A Chink in the Curtains
Saturday August 21, 2010
I was reading along, not expecting to find a startling spiritual image in a twentieth-century novel by a writer not exactly known for his praying.
But W. Somerset Maugham’s character, Larry, the aimless and likeable protagonist in The Razor’s Edge, is recounting the chats he had with a hulking uncouth Polish miner. It turns out that Kosti (a simplified Polish name for the unlikely spiritual guide) had a secret love of spiritual writers (indeed, the man only had the courage to reveal his hidden longings when drunk). He ends up being a kind of spiritual mentor to Larry.
“It was all new to me and I was confused and excited,” Larry told a friend of his conversations with Kosti. And what Larry said next was what struck me: “I was like someone who’s lain awake in a darkened room and suddenly a chink of light shoots through the curtains and he knows he only has to draw them and there the country will be spread before him in a glory of the dawn.”
I wonder what that image meant to Maugham, the author. Certainly something, sometime had felt to him like at least a glimmer or a glimpse: “A chink of light shoots through the curtains.”
And to know that to draw the curtains means seeing a “country … spread out before [us] in a glory of the dawn!” I wonder what intimations he had of the spiritual possibilities.
I know that I can go along, not expecting much, not staying much on the lookout, but then I come awake, maybe for just an instant or so, to a world just out of view, one with a spreading glory, just beyond the curtains of everyday occupations.
No wonder Paul spoke in Ephesians 3:18-19 of how he hoped those hearing him would “have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”
That glory seems to appear to us sometimes through a chink or in a corner or crevice. But sometimes I have the wherewithal to wonder what more lies beyond the glimmer. I might even go looking.
The Biology of Praise
Sunday July 18, 2010
I’m not a biologist, of course, not even close. So I’m not sure why I found an article on the worldwide surge in the discovery of new species—some arcane and far-flung—well, interesting.
Part of my fascination with the Smithsonian July/August issue (with a theme, "Forty things you need to know about the next 40 years") had to do, I suppose, with the odd colorfulness of it all. Like what I saw in the photo of the mottled orangey-red sea spider in Antarctica. Or a Satomi’s pygmy seahorse in Indonesia. There was the tiny limestone leaf warbler from Laos. Some, like the kipunji monkey in Tanzania’s highlands, with its black muzzle and mane of reddish, grayish brown whiskers, lives only in that one corner of East Africa.
But I also think what struck me was not the biology as much as the explosion of awareness of our world. What I read and the photos I studied points to a world of yet-undiscovered possibilities. Confounding conventional wisdom, the article said, "big, colorful, even spectacular new species seem to be turning up everywhere these days." Scientists figure that the world contains between 10 and 50 million different plant and animal species—from microbes to mammals, from low-lying plants to towering trees—to say nothing of the sheer proliferation of bugs. Naturalists estimate they have so far catalogued only about 2 million. That’s a lot of rich, wild diversity. And we’ve just begun to scrutinize it. And then there’s this: The sheer vastness of our universe of a world on earth only comprises a tiny bit of the whole cosmos.
That’s something of an explanation, I guess. But I think what fascinates me the most is how such realities apply to even larger possibilities. If this is the stunningly surprising nature of Creation, what about the One who created all?
I’m trying today to ponder the sense of the inexhaustible riches of God. This God of ineffable, inestimable, unfathomable glories. The architecture of his heavenly realm, the dimensions of his kindness, the indefinable depths of his wonders. Something in me senses that there is more than I can ever comprehend.
But I can begin to ponder it. And when it comes to the One I will only ever partly, piecemeal, failingly, come to know—remember him to adore.
Prayers that Stick and Spread
Friday June 18, 2010
The other day a friend I’ve made through the Internet posed a question. I’ve thought it about ever since. "My wife is in a women’s book club at the church," he wrote; "why is there seldom a men’s book club?"
My friend reads widely and deeply, but he’s often wished that he could start a reading group for people interested in theology and church history: "Perhaps some day!" he says.
His question and his desire got me thinking about groups. I’ve thought about book clubs for women (no direct experience there), the weekly men’s groups at my church (I’m in one now), and the possibilities for shared prayer, whatever the gender of those participating.
And I’ve been helped in my possibility-spinning by Malcolm Gladwell. He’s a New Yorker essayist and author whose best-selling The Tipping Point traces the power of groups and movements to form thinking and behavior. (The "tipping point" refers to the way sometimes an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses some threshold and spreads like a virus or prairie fire—how it becomes not just popular, but a phenomenon.)
Gladwell, while examining commercial products (think Hush Puppies) and cultural habits (the rise of crime in some areas), talks at one point about book clubs—for women, as it turns out. And he finds lessons in the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a book that reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It did so, Gladwell says, for discoverable reasons.
Turns out it’s an ideal "book-group book." As the author Rebecca Wells traveled from book-signing to book-signing after the Ya-Ya Sisterhood’s release, women would tell her, "We’ve been in a book group for two years, and then we read your book and something else happened. It started to drop down to a level of sharing that was more like friendship." They would go to the beach together or hold parties at each other’s houses, forming "Sisterhood" groups resembling that depicted in the novel. The book became not just a solitary reading exercise, but an opportunity for community.
Just as fascinating to me (and creatively related to the Ya-Ya sisterhood phenomenon) is Gladwell’s tracing of what happened with church leaders John Wesley and George Whitefield. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gladwell notes, the Methodist movement Wesley catalyzed in England and North America became epidemic. Today few people, even the most secular, have never heard the term Methodist--the movement (now denomination) that Wesley founded.
But why did it spread so?
Why, especially given how Wesley, as Gladwell notes, "was by no means the most charismatic preacher of his era." Especially when compared to Whitefield, an Anglican clergymen of great oratorical power? From what I could tell Whitefield could preach the bark off a tree. But who’s heard of Whitefield today but scholars or seminary grads?
Wesley, however, did something that made his preaching and teaching "stick," and spread.
He would, as is widely known, gather the enthusiastic converts from his preaching missions into religious "societies." These in turn subdivided into smaller "classes" of a dozen or so. Much was made of holiness. There were high expectations for attendance and, outside of the meetings, for a changed way of life.
Here’s what struck me most in Gladwell’s tracing: "Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured." The groups spread around England and the colonies. His vision became more than an idea or ideal. It "tipped." And what Wesley said in his sermons took root, because of his genius and foresight, in groups of people.
Wesley knew the power of the small to to effect something big.
I think of an even more powerful (and venerable) example: An itinerant Jewish leader who stirred huge crowds with his teachings and miracles centuries ago. But for all the evidence of droves of people who came to hear him preach and teach, Jesus drilled down with a few. In Matthew’s Gospel he even says, "where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." And then he spent focused time, as we see again and again in the Gospels, with his twelve disciples. "Come away by yourselves," he said to them, "to a desolate place and rest a while" (Mark 6:31).
Sounds like a group to me.
So I find myself wondering about prayer. I’ve written about prayer, lectured about it, preached about it, but I wonder about the limits of the words. Often I need to get with a group and do it. I need to get folks together. I think we all need to make mini-movements wherever we find ourselves.
So we join in groups that talk about books that matter, books that enlist us in the kingdom’s advance. We find people who long to grow spiritually, and then we band together—as sisters, to be sure, but also as brothers.
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