Monday, October 3, 2011

Channels of Adoration


This rediscovered passage from C.S. Lewis's Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer shone a slightly different light on this Monday practice of joining my voice with the Gratitude Community at A Holy Experience:
...pleasures are shafts of the glory [of God] as it strikes our sensibility. As it impinges on our will or our understanding, we give it different names--goodness or truth or the like. But its flash upon our senses and mood is pleasure.
   I have tried, since that moment [of first realizing the above], to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don't mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different. How shall I put it?
   We can't--or I can't--hear the song of a bird simply as a sound. Its meaning or message ("That's a bird") comes with it inevitably--just as one can't see a familiar word in print as a merely visual pattern. The reading is as involuntary as the seeing. When the wind roars I don't just hear the roar; I "hear the wind." In the same way it is possible to "read" as well as to "have" a pleasure. Or not even "as well as." The distinction ought to become, and sometimes is, impossible; to receive it and to recognize its divine source are a single experience. This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore.
   Gratitude exclaims, very properly, "How good of God to give me this." Adoration says, "What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!" One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.
   If I could always be what I aim at being, no pleasure would be too ordinary or too usual for such reception; from the first taste of the air when I look out of the window--one's whole cheek becomes a sort of palate--down to one's soft slippers at bedtime (pp.89-90).
Gratitude is good, commanded, right. This idea of turning all into adoration of the good God who creates and sustains it, though,...this captures my imagination and challenges me to keep growing.

What is this adoration? I think I have sipped it here and there, but reading Lewis I want to drink deeply, long draughts of the Glory, to drink until I gasp for breath. Too often the busy, the worry, the emergencies that aren't, these things drive me away and I wonder why I thirst. The Martha in me bustles busy and distracted, back and forth to the well to draw, and I forget to let the concerns draw me to His feet where I find the one good thing. I forget to drink the only water that gives life, the adoration I was made for.

It's been a quiet week, but here are a few of the Glory-shafts which have hit home. I thank God for them and aim at following them back to their beautiful source in Him.
~"The LORD is righteous in all His ways and kind in all His deeds" (Ps. 145:17).
~grace of no medical appointments last week
~courage to call and leave a message for the friend whose phone number I so serendipitously received the preceding week
~creative minds that produce wise books
~listening to the autumnal beauty of Hannah Coulter, understanding my farm-raised, Greatest Generation grandmothers better through it
~seeing myself in the Pharisees' stubborn preoccupation with rules and systems
~God's grace and the blessing of losses to temper that tendency
~Jesus' courage to speak what He heard from His Father and do the deeds of His Father, even though He knew full well that His obedience would set in motion the opposition culminating in the cross
~e-mailed prayers given and received
~God's encouragement from a reader's note about her mom's decades of great life with lupus
~funniest sermon illustration in a long time...
~...that actually pertained to the message at hand
~laughing with others until it hurts: another sunbeam to chase
~celebrating with my sister Mezzo her paid gig in a Bach cantata next month
~God's sovereignty over weather and drought: brief, not forecast pop-up thunderstorm to end a hundred-degree day last week; splendid forecast for this week that could only be improved with rain
(still counting...#1788-1802)










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11 comments:

  1. I prefer your writing to Lewis's. <3

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  2. You are too sweet. Love you too.

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  3. (although I respectfully disagree) :)

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  4. wow.. i love love this post.. what a beautiful shaft of glory to me as I read .. made me feel God.. wahoo..

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  5. Oh, that Mr. Lewis. He is always opening my eyes. It sounds like you have my same appreciation for his words. I have never read these and I am so grateful for your sharing. Yes, drink deeply...that's what he pulls in me too. I'll be thinking about this long after I leave this beautiful place.

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  6. Amazing thoughts on adoration. Really appreciated the wonderful way you played it all out. Celebrating with you better temps and no appointments! Actually, your whole list as always:) Now for some rain. . .

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  7. (as they say around here) brill!! [= brilliant]: so much to think about, and strive for.

    the gratitude/adoration distinction seems to me to be onto something really deep. do you think that distinction is related to a distinction one might draw between two ways of loving our neighbor (or even our enemy)? if i understood you well, in your gratitude/adoration distinction, there is a contrast between a case in which we appreciate some (finite) good simply as a finite good, and are *subsequently* (even if immediately) moved to gratitude towards the Infinite Good, and a case in which we in some way simultaneously experience and are grateful for the Infinite Good in and through our experience of the finite good (the finite good is "instantly redolent" of the infinite one). might there be an analogous distinction between a case where we love our neighbor (or even our enemy), moved by our love for God, but the love of neighbor and the love of God are so to speak "separate" loves, and a case in which we love God in and through--in the very act of--loving our neighbor? so that we have not just the assurance, but the *experience*, of giving our Lord something to eat and to drink, when we give our neighbor something to eat or drink? (maybe it is constitutive of charity that , although it needn't be limited to, it is never separate from the love of God?)

    glad we share a taste for Lewis, whom i've read and loved for since childhood. Wendell Berry, instead, i've just started reading, but he writes in an arrestingly meditative and unhurried way...

    blessings to you, and Allen, and Eb...

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  8. May I just requote? There's nothing more I can add. I love these:
    Lewis: "One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun."

    You: "I want to drink deeply, long draughts of the Glory, to drink until I gasp for breath."

    Beautiful, beautiful!

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  9. from Sylvia at http://sylvrpen.com/ via e-mail:

    "What good thoughts! I think of the direction Psalm 100:4, how the praise follows from the thanksgiving, and how many Psalms beginning with thanksgiving flow right into the reason for it in Who He is and What He's like.

    "As I am stretching to grow in my prayer life by getting prayer priorities in order, and am blog-sharing what I'm learning, I find your post here beautifully helpful. I must mention and link this post in my own post on praising and adoring God in conjunction with thanksgiving. Thank you."

    Her own post can be read here:
    http://sylvrpen.com/2011/10/multiplying-the-treasure-of-prayer-part-three-what-else-to-start-with/

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  10. @crumbles - Thank you all for your kind words. You spoil me!

    @chris -
    Wendell Berry is new reading for me, too, although I've heard his name about for some time now. "Arrestingly meditative and unhurried" - yes. _Hannah Coulter_ also felt melancholy in tone, but that's just me.

    "...there is a contrast between a case in which we appreciate some (finite) good simply as a finite good, and are *subsequently* (even if immediately) moved to gratitude towards the Infinite Good, and a case in which we in some way simultaneously experience and are grateful for the Infinite Good in and through our experience of the finite good (the finite good is "instantly redolent" of the infinite one)." That sums up how I also am understanding the gist of the Lewis passage. I don't know about the extension of the principle to loving God and loving neighbor, but it would be a taste of heaven to realize what you describe.

    Thank you for the blessings. May God return them to you and Mrs. Chris.

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  11. I was so happy to see you joined the jam last week.. and now, I'm enjoying and sipping...

    I'm with Lisa --

    I enjoyed --
    ewis: "One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun."

    You: "I want to drink deeply, long draughts of the Glory, to drink until I gasp for breath."


    Blessings to you this week!

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Thank you for sharing your day with me! Your presence here is a gift. *You* are a gift. Right now I am unable to reply to every comment, but please know I read and pray for each and every commenter. Grace and peace to you in Christ.