A couple of mine are Susan Howatch and Wendell Berry. 

Howatch writes wonderful, thick novels in which the characters wrestle with their personal besetting sins and temptations.  I am continually amazed at the way she enters into the thought processes and motivations of a whole variety of characters, making each one a palpably real person.  Not only is she adept at portraying human psychology in all its wondrous variety, she combines this with profound theological insight.  I am especially enamored of her six-book Starbridge series, each showing us a very human member of the English clergy.  The first in the series is Glittering Images.

Berry is primarily a poet, and his novels are infused with marvelous imagery, beautiful but simple language, and philosophical clarity that brings to life rural America, its way of life and its inhabitants.  A good place to start with Berry is Jayber Crow.

Whose novels do you like and why?

My response was an incredulous, “Even me?”  After all these years, knowing my continuing imperfection, I still struggle to believe – really believe – this promise.  Another member of the group queried how it could be that He has already perfected us and we are still being sanctified.

It occurred to me, as I wrestled with stepping off the cliff of simply believing, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it is precisely there – in actually believing – that sanctification is planted within like a mustard seed that grows, fills and transforms the whole self.  And thus perfection is guaranteed.

That cliff scares me.

On the one hand, I have been blessed with experiences of help from individual saints in specific situations, and (twice) with an overpowering awareness of the saints as a body surrounding and encouraging me.  So I know they are there.  On the other hand, in praying to a saint, how does one make sure that she is not falling into a form of idolatry – the old paganism of many gods, or even ancestor-worship?

My answer came in the form of an image – not unfamiliar – of our growth (sanctification) as Christians being an increasing transparency to God.  Like a soiled stained glass window, as we are cleaned of sin His Light shines ever more brightly through us.  We remain ourselves just as the colors and shapes in a particular window remain themselves, so that the Light shines through each of us in our own particular way.  We are each a little bit of a full reflection of God.

So now, why should it be different with those who have gone on before us?  Does it make any sense to think that all this transparency to God that we might attain in this life becomes null and void in heaven?  We know that God chooses to work through His people in this life – so would it make any sense to think that He no longer works through us when we reach heaven?  Looked at in this way, that “great cloud of witnesses” becomes a circle of friends, and extended family, to whom we can turn as we do to friends and family here.

I read recently in a wonderful book by Martin Israel, The Sacrament of Healing, his belief that every thought, every act, every attitude, every word we utter in this life becomes a building block of the heavenly body being prepared for us now, for after we die.  Thus our true selves will be apparent to all.  Perhaps it would be more accurate – and more beautiful – to think of each of these artifacts of the self as a bit of colored glass, cleaned and polished and lovingly placed by the Master Artist.

Sometimes it seems that life is loss.  Loss of places, loss of youth, loss of people.  We lose through death, and we also lose through life, because life is constant change, like a river that never stops flowing, and if we try to hold onto a particular moment, like Faust, we find it leads to Hell. 

God says He keeps all my tears in a bottle.  Does that mean He also keeps all my moments, tucked safely away somewhere, to be recovered in Heaven?  Maybe when we arrive, we will sort through them all and see how they fit together; and with a heavenly darning needle, repair those places worn and torn or poorly done, to make our own heavenly garment

Today I was eating my morning cereal while rocking gently on the lawn swing, listening to the water falling into the pond, gazing out from under wisteria vines across pink geraniums, nasturtiums, bright coleus, and pansies, all the way to the rose garden and the hydrangea, blooming periwinkle blue again this year.  The roses have finished their first explosion of blossoms and are regathering for another colorful assault, and I noticed with pleasure that “Brandy” has a whole regiment of buds swelling.  The sun glinted on something long and silvery stretched all the way across the path between the rose bush and the lemon tree, a good four feet.  A spider’s suspension bridge.  Such an enterprising spider!  How did she construct this thing?  I imagined her poised trembling at the very tip of a lemon leaf, waiting for just the right breeze, and then launching herself out over the void below, silk spraying behind like a jet stream as she floated gently to a perfect landing.

Ah!  I see the message.  Trust in God.

Of course, we also need interaction with others to grow and develop as persons.  But I suspect the threat we face in these times is the loneliness that comes from loss of self.  It’s easy to become addicted to external stimuli (other people, computers, iPods, etc.) to the point that doing without them, even temporarily, causes panic.  I think this is because the inner self has been forgotten and the person’s whole identity seems to be found in relation only to externals.

