The Guide Star

Laser Guide Star - By ESO/M. Kornmesser - http://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1136a/, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16361914

It is fatally easy to make God in one's own image, or at least to accept a god made in someone else's. So we have angry gods, gods concerned almost exclusively with sexual mores and private morals, political gods (both of the right and of the left), harsh forbidding gods of judgement and predestination, soft warm micromanaging nanny gods, and as many other varieties as there are people prepared to promote them. (Vance G Morgan has a more extensive and detailed list of delusions in his book Freelance Christianity for anyone interested!)

But God is far stranger than any of these. The God of the Bible, especially of the New Testament, is not like any of our imaginings. This God is nearer to us than our own breathing, so close that Catherine of Genoa could say of him, "In God is my being, my I, my strength, my bliss, my desire. But this I that I often call so... in truth I no longer know what the I is, or the Mine, or desire, or the good, or bliss." He is the God "in whom we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17.28) He is the God of Jesus, through whom "all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made." (John 1.3)

We believe in progress – it is written into the DNA of the modern world. If things are bad, they’ll get better... 

...our philosophy of progress colors everything we consider. 19th century Darwinian theory wrote a scientific version of progress into [the] theory of evolution. Of course, using "survival" as the mechanism of change gave cover to a number of political projects who justified their brutality and callousness as an extension of the natural order.  

The metaphor of improvement remains a dominant theme within our culture. A few years ago a survey of young Americans revealed the utterly shocking conclusion that for the first time in recorded history, the young did not expect to be as well off as their parents. It was a paradigm shift in American progressive thought. It remains to be seen how that will play out. 

Fr Stephen Freeman, St Anne's Orthodox Church, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

But the Bible does not seem to believe in progress, not in the way we understand the word. "Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better," to paraphrase Émile Coué, is not the teaching of Jesus. Luke quotes him, "'When you hear of wars and uprisings, do not be frightened. These things must happen first, but the end will not come right away.’ Then he said to them: ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven...'" (Luke 21.9-11) We have tended to collapse the timescale of Jesus' prophecies, and assume that since they did not happen there and then, it was business as usual, despite the fact that the great and progressive Roman Empire under which they were made went, not from strength to strength as it happily became a Christian state under Constantine, but down the tubes within a few centuries. Surely there have been wars and uprisings since then enough to satisfy the most pessimistic of us?

In modern astronomy we find a concept known as a guide star. Though the term has other uses in astronomy, I am thinking of its use in adaptive optics, where it is used as a reference point for correcting the wavefront errors introduced by atmospheric turbulence which distort our view of the distant universe. We can ourselves create a guide star if there is no convenient "steadfast star" we can use, by using the light from a powerful laser to excite atoms in the upper atmosphere  We too, gazing into the dark sky of what is not yet, have a guide star.

In the last chapter of the Bible we read, "'Look, I am coming soon! ... I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End... I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.'" (Revelation 22.12-13,16)

The Jesus of Revelation is the Lamb who was slain (5.12); the victory of Christ is through the cross, not in spite of it, and the glory of God is in the wounds of Christ. The cross extends throughout all time, and it is only through the cross we are brought home to Christ (1 Corinthians 1.18) This is the good news, and our prayer in the name of Jesus is our guide star in even the darkest of nights.

Tuesday in Holy Week

[Holy Week] turns upside down our notions of what real power is and how it is held. It turns upside down our notions of how life-giving change is brought about and the role suffering plays in bringing about that life-giving change... 

The king who rides a donkey, not a war horse, turns our notions about how to bring about peace upside down. Jesus knew the danger he was in and offered himself to us as a pattern for living in dangerous times, personally and politically. We choose who to follow and the choice to follow Jesus is an inner decision to choose life. Jesus didn't show us that he could wield power over life and death, but that in the face of death and destruction it is possible to choose life In the occupied territory of our world, with pain and hatred, we can live differently, live liberated. 

This journey has to be taken for oneself and on a donkey, at peace with oneself and others. Inner peace can bring about external peace, but not force it. There will be times when it feels successful, as it did for Jesus and his followers on Palm Sunday, and times when there is danger and humiliation. Both are to be encountered on the way of peace. 

Justine Allain-Chapman, The Resilient Disciple: A Lenten Journey from Adversity to Maturity

This is a profound insight. The changes so many of us long for, especially in a world threatened by climate change, extremism, and the dangerous posturing of political leaders, will not be brought about by violent protest, vandalism, and aggressive rhetoric. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie and Betsie ten Boom and Martin Niemöller in Nazi Germany, Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela in apartheid-era South Africa, were not failures because of their imprisonment, mistreatment and in some cases death at the hands of despotic regimes. Jesus was not messing about when he told his disciples, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it." (Matthew 16.24-25)

In Freelance Christianity: Philosophy, Faith, and the Real World, Vance G Morgan writes:

In its Latin roots, to "convert" means to "turn around," but this turning is more often like a sunflower following the sun in its slow course across the sky than a dynamic and once for all event... a steady rain, even a gentle drizzle, is better for my plants and grass than an inch-and-a-half-hour downpour. Beneath the layers of violence, hatred, ignorance and despair, something holy is lurking. Let the gentle drizzle and drops upon the heart release it.

St Seraphim of Sarov, a forest hermit and contemplative in 18th century Russia, famously advised his visitors, "Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved." The practice of the Jesus Prayer, indeed of any form of contemplative prayer, is precisely like Vance Morgan's gentle drizzle. This quiet repetition may accomplish, by the grace and mercy of Christ, more than we can imagine.

As Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote:

More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of…
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God… 

Morte d’Arthur