Category: faith

Small Bottles

Oh bless O Lord those of us who, passing
through the dark valleys, could not help
but tighten our grip on things, who
despair when crises reduce our usefulness
to a pebble, our carefree grandiosity
to a bloodshot paranoia.Those of us
who knit our brows even in our sleeping
and dreaming, practicing an outward faith
along with many inward superstitions
—whether we know it or not—
for the same sake of keeping
a comfortable, self-preserving
level of control.

And what’s so wrong with hoarding
control, right? Isn’t it a building block
of a stable, sane, upstanding life in
these modern days? Yet isn’t it
just as human to enjoy music played
for us as it is to play it ourselves?

Maybe more so when it is our turn
to be visited by grief, invited by lament.
Maybe lament is how we keep our sanity.

So may our griefs give us pause,
And whether the pauses harden us
Or break us down, may they bring us
Back again to God’s economy,
Where nothing is wasted, where tears
Are kept lovingly in small bottles
With dates and names.

(5/31/20)

What I witnessed this week working from home

October 28 2021

-A dragonfly that decides to spend the night on the chewed-off stalk of our potted dao tree. And a tiny lizard on his way up the still-small trunk. Whether they meet and what happens when they do, I do not know. But what I am experiencing firsthand is what they say about native trees being attractive to local fauna.

-Two men who make a living collecting scrap, taking turns chipping away at a broken-off column of concrete about four feet long and a foot wide. The goal: to extract the supporting rebars inside it. The sound of chisel on cement goes on from around eight in the morning to almost four in the afternoon. I think of giving them water and bread, but timidity gets the best of me. I wonder how many hours I would have lasted in that task if it were me, and at how our jobs, though different and supposedly made easier by all this technology, sometimes seem just as futile. And at how convenient it is to never move beyond just making analogies. I pray to be bolder next time.

-A baby lizard who—instead of scurrying away as I expected when I unintentionally sprinkle water droplets near it while drying my hand after washing—stays to lick off the droplets on the wall. It is a hot day. Or perhaps the young creature has not yet learned fear.

-A young family of carolers singing at the gate of the house across the road—father with guitar, mother with makeshift tambourine, and the daughter, never minding that her tinny, wee little-child voice is in a totally different key than her parents’. I close the curtain of the window from which I observe (my wife says “spies on”) the neighborhood, finding nothing unusual about it except for how early they start caroling—as today is not even November yet. But after a short while I wonder why they seem to be singing again at the same place after already receiving their pinaskuhan. It turns out this time they are caroling at the empty village chapel beside the house. It didn’t matter that they could not even get past the wrought-iron entrance; most chapels and even bigger churches in my country are safely locked when not in use, just like those special utensils tucked away in homes and the donated lab equipment in public schools–more protected than used.

But how quaint that perhaps out of some almost-forgotten plain-folk sensibility, this family thinks it only natural—after singing to people about the baby who is celebrated this season—to also sing directly to the celebrant himself in one of the places where they believe he could be found.

Maximizing shareholder value and considering the lilies

It is easy to deplore market capitalism and “modern city life” and the many ways they depersonalize people, but most of us who are well-to-do enough to bother about this concern actually live in the thick of them. (Or maybe it’s just that the other less urban voices are not as loud.) We have indoor plumbing, electricity, and grocery stores; we take for granted such conveniences as taxis, toothbrushes, and Internet connection; and we choose jobs based on what we believe are the best that employers can offer. And often the employers, incidentally, are multinationals.

Our condition refuses easy dismissal. We have to pay more attention to this than just the occasional comment about idealism as being something for the young.

—————————–

We may decry the obsession over the next best thing in gadgets and technology, but that is simply an effect of the all-too-familiar drive, year on year, to make products and services better, faster, more efficient in the companies where you and I work. As Norman Lear stated, “Maximizing shareholder value is the central disease of our time.” And even if your job is not in a multinational, it’s likely that the fruit of your labor is still part of this whole system.

In what ways should we engage in our culture? Just how should ordinary folks like us “cultivate the talents entrusted to them” while being “in the world but not of it”? How do we “render unto Cesar” without forgetting to “consider the lilies”? There must be some way to have better balance. Or to at least get a better perspective.

