Reflections on the Highway - Fall 2014

From time to time in "Reflections", we may comment on a topic to open a broader conversation concerning the relationship of the creative process to prayer, discipleship and relating to God daily through the "eyes of the heart". 

For instance, I am learning more each day that through art, we experience a more expansive communication between our Lord and ourselves. To discover Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dostoevsky, John Donne, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, and Van Gogh (to name a scant few), is to discover more of Christ, more beauty, more of the spirit of the heart and soul of man and woman. As Jay Hopler relates, art allows one to confront "two of humankind's most powerful actuations: the drive to create and the drive to know a creator." The same can be said of prayer.

Looking at Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) - he was an Englishman, a member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuit) and a poet.  Today, he is recognized in the first order for his poetry. Certainly, his poetry is devotional but his genius is widely recognized in both religious and secular circles.  He is described as having had an "imposed watchfulness" to detect and communicate, in his words, "news from God".  The artist works very hard -- and is compelled -- not to miss these revelations, conversations or inquiries and to communicate through story, images, cadence and arrangement, the mystery of the unseen coming through the seen.  Or, as Kimberly Johnson comments with regard to lyrical poetry in particular, "it lends itself well to the consideration of mystery. With their shared interest in plumbing mystery and defining the self in the context of such uncertainty, poetry and religion stand as two sympathetic and oft overlapping responses to the same existential uncertainties."

How many times do we miss out on this deeper reality of God speak because of an imposed "UN- watchfulness"?  The world defines for us a narrow reality born out of fear, simplification and ignorance.  As description expands and definition limits, the artist helps teach us to reinterpret and recreate a described reality of simplicity, beauty, mystery and love.  

Overlooking, then, means that we miss in a day, in an an hour, in a moment the very beauty, actuality, and message that God would arrest us in, if only we were attentive to it.  We each have the opportunity in the creation of art or enjoyment of it to celebrate and participate in the incarnate reality of Christ in all things, reminding us that convergences of our attention and God's speaking are gifts of grace and markers of a path.  We can say "Yes" to the Creator in the moment of His immanent presence.  Practically, just taking the time to read and to "stay with" a poem can help us with this.  The same is true of the Scriptures, as they are quite rightly spoken of as the greatest of all literature, including poetry, as well as the Sacred Text, all "inspired" by God himself.

In closing, I want to share one of Hopkins' many poems that has touched me deeply. His poems have encouraged me to embrace prayer creatively and see the artistry of Jesus in the restoring of the human soul, one person at a time. The discipline of not overlooking that one person, or not missing that intersection or convergence in an ordinary day that "catches fire", is aliveness to the active, incarnate love of God in all our circumstances and surroundings.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire
As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
       
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ -- for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  -- Psalm 27:13

Blessings,

Trip

Reflections on the Highway - Christmas 2013

And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. ... it will be for those who walk in that Way.  Isaiah 35:8

Now the eyes of my eyes are opened. -- ee cummings

I have been thinking about the significance of pin holes lately.  One might think of them as the tiniest of openings through which the whole universe has an opportunity to crash.  My spiritual director, at the end of an extended solitude retreat, applied the description to an experience I had related to him early in the week.  I had told him of singing together during the first Eucharist service, the refrain “Remember me Lord when you come into your kingdom.”  I was unconsciously still singing the refrain when I sat down.  Suddenly, I was overcome with emotion, connecting with a plea or call or recognition deep within me of which I was unaware.  I wept.

Following that brief encounter in the service, I began to have each day of the retreat amazing encounters in the Spirit which prompted me to pick up this book and then that one, out of hundreds in the library, there were four in all.  Over the course, I realized that there was a unity in each one of language and clarity concerning at its core what one author described as the “ground or depth of the soul where the Mystery of Being is experienced.”  It all beautifully tied in with a prayer I had received a few weeks before. There was this genuine outpouring revelation, realization and wisdom that I could not absorb fast enough, pray hard enough or write completely enough to take in fully.  I am still working on it.

In our last meeting, having processed throughout the week the interaction I was having with this unifying theme and directing me in prayer, my director connected it up this way: “Possibly the surprise of the ‘Remember me’, its penetration, may have been the pin hole from the very first Mass, opening all of this up more and more.”  For me, then, a pin hole may emerge as a surprise of tears.  For you it may be something else so that you do not miss the occasion of the pin hole of opening up the kingdom of heaven to you, through it.  

