I'll Watch the Moon

Today we were going to Fort Wayne to shop, but when my husband's plans for yesterday afternoon changed, we decided to do our shopping excursion yesterday. The whole day unfolded differently than my original intentions.

The main goal was to find some athletic shoes for my husband at Fred Toenges. As you enter the store, you take a number and await your turn. We were there almost an hour, 30 minutes of waiting and 30 minutes of service. Luckily I had my ipad with me since we were going to Half Price Books on this trip. I wasn't planning to read any books this week, but I selected I'll Watch the Moon by Ann Tatlock so I would have something to do during the wait. This was my first time to read a novel by this author.

Though there were a few light moments in the narration, the book really had a somber feel about it. The thread running through the story was about suffering and loss and how they fit into God's plan and will. Parts of it brought me to tears (thankfully when I was home again, not in the shoe store).

Nova Tierney, the voice of the narration thru most of the book, lives with her mother Catherine and brother Dewey in Minnesota helping to run a boarding house where they also reside. Nine-year-old Nova's greatest wish is that her mother would marry and thus Nova would have a father again. Her father has been dead for 4 years.

The year is 1948. Folks depend on streetcars and trains, TV is a novelty in neighborhoods, and two of the boarders are retired vaudeville entertainers. The characters reflect back on the war, fear the Communists, and see how the scourge of polio effects their neighbors. Then Dewey contracts the disease.

As the book progresses we learn the backstory of Catherine, the suffering she has endured through childhood and into adulthood. She projects sadness and is a worrier. One of her worries comes true when fourteen-year-old Dewey becomes ill.

Dewey ends up in an iron lung in the hospital. He loved astronomy and his aspiration was to one day walk on the moon. Because all he can see in the hospital is the ceiling, Nova promises him that she will watch the moon for him every night.

We learn the story of Josef, one of the boarders, who Catherine comes to trust and to confide in. Polish Josef is starting a new life in the United States as a linguistics professor at a nearby college. He shares little about himself, but it comes out that he spent time in a Nazi concentration camp and that all of his family was killed by the Germans. Nova starts to think of Josef as a possible father figure.

There is an unexpected sad twist in the story. Though most of the characters find some happiness and faith is kindled or strengthened by the end of the book, it is a stark look at the realities of human life on a fallen sin-filled earth. There is some resolution, but I would not call it a feel-good book. The writing and character development are excellent, but you will experience heart ache.

My Bright Abyss

I just finished Christian Wiman’s book My Bright Abyss. It is a difficult book to summarize. Wiman’s honest struggle with questions about suffering, the meaning of life, God come from a modern sensibility and a poet’s sensitivity so different from my own background. When I came to the end, I thought of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven. God’s relentless pursuit of this man through the years, something even Wiman reflects upon when he finally comes to Christ, tells much about God’s grace and love. This book is not your usual conversion testimony, however.

 

Wiman had some traditional exposure to Christianity as a child but turned away to live as a thoroughly modern man, i.e., someone with no need of religion. He still has problems with creeds and doctrinal theology and traditional church structure which he sees as too rigid. He does not reference the Bible in his book. His one allusion to “the still quiet voice” of God (rather than in the storm) has a glaring mistake as he refers to Isaiah rather than Elijah. He appears to be not very well-grounded in Scripture, but to him it is about “experiencing God”. He does understand the necessity and centrality of accepting the resurrected Christ.

 

He states that there is no way to return to the faith of your childhood. “Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come as a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’d been betrayed.” “If you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, you have denied the reality of your life.” Life experiences do inform our beliefs.

 

Wiman didn’t consciously reject God as much as put any thoughts about him aside. “When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not with God, nor with his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities. Perhaps it is never disbelief, which at least is active and conscious, that destroys a person, but unacknowledged belief, or a need for belief so strong that it is continually and silently crucified on the crosses of science, humanism, art or the overweening self.”

 

He asks, “How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life? “ He recognizes and identifies with modern man’s angst and anxiety, but then realizes a cause for this is that “anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern”.

 

Though Wiman in looking back on his life realizes God was there even when Wiman didn’t recognize it though he hungered for meaning, it was when he was diagnosed in his thirties with a rare but aggressive cancer that God got his attention. Yet he sees that experiencing God has to include the mundane as well as the traumatic.

 

“Is God only knowable in emotional extremity? For all the intensity of our meditative moments and mystical experience, until our faith is rooted in and inextricable from our daily reality, those moments are likely to wreck us because we cannot live up them.” One needs to “find God here and there among the ongoing delights and demolitions of daily life.”

