faithful

Trusting God's plan has been a challenge lately, and this song always helps.



Morning by morning I wake up to find
the power and comfort of God's hand in mine.
Season by season I watch Him amazed,
in awe of the mystery of His perfect ways

All I have need of his hand will provide.
He's always been faithful to me

I can't remember a trial or a pain
He did not recycle to bring me gain.
I can't remember one single regret
in serving God only and trusting His hand

This is my anthem, this is my song, the
theme of the stories I've heard for so long.
God has been faithful, he will be again.
His loving compassion, it knows no end.

being good

from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam - he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts. And that has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not. A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble - because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.

That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or - if they think there is not - at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it."

pretty song

It's in Emma and I think it was originally written by Handel.



Did you not hear my lady
Go down the garden singing
Blackbird and thrush were silent
To hear the alleys ringing

Oh, saw you not my lady
Out in the garden there
Shaming the rose and lily
For she is twice as fair

Though I am nothing to her
Though she must rarely look at me

Though I can never woo her
I'll love her 'till I die

Did you not hear my lady
Go down the garden singing
Silencing all the songbirds
And setting the alleys ringing

Surely you heard my lady
Out in the garden there
Rivaling the glittering sunshine
With the glory of golden hair.

Thomas Merton, man.

If I could, I would type the entire Seeds of Contemplation into this blog entry, but I'll have to be satisfied with a little snippet:

"Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the radius of God's will and God's love - outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

We are not very good at recognizing illusions: least of all the ones we have about ourselves - the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life trying to accumulate pleasures and experiences and power and honor and knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself up with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.

But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake.

The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God."