Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace. St. Augustine
Created things pull us outside ourselves. We fix our attention on objects, and so our mode of consciousness becomes objective. We assume that the pursuit of the external will, in return, bring us reward as the objects of our attention come to us.
And yet, no matter how hard we try, the external cannot cross the threshold into our inner being and satisfy our real need. Possessions can go no further than an ephemeral caress of the ego. And this maddening tease drives us to toss aside one failed object for the next, leading us on an endless and fruitless pursuit.
Saint Augustine awakened from objective consciousness, from his madding pursuit of created things, to discover that looking outside himself for meaning only drew him away from himself. And the way back to himself was to yield to the divine call that comes only from within.
Today, we turn our attention away from created things out there– letting go of objective consciousness – and look toward the treasure that lie within, where the Creator of all things calls to us.
Source Scripture
Matthew 6:19-21; Luke 12:33-34
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Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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Paradise Now – Tim Mackie of The Bible Project
We are not running our lives at all. We are being run by our flesh. Fasting is about freedom. Starve the flesh and feed the spirit. John Mark Comer
To fast is to return our attention to ourselves – our spiritual center – our souls.
Its easy to lose touch with our center when we allow the outside world to seize our attention with its sensory, sensational, sensual offerings. And when we focus on these things that couple only with our physical selves, we become self-centered. Egocentric.
And, let’s not forget, we have real physical needs: hunger, thirst, human connection, and much more. We are not bifurcated creatures whose physical and spiritual sides can be separated – not until death, anyway. We are whole beings. Each of us has a soul and a body, woven inextricably together in the Imago Dei.
Even the Lord’s Prayer, as we saw in the previous episode, has a line devoted to asking God to provide our daily bread. So why would we ever spend one or more days shunning that divinely created need?
Fasting has many benefits, but today we will focus on one in particular: that of re-centering – living from the soul. Fasting is a discipline that in the moment may seem pointless, but in the end is a training exercise that yields spiritual strength.
So let’s slow down, and fast.
Source Scripture
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The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays. Soren Kierkegaard
Our modern ears interpret the word pray as ask God to give me something I want or need.
But the word pray used in the Greek text of the Bible means, literally, to move towards the will of God – so that our will might be exchanged for his.
We see this meaning in play as Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before his crucifixion. Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me. Yet not my will, but yours be done.
This is, perhaps, the most enchanting possibility available to those of us with free will – to choose to to relinquish our will in exchange for his.
This is the purpose of prayer.
Today, we will see the purpose of prayer unfold before us in The Lord’s Prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples – and to us. And the walk through that prayer is awe striking.
Source Scripture
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Scripture Meditation Guide for the Lord’s Prayer
Father of us in the heavens – Psalm 139
Hallowed by the name of you – Exodus 3
Come the kingdom of you – Matthew 13:44-46
Be done the will of you as in heaven so also in earth – Luke 22:39-44
The bread of us daily, grant us today – Exodus 16
And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil – Daniel 3
For yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, Amen. – Psalm 23
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Creation is an act of generosity. Generosity is an act of creation. To create is to gather the resources available to us and shape them into something new and wondrous for others to experience. To be generous is quite literally the same thing.
And yet, how many times do we cheapen and pollute our works of creation by scribbling our name all over it?
Rather than create for the purpose of inducing wonder, we hastily mix a stew of popular and unhealthy ingredients and tempt others with the result. And our only motive is payback through attention or money.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, wisely explains to us that altruism is creative and permeated with light, while selfishness is destructive and lives in darkness. Generosity is a creative force that moves outward from the self. Selfishness is a destructive force that collapses in on itself. And any attempt at mixing the two so that the self – the ego – gets the credit, only destroys that creation.
Is it any wonder that God’s first known words in history are let there be light as he creates all that is, generously giving us all a place to live, and move, and have our being.
Today, we explore DMLK’s definition of generosity as creation in contrast to selfishness as destruction, emphasizing Jesus’ words when he said, It is more blissful to give than to receive.
Source Scripture
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Narcissists are consumed with maintaining a shallow false self to others. They’re emotionally crippled souls that are addicted to attention. Because of this they use a multitude of games, in order to receive adoration. Shannon L. Alder
The ego longs to be seen and admired, and all those who fall under its narcissistic spell see the world as their stage. Abandoning their true selves for the sake of thunderous applause, they live their lives in performance.
But, as with all performances, the script has an ending. The actors take their bows. The audience goes home. The stage falls silent, and the performers go back to the dressing rooms, remove their costumes, masks, and makeup, and go home as themselves.
The Greek word for such a stage actor is hypokrites. In English, we transliterate that word as hypocrite, and we use it to refer to a person who acts as if he is one thing on the public stage, but lives as if he is another thing entirely in private.
None of us wants to be known as a hypocrite. None of us wants to be seen as a narcissist. We just want to be seen. Noticed. Accepted. Loved.
The problem is that we are afraid that people will not accept us for who we really are, and so we fashion costumes that hide our true selves in hopes that we will be seen as the performer‘s persona and receive the requisite rounds of applause that go with it.
And the longer we play a role, regardless of how much recognition we receive, our true selves will continue to grow restless until we are seen and known for who we really are.
Today, we will wrestle together with the natural tendencies to fall into narcissism and hypocrisy and discover the rewards of being true to ourselves.
Source Scripture
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A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all men, women, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. Brene Brown
Love and belonging is what we seek. And when we fail to experience love, we fail to experience being. We become broken, lost wanderers in a wasteland of desperation, impatience, entitlement, greed, addiction, and emptiness. Our substitutes for love forever fail to fulfill, and we flounder.
