August 9-15

Dear Old Souls,

Thanks for undertaking these poems with me this summer!  I’ve been challenged beyond what I thought, but enjoyed the challenge and found it worthwhile.  I hope you have too.

This week’s poems were once again tough for me to understand and accept.  MacDonald has a much more deterministic view of God’s action than I do.  He poses the question, on August 11, “Why should the soul, which death shall never know, / Authority, and power, and memory shed?”  He gives this answer: “It is that love with absolute faith would wed; / God takes the inmost garments off his child, / To have him in his arms, naked and undefiled.”

I wonder what kind of experience MacDonald had with dementia among his friends and relatives.  My own experience is quite limited—although I certainly have more here at the end of my internship year, having visited many homebound people who have memory loss or other symptoms of dementia.  To me, it’s always seemed pretty frightening, and I know (by report, not by experience) that it can be deeply painful to lose a loved one in this way.  MacDonald’s contention that dementia is a path to "absolute faith" seems too easy to me, almost like the platitudes we are sometimes tempted to use at the time of a death (e.g. “God needed another angel”), and it doesn’t seem to reflect the range of experiences that people have with dementia.  I know of people with dementia who seem happy, content, and at peace; I know of others who seem frightened, confused, and bitter.  Dementia is for some people a path to “absolute faith,” but not for everyone.

The poems for the next few days—August 12, 13, and 14—provide what I would think is a more genuine and reliable source of comfort in the face of dementia at the end of one’s life.  God is all-knowing and all-caring.  God created each one of us, and knows each of us better than anyone else, including ourselves, possibly could.  God is the one who gives us life and who gives us everything about who we are.  We can trust in God to love and preserve all that is good in ourselves, for God is the creator and sustainer of our whole being.

This week more than usual the poems have explicitly treated the concerns and fears of old age.  I feel more than ever my own inadequacy as a 28-year-old, attempting to explain the work of an “Old Soul” to other souls who know so much more of life and faith than I do; I feel like you all should be explaining this stuff to me.  I have wondered from time to time in what way this Diary might speak to a person of my age.  I don’t think I’m an old soul yet; but I’m older than I was a year ago.  In these past few weeks, I’ve noticed that my hair seems to be thinning a little at the crown of my head.  It’s been hard for me to get used to this idea; I’ve always been rather vain about my hair.  I had gotten used to being an adult with a relatively stable appearance; but I continue to change.  Everything changes.  We grow older.  Perhaps I’ll go bald.  I hope that as I age I’ll grow in wisdom and in faith, but who can tell?  There is only One who knows all, and One who never changes.  May that One renew us in faith and hope each day, for as long as our days are lengthened upon this earth.

Your fellow Growing-Old Soul,

Daniel

August 2-8

I have been away with some of our young people (who perhaps themselves are old souls in many ways) on a mission trip in Duluth; I had thought I might have time for a reflection earlier this week to make up for last week’s miss, but not so.  My apologies, and here are some thoughts on the devotions beginning August 2.

The poem for August 2 was especially convicting for me.  Is God, for me, the solution to a problem, to be ignored when the problem is not presenting itself?  Is God to be called on at need and ignored when not needed?  I fear that I often treat my relationship with God in this way.  This poem uses the metaphor of a plough, as Jesus does in Luke 9:62—“No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”  May God direct my eyes and my steps and my strength to continue forward!

The succeeding poems treat the Old Soul’s relationship with God: utter dependence and connectedness.  “For sap thy dead branch calls, O living vine!” (August 4; cf. John 15:4-5).  We receive this connectedness through trust in God—“Faith opens all the windows to God’s wind” (August 5), a beautiful image if ever there was one.  But this faith is, as we know, not from us, but again a gift from God.  The poem for August 6 is a reflection on God’s care for us.  “I can well afford / All to forget, so thou remember, Lord.”  We are frail and fallible.  God is strong and unfailing and faithful.