As I close out this year, I am aware of a transition going on in my spirit, vision, circumstances and relationships with a proliferation of pin holes.  Some are painful but designed to separate me unto new wine skins.  Others are deep places of revelation, unity and confirmation, including the ones previously mentioned, that evoke great promise, freedom and impact.  It gets harder to accept change and re-creation as one gets older, unless one is willing to listen and receive the various messages as one, even though they appear to be in conflict and bring up conflicting emotional responses.  Richard Rohr describes it this way in his book, FALLING UPWARD:

Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing; and full seeing seems to take most of our lifetime, with a huge leap in the final years, months, weeks and days of our life, as any hospice volunteer will tell you. There seems to be a cumulative and exponential growth in seeing in people's last years, for those who do the inner work. Pg. 130

This process is what, in part, creates elders worth listening to.  Cutting that wisdom off, even if it comes in strange or unwelcome packages, is a great danger to any country, institution, organization or association, as Rohr powerfully warns.  The task of the elder is to stay with the inner work relentlessly and to trust the pin holes to open the Eyes of the eyes.

In closing, Laurie and I would invite the consideration of these possibilities as we all continue to move through advent together and focus our gaze in stillness: Really, isn't the stable a pin hole through which the whole revelation of Jesus comes?  Isn't a flower, Verbena for instance, a pin hole through which a revelation of beauty and transformation may come?  Isn't a poem a pin hole which opens and arrests time at the same moment and, thus, fixes that moment in time?  Isn't every holy symbol a pin hole through which pours the larger and sacramental meaning of the unseen?  Isn't impending death a pin hole through which we can at once see and celebrate life to be called forth in the midst of great suffering, pain and loss?  Isn't deep hurt a pin hole opened up for healing, and a wound, bleeding, open, but not ours, to consume all shame, hatred, evil in love?  Might we be a pin hole for one another in unrestrained encouragement, taken unawares and surprised by kindness, generosity, clarity, honesty, celebration, wisdom, affection and love. Inspiration giving birth, womb like, to all that could be, that will be, that is; more and more and more, not less and less and less; the already but not yet; the “Yes”, the “I AM”; the eternal now in the “are”, the “is”, the “today” of Jesus.

A poet well communicates our prayer for you and for us as we close one year and open another through the birth of a baby.

We must be still and still moving                                                                                        Into another intensity                                                                                                        For a further union, a deeper communion.  -- TS Eliot, “Four Quartets”

Christmas blessings to each of you and those you love. 
The Sizemores

Reflections on the Highway - Fall 2013

Our prior letter reflected on the first half of Isaiah 35. The persons appearing in that segment have "fearful hearts, trembling hands and knees that give way".  As we observed, The Cross of Jesus Christ --His blood actually and not abstractly -- is the promise spoken to that fearful, anxious, traumatized heart in the coming of God, with vengeance and divine retribution to save that one.  We attempted to communicate the fullest meaning of the Cross, the cost to Jesus and his Father required by the Holiness of God and the Love of God for his creation.

Unfortunately, as we have encountered person after person over seventeen years of praying with individuals, and as we have observed both our secular and Christian cultures, we realize how the power of the Cross, the covenant of Jesus blood, has been trivialized, abstracted and conceptualized.  This abstraction has occurred over a long period of time as the exclusively rational has replaced mystery and as recognized time has become limited to the horizontal and sequential. As this shift has taken place, starting at the very least with the so-called "enlightenment" philosophers, two other devastating shifts occurred, devastating both to sacramental reality and spiritual wholeness. The first is the elimination of the acknowledgement of supernatural evil and supernatural good as impacts on our world.  Eliminating one eliminates the other and settles for and explains life on the basis of an enclosed, delimited rational box.  Descartes maxim, "I think therefore I am" takes up this banner, reducing all reality to the size of our own brain, which defines the second devastating shift in determining what is reality or real.

Thus, the "thinking mind" of today can only conceptualize, reduce, define and examine as affected by these shifts.  It cannot intuit, imagine, describe or be in awe. It cannot entertain a paradox and it cannot engage the reality in co-existence or confluence, if you will, of two times:  One a creature in created time; the other divine, eternal, uncreated in the great "I Am" of God.  Knowing God, something the purely rational mind is not designed to do, requires the apprehension and reception of both, namely through the heart, which has been referred to by Leanne Payne and others as the deep, intuitive, imaginative capacity to know God.  If this capacity to receive is shut down by culture, generational sin, personal pain and other attacks on our capacity to be fully human, we are painfully diminished in our capacity to love and receive love, and to know God rather than simply know about Him.

