Happy Poverty

When I was brought low, he saved me.

I have a few quotations taped on the side of my desk, next to my bed. It's a couple of Bible verses, a Rumi poem, a few notes to myself about things I want to remember, a poem by Mary Oliver, a Psalm. I keep them there so that when I wake up in the morning, I remember the important things, and when I'm feeling especially low, I remember the good.

The smallest quotation, written in Sharpie on a tiny orange post-it note, is taken from the Beatitudes.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. 

Today, this is the most important sentence in the entire world. I've had two weeks off for the holidays. This always seems so good to me, time to spend with friends, time to wander, time to bake and read, time to sleep in, time to color and binge watch Netflix. But no matter what else I'm involved in, no matter what activities my body is devoted to, these long breaks always leave time to my heart for thinking, and that means all the topics I've been avoiding suddenly, silently resurface.

There is something about Christmas and New Year's that makes me evaluate my life. Stringently. Part of being around so many loved ones means that I am constantly comparing myself to them: everyone seems to be smarter, prettier, holier, more successful, inexplicably happier. And part of it is that I'm forced to judge my life over the past year. Am I, compared to myself 12 months ago, any holier, smarter, prettier, happier, or more successful? Somehow the answer is always the same: No, you are not. No, Self, you are the same Self you were last year: equally jealous, lonely, angry, weary, pitiable, selfish, fearful, unsuccessful, and sad. This reality always hits me like a sack of potatoes in the face: it hurts.

I don't know what it is, but I can't seem to let go of the fact that other people are better than me. I know God is better than me, this is an un-troubling idea, but even while I write this, I feel annoyed and upset because I have friends who have blog posts that are better written than this one will be.

I want to be a glorious unicorn, but I know I am a worm.

But I want someone to call down from the sky, No, you are not a worm. You have been a glorious unicorn all this time! You are sparkly and you are lovely. You are worthy of love and goodness. 

I hate being spiritually poor.

I googled "What does it mean to be poor in spirit?" and then skimmed a couple of articles from what I thought might be opposing viewpoints. The answer seems to be the same across the board. Spiritual poverty is the inheritance of every human since the Garden of Eden. But to be poor in spirit is to admit and recognize one's spiritual bankruptcy, and to throw one's self upon the mercy of God.

When I look honestly at myself, all I find is spiritual poverty. And it is so discouraging. I don't want to be poor. I want to be good enough. I want to hold up my head in a crowd. I want to feel proud of my accomplishments, of my whole being. But I'm not. I'm ashamed, and I'm sad.

Charles Spurgeon's sermon on this Beatitude emphasizes that the word "blessed" as it appears in this self-effacing maxim is the same word used in the Beatitudes I'd more willingly claim: "blessed are the peacemakers. . . .blessed are the pure in heart. . ." There is no less goodness or happiness in accepting one's spiritual poverty than there is in being a person of righteous reputation. Everyone who is pure in heart, who is persecuted for the sake of righteousness, who hungers and thirsts for goodness, takes their first step on the same road: blessed are the poor in spirit. 

But it is not enough for me, 89% of the time, to be told that God loves my awareness of my own poverty. It is not enough for me to be told that when God looks at me he sees Christ. I don't want him to see Christ! I want him to see me, and love me for my goodness. This is, of course, impossible.

Something that God has been hammering into my head over the past few years, is that it is blessed to receive. We are so good at giving sometimes, having been told by our Lord that it is the better option, that I think we have forgotten how to receive.

Being a spiritual pauper means being a recipient of grace, and being a recipient of grace is the best possible outcome for humanity. But it is hard to receive sometimes. I love being given presents, but it's always easier for me when I give in return a gift of equal value. It is easier to take with one hand while I am giving with another. It is very, very hard to be the person with both hands open, being the vehicle of blessing for someone else who wants to share their blessing with you. It is hard to say, "I accept this gift, knowing that I can in no way give back to you in equal or greater amount. I take, accepting that this gift is by no means fair, because it is unearned, unmerited, and cannot be recompensed."

It's hard to accept good without feeling guilty. Without feeling that you need to make up for it somehow, that you need to balance the scales. But that is entirely what being poor in spirit means. Our hands open to God, our mouths open like ugly little squawking bird-babies, waiting for God, our Nourishing-Mother, to dump sustenance into our impatient, starving mouths.