The poems for August 7 and 8 seem to be another change of subject; how God, rather than any of our beliefs about God or experiences of God, is our source of life and ground of faith.  The last two lines of the poem for August 8 are difficult for me, but I think I understand them.  (I found the other poems this week refreshingly direct after the tortured syntax we had to struggle through earlier this summer.)  The “holy maid” is of course Mary, sister of Martha (Luke 10:38-42).  Mary received something precious by sitting and listening to Jesus.  “Yet, brooding only on that treasure, she / Had soon been roused by conscious loss of heart.”  I take this to mean, roughly, “If Mary had then gone through life only brooding on the treasure she received when she listened to Jesus, she would soon have been rousted out of her faith and lost heart.”  If anyone else understands it differently, I would be glad to know your interpretation.  “Roused” is a word I would normally use in a positive sense in a faith context (roused to action, roused by the Spirit’s moving), but it seems to be negative here.

Again, we are reminded of our dependence on God, moment to moment, for continued faith and life.  This has been much on my mind as I prepare to preach on Sunday; my text is 1 John 2:18-28, which ends—“And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he is revealed we may have confidence and not be put to shame before him at his coming.”  This abiding will continue to occupy us as we reflect on the poems MacDonald wrote for this coming week.

July 12-18

First, briefly: my apologies for the long hiatus!

A general theme that I have noted throughout these poems since I started reading them back at the beginning of June is God’s work on us; God’s use of our lives and of events in our lives to mold us and shape us.  My sense of the past few weeks is that in a broad sense, the poems have been more of the same.  So also the poems for the past week (say we begin with the poem for last Saturday, July 12).  The poems for this week seem more dire than ever: the July 13 poem, if I read it correctly, refers to suicide (“Some break rude exit from the house of life”), in response to the situation described on July 12 (in which a “rapid turn of thought/May throw the life-machine all out of gear”).  July 14 is a prayer against this, and a declaration of confidence: “Thy child should never fear though hell should gape.”  Where July 12 imagined God as an engineer, July 15 and 16 imagine God as a house-builder, rather beautifully: “Where I am most perplexed, it may be there/Thou mak’st a secret chamber, holy-dim,/Where thou wilt come to help my deepest prayer."

MacDonald expresses great confidence in God, related to his apparent belief in what a theologian would call “meticulous” providence.  There are several different accounts of God’s providence, the way God orders the world and creates outcomes.  “Meticulous” providence holds that God controls absolutely everything that happens, down to the smallest detail.

During my first year of seminary, my systematic theology prof had us each choose a doctrine about or attribute of God to study, and I chose God’s providence; my prof had me read the relevant sections of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (namely, chapters 16, 17, and 18 of part 1).  Calvin found great comfort in the doctrine—the world is so full of dangers, but Christians may be confident that no ill will befall them besides what is from the good and gracious will of God.  (See especially chapter 17, sections 10 and 11.)

This is the kind of attitude that MacDonald shows in the July 17 poem: “I cannot tell why this day I am ill;/But I am well because it is thy will.”

I am not, personally, a believer in meticulous providence.  I do not believe, as Calvin did and as MacDonald seems to have, that (for example) each illness we suffer is from God.  But I do believe that God works in us and on us and around us in ways that we cannot now see and may only later understand.  God’s will for us is good, and God will bring about God’s will, and we need not fear—“though hell should gape."

Week 4: June 21-28

I find in this section a prayer that is, all at once, heartfelt and humble and philosophically sophisticated.  MacDonald takes for granted that “Nothing can draw the heart of man but good” (June 23)—therefore, any evil inclination in humankind is not evil in and of itself, but a misdirected good, misdirected because it is rooted in the human heart rather than God’s heart.  The language of the June 22 poem is difficult for me, and I do not think I fully understand it, but it gives several instances of how this  can work; e.g., a desire for justice can easily be bent to a desire for revenge.  Dante’s Purgatorio depicts Purgatory as a seven-tiered mountain, one tier for each of the traditional “deadly sins,” and systematized a similar concept: all sin is in some way deficient love.  So Pride, Envy, and Wrath, the first three tiers, are misdirected love; Sloth is insufficient love; Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust are excessive love of various kinds.