Of course, the refusal to recognize supernatural evil as an actual influence and enmity against our life, relationships, prospects, family, cultural norms, politics, etc. does not, as any objective observer must acknowledge, insulate us from evil's effects.  Furthermore, the elimination or refusal to acknowledge the access to or presence of supernatural good, cuts us off from the life-giving sacramental realities -- such as living in the present, the Eucharist, baptism, marriage as well as Scripture -- and keeps us from falling to our knees asking for and believing for healing, wholeness and intervention in fellowship with that great cloud of witnesses.

So much more could be said about these things, and indeed many have written about this dilemma. The consequences have been devastating and demoralizing to our culture and the personal lives of many believers who know it should be different but it is not. In that state, particularly in their inner-most psyche where anxiety and fear bear far more resemblance in reality to the world that is broken and falling apart, despair, addiction, materialism, among other symptoms, grows rather than diminishes and Scripture seems to accuse rather than encourage.

Hope. The revealed reality of the Cross, the wounds that heal us, that save, are transformational person by person as Isaiah 35 announces and promises in the geography of the human heart: A territory of desert parch and jackal screeches, unhealed; a geography more precious to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit than any other geography in all of creation, and promised, this transformational reality, through the blood of Jesus alone:

"Then will the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
Then will the lame leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy;
Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert;
The burning sand will become a pool, the thirsty ground bubbling springs;                        In the haunts where jackals once lay, grass and reeds and papyrus will grow."

Paul relates that he has determined to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified. Paul prays that the eyes of the believers’ hearts would be opened to the realities of the unseen but real -- the big "R" as Oswald Chambers puts it.  Far from hating His creation, then, He redeems it by his blood and incarnates it with Himself, unifying His creation with Himself and His Father through His Spirit that He might be the incarnate real in us.  May it be so among us.

We would love dialogue and response to these comments or other focuses you may have. In the next letter, we will consider the rest of Isaiah 35 and the promised Highway there.

Blessings,

Trip

Reflections on the Highway - Spring 2013

Isaiah 35 is the inspiration for the title of my periodic letters. Read in the Spirit, it so inflamed and informed my imagination that it lives with me as a road map and living expression of God's love in, through and to all of Creation.

The opening verses communicate a promise to all created things, that which was made by Jesus and for Jesus. "The desert and the parched land will be glad. The wilderness will rejoice and blossom.  Like the crocus it will burst into bloom." (Look around you at the springtime now!)  This is followed by the language of gift, of restoration; "The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon.”  Then the restoration of sight to all created things to see and to know: "They will see the glory of the Lord, the splendor of our God.”  God's glory coming through and settling upon all that he has made. That which was lost in the garden in the Fall, when the glory of the Lord departed and shame came, the very presence of God is restored in awareness, sight and presence to all created things. It is in the gaze of those eyes, fixed on God's glory, that the transfiguration into beauty, ablaze in living things, comes forth. God's glory made manifest and incarnate as gaze meets Gaze.

Plunked down, then, in the middle of Isaiah 35,which is roughly in the middle of the book, is God's prize creation, a human being. The crown of creation, set above the angels but lost, deceived and shamed in that deception. God never forgets the person, the one, Jesus' way of love directed at that one, is an instruction to those of us sitting across from them and in discipleship of that one person: "Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way. Say to those with fearful hearts, your God will come. He will come with vengeance, with divine retribution, He will come to save you."

Prompting the question then to that person with a heart full of fear: When and upon whom will God's wrath, his vengeance be poured out? This can be one of the most dramatic and telling moments for the wounded, lost and shamed soul, even a believing one. In Isaiah 61 and Luke 4, Jesus uses similar language in declaring the "year of the Lord's favor, the day of the vengeance of our God." The deception of the Fall and the deception of the wounded, the deception and misinterpreting of Biblical truth comes into bold relief right here. Multiple answers come haltingly and uncertainly. At judgement. No. Upon all sinners. No. Upon Satan and the rebellious angels. No. Upon the whole world, Hitler and all the despots included. No. When Moses, standing among his people who were dying of a plague, lifted up his staff, what did it become? A snake. Evil, deception, sin and shame and the people were healed. What did this foreshadow? How can a snake lifted up become the healer? Clearly, one is not saved by God's wrath at judgment, or by torching Satan and his minions, or all the world including Hitler, serial killers, you and me.

