A sabbatical

I notice I forgot to post a blog for September in all the chaos of getting a daughter back to college. I have one to post for October, but I'm feeling a need to de-stress life for a while, so I'm going to put off finalizing and posting it, and will put a Facebook notice when I'm back up and running. If you would like a personal notification, then send your email address to crystal.ford@gmail.com, and I'll email you personally.

Non-judging

Given that God is Immanuel -- the One who is with us every moment of every day in all our circumstances, making grocery shopping as holy an event as church attendance because both can be done in the presence of and in fellowship with God -- then one day is not better than another. Today may be more difficult than yesterday, it may have more fun events in it, it may be more exhausting or more exhilirating than another day, but it is not better.

Romans 8:28 says it this way: "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." In other words, no matter what the circumstances of our life look like, God is doing what God is always doing -- working for good, and that makes all our circumstances, in God's hands, a source of good and of blessing.

This is why the Bible can say to "give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus" (1 Thessalonians 5:18). How can you give thanks when a car accident has just claimed the life of your husband? How can you give thanks when you've just lost your job? How can you give thanks when your best friend has turned his back on you? How can you give thanks when sin and the devil are flooding in on you?

How, indeed? But even when the circumstances are evil, God is working for the good of those who love Him. Indeed, He even works for the good of those who don't love Him. "He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Matthew 5:45). As the song says, "God is good all the time".

It is not our natural tendency to make an effort to see God in all our circumstances. We naturally react to everything we experience in terms of what we think its value is to us, and usually we define "value" according to how good something makes us feel. And so, when something happens, we make an automatic judgment, and we lock ourselves into that judgment. Which is unfortunate because then we can't see the good. If we wake up and it's raining, and we grumble, "What a rotten day", we may not then hear the robin singing for all it's worth or the fact that the first crocus has poked its head through the melting snow on our lawn or that there's the faintest but still very beautiful rainbow in the sky. And so we miss the blessings of that part of our day.

Because of this, contemplatives work at spotting these judgments and putting them on hold, so they can see everything that's going on in that moment, including God's goodness.

The sacredness of the present moment

A contemplative views the present moment as sacred. This is because the present is the moment in which we live our lives and where God is with us. The past is gone, and the future is not yet ours. There is only the present.

This means that, in one sense, it doesn't matter what is happening in my life right now. I may be in church worshipping or at home vacuuming. In either case, God, who calls Himself Immanuel (God with us) is present. And wherever God is present is holy ground, as Moses discovered when God asked him to remove his shoes in the desert because he was in the presence of God and that made the ground on which he was standing holy. Similarly, whenever God is present is a holy moment.

But people only notice God in their "ordinary" moments if they know to look for Him there. If they think they are only close to God in church, then they may not notice Him in their vacuuming.

This week for me has been a wild mix of emotions. My Mum was suddenly rushed to hospital, and I was distressed. She continued without a diagnosis and a very poor prognosis, and I began to prepare for the worst. That day I was exhausted with hard news. Yesterday, my Mum received a pacemaker and looks better but is so confused that she may not be able to return home. I was happy but challenged. I worked on some Christmas cards and gifts and now am getting ready for a Christmas dinner and dance: appreciation for the season and for my friends and family, and sorrow for my mother's condition. As a contemplative, I entered fully into all these emotions and circumstances because that is my present and where God is closest to me. And He has indeed proven that to be so. I have felt His comfort. I have resolved some of my conflicted emotions about the mother who loved me and also abused me, and I have had healing. I've realized afresh the depth of what God has given us in terms of ultimate freedom from all that is hurtful and troubling and sad. I have worshipped Him in those realizations. In my home, in the midst of my messy life, I have touched God as surely as He may be touched in any sanctuary.

God is Immanuel, the one who promises to be with us to the very end of the age, to never leave us, ever. And we realize that promise of unbroken fellowship in our present moments where we live our ordinary lives.

A contemplative experience

This summer, five years after my Dad's death, I went to Niagara to visit my Mum. While there, I asked to be driven to the cemetery to be left alone for a while at the gravesite. I knew I wanted to talk with my Dad. Beyond that, I had no idea why I had made such a request.

Once there, I thought, "This is crazy. Dad's not here. He's gone on to be with the Lord. I'm talking to some bones and a headstone. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense." But deep within, I knew it was something I needed to do.

I looked around. There was a fresh gravesite piled high with flowers two plots over from my Dad. Between his grave and that, lying by itself on the grass, was a perfect red rose. I assume it had rolled off the pile because that was the only source of flowers in sight. But it was no longer part of the pile. So I retrieved it. Red roses have a special meaning around my Dad's death. The only flowers at the funeral were a single spray of red roses laid on the coffin. My girls each brought one home to remember. I never did that. Now I had a single red rose in my hand. I laid it on the headstone. It seemed to belong there. And I began to talk.

I told Dad I really wished he had hung on long enough for us to have reached the hospital in time to be able to say goodbye. I told him about Mum and how she abused us as kids. I asked how come he never knew so he could stop it. I told him I loved him. For forty minutes or so I talked and cried and talked some more.

When I had no more to say, I went to wait on a nearby bench til family came back to pick me up. I could see Dad's headstone from the bench. As I looked over, a butterfly appeared from somewhere close to his gravesite and flew by my right shoulder then out of sight. Butterflies are special to me. The fact that they die as caterpillars and rise as these beautiful creatures always speaks to me of resurrection. This one let me see him and then was gone. And I realized that it was time to let Dad go. So I said, "Goodbye Dad", and from somewhere deep in my spirit let him go.

