The Pilgrim and his Progress

I am learning the hard way that there is a distinct difference between the path of the pilgrim and that of the professional. I draw the distinction not so much by the nature of their work as by the manner of their 'way'. Also, I do not mean to question the validity or the value of the 'professional'. A professional at work may well be a pilgrim at heart. That said, the way of the professional and that of the pilgrim share the properties of a set of parallel lines. As close as they may be in proximity to each other, they simply do not intersect.

Where one is measured by the strength of performance, the other is covered by the mystery of grace. Where one is driven to reach destinations, the other takes pleasure in the joy of the journey. Where one pulls tightly on the reigns of control, the other surrenders his will and his all. Where one seeks the view of a sure certain future, the other will follow the lead of His Master. Where one is secure in his bounty of wealth, the other is thankful for his portion of bread. Where one is committed to his palace on earth, the other is devoted to his mansion in heaven.

I don't know what I am to the fullest but I think I am more of a pilgrim than anything else. And what I have found to be true is that, though the journey is long, the way is uncertain and the pilgrim is tired; the Master is worthy, the grace is abundant and the promise is sure. One way or another, this much is true, when a pilgrim sets his foot on road, the road will lead him home.

The Voice of Prayer

Prayer becomes a burden when we are bound by the belief that unless we have expressed ourselves cleary, God has not understood us completely; that unless we have spoken, God has not heard. I can't understand why but it has taken me too long to realize that prayer is not servant and slave to eloquence or articulate expression. And there is a reason for this delay.

In our natural plane of existence, we recognize easily that our ability to communicate is severely restricted by the limitations of language. The agony of the tortured soul or the ecstasy of the satisfied one are both mysteries that have yet to be harnessed and held captive by the community of words. What we feel within we are unable to name. Says Solomon, "Each heart knows its own bitterness and no one else can share its joy."

Our search for a transport to carry the weight of our inner worlds has led us beyond the world of mere words and into the realms of art and alternative expression. There we find some relief and release. But not, I wager, to our complete satisfaction. There is a reality that goes beyond the world of words, the arts, or any other form of personal expression; and the joy of the true believer is to know that prayer is the pathway to that reality. What is unique about the Christian expression of prayer is that the One prayed to, lives within the heart of the one who prays.

The Trinity allows for the Father to transcend, the Spirit to inhabit and the Son to authorize our expression. The burden-relieving thing about prayer is that what we cannot carry with words, God perceives without them. Prayer has many voices and God can hear them all.

Table Manners

I am sitting at a table as I write this. I mention that because it is the thought of tables that are at the heart and center of my earnest investigation and soulful meditation, be it as it may in the wee hours of the morning. I have found that what unites many of the diverse and endless images of authentic pleasure that have been carved by experience into the cave walls of my impressionable mind - is the presence of a table.

I think of the hours of my life that have been spent at everything from cafes to dhabas, sharing anything from coffee to full course meals, with the comfort of friends or the shelter of family, both of whose company I enjoy much more than I am willing or able to admit. "Food is the basis of life, it comes from the earth, and the earth is God's. In a Jewish home in Jesus' day - and even now - the table is seen as an altar. It's holy. Time spent around the table with each other is time spent with God." So says Rob Bell in 'Velvet Elvis'.

In my experience I have found that tables have served as a catalyst of sorts, for experiences of authentic pleasure that allow me to catch a glimpse of a deeper, ultimate reality that hides itself beneath our ever-so-ordinary existence. It takes an experience of pain or authentic pleasure to peel away the thin veil that covers over this ultimate reality and to remind us that there is more to the world we live in than the life that we are consciously aware of.

If God is accused of unjustly bringing upon us pain and suffering, should he not also in the same breath be commended for giving us pleasure with the same measure of injustice? Are we any more deserving of pleasure than we are of pain, if we stand judged by His own standards?

I have tasted of the bitter gall of pain and the sweet wine of pleasure and both have served as open meadows that lay bare before me the glory and the beauty of a God whose grace redeems my pain and whose love colors my pleasure. Be it pain or be it pleasure, my supper will be the Lord's, and I will eat at His own table.

Beauty

Despite its untold ugliness, there is still beauty in this world. But we wouldn't recognize this unless we were created with the ability to perceive it. It is my ability to perceive beauty in spite of all the ugliness that surrounds me which tells me that there must be a cause for my perception.