What, then, what, the confused and fearful heart wants to know. We all may say we know have known, but time after time this interchange occurs. I am telling you, it is truly remarkable, when the person, a deceived, wounded, confused and trapped Christian soul comes to know this truth for the first time. The trivialization of the Cross, the false Jesus, confused and conceptual understanding are exposed. That Jesus, our Jesus, becomes a snake, becomes evil, becomes shame and that all of God's wrath, divine retribution and vengeance are poured out on him comes as a shock and it still may shock all of us who give a pat answer and it should. For from this place, Jesus cries: "My God, my God why has thou forsaken me?" This, and this alone. The full Reality of it, not the conceptualization of it, is what saves a person and there must be a full encounter with that Jesus for the wounded, broken fearful and shamed heart to be healed and transformed. No one can go around the Cross.

Why then is this so shrouded and lost and confused? There are many reasons that I encounter but I am just going to focus, in closing, on the main one. The holiness of God.  God's holiness has been excerpted from much of what is discussed, preached or contemplated concerning who this God is. Nor would I be able fully to examine this subject and attribute in this space. But consider this anew and afresh in the Spirit. The offense against God's holiness, his divine Justice, in the rebellion of the angels and in the Fall, with devastating consequences and effects of sin, killing the hearts of the children from one generation to the next, was so great and beyond that there was only one answer. Jesus would be the one. His blood, known and seen gaze to Gaze by the fearful heart. Nothing short of that. Then and only then will the “lame leap like a deer and the tongue of the dumb shout for joy”.  More on that later.

Blessings,

Trip

Reflections on the Highway - Christmas 2012

One night, recently, Laurie was awakened and went downstairs.  She thought of turning on the television but instead turned to her devotionals and Scripture.  She was confronted with these words:  "For the joy of the Lord is your strength." Neh 8:10.  Anxiety could have awakened her, especially concern for our three-year-old grandson, Kason, who lives with us without his mom and dad.  This circumstance has radically altered her priorities and ours, and our lifestyle.  Our freedom has been curtailed in dozens of ways and redirected in others.  We are absolutely certain God has brought this little one into our midst and yet, we are often frustrated, fatigued and, yes, anxious.

In the morning, we were sitting around our kitchen table with several of our kids and Kason. Laurie stopped the conversation, which she hardly ever does, and said "This is important."  She went on to share her encounter of the previous night. She was alive and animated in the telling.  It was not just that she had discovered a well-known Scripture that was helpful. She spoke it and one could see that it was doing a work in her of actually bringing joy.  She had come to know something rather than just know about it.

Then, on Thanksgiving, over thirty of us were gathered at Laurie's sister's home in Greensboro.  Laurie's mother, Laurie's three sisters, their husbands and children, all of our children, two husbands, a boyfriend, two little grandchildren, along with my sister and Frazier's in-laws were gathered in the kitchen for the Thanksgiving prayer. Laurie stopped us once again.  She began to read a newspaper column, years old, sent to her mother by her mother and redistributed some years ago to Laurie and her sisters by their mom. Laurie kept it and brought it to share.  It spoke directly to the generations gathered in homes at Thanksgiving and I could tell that she was seeing not only the people present but also those gathered in the unseen.  When she reached a line about the faces of the little ones, she broke down.  Her mother was in tears too.  Laurie had to pause for some time but she clearly had the floor.  It was as if she were saying once again: "This is important."  Her tears, her heart, her gentleness, all that was going on in her and spilling out, was a Thanksgiving feast brought through the eyes and tears of someone whose reservoirs are always full but rarely disclosed.  Later, I told her this: "Thank you for taking the time and risk of showing how deeply you feel. It was very attractive and I long to see more of you."  We are eager to hear another, "This is important" from Laurie because we get to know and see her so much more clearly in those moments of wisdom shared from the heart.  