Conversely, when we experience intimacy with another, we are struck by something beyond ourselves. It is if the energy of being itself suddenly takes hold of us and carries us helplessly toward the other. The woman who you will one day propose marriage in hopes of even greater intimacy. The baby who did not exist one year ago but now inexplicably interweaves itself into your soul. The best friend who gets you.
Your best friend gets you because she gets you. Your presence. She is privileged to know you intimately and loves you deeply. With her you have trust and vulnerability and peace. You have being.
But how do we find love? Where can we discover belonging? Especially in a world where everyone wants to take and no one wants to give?
The answer comes to us as we review the last six episodes of Awestruck, where we see Jesus revealing the culmination of all of the Old Testament Law and Prophets – in him. In his life. In his words. In his actions.
And as Jesus weaves together the entirety of the Old Testament into a living portrait of himself, what we see in that portrait is divine love. We see a God whose sole purpose is to bring us into perfect union with him and with each other.
Source Scripture
See episodes 71-76
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Extras
But I say to you, the Lord says, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you. Why did he command these things? So that he might free you from hatred, sadness, anger and grudges, and might grant you the greatest possession of all, perfect love, which is impossible to possess except by the one who loves all equally in imitation of God. Maximus the Confessor
Imagine a reverse wedding ceremony, where the climax occurs as two people stare into each other’s eyes and declare for all to hear, I don’t.
The bride’s wedding dress is blackened with soot. Thorns are strewn in place of flowers. Writhing snakes replace candles. On either side of the aisle there are opposing forces who shout at each other.
And leading the ceremony is zombie-like creature, who says, “Dearly be-hated, we are fractured here today to part these two by breaking the bonds of love and fueling the fires of fury.”
There is a reason why we do not see such ceremonies – they are devoid of beauty.
Weddings are filled with beauty, and set the stage of hope that love will forever bind two people.
Reverse weddings, where two people decide that they are enemies – whether husband and wife, or father and son, two former friends, or perfect strangers who meet on conflicting terms, are filled with darkness. And yet, such ceremonies occur in the privacy of our hearts.
We decide that someone in our lives, whether the crazy neighbor next door or the ruthless dictator of another country, is our enemy. We know that they have no good will toward us specifically or humanity in general, and so we feel justified in assuming the same posture toward them – precisely because we are right and they are wrong. And right must prevail.
Yet perhaps the real reason that we declare war on this enemy of ours is because they have robbed us of beauty and love. And so, wounded by this loss, we exacerbate the issue by living in hate, robbing ourselves – and the world around us – of beauty and love.
We become that which we hate in an effort to extinguish it and hope that beauty returns when the smoke clears.
If we truly wish lost beauty to return, then we must stoke its fire – both within and without.
Source Scripture
Matthew
Matthew 5:43-48; Luke 6:27-28,32-36
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Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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For Further Contemplation
Recommended Reading
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer. Laura Hillenbrand
When we are wronged, we feel out of balance. Our knee jerk reaction is to restore balance with an equal but opposing force. This, we reason, should even the score.
Such an approach fits neatly into a broader, largely unquestioned paradigm of living that we will call the quid pro quomindset. I will give something to you if you give something to me. I will love you if you love me back. I will forgive you if you forgive me. I will ___________ as long as you do the same.
The expected result of quid pro quo living is balance and harmony. Everyone does something for everyone else in equal measure and there is much rejoicing.
A closer look at quid pro quo, though, leads not to the expected balance in our relationships. Instead, we withhold generosity while waiting on others to give to us first. And when everyone assumes this same posture, frustration sets in. Over time, this frustration crystallizes into jade – creating an unbalanced quality of being.
Frozen in this state, we wait for all others to make the first move towards us. And if that move is not in our favor, our internal angst drives us to label it as on offense – whether real or not.
Quid pro quo demands that any offense be met with defense, and so we do the only thing we know how. We strike back, whether passively or aggressively, or some combination of both.
And when we strike back, they strike back, and on and on it goes, creating an unthinkable, undesirable, unsustainable way to live – a decaying orbit destined to burn us all out.
And yet, there is another way. The way of peace. Love. Balance. And it comes not by taking an eye for an eye, but by turning the other cheek.
Source Scripture
Matthew
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Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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For Further Contemplation
Leviticus 19:18; Proverbs 20:22; 1 Samuel 24
Recommended Reading
Unoffendable by Brant Hansen
By putting obedience before listening, one may be reserving the option of making due with mere performance even as one commits one’s self in words that carry the vitality of aspiration, one is flinching from the radical demand of those very words. Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg
Commitment. We all have our various means of desiring to change, choosing a path of transformation, and then mustering the will to follow-through.
Often we turn to ritual, contract, or other form of pledge that marks the moment our new journey begins to assert that we will, in fact, do what we say we will do. We make New Year’s resolutions, buy gym memberships, or announce our goal to family and friends to hold us accountable.
This longstanding approach – longing for change, choosing a methodology, and then attempting to seal the commitment – is fraught with tenuous threads that cannot hold the weight of our convictions.
Transformation rarely occurs without first immersing ourselves – our souls – in truth. We first listen. We drink deeply of the divine until truth overwhelms us within, prompting action without as in inherent by-product.
Today we take a journey backwards from our written, verbal, and internal vows that we will change until we arrive at the wellspring of transformation. From here, we can journey back to the surface, taking with us the boon that eliminates the need for empty promises and giving us – and others – the real power we need for change.
Source Scripture
Connect
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Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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Recommended Reading
The Hidden Order of Intimacy by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
In between the lines of the Easter story is an awestriking, mysterious, divine romance.