MacDonald’s prayer in these poems is that God would perfect his love—“Blow on me till my love loves burningly” (June 24).  He prays that God would purify his anger—make him angry as God is angry, only ever out of love for others and not out of self-love.  This is a good prayer for me, I think.  Anger is a powerful drug.  To give just one example, I think a lot of what is worst in our politics in this country is a direct result of love for the good, praiseworthy desire for justice, being misdirected into anger at one’s opponents.  Righteous anger is such a powerful emotion that it can easily become an end in itself.

Not that we should allow our consciences to become dull against injustice and wrong.  But let our anger be joined to humility, to introspection, and to forgiveness—another prayer of MacDonald’s that I would do well to take up.  As long as we approach the world from the perspective of our own desires, perfect love is impossible.  MacDonald’s prayer, and ours, is that Christ would so rule in us that we would love as God loves.

I think that 1 John 4 could be a very helpful companion to the poems for this week.

Week 3: June 14-20

I found the poem for June 14 very comforting, especially these lines:

That thou who know’st the light-born answer sought
Know’st too the dark where the doubt lies entrenched—
Know’st with what seemings I am sore perplexed,
And that with thee I wait, nor needs my soul be vexed.

None of us live a faith life free of doubt, free of questions, free of fear.  One of the wonderful things about Christianity, and the doctrine of the Incarnation in particular, is that we have a God who not only knows and understands us in our perplexity but has joined us in our perplexity by actually becoming human.  Jesus Christ, the definition of Chalcedon put it, is “like us in all things except sin”; and this includes human emotions like fear and doubt.  The one who prayed and wept at Gethsemane and felt abandoned on the cross joins us in our praying and weeping and feelings of abandonment.

The remainder of the poems for this week discuss a variety of means (rather harsh means, I might add—weariness, fear, madness, unrest, hunger) that God might use to reach human beings, to bring them to faith and teach them to be good—in other words, to sanctify them, to make them holy.   Sanctification can be an uncomfortable topic for Lutherans.  If we are saved entirely by grace through faith, apart from any merit we possess or work we do, is it not dangerous for us to speak of our own holiness, or of progressing toward higher spiritual levels?  And yet we do wish to grow in faith and in righteousness; to do better today than we did yesterday, and better tomorrow than we did today.  But are we not, as Christians, already complete—already, to paraphrase Luther’s explanation to the 3rd article of the Apostles Creed in the Small Catechism, “called through the gospel, enlightened with the Spirit’s gifts, sanctified, and kept in the true faith”?  We are.  And yet we never, as long as we are on earth, fully live into that reality; but perhaps we can come closer.  A seminary friend of mine speaks of “becoming what we are.”  We are called, enlightened, sanctified already; but we also become these things more and more, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18—

"And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”

I would never want to assert to another person that their suffering is God’s way of teaching them.  But I would want to be open to the possibility for myself, and hopefully, as I grow as a pastor, to help others to be open to that possibility.

Next week: Sanctification, continued.  The love of God; the love aspired to by our Old Soul.  Forgiveness.

Week 2: June 6 through 13

There seem to be two related units in this week’s poems: a reflection on the hiddenness of God (June 6-10) and a reflection on those who lack faith (June 11-13).

As Christians, our way of knowing God is through Jesus Christ.  Attempts to know God in another way are doomed to failure: clouds and dreams, as described in the poems for June 6 and 7.  Our difficulty, of course, is that we do not have Jesus with us in the flesh, and so our only way of knowing the Savior is through faith.  I call this a difficulty, and I certainly experience it that way: I struggle to believe in something that I cannot see or feel.  But in faith we have access to everything we need, and even participate in God’s life, as described in the poem for June 9:

Thou art the one self-perfect life, and we
Who trust thy life, therein join on to thee,
Taking our part in self-creating light.

And even more fully on June 10:

Thou lay’st it on me, son, to claim thee, sire;
To that which thou hast made me, I aspire;
To thee, the sun, up flames thy kindled fire.
No man presumes in that to which he was born;
Less than the gift to claim, would be the giver to scorn.

