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Posts Tagged ‘Faith’

On Sin

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on May 13, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
 
Traditional doctrine points to a sin against God, an act of disobedience, not a sin against the neighbor. And certainly, if we are to hold the doctrine of the Fall in any real sense, we must look for the great sin on a deeper and more timeless level than that of social morality.
 
This sin has been described by Saint Augustine as the result of Pride, of the movement whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being whose principle of existence lies not in itself but in another) tries to set up on its own, to exist for itself. Such a sin requires no complex social conditions, no extended experience, no great intellectual development. From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the center is opened to it. 
 
This sin is committed daily by young children and ignorant peasants as well as by sophisticated persons, by solitaries no less than by those who live in society: it is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it.
 
The Problem of Pain. Copyright © 1940, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
 
As opined many times in this space, sin; all sin, flows from the false illusion of separation. Separation from God, from others or from the universe. It is the indivisibility of existence that makes us all part of the same thing, God. When we let our sensory perception rule our spiritual perception, we fall victim to this false notion of separation from God and others because we appear so to the naked eye and physical senses. It is an illusion that sets us up for all sin and unrighteousness. 
 
Today, let us embrace our oneness with God and with each other so the true reality of joy and peace are revealed to us.
 
In unity,
Z gardener

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On God Wanting Us

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on May 12, 2014| Leave a Comment »

You ask ‘for what’ God wants you. Isn’t the primary answer that He wants you. We’re not told that the lost sheep was sought out for anything except itself [Matthew 18:12-14; Luke 15:3-7]. Of course, He may have a special job for you: and the certain job is that of becoming more and more His.
 
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
It is quite simple. God wants us, just as any father wants their child. And God wants us to become our very best, just as any loving father would. And, like a good father, God allows us to find our way by telling us the way, helping us when we stumble, suffering with us when we fall and nurturing us as we stand and heal. Lastly, like our earthly father always should, God forgives us when we repent and shows mercy for our transgressions once repented. As above, so below. 
 
Thank you Father,
Z gardener
 
Author’s Note: After three weeks in the Horn Island wilderness, this scribe returns to The Good Morning Garden tested, tired and true. Thanks to all who helped and those who prayed for this gardener. Attached is a photo of this special place.

 

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On Confusion And Pride

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 15, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
 
The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modem resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another! It is as if a royal child whom his father has placed, for love’s sake, in titular command of some great province, under the real rule of wise counselors, should come to fancy he really owns the cities, the forests, and the corn, in the same way as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor.
 
We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun—the finely graded differences that run from ‘my boots’ through ‘my dog’, ‘my servant’, ‘my wife’, ‘my father’, ‘my master’ and ‘my country’, to ‘my God’. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of ‘my boots’, the ‘my’ 
of ownership.
 
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
Brothers and sisters, do not let yourselves be confused by the false illusion of possession. It is the child of the false illusion of separation. It too, is no thing and represents only the absence of unity and communion. It is false in any sense or true meaning. One may think they own their boots, but to whom will the boots belong when the current “owner” leaves this plane?
 
Unconfused,
Z gardener

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On Humility

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »

And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex for ever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero’s book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself: “it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign.”
 
The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
Oh what a wonderful day when our self-pride is nullified and our insecurities sink beyond reach. To be the joy we were created to bring, is to live in Eden and thereby please God.
 
 Be joy,
Z gardener

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More On Pride

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 9, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
If you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off?’ The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with every one else’s pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. 
 
Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature— while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. 
 
Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not. . . . . Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more just to assert his power. Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride.
 
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
And now we get to the kernel of truth that underlies what Lewis calls “the center of Christian morals”  and “that by which the devil became the devil”…pride. The competitive nature of pride is based on the false illusion of separation, the results of which are known as sin. To be “better than someone else” we must first succumb to the lie that we are separate from the other person. As we learned in America, and as stated by the Supreme Court, separate is inherently unequal. It is not only the law, but also our faith upon which that law is based, that describes sin as the false notion of separation from God and others.
 
So, the false perception of separation leads to the sin of pride, the greatest of sins, the gateway sin, the sin which blinds us to the light and subjects us to the dark, the absence, the no thing. Today Father, let us remove the blinding scales of false separation and pride from our eyes, so we can see all things by the true light and see clearly the Eden that is waiting here for us.
 
Seeing clearly,
Z gardener

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On Faith

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on April 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »

It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.
 
From Miracles
Compiled in Words to Live By
Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Copyright 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Revised 1960, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
The acceptance that the “self” is nothing in and of itself, is the beginning of spiritual wisdom. It is only through indivisible communion with God and God’s creation that our existence has any true light, being, value or real meaning. 
 
Trapped inside the artificial self, cut off from true existence, we merely grow and reproduce without really facing the truth that, without God, we are no thing, but merely the absence of something. By facing our nothingness, we are empowered to turn our face toward the light, toward all this is and away from the dark and all that is not.
 
Facing the light,
Z gardener

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On Pride

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 7, 2014| Leave a Comment »

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

 

From Mere Christianity

Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers
 
Indeed, we have come to the center of Christian morals. And it certainly is how the devil became the devil (the nothing, absence, no thing or the not). 
 
Father, forgive me of my pride, heal me of my self-conceit and lift me out of my anti-God state into the light seen only from the kneeling eyes of one humbled into perfect God-state. Amen,
 
i am,
Z gardener

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On Equality

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on April 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »

“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”
 
“Ah, equality?” said the Director. “We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”
 
“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”
 
“You were mistaken,” said he gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes—that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.”
 
That Hideous Strength. Copyright © 1945 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All right reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
And yes, we also have equal access to God’s love, Eden and eternal life. Whether we act in a way to claim them and live in them is up to us. If we choose to follow God’s will an walk in God’s way, even our inequality of sin and repentance will not keep us from God’s love, Eden or eternal life. 
 
Equally loved,
Z gardener

 

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On Fundamental Deception

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 29, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. 
 
Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-à-tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. 
 
Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.
 
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers
 
Our time, as ourselves, does not belong exclusively to us. We are here by the grace of God to commune with and share our time, talents and treasures. To think or do otherwise is to take from God that which has been God’s all along. he just loans it to us for his good purpose.
 
Sharing time,
Z gardener

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On Depression

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
 
My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think that we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his “faith in human nature” who is really sad.
 
The Problem of Pain. Copyright © 1940, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
It is very difficult for someone in the midst of great loss or pain to hear that we are to “rejoice in all things.” However, the degree of difficulty in it’s hearing does not diminish its truth. The challenge therefore, is to continue believing, expecting and searching for the blessing hidden in the pain. If we can cling to that truth, and search for it, we will almost always find it, and it will be the best path through our present difficulty.
 
Seeking the joy,
Z gardener

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