Short is Sweet

Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. -- Ecclesiastes 5:2

In those ancient days of yore when I was a college student, I didn’t give much thought to challenging what I was told.  I believed some things; I didn’t believe other things, but I did not bother much with trying to figure out why I thought a thing was true or untrue.  I remember one of the few times I did ask myself why.  We were in an Abnormal Psych class and there was a professor from the Philosophy department auditing the class.  Somehow he and I got into a discussion of whether or not there was such a thing as the “subconscious mind”.  He argued there was not. 

As time has gone on, I think he was so wrong that he was almost right.  Obviously, we do have an autonomic nervous system (ANS) that runs the various life-sustaining functions of the body such as respiration, digestion, and circulation of the blood.  This control system can be influenced by our conscious mind – when we are threatened by danger, for example, but not directly manipulated.  I can’t order my heart rate to be 72 instead of 55.  Some people seem to be able to do this, more or less, at will, but it likely involves tricking the ANS into reacting in a certain direction.

I don’t think there is a place in the brain where the subconscious resides, like a well or cave shrouded in mystery or darkness.  The analogy we sometimes use is to describe the “conscious” part of the mind as being like a circle from a flashlight in a dark building.  What’s in the light is that of which we are aware.  Attention may be part of the issue, but when someone talks about the power of the “subconscious” mind, this isn’t what they mean. 

I have come to believe that the brain and the mind are not synonymous.  The conscious mind seems more like a communications hub.  Thoughts, interpretations of sensations, the wash of emotions, impulses, and all the rest come through the conscious mind.  It connects the body and the outside world – but not just the material world of our five senses.  We are also connected to the spiritual, and it is here, in the realm of the spirit, of the eternal, that this powerful mystery we call the subconscious resides. 

When we speak of the heart or the spirit, we are trying to get at this realm that both lies at the center of our being yet is as uncontained as the cosmos itself.  From whence came the music of Mozart or Bach or Bo Diddley?  Where did Dante find The Inferno?   How did Milton know about Paradise Lost or Shakespeare Hamlet?  Many men sailed on whaling ships, but only Melville encountered Moby Dick.  The same can be asked of a multitude of musicians, poets, painters, and the various and sundry geniuses of mathematics, physics and other sciences who have brought us treasures from heaven. 

We should be careful of what we say, listen more than we speak for the kingdom of heaven is within us, and among us.  We abide in Christ, and Christ abides in us.  The Lord warned us against babbling vain repetitions for He hears us, both when we pray and when we curse, and most of us can’t say much without saying something stupid. 

(I prove this myself right here as often as not.)

RE: TARDIS

In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old, that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name, declares the LORD who does this. -- Amos 9:11-12

The booth or tabernacle of David was the tent in which the Ark rested after David brought it up to Jerusalem until the completion of Solomon’s temple.  Amos is prophesying some two hundred years after the reign of Solomon.  Referencing the tabernacle of David would have been analogous, in a historical sense, to our referencing that period when the seat of the federal government was in New York rather than in Washington, D.C.  The words of Amos, though, look forward to the Son of David and His resurrection. 

We were talking about the Ark and how we are God’s dwelling a couple of days ago.  It is sometimes said, in words to this effect, God is so vast and transcendent that the cosmos itself cannot contain Him yet so immanent, so personal and intimate that He is able to dwell within a human heart.  We are not worried by paradoxes, recognizing enlightenment reconciles parallel lines at the vanishing point of language.     

I am not a diehard Dr. Who fan, but I know what TARDIS is, and I know that it is bigger on the inside than on the outside.  Humans are the same way.  We tend to think, in common sense, of our bodies as containers.  They are more like three-dimensional interfaces.  I won’t be tattooing this old carcass – too much like branding cattle – but if I were of that persuasion, I would consider:  Cosmos Inside.      

Restoring the booth of David would serve to unite the people of God.  Edom, that is Esau, and Israel are brothers separated and often at odds with one another.  The Lord rejected Esau as He had previously rejected Ishmael but not forever.  The rejection of the nations, whatever their lineage, was only temporary and relative.  Eventually all are reunited in and under the one Tabernacle: Christ.  We are all in Christ, and He dwells in us.  The kingdom of God is within you.   

Into the Deep

And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch. -- Luke 5:4

I watched a first half-hour or so of the Tom Hank’s movie Cast Away, again, the other night.  The island on which the character, Chuck Noland, finds himself stranded is surrounded by a reef, over which the surf surges powerfully.  His first attempt to escape and reach a ship passing in the distance  is thwarted by the surf.  Despite his best efforts to overcome the waves' power, he is thrown back.  No matter how hard or frantically he paddled, he could not climb the mountain of water that stood in his way.  After years on the island, having adapted to his situation and developed a new set of skills, he finds a section of a Port-a-Potty washed up.  With this, he constructs a sail on a raft.  Aided by the wind, Noland is finally able to escape the shallow lagoon and reach deep water.

