JOLLYBLOGGER

Exulting in Monotony

Hi, me again, for your once whenever I get around to it blog update.  Sorry that I break every promise to keep you updated and blog more.  On the health front I'm feeling good, waiting on results of a CT Scan, so I promise (and by promise I mean "maybe") I will update you when I hear.

But that's not why I'm blogging today.  I was looking for a Chesterton quote today and came across the one below - it's from Chesterton but unfortunately it goes un-cited on the page on which I found it.  But it fits well with some things I have been thinking thoughtfully about lately, when I have time to think. 

I once heard it said, and this may come from Chesterton, that all of the problems in the world are caused by man's inability to sit still in a room.  In other words, we are restless, always trying to make things happen - it is as if we treat it as our moral obligation to be perpetually dissatisfied.  Of course we spiritually spruce up our language and call it "striving for excellence," or "pursuing a more passionate spiritual walk," or "being relevant," but I've come to believe all of that is a smokescreen for the fact that we have acquiesced to the spirit of the age, ergo, the newer and more flashy is always better.  

The greatest blessing of the Noahic Covenant is God's promise to not destroy the world with a flood, but the second and only slightly less well known is God's promise of a regularly ordered world - Genesis 8:22

“As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.”

In other words, as long as life endures we will live in a world governed by regularity and sameness.   

So, enough of my rambling, here's the quote I loved so much this morning: 

A child kicks its legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough... It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again," to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again," to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Grown ups are not strong enough to exult in monotony - think about that one for awhile!. 

May God bless you greatly today!

A Theology of Illness

Hi everyone.  To all three of you who remain faithful readers let me say thanks an apologies for still checking in here and checking your rss feeds for me.  In recent months most of my posts have been health updates and have been a bit infrequent, but lately I have taken infrequency (if that's not really a word I claim it as my invention) to extremes. 

Sadly, for my blogging career I've been re-reading a bit of Neil Postman, finally read Brave New World by Huxley, and those things coupled with the serious ramifications of my declining health, have weakened my love for technology a bit lately, and all of the things you can do with said technology have lost quite a bit of their sex-appeal.

Still, I remain grateful for all of the friends I have made through blogging and Facebook so I hope to not go completely silent and may even post more frequently in the future, then again I may not.  At the least I do hope to give a health update soon, maybe this week.  Suffice it to say that aside from kicking a piece of furniture yesterday and breaking a toe (for which I have moaned and groaned like a woman in labor) I'm feeling very well these days.

But that's not what today's post is about.  I came across a wonderful commentary from Rod Dreher on praying for distasteful people like Bernie Madoff, and in this he quotes a wonderful passage from a book called A Theology of Illness by Jean-Claude Larchet.  Even us hard boiled Presbyterians ought to be able to appreciate the perspective on illness that is here attributed to Orthodoxy.

For illness always calls into question the basis, the framework an the shape of our lives, including the life-patterns we have acquired, the free use of our bodily and psychological faculties, our system of values, our relations with other people, even life itself. This is because in times of illness the inevitability of death becomes a stark reality. ... Far from being an event that touches only our body, and that for a limited time, illness often forces us to assume a spiritual struggle that involves our whole being, and destiny. ...

...Orthodox Christianity brings to the holistic treatment of a sick person a philosophically ascetic orientation increasingly alien to the way we live and think in the modern West.

For example, Orthodoxy encourages believers to pray for good health, but more importantly, to pray for what is most spiritually useful. Orthodoxy enjoins the patient to see his illness in the entire context of his life, and how it can be used to deepen his relationship with God. Elder Zacharias, a monk from the Orthodox monastery in Essex, England, tells of a woman who approached him with a diagnosis of six months to live. She had incurable cancer. "Wonderful," he told her. "You have six months to prepare for the most important encounter of your life." She used that time to work with him, in prayer and counseling, to meet God. He reports that on his final visit with her, her body was ravaged, but her face was luminous. She told the elder that she didn't feel worthy of the grace of having that illness. Orthodox Christianity could not prevent death, but it helped this woman imbue her suffering with meaning, and to bear it with grace, dignity, and even, in the end, joy.