…God who has been my shepherd from my birth to this day …who has redeemed me…

The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing.

Give ear, O shepherd of Israel… appear… come to our help! Restore us…

Like a shepherd he pastures his flock: he gathers… carries… gently [he] drives…

As a shepherd seeks out his flock… so I will seek out my flock… I will look for the lost, I will bring back the strayed… I will sustain the weak…

(Genesis 48: 15; Psalm 23: 1; Psalm 80: 1-3; Isaiah 40: 11; Ezekiel 34:12 and 16 — all Tanakh)

~~~

The good shepherd surrenders his life for his sheep (John 10: 11), but he does so in order to ‘take it up again’. At this point, surely, he re-assumes his identity as our good shepherd (Hebrews 10: 13). He now shepherds us — giving his life for us and to us — in the Holy Spirit.

One of the exciting, even breathtaking, things I’m rediscovering is the immediacy of God: his participation in the day-to-day events of life. Thus I read something; and then someone refers to it, or says something which clarifies or amplifies it, very soon after. I meet someone — and then I’m linked up, often quite remarkably, with someone else who points me forward in my association with my new contact.

We love to talk about networking. It is the ‘go-between God’, to use John V. Taylor’s evocative term for him, who initiates and fosters and is involved in our relationships.

God is always at work. Remember those who asked/demanded of Jesus a sign? The signs are all around us if we are ‘open to God’; if we are tiptoe with expectancy as we wait to see where next, how next, he will participate in our lives.

Whether he links us with others; or with himself; or with our own self; or with events — it doesn’t matter. In all these things he is working in us. Shepherding us, if you like!

~~~

Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no-one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offence, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

It is true that the ten commandments had a central place in Judaism because they were believed to be an expression of the divine will. Obedience to the commandments is a test of human goodness. But the rich man (Mark 10)

adopted a mechanical… view of salvation. Lochman has some perceptive words on this mechanical attitude to salvation. ‘Salvation is found neither in a system nor as a system, but only wherever real life, freedom and happiness shatter the salvation systems, and the planned and the predictable can be expected to be disturbed.’

Resurrection? Judgment? Grace?… These incisive questions, particularly the reference to resurrection, judgment and grace… bring us to the second aspect of the alienation of salvation in the life of society and the church, namely the one-dimensional view of salvation. All salvation systems and machines have this tendency. A one-dimensional view of salvation enables them to operate more smoothly, ‘interference free’ with ‘painful’ (or agreeable) ‘precision’. Undimensional man is far easier to direct and control. Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of human alienation along these lines is therefore to be taken very seriously. It fits all salvation machines, both Eastern style and Western!

The attitude of the rich man in the story of Jesus is representative of the many good and ‘decent’ Christians who de facto exclude the ‘interference factor’ by limiting the scope of such factors as faith, God, judgment and resurrection.

John Pobee, Who are the poor?

You need not choose evil; you have only to fail to choose good, and you drift toward evil. You do not need to say, ‘I will be bad’; you only have to say ‘I will not choose God’s choice’, and the choice of evil is already settled.

W.J. Dawson

I told you once that I couldn’t really regret the past. But now I do regret it, very much. It’s as if absolution and communion and prayer let us through into a place where we get a horribly clear view — a new view — so that we see all the waste, and the cost of it, and how its roots struck deep down into the earth, poisoning the springs of our own lives and other people’s. Such waste, such cost in human and spiritual values. The priest says, ‘Go in peace, the Lord has put away thy sin.’ But of course one doesn’t go in peace, and in one sense he can’t put it away; it has done its work. You can’t undo what’s done. Not all the long years of happiness together, of love and friendship and almost perfect companionship (in spite of its background) was worth while. It cost too much, to us and to other people. I didn’t know that before, but I do now. If only I had refused, and gone on refusing. It’s not a question of forgiveness, but of irrevocable damage done. Perhaps I shall mind more and more, all my life. Is this what absolution and communion do to one? I see now why belief in God fades away and has to go, while one is leading a life one knows to be wrong. The two can’t live together. It doesn’t give even intellectual acceptance its chance.

Rose Macauley, Letters to a Friend

Once, many years ago, there was a child of nine who loved Walter Milligan. One Saturday morning she was walking in the neighbourhood of her school. She walked and thought, ‘The plain fact is — as I have heard so many times — that in several years’ time I will not love Walter Milligan. I will very probably marry someone else. I will be untrue; I will forget Waiter Milligan.’

Deeply, unforgettably, she thought that if what they said about Walter Milligan was true, then the rest went with it: that she would one day like her sister, and that she would be glad she had taken piano lessons. She was standing at the curb, waiting for the light to change. It was all she could do to remember not to get run over, so she would have to betray herself. For a series of connected notions presented themselves: if all these passions of mine be overturned, then what will become of me? Then what am I now?

She seemed real enough to herself, willful and conscious, but she had to consider the possibility, the likelihood, even, that she was a short-lived phenomenon, a fierce, vanishing thing like a hard shower, or transitional form like a tadpole or winter bud — not the thing in itself but a running start on the thing — and that she was being borne helplessly and against all her wishes to suicide, to the certain loss of self and all she held dear. Herself and all that she held dear — this particular combination of love for Walter Milligan, hatred of sister and piano lessons, etc. — would vanish, destroyed against her wishes by her own hand.

When she changed, where will that other person have gone? Could anyone keep her alive, this person here on the street, and her passions? WiLl the unthinkable adult that she would become remember her? Will she think she is stupid? Will she laugh at her?

She was a willful one, and she made a vow… I will until I die love Walter Milligan and hate my sister and read and walk in the woods…

Foremost in her vow was this, that she would remember the vow itself.

Anne Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

The whole business of communion with God [is] so ageold, so irrepressible, so partially achieved, so always sought after.

