BP Newsletter for December 2014. Collect your hard copy at the cashiers. When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bounds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world...and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be. ~ PATANJALI ~ December 2014 Dear All Another year has just flown by, much too fast. This story that I am sharing today, is rather longer than my normal one page letter. Hope it impacts you as it did me. Something to make you think. Two Parables from Disappointment with God by Philip Yancey. “Here are two stories, both of them true, which for me stand as parables for the alternatives: the way of faith and the way of non-faith. The first comes from a sermon by Frederick Buechner: It is a peculiarly twentieth-century story, and it is almost too awful to tell: about a boy of twelve or thirteen who, in a fit of crazy anger and depression, got hold of a gun somewhere and fired it at this father, who died not right away but soon afterward. When the authorities asked the boy why he had done it, he said that it was because he could not stand his father, because his father demanded too much of him, because he was always after him, because he hated his father. And then later on, after he had been placed in a house of detention somewhere, a guard was walking down the corridor late one night when he heard sounds from the boy’s room, and he stopped to listen. The words that he heard the boy sobbing out in the dark were, “I want my father, I want my father.” Buechner says that this story is “a kind of parable of the lives of all of us.” Modern society is like that boy in the house of detention. We have killed off our Father. Few thinkers or writers or moviemakers or television producers take God seriously anymore. He’s an anachronism, something we’ve outgrown. The modern world has accepted The Wager and bet against God. There are too many unanswered questions. He has disappointed us once too often.* *”Have you not heard of the man who lit a lamp on a bright morning and went to the marketplace crying ceaselessly, ‘I seek God. I seek God’…. They laughed, and...the man sprang into their midst and looked daggers at them. ‘Where is God?’ he cried. ‘I will tell you. We have killed Him, you and I.’ We are all His killers, but how can we have done that? How could we swallow up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What will we do as the earth is set loose from its sun?” - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science It is a hard thing to live, uncertain of anything. And yet, sobs can still be heard, muffled cries of loss, such as those expressed in literature and film and almost all modern art. The alternative to disappointment with God seems to be disappointment without God. (“The center of me,” said Bertrand Russell, “is always and eternally a terrible pain—a curious wild pain—a searching for something beyond what the world contains.”) I see that sense of loss in the eyes of my friend, Richard, even now. He says he does not believe in God, but he keeps bringing up the subject, protesting too loudly. From where comes this wounded sense of betrayal if no one is there to do the betraying? Frederich Buechner’s parable concerns the loss of a father; the second concerns the discovery of a father. It too is a true story, my own story. One holiday I was visiting my mother, who lives seven hundred miles away. We reminisced about times long past, as mothers and sons tend to do. Inevitable, the large box of old photos came down from the closet shelf, spilling out a jumbled pile of thin rectangles that mark my progression through childhood and adolescence: the cowboy-and-Indian getups, the Peter Cottontail suit in the first grade play, my childhood pets, endless piano recitals, the graduations from grade school and high school and finally college. Among those photos I found one of an infant, with my name written on the back. The portrait itself was not unusual. I looked like any baby: fat-cheeked, half-bald, with a wild, unfocused look to my eyes. But the photo was crumpled and mangled, as if one of those childhood pets had got hold of it. I asked my mother why she had hung onto such an abused photo when she had so many other undamaged ones. There is something you should know about my family: when I was ten months old, my father contracted spinal lumbar polio. He died three months later, just after my first birthday. My father was totally paralyzed at age twenty-four, his muscles so weakened that he had to live inside a large steel cylinder that did his breathing for him. He had few visitors—people had as much hysteria about polio in 1950 as they do about AIDS today. The one visitor who came faithfully, my mother, would sit in a certain place so that he could see her in a mirror bolted to the side of the iron lung. My mother explained to me that she had kept the photo as a memento, because during my father’s illness it had been fastened to his iron lung. He had asked for pictures of her and of his two sons, and my mother had had to jam the pictures in between some metal knobs. Thus, the crumpled condition of my baby photo. I rarely saw my father after he entered the hospital, since children were not allowed in polio wards. Besides, I was so young that, even if I had been allowed in, I would not now retain those memories. When my mother told me the story of the crumpled photo, I had a strange and powerful reaction. It seemed odd to imagine someone caring about me whom, in a sense, I had never met. During the last months of his life, my father had spent his waking hours staring at those three images of his family, my family. There was nothing else in his field of view. What did he do all day? Did he pray for us? Yes, surely. Did he love us? Yes, But how can a paralyzed person express his love, especially when his own children are banned from the room? I have often thought of that crumpled photo, for it is one of the few links connecting me to the stranger who was my father, a stranger who died a decade younger than I am now. Someone I have no memory of, no sensory knowledge of, spent all day every day thinking of me, devoting himself to me, loving me as well as he could. Perhaps, in some mysterious way, he is doing so now in another dimension. Perhaps I will have time, much time, to renew a relationship that was cruelly ended just as it had begun. I mention this story because the emotions I felt when my mother showed me the crumpled photo were the very same emotions I felt that February night in a college dorm room when I first believed in a God of love. Someone is there, I realized. Someone is watching life as it unfolds on this planet. More, Someone is there who loves me. It was a startling feeling of wild hope, a feeling so new and overwhelming that it seemed fully worth risking my life on.” May you experience the love of God over the season and throughout the New Year. For those on holiday, that you have a good rest so that you renew your energy and are inspired with new ideas to tackle in 2015. ‘Till next month………………………………………..André & Margot
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 18:16:11 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015