Snap Judgment: The story of Xiao Xiao

Listen to this incredible story of love...a four-year old girl gives us a glimpse of what Jesus' love must be like for us.

http://snapjudgment.org/audio/by/title/xiao_xiao



"The way I think about it is this: if you think about love being a state where you can't be happy if the person you love isn't happy, this is the way she loved that little boy. She never could rest knowing that he was still there." --Jacqueline's mother





the power of prayer;

http://snapjudgment.org/lost-in-translation

A Saint Caught in the Middle

As I've already written, today was one of my favorite holy days: All Saint's Day. I was looking forward to singing "For All the Saints, to participating in our annual litany, wherein congregants call out names of those Christians who they wish to remember and honor, and receiving communion.

But the Lord had a surprise for me. We were just beginning our discussion of Shane Clairborne's Irresistable Revolution in the adult Christian Ed class when Steve appeared in the doorway. "You have a chance to put what you're reading to practice," he said."Come meet P."

P. was a 60ish mentally ill woman, clad in raincoat, with blue scrub pants and a top that seemed to be constructed of blue Pellon. She was quite agitated, and I soon discovered why. Near her stood C. and A., the pastor and his wife from the Friends church down the street. They have known and been ministering to P. for over five years. Apparently she has been off her meds. She began using inappropriate language in front of the teens this morning. C.--gentlest of souls-- asked her to stop, but she took this as rejection, and left, in great anger, insisting C. was a hypocrite and that she would never set foot in that church again. She then wandered down the street and arrived at VCC, babbling irrationally and with great vehemence. It was at this point that Steve met her.

C. and A. had followed her, and when we arrived, P. was smoking outside under the porch, drinking a cup of coffee Jim had brought. We spent some time trying to calm her down. It was like a scene out of "A Beautiful Mind," for P. was fascinated with numbers. Every few minutes she would fasten onto something we'd said and start investigating its numerological significance. I didn't know whether to go along with some of what she was saying or whether to try to draw her back to reality. It seemed like the latter was causing her greater agitation, so I tried to find ways of affirming her and asking her to tell me about herself.

Gradually she calmed, and agreed she would let A. and I walk her back to her apartment, only a couple of blocks away. "I don't trust men," she spat, and I cringed to think of what past experience prompted that remark. The fall trees were gloriously golden and orange, and trying to keep her distracted and focused on whatsoever was beautiful and good, A. and I remarked about some particularly lovely leaves. Alas, what P. saw were baby's faces staring up from them.

We finally got her settled in her apartment, brought her her meds, refilled her coffee, and let her watch TV. A. promised that she and C. would call in another couple of hours and check up on her. "Don't close the door," P. ordered as we left. "Leave it open a crack."

Walking back with A., I realized that P. was one of those living parables God sometimes gives us. Just as she was caught between delusion and reality, so we Christians are caught between this present world and the world to come, promised in Rev. 21:1-6, the sermon text for today.

P. is a saint in progress, and so am I. Spiritually, I must look to Jesus as confused and belligerent and unstable as P appears to me. I only pray that our love today gave P. a taste of the love He has given us.

I returned to VCC 15 minutes late for worship; but God was not done surprising me. I had missed the praise songs, greeting time and scripture readings, but I hadn't missed "For All the Saints"or the litany!

"The Apostle Peter."
For this one, Lord, we give thanks.
"Hope Anderson."
For this one, Lord, we give thanks.
"Martin Luther."
For this one, Lord, we give thanks.
"Martyrs of Compiègne"
For this one, Lord, we give thanks.
Arezoo
For this one, Lord, we give thanks.
P.
For this one, Lord, we give thanks.

"Nothing comes easy or free."

My friend also wrote, "Nothing good comes easy or free."

Perhaps not initially, in this fallen world; but it is the faith of Christians that some things come for free, and that eventually it is possible that some good things come easier and easier. I turn to Josef Pieper here, who writes in Leisure, the Basis of Culture:

" ...according to Kant, the morl law by definition is opposed to natural inclination. It is simply part of the nature of things that the Good is difficult and that the voluntary effort put into forcing oneself to do something becomes the standard for moral goodness. The more difficult thing must be the higher good. Schiller's ironic verses point out the problem:

I help my friends, and it feels nice,

until I fear that it's a vice.

So, effort is good. This was the thought formulated long ago by the Cynic philosopher Antisthenes, one of Palto's friends and a fellow disciple of Socrates. Antisthenes, by the way, was a suprisingly 'modern' figure. He was responsible for the first paradigm of the 'worker'--or rather, he represented it himself. He not only came up with the equation of effort with goodness, he also extolled Hercules as the Accomplisher of Superhuman Actions. Now this is an image that still (or , once more?) has a certain compelling attraction: from the motto of Erasmus to the philosophy of Kant, who used the word 'Herculean' to praise the heroism of philosophers, and on to Thomas Carlyle, the prophet of the religion of Work: 'You must labor like Hercules...'As the ethicist of independence, this Antisthenes had no feeling for cultic celebration, which he preferred attacking with 'enlightened' wit; he was 'a-musical, ( a foe of the Muses: poetry only interested him for its moral content); he felt no responsiveness to Eros (he said he 'would like to kill Aphrodite'); as a flat Realist, he had no belief in immortality (what really matters, he said, was to live rightly 'on this earth'). This collection of character traits appear almost purposely designed to illustrate the very 'type' of the modern 'work-aholic.'

"Effort is good': objecting to this thesis in the Summa theologieae, Thomas Aquinas wrote as follows: 'The essence of virtue consists more in the Good than in the Difficult.' 'When something is more difficult, it is not for that reason necessarily more worthwhile, but it must be more difficult in such a way as to be at a higher level of goodness.' The Middle Ages had something to say about virtue that whill be hard for us fellow countrymen of Kant to understand. And what was this? That virtue makes it possible for us ...to master our natural inclinations? No. That is what Kant would have said, and we all might be ready to agree. What Thomas says, instead, is that virtue perfects us so that we can follow our natural inclination in the right way. Yes, the highest realizations of moral goodness are known to be such precisely in that they take place effortlessly because it is of their essence to arise from love. And yet the overemphasis on effort and struggle has made an inroad even on our understanding of love. Why, for instance, in the opinion of the average Christian, is the love of one's enemies the highest form of love? Because here, the natural inclination is supressed to a heroic degree. What makes this kind of love so great is precisely its unusual difficulty, its practical impossibility. But what does Thomas say? 'It is not the difficulty involved that makes this kind of love so worthy, even though the greatness of the love is shown by its power to overcome the difficulty. But if the love were so great as completely to remove all difficulty - that would be a still greater love...

...The innermost meaning of this over-emphasis on effort appears to be this: that man mistrusts everything that is without effort; that in good conscience he can own only what he himself has reached through painful effort; that he refuses to let himself be given anything. We should consider for a moment how much the Christian understanding of life is based on the reality of 'Grace', let us also recall that the Holy Spirit Himself is called 'Gift';that the greatest Christian teachers have said that the Justice of God is based on Love; that something given, something free of all debt, something undeserved, something not-achieved-- is presumed in everything achieved or laid claim to; that what is first is always something received -- if we keep all this before our eyes, we can see the abyss that separates this other attitude from the inheritence of Christian Europe."

Merry Christmas! May you receive God's greatest Gift on Christmas and always.