Ugliness is not the opposite of beauty. It is the absence of it. If we can recognize what is ugly, it is only because we expect there ought be something beautiful besides. There must be a beauty that transcends and lies beyond the physical realm, a beauty that alone can satisfy the soul's hunger to be overwhelmed by what is greater than itself, a beauty that we have lost sight of, and possibly fallen from, to the point where we find ourselves broken, beaten and marred.

I wonder whether God did not create us with the ability to appreciate beauty for the sole reason that we are required to recognize the beauty of His glory and even more, to reflect His beauty in the face of a beautiless existence. If the world is to be beautiful again, it must be inhabited by people who recognize and reflect the glory of their beautiful Maker in the face of a beautiless world. Let light shine in the darkness and let beauty expell its own absence.

"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"
2 Corinthians 3:18

A Song for the Soul

Few are given the gift of taking what lies within their reality of illusions and presenting it as an offering to the reality that we experience together as humanity, a reality in which we can take hold of the fruit of someone else's imagination and let it affect us in a way that reminds us that though we are separate, in another wholly different sense, we are also one.

As a reader, I know the joy of discovering a restless unnamed feeling lie bare before me in words that have been strung together by a writer who might as well have been reading aloud from the pages of my own soul. As an aspiring writer, on occasion I know the struggle and the satisfaction of harnessing the untamed tension that lies within and bringing it to the point of submission in a perfectly sustained symphony of words. As a listener, I find that my soul has the capacity to be moved and to be overpowered by the force of sound that has been artistically arranged with the specific purpose of arousing our longing senses. As an observer, I find I have to often surrender to the relentless force of an image or an expression that has been birthed into existence from the passion and the purpose of a paintbrush in the hands of a gifted artist, whether human or Divine. Today, I understand in words, as I did in experience when I was younger, that when the worlds of our imaginations are forced to collide with each other in the realm of our common reality, pleasure is the natural offspring.

But we do ourselves a grave injustice if we are content to be satisfied with pleasure for its own sake. The curse of the pleasure we experience is that it is a slave to the moment in which we experience it. At best, we can savor its memory or recreate its setting but it is, and always will be, alas, fleeting.

On the other hand, the soul with which we experience this pleasure is not temporary but permanent. The nature of pleasure is temporary but the nature of the soul is permanent. The soul can only be satisfied temporarily by what is temporal. It can only be satisfied wholly by what is permanent. Pleasure may satisfy the soul for the moment but only God is big enough to satisfy it for eternity.

Voices

I embraced the Gospel in the same breath and with the same vigor as I embraced the arts.

In art, I found that there lay within me the ability to appreciate and to enjoy the gift of another's imagination for the simple reason that in the sound of another's soul, I found the voice of my own.

In the Gospel I realized that beauty is best recognized in contrast with what is beautiless. The light of the Gospel shines in the darkness of its roots. The life of man emerges from the death of God. Pleasure for our soul stems from the suffering of His own. Salvation of our bodies comes from the ravaging of His own. The promise of our life is born from the sacrifice of his own. If we can embrace the wealth of each other's voices in the offerings of our souls, it is in the beauty of the Gospel that we can discern the voice of God. And what a voice it is!

With that in mind, I wonder whether the purpose of the voices that we raise and embrace is only that they be lifted in unision to the One who gave us voice when we deserved to be silenced; beauty when we deserved scars; life when we deserved death.

"I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live."
Jesus

Out of the Darkness

If there is one thing I have learnt from the wealth of my spiritual heritage, it is this. You have to go through the wilderness before you find the promised land. The wilderness experience is commonplace for the community of true believers. There is a wordless bond that exists between those who have ever been through the dark night of the soul armed with nothing but the dim light of an old lamp that is willing only to guide your next step. Illusions seem real and reality an illusion in the mind-numbing darkness of a tunnel where the air is so thin you can't tell if you're awake or asleep, alive or dead.

But if your lamp has been held firmly and your steps have been taken faithfully, when you finally emerge from this dark tunnel of nothingness you find yourself a lighter man because a shade of the former self has been left behind. And the world is a better place for it. Even more, the uncomfortable intimacy you shared with the darkness you were one with, now drives you to deeper intimacy with the light you are drenched in. It is a good thing for the soul to live through the night because when the face of a new sun presents itself unbridled, then a better man rises to seize the day unhindered.

The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically intimical...Its forms are bold and suggestive...To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.

Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature.

Joy Authentic

In the way that a river carves its course through dry land over years of stubborn friction, one of the deeper lines of thought that has carved its way in the canyons of my mind is the sustained tension between joy and pain in the life of a believer. For a believer, joy and pain are not mutually exclusive. Authentic joy is not the absence of pain. On the contrary, it is in the midst of pain that joy proves itself to be authentic. However, there is possibly a stark difference between the believer and the skeptic in their experience of joy and pain.

