,
attaining to the whole measure
of the fullness of Christ.”
Ephesians 4:13
 .

Moving From Head to Heart

  • Do you think of yourself as a person of wholeness and integrity?
  • Either way, are you measuring by “perfection” or by “embracing [the] brokenness” that is integral to your life?
  • Can you “claim the [good and bad] events of your life”, and be a person who is “fierce with reality?” If not, what does that say about you?
  • Does your “weakness” cause you to “seek the aid of a physician” (the Great Physician)? Can you be glad for it then?

Abba, take all that I am, all I have done. Make me real, whole, and useful to you and others.

For More: “On the Brink of Everything” by Parker Palmer

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow my blog, and share it. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

 

Daily Riches: Radically Trusting God, Truly Helping Others (Nikos Kazantzakis, Parker Palmer)

Posted on by under Change Yourself First, Detachment and Attachment, Hurry Sickness, Jesus the Savior, Learning Your Proper Place, Loving Listening, Loving Well, Waiting on God
“I remember one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited awhile, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened; the butterfly started slowly crawling out, and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were foldedhatching back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath, in vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand. That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the external rhythm.”  Nikos Kazantzakis
 .
“…most people can and must come to life in their own way and time, and if we try to help them by hastening the process, we end up doing harm. …[but] when we understand that our efforts to help other people can be unhelpful, or worse, we may start to avert our eyes from their struggles and pains, not knowing what to do and embarrassed by our own ineptitude. … [but] Instead of fixing up, or letting down, people who have a problem, we [can] stand with simple attentiveness at the borders of their solitude – trusting that they have within themselves whatever resources they need and that our attentiveness can help bring those resources into play. …We stay present to each other without wavering, while stifling any impulse to fix each other up. We offer each other support in going where each needs to go, and learning what each needs to learn, at each one’s pace….” Parker Palmer
 
“Everyone should be … slow to speak”
James 1:19
 .

Moving From Head to Heart

  • Can you resist the urge to “fix” someone in need?
  • Can you simply be “present” to them in love rather than averting your eyes?
  • Will you trust them to do for themselves what only they can do, and God to do for them what only God can do – and will do in God’s time?

Abba, help.

For More: A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

Daily Riches: Fasting From Seeking God? (Dan Clendenin, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton)

Posted on by under Asceticism, Being the Beloved, Fasting, God's Grace, Spiritual Disciplines, Striving and drivenness, The Love of God

“Jesus describes our struggle between light and dark, life and death, salvation and condemnation, belief and unbelief. … ‘All of us,’ says Paul in Ephesians, are implicated. …So, what am I to do? Double down on earnest religious effort? …A friend encouraged me last week when he described how his spiritual director told him to abstain from all his tried-n-true ways of seeking God — conversational prayer, meditation … “Christian” books, lectio divina, and the like. He’s ‘fasting’ from all that hard work he does to relate to God. …John tells a story from Numbers 21 to point the way forward. Just as Moses lifted up a bronze serpent in the desert that healed people merely by looking at it, so today we only have to look to the love of God. There’s nothing else we can or should do. In his little epistle, John strips away all pious pretense with a shocking admission: ‘In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.’ The only thing I’m asked to do is ‘to know and rely upon the love that God has for us’ (1 John 4:10, 16). Paul says the same thing. I experience God’s favor ‘by grace through faith,’ apart from any human merit. His goodness is a free gift, not a reward for my spiritual efforts. And my faith? Luther compared faith to ‘the beggar’s empty hand’ that receives a gift. God only asks me to accept his acceptance, in the words of the hymn, ‘just as I am, / without one plea.’ This Lent I want to experience what Denise Levertov describes in her poem The Avowal.

‘As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
free fall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.’

A true saint, said Merton, is not someone who has become good through strenuous disciplines, but someone who has experienced the free goodness of God.” Dan Clendenin

“Cease striving and know that I am God….”
Psalm 46:10
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Moving From Head to Heart
  • Is your response to these words “But, but, but…?” What explains that?
  • Do you “work hard to relate to God?” Could there ever be a reason to abstain from doing that?

