The Mark – No. 11 About Adultery

The commands of Jesus are the Mark, the target for the perfect life. To aim for and to hit the Mark is to conform to the image and likeness of God. To ignore, neglect, or miss the Mark is to sin. The commands provide stepping stones through earthly life, upon which the child of God survives tempests and deflects the boomeranging darts of pride. Adhering to the Mark aspiring immortals gain victory.

But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery.

Matthew 5:28

Focused aspiring immortals hand in hand

Stroll carefully and confidently on the straight and narrow path

Loving God with every breath and with pure hearts

Not concerned that

Invisibly He watches from on high, to judge them by their mating love.

For Adam and Eve, it wasn’t the curiosity about the forbidden fruit, or even heeding the serpent’s skeptical words that expelled them from His Garden, but actually eating it. The temptation to sin is not the crime, only the doing of it.

Adultery is the exception because the lust is the sin, even without the act. Lust is disloyalty. Lust supplants the spouse in one’s heart, if not yet in the bed. In Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the punishment for adultery is death for both parties. God deplores a divided heart.   

His love is loyal, abiding, unchanging; it is not fickle or double minded. To be like God, one must first and foremost love like God.

I God You my Valentine

When a child I was told that God is love. That information made me feel all warm and fuzzy. I imagined that it meant He was like my Teddy Bear who always smiled and let me hug him all night without squirming away.

When Jesus said to love my enemies, to be good to them because God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked I had to think just a little bit harder about what love is. I wondered if God is kind to me when I am ungrateful and wicked; if He patiently waits for me to be kind too. God’s love is not as void as my Teddy Bear’s.

Love has to overcome some pretty powerful resistance to be itself. Being impatient and angry is like sledding down a snowy hill, when really love is walking back up. I suppose I would much rather be loved then to love others.

If I can be loved by God and anyone else who is foolish enough to try hard to become like God who loves His enemies, the wicked and ungrateful, then I don’t have to do anything at all.  I can even be unkind and wicked. I can lie and cheat and steal and hate my sister and God will still love me because He can’t help Himself. He is love and the only way He relates to anyone is via the love channel.

God’s love for each person is a compulsive love which sometimes is appreciated and reciprocated and sometimes it is ignored. Poor God.

I think God tries very hard to be loved and I feel sorry for Him because He doesn’t have anyone above Him, like His own God who must love Him no matter what He does. The way I see it, God works hard for our love.  He teaches, and gives amazing gifts and He heals. These are some of the reasons I love Him so much. I know I can trust Him because He is honest, He never ever lies to me.

I am so happy to know that I don’t have to work as hard to be loveable as God does. I suppose one of the reasons that God wants people to follow Him, to be exactly like Him is for the relief He experiences of being loved no matter what happens in their lives, even bad things that aren’t fixed right away like sickness and poverty or even loneliness.

Okay, I won’t be silly anymore because those thoughts make me feel too sad; it is all so unfair.

God is love. I want to be like Him, just like Him in every way, even when it means climbing up a snowy hill, and loving people who are mean to me or ignore me just as He does. This way God will know He found someone in me that loves Him too, no matter what.

My dear Valentine, you don’t have to be a Teddy Bear for me to love you because of what God taught me. But it would help. :-)    

When Death is Good

I don’t mean to scare you or to engage in sensationalism when I talk about the end of the world as by earthquakes in 2012 or by the return of Christ, but for aspiring immortals the whole point is to finally have the scales removed from our eyes that blind us here on this old earth to what is truly important and what is deserving of our concentration and our might --in contrast to that which is fleeting (such as money or power) or will detract us from our quest for eternal life with God (as when we miss the mark way too much).

One thing we know is that our flesh will certainly die, it happens every day to someone else.  To avoid the shock of sudden change, whether after nature’s death or during wholesale cataclysm, it doesn’t matter, the result is the same so let’s consciously and with full awareness live under the reign of God here and now. This way when nature or violence gives us the bite, less difference and more happiness will ensue. It’s the most practical approach to living and the best way to sass that adorable fool, nature.