Re-discovering the inner self can only happen in solitude, and it requires courage.  First one must trust that the inner self is there, where at first glance there is only a void.  But even more courage is needed after the inner self is recognized, because we find that it carries every bruise and stain of all the days it has been ignored.  Every hurt, every irritation, every fear, every blessing – every thought and experience leaves its residue of feeling.  These need to be attended to on a daily basis, and if much time goes by without doing so, they become a loud, chaotic, confused tangle that is emotionally painful to experience.

And yet, experience them all we must, in order to let them transform, through forgiveness or repentance or thankfulness, into integral parts of ourselves, to clear and polish the image of God within, and be able to reflect that image out into the world.

And that brings us to the third reason for needing courage in solitude – because it is in solitude and in this process of self-recognition that solitude brings, that we meet God.

Awhile back, in N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope, I found the startling (to me) claim that the Kingdom of Heaven is a separate, physical “place” that is nevertheless all around us.  I picture something like a parallel universe with which we have very limited communication that appears to us, because of the limitations of our world, to come from disembodied spiritual beings.  Wright tells us that God’s plan is to eventually unite the two universes, so that the “spiritual” and “physical” – what we perceive as embodied and disembodied – become one, and God can be all in all.  This uniting has begun to happen as the two realities intersect at certain points, such as the Sacraments.  Each believer also is a “new person,” a duality of the two kinds of being, “spirit” and “flesh,” gradually being transformed by the Holy Spirit into a unified, integrated whole.  The mission of the Church, the body of believers, is to multiply in population and grow in perfection, manifesting this spiritual life more and more fully in the world.

I’ve been chewing on this perception for some time, and I find it offers a way to make sense of some of the perplexities of our faith.

Now more recently, I have been studying a training manual for the Healing Rooms ministry.  In considering how and why miraculous healing happens, its claim is that healing is always God’s will, and his love/power/healing is always being poured out toward us.  The healing we pray for is immediately granted; however, it requires a vehicle or conduit in order to reach its intended goal.  And that conduit is the person of faith who is infused with the Spirit and whose will is submitted to and aligned with God’s will in the matter.

So here is the “how” of the matter, how the process of manifesting the Kingdom in the world works in the specific area of healing.  Once again there is a dual reality: God is in his heaven, pouring out the requested healing – but the ill person is in the world, and the two realities are separate.  Once again, the person of faith is the point of intersection between the two, the necessary vehicle by which God’s healing can manifest here.

Now the question comes:  Why?  Why would God make such a cumbersome, complicated system?  Why would he require the cooperation of weak, fallible creatures like us to manifest his power?  The answer to this, and other big questions, comes to me from Abraham Joshua Heschel, a foremost Jewish theologian of the 20^th Century.

We are all aware that we need God.  But according to Heschel, God needs us, too.  Now that is stunning.  But God’s need is not a result of any weakness or limitation, but of His overflowing love.  It might be more accurate to say He desires us.  In fact, it may be that the whole point of Creation has been to gain for himself a Beloved.  A faithful Beloved, who returns His love, a perfect complement to His un-reproducible Self.  How to go about that?

Well, first would be to create a being in His own image (something like “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone”).  Set them in His garden, lavish them with all the wonders of His creative art, joy in fellowship with them.  But wait.  Something is still missing; the ultimate joy is not something He can give Himself.  It is love, returned to Him freely.  He must give them free will to make that return, and with it, the temptation to reject Him  – which, inevitably, happens. 

And so begins the long, painful process that is the only way to what God desires – a Bride suitable for Himself, to live with Him in His Kingdom.  He woos, He pursues, she flirts, she is unfaithful, He rages, He punishes, she comes crawling back and He forgives, only to go through it all again and again.  All along the way, each of us either accepts or rejects His advances, accepts or rejects the infusion of the Holy Spirit to work His transformation and make us ready.

As I stand back, I see that the whole, painful process of fall and redemption is necessary, a part and perhaps the last stage of Creation itself – the formation of a Beloved to share in the Kingdom.  In the fullness of time, the “world” will be completely overcome by, and united to, the Kingdom.  Here, now, we each have our small part to play in connecting the two; and in the hereafter, our membership in the Bride.