Freedom From The Inner Ring

You and I cannot escape the pull toward self-promotion. It invades each day through various mediums. And the very culture that tells us to hoist up our personal banners everywhere is the same culture that empowers us to act as our own judge and jury. It tells us that permissive behavior is the norm.

But though we cannot escape the cultural pull, we need not give in to it.

On Wednesday I wrote about the lost art of reflection. I discussed how, if we wait and reflect instead of reacting to situations, people and "news," we should find a most helpful friend: discernment. This friend draws a hard line, one our pride finds stark and uninviting.

Today, as we ready our hearts and minds for the coming Sunday gathering let's consider how we might join the practice of quiet reflection with true Christian freedom.

They seem opposed, restraining from reaction yet exercising freedom. But they are, in fact, kindred.

The Apostle Peter reminds his readers: “Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor (1 Peter 2:16–17 ESV).”

Christian freedom means we are free to follow God's will. We are, like Paul, slaves to the Gospel. As such we do not live as permissive agents of cheap grace and license.

Rather, we adhere to a specific code: every person is to be shown respect, our Christian brothers and sisters are to be loved, God is to be approached in reverent fear and our authorities are to be respected.

Actions Reveal Motives

It's easy to forget this Christian Code. In the pursuit to build leadership platforms, influence, personal brands, secure a raise, or position we pounce on opportunity.

I often see this in the world of blogs and writing. In the name of "being prophetic," or "holding some Christian leader accountable," or "just because I can" writers and talking heads wield their words as battle-axes. They scramble to be heard and seen and, of course, followed.

At some level we all of us desire to exist and be seen as a person of the inner circle of our chosen professions.

But why?

In his address titled "The Inner Ring" C.S. Lewis exhorts his listeners to beware of pursuing such an inner ring. Such a pursuit often demands character compromises. Because we desire exclusivity, to be "in the know," to be cool, to be accepted, to be viewed as exceptional, we disregard our Christian code. We offer convenient excuses for our selfish actions.

Lewis offers this bit of wisdom that I find helpful as a daily reminder (pardon its length):

The quest for the inner ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters.

You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know.

But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are indeed sung and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring.

But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric, for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things they like. This is frienship.

If we set out each day to work, to hone our craft—whatever it may be—then we create a culture that cares little for the pull of self-promotion and permissive behavior. We, in fact, create a safe place where respect and love and reverence flourish.

We will find ourselves free in Christ, yet bound to the hard and beautiful words of his Gospel. We will find ourselves caring less for the Inner Ring and more for those we should be caring for anyway: our true friends.

Lord, grow us in your patience. Strengthen us as we strive to live in the freedom of your Way.

The Lost Art of Reflection

I remember the daffodils, a beauty not astonishing. How they waved to me from a textbook page. How they bobbed in tetrametric dance. All week my thought rested on these daffodils as I tried to remember my first encounter with beauty. A beauty that I recognized as different; as referent to something other than what I was beholding.

It was in Wordsworth's poem, "I Wondered Lonely As A Cloud" I encountered an image I would not soon forget:

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

In Till We Have Faces Lewis describes Psyche's beauty by saying, "It was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it."

I find resonance with Lewis's description of beauty with how Wordsworth defines poetry: "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings arising from emotion recollected in tranquility."

Interesting how beauty and poetry find their origins in reflection. How the astonishment was not immediate, but expanded and grew as time tooled the image or thought into something transcendent.

A few weeks back I started The Faerie Queen, a classic poem of enormous proportions. This poem influenced Lewis's imaginative shaping, and I can see why.

Only a few pages in, I stumbled upon a description of trees that demanded I reread, over and over. Each tree—the oak, laurel, pine and poplar all—was given human paint as they drifted beneath the stormy sky, dancing like the daffodils.