That day, I had two special contemplative moments, one with the rose and another with the butterfly. I have hinted at their meaning, but I have no words for how they touched something so deep in my soul that even I don't know the depth of their impact. A non-contemplative would perhaps say that these were coincidences into which I had read something more. But a contemplative knows when they are reading meaning into something. And they know when the meaning finds them, coming out of a deeper part of our reality than we normally experience. This day, I touched that reality.

All of us are gift

If I am a gift, then all of us on this planet are also gift. Gifts of God given to bless and to enrich the world. True, some choose not to be what they were created to be. Some choose to only take or worse, to wreak evil. This is not how things were intended to be.

But in God's economy, everything is redeemed, and so the Scriptures say (Romans 8:28): "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." It also says (Isaiah 59:19): "When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him." And again (2 Samuel 22:29): "You are my lamp, O LORD; the LORD turns my darkness into light."

What does that mean? It means that although evil happens to those who belong to God, God turns it all to good. I am an abuse survivor. Today, as I look at myself, I rather like who I am. One day, as I was considering the kind of person I had become despite everything, I realized that I hadn't become despite everything, but because of everything. I would not be who I am today apart from the abuse. Sure, I had to overcome some major dysfunction that resulted. But I truly believe that my heart of compassion for the broken, my sense of justice and fairness, and my ability to empathize all stem directly from the "evil" of my past.

Laurence Gonzales has written a powerful book called Deep Survival. In it, he tells stories of people who have endured horrendous survival situations from going down in a plane in the Andes to being cast adrift in the ocean for weeks. He looks at the qualities of the survivors vs. the people who didn't make it. One of the things he notes is that, eventually, survivors, while they are still in the midst of their ordeal, start to see beauty in their situation. It's no longer nothing but unremitting evil for them. Some are even enraptured with what they begin to notice all around them.

Which is a characteristic of a contemplative. A contemplative is never satisfied with the superficial. They wonder what lies deeper and what lies beyond. A Christian contemplative wonders how God is revealing Himself in the good and the evil, the ordinary and the extraordinary of their lives. They make time to reflect and to consider so they don't miss the beauty, the divine, and the deep wisdom that is all around us in all the circumstances of our life, no matter who we are. And eventually we come to the place where we know that God has told us the truth. In all things, He really is turning the tables on evil and working for our good.

And so we begin

In the three months since my last post, I have wondered, "How do I explain what it's like to be a contemplative in a society, including a church society, that is largely uncontemplative? How do I make something like that understandable?" After three months, I have decided that perhaps the best way is to tell little stories out of my life. So here goes.

One of the things being contemplative means is that I hold my life way more lightly than I used to. Which has by no means been an easy task. I am an abuse survivor. One thing abuse survivors tend to have in common is a passion to control everything that can be controlled. Because we have learned that, when things get out of control, life isn't just chaotic or unpleasant, but life is in jeopardy. We may live through the chaos, but there are pretty good odds we'll die. So we control to survive. As adults, chaos doesn't necessarily put our lives in jeopardy any more, but emotionally we react as if it does. And we continue to control whatever we can.

But all control does is to stifle living things. If I could successfully control my kids' safety, the jobs they choose, the mate they fall in love with, and so on, I would end up with robots in the place of kids. If I could successfully control every detail of my life so that I am perfectly safe, my life would have no adventure, no challenge, nothing new and interesting -- in short, nothing that gives life to my life. It would be like taking a rose bud and prying all the petals apart so they look exactly the way I think they should. But if you force those petals, they break, and the flower ends up a mess instead of the beautiful thing it could have been. For a rose to be a rose, it needs space and freedom to open as it will. Sure, it needs care -- sunlight and good soil and water. The same as the people around me need care. The same as I need care. But forcing and control, none of us needs.

As I think of allowing my life to unfold like a rose, I am excited because I don't know what I'll look like tomorrow or the next day or the next. And unlike the rose, for me as a God-created human being, there is no end to my ability to unfold in ever-increasing beauty (2 Corinthians 3:18): "And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit."

I prefer the rose to a caricature of a rose forced into shape by me. I prefer to see all that I can become rather than hedging myself in for safety. Besides, my life isn't mine to horde. I am a gift to the world. The fact that I am here means the world is not the same as it would be if I weren't here. So how can I hide my life? If I do that, I can't be gift. And I prefer to be gift. Sure, some may not appreciate the gift, but that doesn't make me any less precious a gift. But how wonderful to see the delight of those who do recognize the gift that I am.

What do we do with those contemplative moments?

All of us have had those moments when the ordinary suddenly becomes extraordinary. One sunset on one night is no more spectacular than many others we have seen, but for some reason, this one takes our breath away and holds us in rapt attention. We look up to stars that have shone over our heads ever since we were born but one night, we know down to our toes the immensity and the awesomeness of the starry heavens. We check in on our sleeping child as we do every night, but one night we are struck with wonder at the miracle of having produced this life and the supreme trust that has been placed in our hands in the raising of this child.

In these moments we know that there is more, so much more, to what we're seeing than simply what we're seeing. It's like we've touched into something spiritual, something beyond and so much greater than the earthly. We may not know what that something is, but we know with every fibre of our being that it's there.

Most of us enjoy those moments then move on. They come infrequently. We savour them when they come and we don't give them any thought when we don't.

But some of us wonder if those moments aren't invitations. Invitations to live more on that level and less just blindly taking things at face value. What if this is God beckoning us? Giving us a taste of what life with Him can be. Giving us a taste so we're hungry for more. What if more is in our reach? What if we can have it if we want it? Would we go for it?