Why do I share these vignettes with you as our Christmas and year-end greeting?  For one, I want you to know this companion of mine who is often hidden from view in our work, except to those who come for prayer each week and share a meal at Laurie's table before we begin three days of prayer.  Secondly, I believe for each of us, when we are fully in the truth, present to the truth, we become fully present to others through joy and tears and passion. We are not wondering about our existence; rather, we are in existence.  We step into our personality, fully human, and there is an impact from being seen that rocks the universe.  It cannot be ignored either in the seen or the unseen.  Thirdly, it gives me an opportunity to comment on a preceding event last spring that deepened Laurie in both her humanity and her spirit.  For the first time, she was able to join me on an eight-day solitude retreat together with the Jesuits north of Boston. This both awakened her, rested her and prepared her for the pressures to come.  It cannot be over emphasized concerning what this time meant to her and what it fulfilled in her, as well as what it meant to me to finally share this restorative time with her. 

So, I pray for us and for each of you this Christmas to be more present to our God and to ourselves and to each other.  Otherwise we may miss each other.  We may not really come to know each other and will also miss becoming known.  In the same way, we may not see Jesus even though we are celebrating his birth.  We may not see Mary except as an actor in a play and thus miss the opportunity to learn from her. We may not hear the angels sing "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace and goodwill toward" all of humanity.  We may not see through the eyes of Simeon as he clasps the baby to his breast and cries out with all of himself, "For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation." 

As disciples of Jesus, we are called to speak of what we have seen and heard, filled with the Holy Spirit.  Acts 4:20.  We can speak of what we heard and that counts, but it has nowhere near the power, in the Holy Spirit, that both seeing and hearing in proclamation does.  That shakes the universe.  The difference is both palpable and Real.  My seeing is better through the eyes of Laurie's heart, a real helpmate to me.  Can you hear the angels? Can you see them?  Can you hear the nails being driven?  Can you see the wounds? 

We pray for ears to hear and eyes to see what the Spirit is saying, to share and be present in that oneness.  John 17.  And with Paul, we pray for you and for us:  "I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know Him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and His incomparably great power for us who believe."  Ephesians 1:17,18,19a.

Wishing for you and the ones you love, a Christmas filled with joy…

The Sizemores

Reflections on the Highway - Spring 2014

Recently, I was asked to speak at a Men's Retreat in the Midwest.  I had a conflict for that date so we videoed the talk which was in two parts.  The topic for the weekend was on how to deal with fear.  For this Reflections issue, I am including Part 1 of the talk as transcribed. Blessings to you in this beautiful bloom of Spring.

We are considering in these more focused times together the topic of fear and how we might best handle the expression and bondage of fear in our lives as disciples of Jesus.  It is well, I think, to say at the outset that fear, like money, is not always a bad thing and, in fact, can operate to protect us from danger. More positively, in relation to God, the Old Testament calls and instructs us to fear the Lord.  This includes a call to obedience to his commandments out of reverence, awe and openness to who God is. It also includes a warning as to the consequences of disobedience.

Proverbs 9:10 states flatly that "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  Psalm 34:7 offers protection and deliverance for those who fear the Lord: "The angel of the Lord encamps around them who fear him and he (that is the Lord) delivers them."  The growing apprehension of the Lord God in all his attributes is consonant with a growth in fearing God to the exclusion of all other fears.  His closeness, immanence, his very presence is a shield against the fears of men, fears of death and fears of terror: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and Your staff bring comfort to me." Psalm 23:4. The fear of the Lord, then, is a calling, a response to his holiness and to his love.  It is practiced in the invocation of his presence and in obedience.  The fear of punishment is an active ingredient in relation to a holy and just God who is a consuming fire. Both responses are caught up in the fear of the Lord and healthy in balance and necessary to serve, honor and please God.

The other face of fear we may define very appropriately as the dictionary does: A feeling of alarm or disquiet caused by the expectation of danger, pain, disaster, or the like.  A stat or condition of alarm or dread." In this context, the words "dread", "terror", "fright", "panic" and "alarm" may be synonymous with fear but also describe the terrible emotional state that accompanies this fear. These emotions can, and do, produce physical reactions and disease.  Now, briefly, here we should also say that "fear" so defined can produce a healthy, if stressful, response by pumping adrenaline to prompt avoidance or flight from real trouble.

Probably another distinction that should be made, particularly in the modern, post-modern era that we are in, is the distinction between fear and anxiety.  In fact, it is very possible in our age of anxiousness that many are referring to fear when they mean anxiety.  They are referring to a state of anxiety, most often generalized, sometimes specific.  In this gathering, in your home or your car, you may be aware of anxieties that walk around with you and that you have brought with you: your finances, your kids, your health, the overwhelming consequences of modern life or the general state of the country, the world and on and on.  This more or less constant or chronic anxiety robs us of being present in the present and robs us of joy and peace and contentment with our circumstances.  

