Rediscovered: An Ecstasy Remembered

My office occupies one of two attic rooms on the third floor of our house. The other attic room has accumulated God-alone-knows-what-all for a decade or more, and about a week ago I followed the impulse to start clearing out stuff that all reason says will never be used and no longer has value.

In the process, I am rediscovering long-ignored things that do have some value, including a journal from a time when I journaled sporadically.

Here's an entry from that journal, written at 6:30 am on Wednesday, December 5, 2001 (inspired by a device used by David Bradley in "The Chaneysville Incident," I headed each entry with a timestamp).

0630120501WE
I saw this one day while I was in the tub. I was not sleeping, so it wasn't a dream; but I dare not call it a vision. It was simply something I saw.
I saw my life as a single thing. All of my past experiences, my present moment, and everything I do in the future were part of this one thing. From birth to death, it was all contained in a single strand of light.
The strand of light was no longer than a piece of thread, but as I watched, it grew even smaller, as if I were backing away from it. As it grew smaller, I saw more of its surroundings. But I saw those surroundings as I'd never seen anything before, for I saw both space and time. I saw not only the earth upon which I lived, but I saw times before my life and times after.
The strand of light continued to shrink - I saw stars and galaxies, and I saw millenia and eons. And the stars and galaxies shank, and the millenia and eons shrank, until I felt that I was beholding the entire creation and all of time, as a single thing. And as a part of that thing, my strand of light was so infinitesmal that it was barely visible.
Then creation itself, and all of time, shrank, and I saw it all enclosed in a crystalline globe, which was resting in the palm of a lady's hand. Not just a woman's hand; a Lady's hand. And I realized that I was viewing creation itself, and all of time, from that Lady's point of view - that I was looking through Her eyes. And I knew that, while She saw all of creation and all of time, She was looking at that tiny, tiny strand of light.
Then it became clear that I was not only looking through the Lady's eyes, but that I was somehow part of Her, for I found myself sensing Her movement, feeling Her emotion, and sharing Her thought. As we gazed upon that miniscule filament of light, I sensed a smile coming across Her face, and I smiled with Her; and I felt Her sense of amusement as She and I shared this thought:
"To think that I once considered THIS to be my life!"
Thus the hallucination, for want of a better word, ended; and here my telling of it ends, for I have nothing to add.

Remembering that challenges me never to forget.

Do I need to say that the Lady is the ecclesia, the Bride of Christ? Okay, then; I have.

On Guiltification

This post is a first for me. For the first time, I am porting a Facebook status from there to here as a blog post.

A little background: This morning, a thought popped into my head that I wanted to talk with other believers about, so I posted it on Facebook with a question:

It just struck me that in the religious environment of my childhood, the key to pleasing God was neither faith nor works, but emotion - i.e., feeling guilty. The idea, pervasive without ever being fully articulated, was that the worse I could feel about myself, the more likely I was to find favor with the Almighty.

Has anybody else been there?

To my surprise, my first, almost immediate response came from a non-Christian friend, Khrys Myrddin:

Khrys Myrddin That is a profoundly sad realization, isn't it? If God is love, then should He not rejoice in your goodness? Should He not support you in your weakness, ever calling you to be the best person you can be? I hope that you have moved beyond this in your spiritual life now because, aside from just the crappiness of feeling crappy about yourself all the time, guilt is not a useful emotion. Intelligent regret is another thing--this helps us learn and improve our commitment to acting better and changing our minds and hearts.

I said that for me, it wasn't sad at all, but that it would take me some time to explain why. That was this morning. This evening I wrote this:


Okay, here goes... The phrase "God is love," like "to be or not to be," is so much a part of our culture that many people who use it don't know where it comes from. So, a little background:

It comes from the first of three letters written by the apostle John that are part of the Christian Bible, referred to as 1 John. John also wrote the Gospel of John, one of four accounts of Jesus' life found in the Bible. The letter is short, but is jam-packed with themes like the holiness of God, the divinity of Christ, the centrality of love and the reality of sin.

Also, the letter draws upon the Gospel so much that it's practically an extension of it, so to fully appreciate what he means when he says, "God is love," one would need to read the Gospel, then the letter. The following is just a tip of the iceberg, to provide a taste of context (he said, awkwardly mixing metaphors).

John's letter says twice that "God is love." The first time is here (1 John 4:7-10):

"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

Note what happens here. John says "God is love," then talks in almost the next breath about God sending His Son to satisfy His anger against our sins by dying (that's "propitiation"). That's a big chunk of stuff that many people do not associate with God being love, but that's what John meant when he wrote it.

You ask, "If God is love, should He not rejoice in your goodness?" I can't say what God should do. But I can restate John to say what He HAS done and IS doing: BECAUSE God is love, He HAS forgiven my badness - at the cost of His Son's life. BECAUSE God is love, He IS giving me His own goodness from the inside out. Which is a better deal than simply celebrating my goodness, because my goodness is not nearly as sturdy as His.

My original post oversimplified things; my religious teaching was not ALL about guilt. It would indeed be sad if it were "only the feeling of guilt that bears one closer to the source of all love and goodness." But in fact I was taught that because God is love, He has removed my objective guilt through His Son's death; thus I was drawn to God by gratitude.

The problem was that somehow, that teaching was overlaid with the idea that I still needed to cultivate guilty feelings. Somehow, while believing that God's Son paid the price for all of my sins, I believed that I still needed to pay for them in some fashion myself. Thus, guiltification - using guilt as a qualification for God's approval (yep, I made that up).

This morning's realization was not sad precisely because I did receive the above teaching from John (and the rest of Scripture) deeply enough so that it went deeper than guiltification. If it hadn't, I might have developed a level of resentment that would have led me to turn away from God altogether. As it was, I merely suffered some neurosis for a while. Given that every child of human parents gets screwed up somehow, I got off much easier than many others, and on the whole I am deeply grateful.
_______________________

Are you a Christian for whom justification has sometimes been obscured by guiltification? For that matter, have you seen guiltification at work in purely human relationships ("I'll like you more when you act more guilty.")? Share your story in the comments!