Source unknown

One of the main purposes of meditation is to expose us to the reality of the Father in such a way that we can become the kind of people who are able to love. His life radiating through us cleanses, heals and transforms us. Then we can truly love in the way that Jesus asked of us. He did not tell us that we are his followers when we are great at meditating ‘and religious activities, but only when we love one another as he loved us. This is the ultimate criterion of our lives, which can be fully realised only as we turn inward and open ourselves to God.

The most basic premise for giving love is knowing the person one loves. Before there can be any real love, one must find out what the other person is like. One has to become aware, conscious of the person’s true being, in order to love that very person and not some image of one’s own that one projects upon the other. It is altogether too easy to believe that I really love someone when all I am doing is enjoying my own ideal of what I would like that person to be. And probably the surest way of finding out the difference is by listening to the other person, allowing oneself to be open and sensitive to the person’s real reactions.

Morton Kelsey, The Other Side of Silence

The Industrial Revolution has given way to a revolution in information technology… transforming yesterday’s blue-collar worker into a fully-fledged information worker and blurring the distinction between worker and foreman, foreman and manager. As the workforce becomes more educated and sophisticated, hierarchical management from the top down will have to be replaced by a participative system of relatively autonomous computer operators or ganised from the bottom up.

We have recognised the inefficiency of authority to motivate and lead people in the new information environment. We can no longer control people by authority, by bureaucracy, and by rules.

Naisbitt and Aburdene, Re-inventing the Corporation

This need for security is basic to all of us. There is no escape from it. The question is where and in what fashion we place the trust that will bring it. There seem to be very strong movements to place it in key elements of our external and internal world.

Internally, as reason begins to develop, the locus of that trust tends to be in the understanding and categories by which each individual orders and masters the world. Knowledge and understanding born of learning are of prime importance, but so are the categories, prejudices and particular world views which we inherit from parents, family and local community. These tend to give us a basis for judgment, especially regarding our everyday life that we must live in the midst of persons and things that need to be dealt with and ultimately controlled. This internal organisation tends to delude us into thinking that we have that absolute control or mastery of our world. But in so doing it narrows and constrains, and in the long run can make us incapable of moving beyond, of risking the novel, the uncertain.

In the external order we look to certain persons and things to provide the same security. It can be money, position and all the comfortable security that they provide. Perhaps more restraining, yet seemingly securing, is the adoption of certain roles which each of us plays and expects those who relate to us to play. There is a certainty and security if I can name who someone is, who I am, and then live a related life in terms of those roles. There is no risk of uncertainty in terms of the future, and a comfortable sense of security is achieved. James Grace in Spirituality Today

The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for others to see by. The saint is the one who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light.

Felix Adler

I search the Psalms —

Those Psalms of David that delighted him,

Learned in his childhood speech,

Repeated to me at night

While the others slept.

None reached, he said, the depths of spirit

David touched, nor built a surer rock

Of song to climb upon. I remember…

Why art thou cast down, O my soul?

And why art thou disquieted within me?

Hope thou in God; for I shall still praise him

Who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

He hears my thoughts. Lifting his head

He wills his love towards me.

His parched lips move with mine:

All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me,

I will say unto God, my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me?

Why go I mourning because of the oppression of my enemy?

Seeing him revive and hearing ‘God’,

The crowd renews its mocking: ‘He saved others:

Himself he cannot save!’ For thy sake

I have borne reproach, his lips continue.

I am become a stranger unto my brethren

And an alien unto my mother’s children.

For the zeal of thy house hath eaten me up,

And the reproaches of them that reproach thee

Are fallen on me. For the first time

He turns to his mother,

Mary of Nazareth, on her shelf of rock.

‘Woman’ — linking us with his eyes -‘Behold your son.’

The voice is effort.

‘Son, behold your mother.’

His lips part for a new psalm:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Still in the northern form: ‘Eloi! Eloi!’

None understands but I. To his enemies

He calls Elijah. To his few friends

He is drowning in despair.

Only I know -Know he controls despair

By giving shape to it, a mould of words,

Finds in undying beauty

Assurance that the spirit which gave it birth

Is also deathless. 0 my God,

I cry in the day-time and thou hearest not,

And in the night season and am not silent…

A Pharisee, standing near the cross,

Has caught his words, and caps them, jeering:

He trusted in the Lord that he would deliver him,

Let him deliver him. ‘Ignoring him,

My friend continues:

The assembly of the wicked has enclosed me:

They pierced my hands and feet,

They parted my garments among them

And cast lots upon my vesture.

Be not thou far from me,

O Lord my strength; haste thou to help me!

I follow him through the long Psalm

To its triumphant climax:

All the ends of the world shall remember

And turn unto the Lord.

He gazes at me for the last time,

Defeat defeated.

Then aloud, with great expense

Of power: ‘It is finished.’

Clive Sanson, ‘John’

~~~

See me through this day, Lord — me and those I’m linked with. Tie things together for us. We for our part will tie together what things we can, wherever it lies in our power to do so.

You have already offered meaning and purpose to this day. Help us to see — and then to choose — authentic meanings, ennobling purposes. Provide us in our pilgrimage today with glimpses of new horizons; and grant us the vision and strength to pursue them. You know that we long to live in accord with this prayer; first, so as to glorify your name and honour your presence among us; and then, so that our lives in being graced by you may have the potential to bless the lives of others. Hear us, Lord, we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

~~~

A Benediction

May the God of ongoing involvement invite you, this day, to be again involved with him in the working of his net. May you see him as the networker par excellence — and delight in the opportunity to drag in the net with him.

Amen.

Rowland Croucher ed., High Mountains Deep Valleys (Albatross/Lion), chapter 47