The faerie scene of growing tension not only demands several readings, but invites the whimsy of thought. I fall asleep to these scenes of waving daffodils and the swaying kings of the forest (oaks). Beauty absconds with our hearts but also rifles our intellect, holding it at melodic gunpoint.

What Beauty Demands

Our encounters of beauty turn us to certain realities we cannot neglect. In thinking upon the daffodils I faced a knowledge of something else beyond my capacity to explain. It drew desire from me, it resonated with what I understood to be a kind of goodness upon the earth, though I could not and still cannot articulate it.

In all beauty, it seems, we face a healthy bit of morality. And, as a Christian, this makes sense to me since I believe God to be the originator of all things good and true. Beauty resonates in us all and demands not only our attention but also the soulish side of our beings.

Am I hoisting up beauty as a proof for God? Maybe, I wouldn't be the first. But at a more popular level I think what we can learn from beauty (and poetry) is an art form lost in this world of instant publishing, opinions and hoo-ha. And that art form is reflection.

Reflection encourages a morality of heart and mind. If we simmer on something long enough, we will find what we did not want to find: our opinions laid waste. For reflection can house the grandest of notions and the deepest of beauties.

But, if we do in fact surrender our hearts and minds to God, reflection will show us how prideful our pens and thoughts can be—how lazy our opinions are formed. Lewis touched on this idea in his essay "The Seeing Eye." He writes:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully, but you’d be safer to stick to the papers. You’ll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or snobbish appeal.

 ​In today's world, it pays to be astonishing or provocative. But a holy beauty demands more from us. It demands the rights to our pride and our weak discernment; it demands we wait. It demands we sift through our reactions and realize our point of view can be selfish and wrong.

Let us, as Christians, strive to write pieces of beauty; pieces that demand reflection to produce and pieces that demand our readers to reflect as well. So much of what gets passed around in the blogsophere demands little from us.

Provocation and astonishment might garner large followings for a time, but in the long run they wither and are easily deleted.

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The Prayer Series // Hear My Heart O Lord

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I know, Lord. I know. But I can't see that far. I know you hold it all, all of it. But I want to hold it before I believe it. Can I do that? Can I hold it first?

I know you're capable to supply the need. And, I don't mind asking. But my belief wavers. My mind cries out, and scrambles to the closest worldly anchor—well, for a time they feel like anchors, all those things I think I control. And when I consider this and that, I doubt, I doubt, I doubt—my direction, my calling. What if my faith veers me and I don't know it? What if my intentions, which I think true, are really clouded with pride?

Oh my God, why do I stumble over my own feet? Why do I foster a spirit of fear—the bedfellow of doubt? Where does fear fit in with my relationship with you?

Forgive my selfishness and worrying heart. Forgive my shortsightedness. Even though I stumble over my weak heart I cannot fall far from your mercy. Your graciousness picks me up and I, once again life.

Your words to Isaiah comfort me. Your arm is not too short to save. I create the barrier, I build the wall—me and my sin. I lose sight of Your vision for me, how you desire my triumph. I sit making mud pies when the vineyard sprawls just beyond the bend. Why can't I see?

But you opened my eyes, O Lord! I see the veil hiding me from you. Of course You hear me. Of course You possess the strength to save. Your beauty, to me, is your steadfastness. You can't disown yourself. Even when I stammer in my faithlessness You remain faithful.

And there you are, O Lord, my God, dressed in your armor: your breastplate of righteousness, helmet of salvation, garments of vengeance, your cloak of zeal. You come riding to me, to me! You come on the intensity of a flood that you cause with your breath!

You are my Warrior God. You shoot the shoots of deliverance with strands of love and kindness following behind. You stoop to feed! I eat and I am filled. You bends to help, even when I can't help but to wallow in my pride and doubt and muck.

"Make a promise to me now, reassure me somehow … I have a feeling in my soul and I pray that I'm not wrong, the life I have now it is only the beginning. Feels like I'm born again! Feels like I'm living!" (Lyric, Mac Powell)