If you will forgive the masculine language, this is of universal importance: it is an expression of the truth expressed in John 1:12-13—"But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”

God created us to be God’s children—God loves us, and wants us to know that love and participate in that ultimate life.  Luther wrote of a “happy exchange,” in which Christ in the Incarnation took on flesh, took on sin and death and all the poverty and need attendant on being human, and assumed them for himself—while at the same time, and in the same Incarnation, transmitted to humankind the life and blamelessness of God.  When we were baptized, we died and were born again—born to precisely this, and we are not presumptuous in claiming it for ourselves.

But how to live that out—when we are still human, still frail, still sinful?  That is the great question of the Christian life, but also a question not to worry about overmuch: Christ has done what is necessary for us.

I was, to be honest, a little disappointed with the poems for June 12 and 13, regarding those who don’t believe in God.  Smugness and contempt are a temptation whenever we speak of those with whom we disagree, and I fear it’s a temptation that MacDonald succumbed to here.  But I thought one turn of phrase in particular was interesting: “Nothing they could know, could be God.”  I think that’s true for us believers, too.  What if, as Kierkegaard suggested, God were a green bird in the town square?  We could all go out and confirm the existence of such a god.  But what claim could such a God have on us?

We cannot know God.  And yet, God has sent his Son into the world in order that we may know God.  Though God is unknowable, yet we know God—through Jesus Christ, whom we receive in Word and Sacrament.

Next week: Poems for June 14-20.  Doubts, and God’s presence in the midst of our doubts.  Goads to belief and understanding.  Hunger to know God.

Week 1: May 30 through June 5

As best I can tell, the poems for May 30 through June 5 are all part of a unit, and I will address them together today.  It will be interesting, as we read through the poems this summer, to note how large these units are.  I had expected that each day's poem would be independent of its neighbors, but the May 31 poem, for example ("'Tis heart on heart thou rulest...") is much more comprehensible when read together with the May 30 poem ("O Christ, who didst appear in Judah land...").

The poems in this unit tell of God's plan for the world, and ask that we may take part in that plan.  MacDonald had an expansive vision of God's love and beneficence.  For MacDonald, God is at all times "working the holy, satisfying hour, / When all shall love, and all be loved again" (May 31).  In fact, for MacDonald, all that God does to order the world is in service to that end.  The matter is most plainly stated in the June 3 poem, addressed to Christ:

This, this alone thy father careth for--
That men should live hearted throughout with thee--
Because the simple, only life thou art,
Of the very truth of living, the pure heart.
For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea,
Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor
Shall cease till men have chosen the better part.

I have always been troubled by such statements; there are so many terrible things in the world that I have a hard time imagining that our loving God ordains them all for loving ends.  Of course, I am not the first person to ask such questions, in ancient times or in relatively recent history, nor the only one today to be troubled by them.  And I'm deeply suspicious of the apparent implication that humankind can somehow "choose the better part" and bring about the Kingdom of God—or that human suffering is likely to bring about such a choice.

I had not expected to be thrown so rapidly into theodicy when I chose this book for my summer devotion series!  It is, I confess, easy for me to become preoccupied with such questions.

But rather than digging myself further into a "Problem of Evil" hole, let me stay closer to MacDonald's chosen theme for this week's poems.  MacDonald is writing to, and of, Christ—God's ultimate self-expression, our best way of knowing God.  The ultimate mark of God's love for us is Christ's coming among us, dying, and rising again.  It is the love we know in Christ that makes it possible for us to love our neighbors.  And since Christ is living, Christ now and at all times continues as he did when he lived on earth, "feeding the faint divine in humble men [and women!]" (May 31).  Christ gives us life here and now—not in some distant future—in order that we may live for others.

I close with a quotation from the June 1 poem:

Here is my heart--from thine, Lord, fill it up,
That I may offer it as the holy cup
Of thy communion to my every man.

That is a good prayer for all times; I will make it mine for this week, and I invite you to do the same.  Christ fills your heart—how will you offer to others that which you have received?

Next week: verses for June 6-13.  Faith in the unseen.  Our participation in God's existence.  Unbelief and unbelievers.