A Kingdom for Children

“In a world where significance and identity are earned by what we do, by what we have accomplished, by what we own, by what we earn, and where Christmas is about the lines we fought, the lists we finished, the gifts we were able to secure, the kingdom of God arrives scandalously, jarringly–even offensively–into our captive and content lives. In this kingdom, a person’s value begins before she had said or done the right things, before he had accumulated the right lifestyle, or even made the right lists. In this kingdom, God not only uses children in the story of salvation, not only calls us to embrace the kingdom as little children, but so the very God of creation steps into the world as a child.”–Jill Carattini

A passion exceeding other passions: A review of Larry Crabb’s Finding God

Note: The following is a repost of a book review I wrote for the Philippine Navigators newsletter in December 2015.

 

I first read Dr. Larry Crabb’s Finding God during the semestral break of my junior year in college, after a few months of hanging out with a Bible study group mostly for the sense of fun and friendship (not to mention the cooking of our study leader, Ate Paping) than for anything else.

I was merely looking for something to read; it did not occur to me how heavy the book would turn out to be as I see it now. I can’t even remember if it was recommended to me or if I just happened to pick it among many other books in the shelf. But considering how there couldn’t be such a thing as chance if there’s such a person as God, that choice must have been divinely appointed.

You see, it’s one of those books that make you deal with questions you may not know you’re asking, but need to.

Like most people in a relatively religious culture, I was familiar with such messages as trusting God and resting in the fact that he is in control, perhaps so familiar to the point of it all sounding commonplace and unremarkable. But exactly how that trust plays out and what it involves—what it demands of us—is often lost in trite sayings and the platitudes of forwarded e-mails and memes. Dr. Crabb’s book, I found as I read along, is one of the most painstaking, rigorous, but realistic explorations of how that trust looks like.

The book is rich with insights from biblical examples as well as stories from his own life and from people he had counseling sessions with. Its unrelenting assertion is that our fundamental sin is doubting God, doubting that he is good. The world is full of pain—even for people who are walking in the way of Christ. One common way that we cope is to tend to become indulgers (like the younger brother in the story of the Prodigal Son), dulling the pain with entitlements and pleasures we believe we deserve. Another is to become conformists (like the elder brother), jumping the hoops, subduing all desire, and believing that we can get God to cooperate with us, but ending up angrier when life takes a bad turn or seems unbearably unfair.

Neither of these is the biblical way, Dr. Crabb says, because in both cases we seek desperately to make life work with the tools and talents God has given us so that we don’t have to deal with him. We are in fact actively arranging life so that we can make it “a satisfying experience without ever having to trust God.”

In this perspective, sin is therefore not just our breaking of laws but our effort to supplement what we think are limits to God’s goodness. In a number of different ways, the book asks the question: “Did the fact ever cross your mind that you are here in this world just to understand the Lord Jesus Christ, and for no other reason?”

We begin to find God when we start considering seriously that he is good even if we don’t get everything that we want. That God himself is enough, even if our pain never goes away. “We find God to the degree that we want to find him. Until our passion for finding God exceeds all other passions, . . . we will not find him as deeply as he longs to be found.” In other words, our primary purpose is not to use God to solve our problems but to move through our problems toward finding God.

Finding God is personally significant to me because it happened to be the book that introduced me to the world of authors who wrote on the same theme: Philip Yancey (Where Is God When It Hurts? and Disappointment with God), John Piper (The Pleasures of God), Jerry Bridges (Trusting God), and later C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity) and Frederick Buechner. (Consider giving these books a try as well for a wider perspective.)

Perhaps one criticism that could be made about the book is that it doesn’t seem to dwell as much on the glories of finding God as it does on the upheavals and “pruning” that one goes through in finding God. But maybe that’s just as well, because that’s an accurate picture of the Gospel—something that is “bad news before it is good news.” Still, the book does talk about what can be called initial redemptions in transformed lives, and it makes references to the banquet, the party, the wedding feast with Christ that the Bible foreshadows.

“The Christian ideal,” says G. K. Chesterton, ” has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried.” Read this book for a soulful look at what it would be like if twenty-first-century people like you and me did try it. It will involve more than a little brokenness, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be beauty in it.

You could say it is part psychology and self-help, in the sense that you can assume anyone reading a book with this title would probably at least want to help himself to a better understanding of himself and of God. But the message in this book is one of the farthest things you will see from that of the popular self-help bestsellers on today’s bookstores—even the supposedly religious ones.

More than an academic work or your typical motivational guide, this book is a sort of biblical mirror, a journal of all the mess of coming face-to-face with ourselves, our sometimes misguided passions, our deceptively fallen foundations, and through it all a stirring invitation into a trusting relationship with our Savior that doesn’t sweep away our emotions but instead puts them in perspective in light of Who it is we are relating with.