G.K. Chesterton argued that, while joy for the believer is fundamental and sorrow is superficial, joy for the skeptic is superficial and sorrow is fundamental. Foundational for his argument is the suggestion that, for the believer, the fundamental questions of life are answered while the superifical ones are not. For the skeptic, the fundamental questions of life are unanswered while the superficial ones are answered.

In the way that a controlled explosion can be sustained in a secure environment, the sting of uncertainty that I experience in the course of my existence lies safely within the secure confines of a love that shelters, guards, protects and preserves me with a patriot's passion and a spartan's resolve. Joy authentic is the natural result.

At the Head of Every Sword

I've been told more times than I'd like to have heard it that religion is the root of all war. The people who say this are generally people who believe that religion is irrelevant, unscientific, illogical and unreliable - the kind of stuff that weak people need to believe in so that they can cajole their insecurities, calm their restless fears and play the sacrificial host to their nagging superstitions - the kind of stuff that helps you sleep at night.

Their views of religion aside, I find it naive and somewhat ignorant that one would assume that religion was the root of all war. Naive, because it assumes that man would not go to war if not for religious beliefs. Ignorant, because it negates all the war and violence in history that was initiated by the most non-religious of men.

Men go to war because men have war in their hearts. Religion may fuel the fire, but I find it naive to think that religion started the fire. If there was no religion, would not men fight for the color of their skin, for their place on the ladder of social class, for the borders of their countries, for the expansion of their kingdoms, for the establishment of their non-religious dogmas? Have they not gone to war for those very reasons in the past? To take religion out of the picture would only mean that there was one less reason/excuse in the world for men to go to war.

The fact that men go to war is not the failure of religion. It is the failure of man. It is his greed, his pride, his stubborn rebellion against reason and his insatiable hunger for glory. To fail to recognize that, is to fail to confront ourselves as a people. To fail to confront ourselves, is to set the stage for a world at war with itself. With or without religion.

In a Moment

I'm beginning to be convinced that the quality of my life and the health of my inner being can be gauged by the measure of the joy I can find in the moment. Life isn't lived in the past or the future. Its lived right here and now, in the present, in the now, in the moment. From one into the other.

Whether its the longish walk to the cobbler's or the company of good friends, the more I am in the moment, the more I'm prone to joy. We weren't designed to give the best of ourselves to a past we cannot change or a future we cannot alter. We live best when the best of who we are is given to the moment that we're in. Everything else, is in better hands.

"Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
- Jesus

The End of Every River

How much of our lives are we really in control of? The past is unalterable, the present is unpredictable and the future is uncertain. Every day brings its own set of questions and conundrums that are as new and as erratic as the day itself.

All of this only serves to remind us that if time is like a steady flowing river then we are like twigs at the mercy of its current. There is nothing we can do to change its pace or alter its course. There is nothing we can do to stay its motion or deter its force. We are at the mercy of a current as constant as the sunrise and as uncertain as the skies.

But even the fiercest of rivers are servant to the course nature has carved for them from years of restless friction. Every river has a current and every current has its force, but its end is predetermined, and its bed controls its course. Bemoaning the monotony of life, Solomon unwittingly observes – "All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again." (Ecc 1:7)

If time is a restless river and the believer is at its mercy, there is a hand that controls its current and a voice that guides its way. If control is an illusion and God is Lord of all, His promise is our tomorrow and His joy is ours today.

For Better or For Worse

If ever I had an epiphany worth mentioning, it is this. I am an idealist and a purist. And there's nothing I can do to change it. I like things to be the way they ought to be - the way they were designed to be - the way they were purposed to be. And when I see a shift in the order like a ripple in waters, it invades my inner being and irks my calm composure. For better or for worse.

I like believers to be devoted, sinners to seek the truth, fathers to be faithful and lovers to be true. I want the poor to find their comfort, the hungry to have food, orphans to have shelter and the faithful to find fruit.

I want the world to be unfallen. I want the rebellious to repent. I want the shattered to find healing and the hurt to find a friend. I want the outcast to be welcome. I want the captive to be free. I want the blind to see the sky again; and I want every war to cease. I want the world to find redemption, from every single sin. I want the heaven that I hope for and the Savior to be King.

I'm an idealist and a purist, and its hard to be that way. But I'm an idealist and a purist, and that's all I have to say.