The Scripture speaks of this state and calls us out. Philippians 4:5 begins: "The Lord is near."  The emphasis first is the truth of where existentially God is.  He is near, not remote.  He is aware, not asleep. His presence is with us.  Practice it by calling on his Spirit, inviting and invoking that presence.  "Come Holy Spirit".  Anxiety, anxiousness and fear make us feel that we are separated unto ourselves, isolated, alone and left to our own strategies and patterns to deal with our projections and apprehensions.  With both anxiety and fear, there is the destructive projection into a future, which does not exist as if the worst has already happened and we are living in it.

Practicing the presence of the Lord, looking up and out of ourselves, is the way out of anxiety, so the instruction follows in verse 6: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, present your requests to God."  We have work to do, as believers, not just sometimes but in "every situation."  There are no exceptions.  Gratefulness, prayer and asking all acknowledge the goodness of God and a relationship with him as the sheep of his pasture in dependency and real moment-by-moment belief.  The promise is, as we go this way, that the "peace of God, which transcends all understanding (that is the coping, comprehensions and stratagems of the mind) will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus,"  His peace, his power not just displacing the anxiety but replacing it.  One very encouraging practice you may want to do among yourselves here is to recall those times when you did practice his presence, in the midst of anxiety, and knew his peace.  Those could be great stories.

Having made these distinctions, let us return to the issue of fear in the dread sense, the guilt sense, the terror sense.  This, I would say is an existential fear. It comes with existence.  It is referring to those in Isaiah 35 with trembling hands, knees that give way and hearts full of fear.  It proceeds from the Fall.  It is in our blood stream; it is reinforced through preceding generations and by our experience of life.  It is born of deception, based on a lie.  It is the enemy of love.  It demands that we control our environments, our relationships and our futures, even while there is something telling us that we really cannot. And this produces more fear and more anxiety.  Fear stifles creativity and leadership.  It emasculates masculinity.  It carries us into addiction and all manner of sin.  It demands that we take charge but the demand itself mocks us in our weakness.

We could say, then, that fear and control can and do occupy the same space.  If you fear, you will try to control.  If you are controlling, you are living a fear-based life.  Anyone who was raised by a controlling parent, living from fear, knows the destruction to the spirit of a child this brings.  I am sure there is no one here and no one reading this letter who knows that reality.  So we will move on.  Now, it is also true that love and fear cannot occupy the same space. Control and love do not and cannot.  But love and pain can and they do if we stop denying the pain.

Thus, I say that the problem of pain is all about love and that love is the answer to fear as we have defined it.  In 1st John 4:16-23, the Apostle says this: "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God.  This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment.  In this world we are like Jesus.  There is no fear in love.  But perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment.  The one who fears is not made perfect in love."  What powerful, provocative and even disturbing words these are. In this world, a fallen, broken and fearful world full of addiction, terror and horrible acts of brutality and malice, we are like Jesus.  Are we? Are we living in fear or in some gray middle ground lifeless area between love and fear that we are separated from ourselves, incapable of impacting our world, leading our families and loving both friends and enemies.

Now I could go several directions from here but I am only going one.  It the one that shows up in Isaiah 35 to save the fearful heart.  John, who wrote the preceding words, was there when Jesus was transfigured on the Mount; he was there when Jesus suffered, bled and died; he was there with the resurrected Jesus and he was present and baptized with fire when the Holy Spirit descended from above upon those waiting in obedience and prayer. Could the problem be that we are so detached from these realities, from the big "R" as Chambers refers to Reality, Redemption and Resurrection, that it becomes ordinary to read John's words, nod approvingly and go on.  What we need it seems is transformation out of fear and into love and for that we cannot go around the Cross. No one can and know the power of his Resurrection.

For emphasis, I will close with this invitation to know the Cross and the blood, delivered by Catherine of Siena in a letter to one under her spiritual direction.

Remember the overflowing blood of God's son.
Christ bathed us in it when he opened His body up and drained Himself with Holy fire and blazing love on the wood of the Cross.
Love held Jesus there fast.
As the saints say, neither the cross or the nails could have held God had it not been for the cement of divine love.
That is why you should always be looking on the wood.
Let the eye of your understanding rest on the Cross always.                                                  Here you will discover true virtue and fall in love with it.

Blessings,

Trip