For example, I have a client who is being unreasonable, manipulative, and exploitative. Basically it wants to steal from my company and there is no end in sight. We sell time and it grabs more than it is willing to pay for. Sometimes it is mean about it to force me to give, like a robber. Human nature beguiles me to become angry and protective. But since the Word lives in me, It keeps reminding me to turn the other cheek and to let him who takes my cloak have my coat also. I am compelled by my King to allow this to continue. I can’t accept the reign of God and of mammon at the same time. After all this time living in the Kingdom, I happen to know that I will be reimbursed somehow, somewhere, so it isn’t really much of a sacrifice. I wonder if it matters whether the client knows that my response is not from weakness but from strength in obeying God’s rule.

Odd to think about how so many problems I have, God has already had. I was very upset when a few people who I had been most generous with, did not acknowledge my gift or express any gratitude. Then I understood that once again I was being shown God’s problems to unite me with He. Does He beg for gratitude as I craved to get rid of the pain? No, He silently waits and hopes. I suppose the American feast of Thanksgiving was proclaimed to give God a little relief.

When I was younger, I studied the list of fruit of the Holy Spirit. (i.e. Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Longsuffering, Mildness, Fidelity, Modesty, Continence, and Chastity). It seemed to me that there was a rock in that fruit-basket. How could longsuffering be considered fruit?  I couldn’t imagine that the Power of the Universe could suffer. Don’t we want power and wealth to avoid suffering?

God’s ways are so very different from nature’s ways. God made man in His image and likeness, but He surely didn’t do that for nature! To live under the reign of God is certainly to have the natural mind and heart die, like the grain of wheat that falls to the ground to grow a new mind and heart. Nature’s death is devastating to the natural man, but not to the immortal man. The good death then is the death of what is called human nature; it is not relief from pain and suffering from cancer or aids as you may have thought. Good death is the kind of death that learning makes which transforms. Look ma, no fear!

The Good Family

So far the family reunion is everything I hoped for. The first couple of days were spent getting ready. My brother Lar and I were determined to obey our strict but loving Mother by not eating anything, not even a crumb of bread. We had never done that before, but you know, it wasn’t so hard. In fact it made me think about how Jesus didn’t eat for forty days and then he was hungry. Yes, I felt weak but I was supposed to. She said that the hunger would make me more aware of my dependence on God. If only I could always be aware of my dependence on God more than on my dependence on food, I would probably be thinner and less cocky.

Then, on the third day my dream came true. I still didn’t eat anything and I was amazed that I hadn’t so I started to feel hungry. That was like when Peter tried to walk on the water. When he became aware of how crazy that was he started to sink. Afraid of angering Jesus too, I stopped thinking about being hungry. In the evening Lar and I went to visit Mother and the family at a place called Saint George. We read psalms and prayers with lots of brothers and sisters and we broke the fast with the Body and Blood of Christ. He tasted so good and felt so warm and smooth as He traveled into my heart. Then, like the family we are, we all went into a big room full of tables and ate bean soup together. I gave Lar two bowls because he is so big and there was enough left over. He ate them faster than you can spit.

The best part was, and I’m so glad to have this to tell you, that the most important brother in the whole wide world came to be with us and talk to us about God. When he was born his mom named him Timothy and his father ended it with Ware, but now his names have more syllables than most. Met-ro-pol-i-tan-Kal-li-stos. Try to say that fast three times! This man turned a giant light on for the English speaking world by translating so many saintly writings and by writing about the Mother [Church], her background and her ways, things that Greeks and Russians took for granted but had been all darkness to English speakers until God sent Timothy on his mission. I could cry when I think about how different my world would be if little Timothy didn’t love God so much.

I can’t tell you everything he said to us but I will tell you what struck me like little bolts of lightning and made me smile. He came to tell us about how our God is a trinity and even though that concept is a mystery, some of the multitudinous mysterious aspects of it can be described, first by contrast with the one monolithic God of the Jews and Moslems. A monolithic idea of God isn’t very sociable. But a triune Godhead is very sociable because it loves each of its Selves and in the same way God loves each and every one of us humans. So, when Kallistos says God, he thinks all three-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together. Then, he got all intellectual and quoted Lossky to tell us that he said “The doctrine of the Trinity is the cross for human thought.” I suppose he said that so we wouldn’t get too comfortable by thinking that everything else he would say was really so simple. I wonder if Lossky’s powerful quote means that we have to completely surrender to the whole intricate concept of a triune God like Christ surrendered to death.

