From my reading

The worship of success was something that fascinated Dietrich Bonhoeffer (I wrote about it here) and it's something that intrigues me. It's something that has pervaded not only the culture of the world around us, but also the church and our general attitude to suffering.

 A.W. Tozer, in his wonderful little book of essays, The Root of the Righteous, said that:

One marked difference between the faith of our fathers as conceived by the fathers and the same faith as understood and lived by their children is that the fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day descendants seem concerned only with the fruit. 

Success looks only at the fruit, at that which may be 'the brief bright effort of the severed branch to bring forth its fruit in its season.' 

Tozer goes on to observe that, 'Preoccupation with appearances and a corresponding neglect of the out-of-sight root of the true spiritual life are prophetic signs that go unheeded. Immediate 'results' are all that matter, quick proofs of present success...
Religious pragmatism...Truth is whatever works. If it gets results it is good. There is but one test for the religious leader: success. Everything is forgiven him except failure.'

I recently read an essay on the Book of Job in the Old Testament by G.K. Chesterton that one of my daughters recommended. Chesterton says:

Here in this book the question is really asked whether God invariably punishes vice with terrestrial punishment and rewards virtue with terrestrial prosperity. If the Jews had answered that question wrongly they might have lost all their after influence in human history. They might have sunk even down to the level of modern well-educated society.

For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good.
 
Job is not told that his misfortunes were due to his sins or a part of any plan for his improvement...we see Job tormented not because he was the worst of men, but because he was the best.

 



Secular writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) offered some piercing thoughts on worship:

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship...
If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth...Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

I think it would be consistent with Wallace's observations to say that if you worship success...you will never be satisfied. You will end up feeling you've achieved nothing.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.


The worship of success is a default setting. You won't be discouraged from operating on this setting. You will be applauded and encouraged, most likely, but you won't be free.

The test of the life of a saint is not success, but faithfulness in human life as it actually is...

Oswald Chambers

Mother Culture

Some quotes and thoughts that have stirred my heart or encouraged me in some way this week:

Uniqueness

'Everyone on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. Everyone on the earth should believe that he has something to give the world which cannot otherwise be given.'

The Quotable Chesterton

I keep a prayer notebook. For each day of the month I have a list of people I pray for. I also have a couple of pages set aside for my immediate family with ongoing prayer reminders and scriptures I pray over each of them and I'd neglected this notebook in recent months. I was still praying but some people slipped through the cracks because I didn't think of them in the busyness of life. I read these words and was stirred to be more faithful in prayer:

'If you are not getting the hundredfold more, not getting insight into God's Word, then start praying for your friends, enter into the ministry of the interior. "The Lord turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his friends." Job 42:10 Wherever God puts you in circumstances, pray immediately...Pray for your friends now; pray for those with whom you come in contact now...'

Oswald Chambers

After reading the words by Chambers above I also thought that I should be putting feet on my prayers. I decided I'd act upon what the Lord put on my heart that day - pray and then follow it up with an action, however small. For me that meant an email, a phone call, a visit, some text messages, a letter, a card.

'As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you.' 1 Samuel 12:23

My intention: to put feet on at least one of the prayers I pray today. 

A picture of a friendship between two couples inspired me to have a large-spirit mentality in my relationships:

'In the ripened Indian summer weather, those two once again choose us. In circumstances where smaller spirits might let envy corrode liking, they declare their generous pleasure in our company and our good luck...

We have been invited into their lives, from which we will never be evicted or evict ourselves.'

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Sometimes my children have not appreciated reading and memorising Poetry. "When are we ever going to use this? What's the point?"
Well, one day it might save your life.

We've just completed Plutarch's life of Nicias. The Syracrusans had defeated the Athenians and the Athenian prisoners were sent to the quarries or into slavery and their commanders executed. But there were some who gained their freedom in an unusual way:

'Several were saved for the sake of Euripides, whose poetry, it appears, was in request among the Sicilians more than among any of the settlers out of Greece. And when any travelers arrived that could tell them some passage, or give them any specimen of his verses, they were delighted to be able to communicate them to one another. Many of the captives who got safe back to Athens are said, after they reached home, to have gone and made their acknowledgments to Euripides, relating how that some of them had been released from their slavery by teaching what they could remember of his poems, and others, when straggling after the fight, been relieved with meat and drink for repeating some of his lyrics. Nor need this be any wonder, for it is told that a ship of Caunus fleeing into one of their harbors for protection, pursued by pirates, was not received, but forced back, till one asked if they knew any of Euripides’s verses, and on their saying they did, they were admitted, and their ship brought into harbour.'

Plutarch's Lives

 We teach Poetry because it nourishes the soul and here it had the added benefit of preserving it.

G.K. Chesterton: Contentment

'The word content is not inspiring nowadays; rather it is irritating because it is dull.
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.'

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to visit a place where I'd lived for three years. For those three years I'd felt like a lump of clay on the Potter's wheel. Not pretty, unusable, messy, and dull.

Going back and showing my family the different places I'd lived when I was there, remembering people who had been a part of my shaping and firing; walking through the township and seeing the old buildings, the beautiful parks, the river front - I thought, "I don't remember this place being so lovely."

I suddenly realised how much beauty I had missed because my eyes had been only on the vulgar lump of clay and all its irregularities.
I was jarred by the thought that I hadn't made the most of my time in that place. That experience was gone and would never come to me again. I hadn't found the poetry in that unique experience setting. I didn't drink it dry.

I don't want to ever let that happen again.

'Thus the Suffragette will say, "I have passed through the paltry duties of pots and pans, the drudgery of the vulgar kitchen; but I have come out to intellectual liberty." The sound philosopher will answer, "You have never passed through the kitchen, or you never would call it vulgar. Wiser and stronger women than you have really seen a poetry in pots and pans; naturally, because there is a poetry in them."

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.'

A Miscellany of Men

Am I exhausting this experience I am going through now?

Will I be able to look back and know that I experienced the beauty of this place, for this season of my life?

Will I Iet this experience go through me - the difficulties, the pain, the dullness - and drain the cup dry?

I want to see the poetry in my pots and pans.

Rejoice in the Lord always...

The Lord is near...

Do not be anxious about anything...

I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances...

I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation...

I can do everything through Him who gives me strength.

Philippians 4

G.K. Chesterton: The Romantic in the Rain

It's our first day of winter and it's raining for the first time in a while.

 

But the scheme of rain in itself is one of an enormous purification. It realises the dream of some insane hygienist: it scrubs the sky. 

Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starry rafters and Starless corners of the cosmos; it is a cosmic spring cleaning.

While it decreases light, yet it doubles it. If it dims the sky, it brightens the earth.

For indeed this is one of the real beauties of rainy weather, that while the amount of original and direct light is commonly lessened, the number of things that reflect light is unquestionably increased. 

The Romantic in the Rain

G.K.Chesterton: Jane Austen

"... I fancy that Jane Austen was stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite sure that she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly describe a man. ..." 

What's Wrong With The World  (1910)

"No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Bronte could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know--like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write..."

The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)