Bah. Blessed. Happy are you when you realize your hands are empty. Happy are you when you let someone else fill them. Happy are you when you take what you have been given, and glory in the fact that you have nothing of equal value to give in return. Happy are you when you gladly receive all good gifts, whether from God or from man, and are simply happy to have them.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven, and they have done nothing to deserve it but to hold out their empty hands. Happy Poverty.

A Day in the Life of a Bridesmaid. . .

Yesterday, my best friend of over 20 years got married. Yes, I know. Married. Here are some gratuitous photos to prove it, given here for the gratification of my own feelings. I can't go into a long description of the day, or my feelings about it, because I don't actually want to.  I will say though, that it surprised me. Each wedding I've been in is as different as each of the friends I've attended. Shall I show the photos now? Yes. I shall.

All done crying, by this point.

The Best Man got lost for a while and missed this photo opp.

Using all of my rhetorical powers.

Being the Church

A.A. Milne's "Hoppity"

Hoppity

Christopher Robin goes
Hoppity, hoppity,

Hoppity, hoppity, hop.
Whenever I tell him
Politely to stop it, he
Says he can't possibly stop.

If he stopped hopping,
        He couldn't go anywhere,
Poor little Christopher
Couldn't go anywhere. . . .
That's why he always goes
Hoppity, hoppity,
Hoppity,
Hoppity,
Hop. 

The Giving Tree

Listening to the Pride & Prejudice soundtrack at the day's end with my hairpins removed makes me feel so spiritual. I'm sitting here, trying to write honestly. Right now,  I feel the lack of God's presence in my life. This week I've felt so. . .heavy laden. My soul feels as though it has been tied up in knots, twisted and gnarled, my psyche is suffering from Indian burn.

In moments like these, days like these, I see how hard it is for me to be even superficially pleasant. I don't know what makes me feel so badly, and I am aware, almost every moment, of my own inability to live a life of love. At work, one of the instructors read the book "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein. She asked all of the students, and some of the staff, to choose one thing they would like to give others throughout the school year. I decided that I would give love, because that is the best gift I could think of, and the most costly. That gift mocks me every day, as I sit in my classroom looking at the Mother Theresa prayer for those serving the sick pinned to the bottom left corner of my bulletin board. It's hard to love, I tell you! But sometimes it's hard merely to want to love.

Today I feel full of despair again. It's so hard, sometimes, to believe that righteousness is possible. It's very easy to believe that the road to happiness is getting my own way, or the removal of every difficulty: it isn't though. When I pray, it feels like I'm begging an indifferent passerby on the street for sacks of gems. I don't expect anything, because I feel like a) I don't deserve it, and b) giving is not in the nature of the one I am beseeching. This is a lie of course, well, not the first part. I don't deserve anything beautiful, true, or good, but I'm expected to expect these things anyway. It's so hard to pray for joy when I feel like it never comes. It's so hard to pray for faith when you don't believe anything. It's impossible to believe that God is happy when I am so miserable. Or is it?

I need to be re-taught that God is a giving tree, that he hears us, hears me, when we pray, that he gives benevolently out of the overflowing goodness of his own excellent nature. But I doubt it; I doubt.

God is a giving tree. He gives conditionally, in that he gives us what is good even when this is not what we have desired. He gives conditionally, in that he gives when he ask according to his will. Is God deaf to my prayers? Have I sinned against him in a way that would cause him to stop-up his ears? Oh, God, grant what you command, and command what you will.

I have been thinking a lot about St. Augustine, Dante, George MacDonald, John Donne, Plato--everyone who writes about ordinate love and the beatific vision. It is so easy to love inordinately. 

"If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee." 

It's hard to be good. Part of the difficulty of being good is believing that God will make you good when you ask.

But God is a giving tree, he loves to give, to bless. He gives pain and he gives great joy.