What really hit me was that the Trinity doesn’t have free will like we humans do who go this way and that and who change like butterflies. Each Person, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit conform to one will, called the will of God. It is probably better to think of it as the Will of the Father. We are so hot about having free will like it is everything, but when I think that Jesus and the Holy Spirit don’t have free will, well, I have to tell you, I am glad. That’s why we can trust God so much. Because He isn’t going to change His mind tomorrow about what He wants to do with us. Maybe free will isn’t so great; maybe not as great as joining God in His will. Wait a second; that reminds me! “Thy Will be done.” Maybe the best of us don’t want free will either; those who give their free wills back to God.

Because God is social, to be social is Godlike. Hell is self cut off from others. Kallistos went on and on about how wrong it is to be alone or to love yourself, which I suppose is an oxymoron since love must involve another person.

Kallistos said there is only one choice and that is to either join the Trinity or hell. Then he really opened it up by adding that all forms of community, schools, governments, businesses, families, churches should all be forms of the Trinity where mutual love and respect are free from oppression, and coercion.

When he prays, Kallistos is aware that it is not a dialogue between him and God, but rather he is taken up into their exchange of love. Sometimes he sees flashes of the Trinity inside of him conversing with each other. I suppose that happens when you and I pray too but we aren’t looking out for it, not until now at least.

I asked him how God could love everyone since so many people were so self absorbed or mean. He gave me a good answer, something I can think about for a long time. It was a gift.

He said that God made each person to be very unique. That sure is true! Well, so God loves each person uniquely. He expects different things from each person. Not us, we expect the same thing from everyone which is why we get so angry with them. What a better way God has!

This wonderful family gathering gave me two Lenten homework assignments, 1) to love people as God does by remembering the uniqueness of each person, and 2) when I pray, to listen for God talking to Himselves. 

Me and God

I love Him but I can’t see Him. I know He is there because He proves it to me when He plays with time right in front of my eyes. Last week I thought I should try again to look for an agent for my book, The Immortal Life, and the very next day Beth told me that she spoke to her old friend from Bedford after thirty five years and it turns out that Sally is an agent and is willing to see my book. How did He do that?

A week later I went to my new book club to talk about Frankenstein with the Catholic ladies. When I arrived, there was only the leader there and no one else. She mentioned that there was a Mass going on in the chapel so I said, “Let’s go!” There was a small company of about five people in the Mass. It was being said for their new project. When we walked in the lay reader was reading the Book of Samuel, and was at the point when young Samuel was trying to sleep. He kept hearing his master call him. Several times Samuel got up and went to find out what he wanted only to hear the master say that he did not call him. Finally the master realized that God was calling young Samuel and had something to say so he told the boy that the next time he heard the call he should reply “Here I am Lord.” Everyone in the small congregation silently said, “Here I am Lord.” And then we said it together out loud a few times in the responsive prayer. After Mass my new friend and I went back into the sitting room to talk about Frankenstein. A couple of men joined us because we offered wine and camaraderie. When the small company emerged from the chapel I asked them what their project was, and the one man replied that they were going to syndicate content to Christians. I asked if they needed content and gave them my card. Once again my invisible but powerful Lord was encouraging me.

It doesn’t matter if nothing comes of these two incidents; God was showing me for the millionth time that He can orchestrate my life (and yours) any way He wants. I like that. I don’t have to try too hard or be too ambitious. I only have to try hard to listen and write what He wants me to write. As I’ve said, ‘I am the visible ghost-writer of the invisible author.’ That alone is not an easy job. Someone else has to do the marketing of all this writing. I’m glad to be reminded that it is the Author who markets for me.

I suppose that it isn’t really the Father God Himself who is orchestrating all these marvels, but it is His angel that He has assigned to me.  I hope that my angel is very good and perfectly serves our Lord. I would hate to have a flawed or tricky angel.

Every time, well almost every time, God plays with time to show me He is near I get so excited about it that I write it down in my hard copy Journal. I feel so sorry for the people who don’t believe that the invisible God is Someone to love and obey and that one day will become very visible and that forever and ever and ever in a sunny place.

I trust Him with my life because He can play with time and I wonder over and over again how He does that because I can’t, at least not yet.