 

Wiman suffered great physical pain from his cancer and the treatments. A difficulty with following what really are his synthesized journal thoughts over years, is that how he perceives life and pain sometimes does a u-turn. He feels “pain islands you”; yet, he decides that “the absolutely solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion” because Christ’s compassion flows through human compassion. This working through his thoughts to almost opposite sides of his first statements can make for hard reading. He intersperses his thoughts with poems by himself and others. While I did take a course on Christian poets, including George Herbert whom Wiman loves, grasping the heart and meaning of poetry is not natural to me.

 

He finishes with “So much of faith has so little to do with belief, and so much to do with acceptance. Acceptance of all the gifts that God grants us. Acceptance of the fact that we are accepted. Acceptance of grace.”

Rather than fall into an existential abyss of angst and meaninglessness, one falls into the bright abyss of experiencing and belonging to a loving God even though we can never fully comprehend Him.

 

 

Who’s Filling the Bowl?

Questions about suffering and loss and how they fit into God’s will enter our minds as we see what fills our beggar’s bowls. I have mostly operated under the idea that suffering is a consequence of living in a fallen world and/or a consequence of individual sin.

Trusting God by Jerry Bridges states that both calamities and good things come from God. He quotes Saint Augustine who said, “Nothing, therefore, happens unless the Omnipotent wills it to happen: He either permits it to happen or He brings it about Himself.”

I feel bewildered to think of God directly causing suffering. How can He be good and loving if He wills pain for His people? Yet, His plan of salvation included suffering for His Son.

Authors like Philip Yancey try to distinguish among 3 types of “wills” in God’s plan. 1) Intentional (goodness); 2) circumstantial; and 3) ultimate. The Bible teaches God is good and His intent is good so the ultimate must also be good. God uses circumstances to serve His ultimate will. The ultimate will is His own glory and the good of His people.

According to Bridges, all occasions of pain and sorrow are under the absolute control of God. People’s sinful intents and actions serve the sovereign purpose of God, but He does not make them sin. They make the choices. God is not the author of sin.

John Piper in the pdf file available on the internet titled Disability and the Sovereign Goodness of God discusses the man born blind in John 9. Jesus does not focus on the cause of the man’s blindness but on the purpose for the blindness, i.e., to demonstrate the glory of God, in this case thru healing. The explanation of the blindness does not lie in the cause but in the purpose.

Suffering can only have value and meaning in relation to God’s plan.

Bridges says the natural response to adversity is to seek relief, but our greatest need is not freedom from adversity, but freedom from the penalty of sin. If God’s love was sufficient for my greatest need, I need to trust it is sufficient for my lesser needs. Trust means not resigning ourselves to pain and heartbreak, but accepting it as part of God’s purposes and plan.

Most of the writings on suffering by evangelical Christians offer words of advice. Don’t dwell on the why, but focus on how God redeems the pain and uses it for ultimate good. Hard to do because sometimes the suffering lasts a long time, even a lifetime. Often we cannot foresee the outcome, the way God uses adversity.

No matter how limited our understanding of suffering, we do know God is always present with us and sees us thru our adversities. We have to quietly rest in Him and trustingly ingest the hard-to-swallow rations that fill our bowls (lives). I confess when I see no relief, I often fall into resignation. Let’s try to move to thanksgiving that God does have redemptive purposes.

Singing Heart

Today my heart is singing. The sticky oppressive heat promises to go away for several days once some storms have passed through. The rose bush which has promised new blooms finally has produced; I have 3 roses in the bud vase. The Rose of Sharon bush which also holds promise finally has some slight streaks of color in its buds. Two pine trees were planted today behind my condo to replace the ones that died last fall. I found a lovely serving bowl at the consignment shop for $3. 

My husband wanted to eat lunch at the Grace Village dining room today. While eating, a man and wife joined us. It appeared that she had rolled him in his wheelchair from the rehab section. As we chatted, we learned that she will be moving into the vacant condo down the block from us August 1st, her husband joining her when able.

 Then, I finally sat down and read the blogs I follow and learned that I was 1 of the 5 winners of Leslie Leyland Fields' blog give-aways. She is sending some homemade jam and what I most want, her book Surviving the Island of Grace.

 The package never arrived. I had been told it could take a month as it would go on a small boat from the island where she lives in Alaska to a post office and then to the mainland. But after 3 months I figured it would not show up. It did not.

It is a sad commentary on the poverty of my soul that it so easily soars when the beggar’s bowl is full of lovely things. My heart is full of gratitude to God; but when circumstances and things are hard, the gratitude is not so easily given. 

I just finished The Hawk and the Dove (a Christian fiction trilogy) by Penelope Wilcock that so poignantly describes the soul’s struggle with reconciling loss and suffering with God’s goodness and love. It is a story of a 14th century monastery and how the individuals of the community must come to grips with these lessons in their relationships with one another and with God. A good reminder that whatever fills the bowl of life, God does love us.