Oh, I wanted to relate this back to George MacDonald. I'm re-reading At the Back of the North Wind, and I'm re-remembering (again) all that MacDonald says about being at the still point. Do you remember the still point? The still point harkens back to Boethius, to Dante, to lots of people. The point is this: at the center of the universe is God, a Being supremely perfect and happy. Evil happens around him, and he uses the good and the bad to shape human events while he himself remains wholly uncontaminated and unchanged. If I keep myself at the still point, where God is, I will not be shaken by the things in this life, small or great, that threaten to tie knots in my soul. I need to understand this because it is so easy to tie a knot in my soul. I am derailed by weather changes.

But God is a giving tree. He is a giving tree, and he loves us. He loves us. O! How he loves us!




Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways.

On Holy Optimism

Anne: Can't you even imagine you're in the depths of despair?
Marilla: No, I cannot. To despair is to turn your back on God. 

I used to laugh at this part of the movie when I was a child, but now Marilla's words ring true. I don't think Christians are supposed to be the glass-half-full types, exactly. But, I do think that a Christian's outlook on life should be pretty rosy, because Jesus is the lens, and the light, by which we see.

That entire paragraph was full of cliches and quotations from other people. I'll offer you my own thoughts now. I'm a pessimist. I'm also a Christian. Sometimes, I don't feel that these aspects of my nature are at odds with one another. But, they are. Oh, how they are! People who are bubbly, consistently positive, or over-given to smiling tend to get on my nerves--but mainly because I feel that there is something false in, or absent from, a thoroughly optimistic person. Surely a happy person is happy either because they have never suffered or because they are faking it, that's my usual explanation. This is silly though, because the truest, most real Thing is God. And God is, in his essence, perfect happiness. Do you know how profound that is? God is happy.

God is happiness in the same way that God is love. It is one of his perfections, and God is the sum of all perfections: perfect power, perfect being, perfect goodness, perfect contentment. The realization that the foundation of reality is happiness hits me like a ton of bricks. It really does. God doesn't promise a happy life in the way that I tend to define happiness. My picture of happiness tends to be anti-Boethian. Boethius (and God, too I think) says that true happiness does not come from that which can be taken away. Think about that: if you can lose it, it cannot make you happy. You can lose things, relationships with people, your own health, a home. Happiness is not in these things then. Happiness is inherent in that which is secure, perfect, and eternal. God does not promise the happiness that I think will come with adequate personal space, a fulfilling career, or meaningful and healthy relationships. God does promise, however, perfection and eternal bliss. God promises a happiness that I cannot even conceive of, and the best part is that this happiness flows from his own laughing, loving nature.

I need to dwell on this idea a little more, because it's hard for me to think of God this way. And that's just my problem: unbelief. I'm unhappy, I'm given to pessimism and despair so often, because I'm given to unbelief. It's hard for me to believe what God says about himself when it relates to my own personal well-being. It's easy for me to believe, say, that God exists; it's easy for me to believe that he is all-knowing and all-powerful. It's easy for me believe that Jesus died for the sins of the masses, for the nations, for the world, for my friends. It's hard to believe that Jesus' salvation extends to me, also. It's hard for me to believe that he is genuinely interested in my life, in my particular life. It's hard for me to believe that God is happy, and that he wants me to be happy, too.

My patterns of sinfulness begin and end in unbelief. Anxiety, worry, fear, doubt--these are all differing manifestations of the same basic lie: that life is essentially a burden and that God is essentially grim. Therefore, because I spend so much time believing a lie, I spend a great deal of time doubting the truth. Hence, despair. And in my despair, I turn toward deception, giving my back to God. Marilla is a wise woman.

It's important for me to know that God is happy. God is happy, and he has invited me to share in his own divine happiness: the glorious perfect beatitude of the Trinity.

More on this from desiringgod.org:

So often we think of God as non-enthusiastic or even gloomy. The exact opposite is true: He loves to be God, He takes great pleasure in all that He does, and He is enthusiastic about serving His people and working for their welfare. For example, God says in Jeremiah 32:41: "I will rejoice in doing them good." Jesus said in John 15:11, "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you." And Paul writes in 1 Timothy 1:11 of "the glorious gospel of the blessed God." Blessed means happy. So Paul is saying: "the glorious gospel of the happy God."

