Knowledge and Power

God, Gratitude, Guidance, Life, Obedience 0

“Please give me knowledge of your will for me and the power to carry it out.” It is in the knowledge of God’s will for us that we begin to discover our true nature. God’s will and our will are not at opposite ends of the table, although we may fear that they are. It is God’s will for us to be happy, joyous, and free and just what will make us that way is what we are out to discover. Things may make us happy that we do not credit with the power to give us happiness. Things may make us unhappy that we falsely believe will make us happy. When we turn our will and our life over to the care of God, the key word there is care. In God’s care, we discover ourselves and our true nature. We learn to see which of the many things on life’s menu might be appropriate to our own genuine appetites — and as we pray for knowledge of God’s will, we may find our tastes shifting. We can cooperate with where and how we are being led. The chief means by which we are able to cooperate is through our gratitude. Gratitude leads us to alertness to God’s involvement with our lives.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 80-81

A Personal God

Faith, God, Guidance 0

It is the idea of God “being involved” that is often the sticking point. Many of us prefer to think of our relationship with God as being unrequited. Most of us are not really comfortable with the idea of a personal God, one interested in all our affairs. We think that there are areas beneath God’s concern, and those are the areas, particularly finance and romance, that we tend to try to run ourselves. Very often it is the area that we declare beneath God’s interest where we could use the most divine help. Stubbornly isolationist, often more than a little self-pitying, rather than open our eyes to the help all around us, help that has been divinely sent, we try to go it alone. In so doing, we shut out many of the intended helpers sent in our direction.

When a gift horse is sent our way, we not only look it in the mouth, we slap it on the rump to get it out of our vicinity as soon as possible. “It’s just a coincidence,” we say when something transpires that seems an answered prayer.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 78

God of Our Dreams

God, Guidance, Prayer 0

When we hide from God our true goals and agendas, we cannot really hide them, but we can prevent ourselves from enjoying the comfort of knowing that God is “on the case” and working on our behalf. We can rob ourselves of the comfort of an ongoing collaboration with God, in which we both try to work to meet “our” goals. The problem, of course, is that we often assume that our personal goals and God’s goals for us are at opposite ends of the table. We do not trust that our dreams come from God and that God has the power to accomplish them. Instead, we act as though every idea we have is born out of self-will, and even in the most willful of us, this is never the case. God inspires us with desires and dreams. God gives us goals and agendas. God is prepared to help fulfill our goals and dreams. One more time it comes back to the questions of prayer. When we pray, “Please give me knowledge of your will for me and the power to carry it out,” we are often shocked by the fact that what is clarified for us is some very personal intention. We pray for God’s will only to discover how sharply we long for a partnership of our own with another human being. We pray for God’s will, thinking we will be pointed toward heaven, only to find that we are pointed squarely back into our career with a clear idea of what it is that we must do next to move ahead further.

God is not otherworldly. God is not flaky and airy-fairy. God is grounded in reality, and as we pray to God, we become more grounded, not less. As we ask to have our life run by God, we become more comfortable, not less, with the actual details of that life.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 76-77

Also Distant from the Father

God, Life 0

Elder brothers expect their goodness to pay off, and if it doesn’t there is confusion and rage. If you think goodness and decency is the way to merit a good life from God, you will be eaten up with anger, since life never goes as we wish. You will always feel that you are owed more than you are getting. You will always see someone doing better than you in some aspect of life and will ask, “Why this person and not me? After all I’ve done!” This resentment is your own fault. It is caused not by the prosperity of the other person, but by your own effort to control life through your performance.

— Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p. 52-53

Universalist Teachings of the Early Church

Forgiveness, God, Growth, Universalism 0

[About the teaching of Clement of Alexandria:] It is his lofty and wholesome doctrine that man is made in the image of God; that man’s will is free; that he is redeemed from sin by a divine education and a corrective discipline; that fear and punishment are but remedial instruments in man’s training; that Justice is but another aspect of perfect Love; that the physical world is good and not evil; that Christ is a Living not a Dead Christ; that all mankind form one great brotherhood in him; that salvation is an ethical process, not an external reward; that the atonement was not the pacification of wrath, but the revelation of God’s eternal mercy. . . . That judgment is a continuous process, not a single sentence; that God works all things up to what is better; that souls may be purified beyond the grave.

— John Wesley Hanson, Universalism, the Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church During Its First Five Hundred Years: With Authorities and Extracts, p. 126-127

H for Heliotrope

God, Guidance 0

The ingenuity of God is often startling. We think that we can see God’s will coming — and that it will be either A or B. Arriving, God’s will is often — as a friend of mine says — H, heliotrope, something that never would have occurred to you. It is for this reason that prayers for God’s will are best kept a daily and doable practice. This doesn’t eliminate surprises, but it does keep surprises a little more to the minimum.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 74

Forgiving our Neighbor

Forgiveness, God, Love, Obedience 0

When we forgive our neighbor, in flows the forgiveness of God’s forgiveness to us. For God to withhold his forgiveness from the one who will not forgive his neighbor is love as well as necessity. If God said, “I forgive you,” to a man who hated his brother, what would it mean to him? How would the man interpret it? Would it not mean to him, “You may go on hating. I do not mind it. You have had great provocation, and are justified in your hate.” No, the hater must be delivered from the hell of his hate, that God’s child should be made the loving child that he meant him to be.

— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 162

The Elder Brother’s Spirit

God, Life, Obedience, Trials 0

We see that the elder brother “became angry.” All of his words are dripping with resentment. The first sign you have an elder-brother spirit is that when your life doesn’t go as you want, you aren’t just sorrowful but deeply angry and bitter. Elder brothers believe that if they live a good life they should get a good life, that God owes them a smooth road if they try very hard to live up to standards.

What happens, then, if you are an elder brother and things go wrong in your life? If you feel you have been living up to your moral standards, you will be furious with God. You don’t deserve this, you will think, after how hard you’ve worked to be a decent person! What happens, however, if things have gone wrong in your life when you know that you have been falling short of your standards? Then you will be furious with yourself, filled with self-loathing and inner pain….

Elder brothers’ inability to handle suffering arises from the fact that their moral observance is results-oriented. The good life is lived not for delight in good deeds themselves, but as calculated ways to control their environment.

— Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p. 49-50