As I have noted before, the exposition of those first verses of Luke 5 was a life-changing experience for me.  The fishermen of Galilee cast their nets at night and scooped up the fish feeding in the shallows near the shore.  There was no point in throwing their nets into deep water – to which the fish retreated as the sun warmed the waters of the lake.  No catch in those conditions would be worth the effort.  Jesus changes the equation.

The conscious, natural mind of man is like shallow water.  A lot gets caught or trapped there.  Some of it is useful and beneficial, but it ends up being a very limited and isolated existence.  If we cannot venture out into deep water, into that part of ourselves that is open to and connected with the infinite, we can’t have much hope.  Our existence will be routine, perhaps even drudgery and imprisonment.  No amount of education or intellectual effort is going to paddle us over the breaker and set us free.  But we can, through Christ, make use of the wind of the Spirit.  He can enable us to go beyond the barriers that have confined us.

Now, of course, deep water or an open ocean can be a pretty scary place.  When there is nothing on the horizon, how do we know where to go?  Some of the well-intentioned souls who risked leaving their island find themselves adrift and lost.  In all that shifting, chaotic water, we need God's word as a compass and His truth as rudder to steer us straight.  Again, we look to Jesus who is always the Way, the Truth, and our Guiding Light. 

We are in Him, but just the same, Jesus said, He abides in us – as within so without.  The Father is accessible to us at every moment, in every situation.  Do not be afraid of the deep. 

Made Out in the Shades

Therefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision — Acts 26:19

Visions are not as rare as many tend to think, but neither are they normally as dramatic and overwhelming as that which came upon Saul of Tarsus. I doubt that anyone is converted apart from a vision. We just don't call it that. We talk about a realization or a sudden understanding. It may not be, most likely it isn't, a direct vision of Christ. Instead we are stopped on our way by something we don't really understand. The light flooding into our eyes may not show us anything except our own blindness. The words we hear may give us only the next step rather than our ultimate destination.

Things that had been chafing us and challenging us at last confront us. We find ourselves pushed in a new direction. Remember that after his encounter with Jesus, Saul was blind for three days. Vision does not equal immediate clarity of purpose and direction. We are not necessarily like the Donald Pleasence character in "Hallelujah Trail" who, upon imbibing, would shout, "I see it now!"

Leading up to our house is a simple little drive made of limestone. We have a family or two of killdeer that live around our pond. They often come up and build their nest in the bare road. This involves creating a little hollow in the gravel where the eggs can rest. How they figure out the spots where the wheels or the mower will miss them is beyond my comprehension, but they do. They apparently depend upon the kindness of the stranger not to take them out with the trimmer. For weeks, I will see one of the adult birds doing the broken-wing draw play in front of my truck, tractor or bike. The little eggs are a silvery gray with black specks, and, unless one knows to look for them, they are hard to spot amid the grays and whites of three-quarter inch limestone chunks.

In a dream that I had a few days ago, I was walking on the driveway, and there, in the middle as usual, were two plover eggs. They looked a little odd, though, too small and too flat, too two-dimensional. I looked around and saw, off in the grass, two more eggs, larger and more natural in appearance. Knowing that I would run the mower over them, I decided to pick them up and replace them in the nest from which they must have been removed. Oddly, with the two speckled plover eggs, I saw another egg colored like a robin's, solid pale blue but much too large. When I stooped to pick up the eggs, I saw that the blue egg was really (or had turned into) a slightly flattened, roughly egg-shaped piece of soap — a half of one split at the long axis and set on that flat edge. That wasn't too surprising since we sometimes hang bar soap on the trees to freak out the deer. I looked down again and saw a lens from a pair of sunglasses lying on the road. I picked it up and held it in front of me.

If you have ever been out in the deep dark, like a remote woods on a moonless night, with only a lantern or flashlight, you have a good idea of how the mind works. Your mind is the dark forest. Consciousness is where the lantern spills its illumination. Dreams are a flash of lightning over the woods or a break in the clouds that allows the reflected light of the moon to bathe the world for a moment. Dreams are, by necessity, personal. My pastor used to say that we always have the interpretation with a dream or vision — Old Testament exceptions of Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar notwithstanding.

Truth is fragile and must be maintained whole to bring forth life.

Truth must be sought out and protected.

If we are truly looking for truth, we will know it when we see it.

If we find truth off the beaten path, we should ask ourselves if our direction needs to change.

Handling truth requires cleansing. We must be obedient to it rather than using it for our own ends. Our motives must be at least 99 and 44/100ths percent pure.

It is always wise to remind ourselves that we often see only a dim reflection of reality — "in a glass darkly".