God is infinitely happy because he is infinitely glorious. And, the good news is that he invites us to enter into his happiness. Here is what Piper writes in The Pleasures of God (p. 26): "It is good news that God is gloriously happy. No one would want to spend eternity with an unhappy God. If God is unhappy then the goal of the gospel is not a happy goal, and that means it would be no gospel at all. But, in fact, Jesus invites us to spend eternity with a happy God when he says, ‘Enter into the joy of your master' (Matthew 25:23). Jesus lived and died that his joy-God's joy-might be in us and our joy might be full (John 15:11; 17:13). Therefore the gospel is ‘the gospel of the glory of the happy God.'"

So. The expectation for happiness is grounded in reality itself. 

Cheer up. Believe. God is happy.

And now, something to lift your spirits, courtesy of my friend, Sara:
Ignore the early 90's aesthetic and Christian materialism, pay attention to the chorus

I'm feeling very happy about this

If you can't tell from the photograph, one of those people is wearing a very fancy ring. But I won't tell you which one. HOORAY!

Portrait of a. . .?

Don't read Henry James. There are better things to do with one's time. However, I'm reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady just now, and his writing style does begin to grow on one. This is still not an excuse for you to read Henry James. It isn't that I don't love to picture sun-warmed stone benches and tangled rose vines in Florence, don't misunderstand me. I'd just rather fill in the details for myself and skip the pages where he tries to bend my imaginative faculty to his too-vigorous descriptions.

I'm thinking, as usual, about my life. I'm bored. I find that in trying to carefully keep the balance between prudential living and passionate adventurism I continually manage to do nothing at all. This is a problem because, like I said, I'm bored. I always admire the friends who pursue what sounds good to them--the ones who seem to discredit all the reasons against adventure. I apparently ought to marry the reasons against adventure because I love them so much. Sometimes I ask myself what I'd do if I could do whatever my heart desired. The answer doesn't seem to be so different than what I'm preparing to do: go to grad school, become fluent in French, and live abroad. But, I'd do it more carelessly perhaps. With a truer zest for life, with more expectation of goodness.

The future has almost ceased to interest me. That is, except for those moments when I'm still curious about how I'll "turn out". At 25, am I finally nearing the point when I can no longer ask such questions? At which point, exactly, will I be turned? At 30? I feel that the older I get, the more my possibilities diminish, yet I don't know what the possibilities have been or are currently. But I am getting sidetracked.

I do not like regret. I do not like it, because I believe it has no cure. In college, I denied myself many pleasures for the greater pleasure of being a good student. Do not ask me what it means to be a good student. I have asked myself that question so many times I couldn't make you a decent answer. However, the point remains. I pursued (and I'm glad of it still) academic rigor at the expense of having a good time. Well, now my academic rigors have subsided, at least for a while, and I am still not having a good time. I'm working full-time again, as I do every summer, and finding it delightful in many ways. The great difference between this year and last is that I'm not frantically reading ahead--or generally angsty about the duration of my degree.I'm finished now. This is a glorious truth which I frequently turn to ponder in my soul. It maketh the heart glad.

But, the point. I expected greater responsibilities after college. I expected to have to act like a grown-up. Although, as I've been paying for most of the costs of my maintenance for years not much has changed there.

The thing I also expected, which has turned out to be a grave disappointment, was to find waiting for me the pleasures I disdained to get all of those books read.

It isn't here. Here is a 40-hour work week and aimless free time after hours. Here are friends who live too far away or who are too busy with their marriages or careers to indulge in the pleasures of the life I've so long postponed.

Here, now, with wings finally unfurled, I find that I've not escaped the cage. It was a different place, with my wings submissively folded in, but now they are open and restless for wind. They scrape the prison bars and a few feathers are torn loose and drift to the floor.

I made a rule before graduating against parenthetical living. Parenthetical living being, of course, my only skill and glory. So I ask myself, am I waiting in vain for a time when life will be more accessible? I hope not, because that time will not come, I'm certain of this now.

A friend of mine once remarked, after spontaneously piercing her eyebrow at 25, that if you miss youthful folly when you're young, you mayn't make up for it later. It's too late then. Is it too late now?

I so want to enjoy myself. I have known keen intellectual pleasures over the past seven years, yes, but other avenues of existence have been wanting. It is time to turn down other lanes if I have not lost the way.

I want to fly.