Abba, help me free fall into your embrace.

For More: “When Less Is More” Dan Clendenin

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow my blog, and share it. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

Daily Riches: Treating the Poor as Honored Guests (Dorothy Day, Robert Coles and Thomas Merton)

Posted on by under Loving Well, The Poor and Disenfranchised

“One afternoon, after several of us had struggled with a ‘wino,’ a ‘Bowery bum,’ an angry, cursing, truculent man of fifty or so, with long gray hair, a full, scraggly beard, a huge scar on this right cheek, a mouth with virtually no teeth, and bloodshot eyes, one of which had a terrible tic, she [Dorothy Day, in her Catholic Worker’s soup kitchen] said,  ‘For all we know he might be God Himself come here to test us, so let us treat him as an honored guest and look at his face as if it is the most beautiful one we can imagine.’”  Robert Coles

jesus-in-the-breadline-p-eichenberg

“Into this world,
this demented inn,
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ has come uninvited.
But because he cannot be at home in it,
because he is out of place in it,
and yet he must be in it,
his place is with those others for whom there is no room.
His place is with those who do not belong,
who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak,
those who are discredited,
who are denied the status of persons,
tortured,
excommunicated.
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world.”
Thomas Merton

“[God] will rescue the poor when they cry to him;
he will help the oppressed, who have no one to defend them.
He feels pity for the weak and the needy, and he will rescue them.
He will redeem them from oppression and violence,
for their lives are precious to him.”   
Psalm 72:1-14
.

Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Do you share God’s “pity for the weak and the needy?” Have you ever treated a “Bowery bum” as an honored guest? If so, what happened?
  • Christ’s place is “with those others for whom there is no room.” He identifies himself with them. He stands with them in solidarity (Mt. 25:40) Do you attempt to treat such people as you would treat Jesus?
  • Imagine being “denied the status of persons.” Imagine what standing with and loving such a person could do for her. Who do you know who is “denied the status” of a person?

Abba, open my eyes to the invisible. Open my heart to the unwanted. Open my hands to the needy.

For More: Raids On the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow my blog, and share it. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

Daily Riches: Hiatus for One Week

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I’m going to be working with a ministry in Manhattan (Relief Bus) all this week – reaching out to and feeding the homeless. We’ll also have a prayer ministry and provide job counseling. I’m not able to post anything during week, regrettably, but I’ll be back on the regular schedule next Monday.

I really appreciate your interest in my Daily Riches @ richerbyfar.com. Your comments, sharing, reblogging, etc. are a real encouragement. See you next week.

Bill

 

Daily Riches: All Men Are Idolaters (C. S. Lewis, James Martin and Helmut Thielicke)

Posted on by under Awareness, Embracing Losses and Limits, God's Grace, Humility
“The sister walks up and down the aisles [of her first grade art class] looking at what each student has painted. She stops over the desk of one little boy. ‘What are you painting, Billy?’ she asks. Billy looks up and answers, ‘I’m painting the face of God.’ ‘That’s impossible,’ says the sister. ‘No one has seen the face of God.’ Billy turns back to his drawing and says, ‘They will in five minutes!’” James Martin
.
“He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.”
C. S. Lewis
 .
 “I don’t believe that God is a fussy faultfinder in dealing with theological ideas. He who provides forgiveness for a sinful life will also surely be a generous judge of theological reflections. Even an orthodox theologian can be spiritually dead, while perhaps a heretic crawls on forbidden bypaths to the sources of life.” Helmut Thielicke

Moving From Head to Heart

  • Have you ever thought of your prayers as “aimed unskillfully … to a deaf idol” if not for the mercy of God?
  • Imagine the multitudes offering prayers which God can’t possibly take literally. Is this just others, or does it include your group?
  • Is there hope for heretics? What about for you and your “limping metaphors?”

Abba, thank you for all the bypaths that by your mercy become sources of life.

For More: The Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)