Author: itoccurstocp

“Each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up.”  Pliny

The more I contemplated this, the more it intrigued me.  It occurs to me that we regularly acknowledge the education we receive from other sources, from books, from other people, yet it seems true that if we let them, our own experiences, and our reactions and responses to them, stand to be our greatest teachers.  But there is that condition in the quote – “provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up.”  I might replace “capacity” with “willingness,” but either correctly implies both a reluctance to and a cost of this spying “from close up.”  Any  amount of honest introspection will reveal a healthy share of bonehead moves, blunders, and over/underreactions to things from my past.   And while it makes sense that these provide fertile ground for education to blossom, well, let’s just say it is generally less painful to learn from others experiences than from my own.  Still, the point is, I have a lot to learn from myself.

“Fret not thyself; it lendeth only to evil doing.”  Psalm 37:8

Chambers focuses today on fretting.  (All other aside, isn’t that a great word – “fret.”  It carries with it so much more of what it is than its poor substitute – “worry.”)  On this passage Chambers writes: “It is one thing to say ‘Fret not,’ but a very different thing to have such a disposition that you find yourself able not to fret.”  So true!

As usual, Chambers cuts to the heart of it: “Fretting springs from a determination to get our own way.”  It springs from, if you will on this day, our “Declaration of Independence” from God.   (A declaration that is destined to be less successful than the one in 1776.)  It comes from things not working out the way I have projected and played out in my mind, things not meeting MY expectations.  All that to say that fret puts God in the background, in an advisory or observer capacity, if in fact He is in the equation at all.  Or as Chambers puts it, “All our fret and worry is caused by calculating without God.”

From Luke 15:28-30, the discourse of the older son after the father asks him to come in and join the party for the returned, younger son:

 “But he was angry, and would not go in.  Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him.  So he answered and said to his father ‘Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you  never  gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends.  But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you have killed the fatted calf for him.’”

The younger son who swallowed his pride to penitently returned home and the slighted older son — It is difficult (sometimes more than others) to pick a side here.  But it occurs to me that perhaps that is the point of the parable, at least one of them —  We don’t need to pick a side.  The father didn’t.  He did his best to make things work out in light of the facts presented.  There is nothing to indicate that the father, hearing of the return of the prodigal son, let out a sigh and then grudgingly trudged down the road to meet him.  No, Luke says he ran down the road to meet him and welcomed the younger son back.  Likewise, when a servant reports that the older son is not joining the party, the father doesn’t throw his hands up in frustration, he goes out to meet his elder son and get him to join the party.

Often, I am faced with what seems like “either/or” situations that might well be “both” situations if I am willing to put the time in.  It is, most often, just easier to pick a side, and most often, I pick mine!

“An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up.”  Proverbs 12:25

The movie world seems currently intent on producing movies about superheroes, the main characters having some superpower.  Perhaps that is why, on reading this passage, it occurred to me that while I don’t have ready access to invisibility, super strength, the ability to fly or to “leap tall buildings in a single bound,” I nonetheless have ready access to a superpower – the kind word.  Using the superpower of the kind word, I can make someone’s day, and, as a bonus, make my own.

Well, okay, this is a superpower we all have.  And technically, if we all have it, I guess it can’t be a true superpower.  But still, we have the power, it is pretty neat, and we ought to exercise it frequently.

Revisiting Choices, a George Jones favorite written by Billy Yates and Mike Curtis:

“I’ve had choices, since the day that I was born

I heard voices, that told me right from wrong

If I had listened, no I wouldn’t be here today

Living and dying with the choices I’ve made.”

When George Jones sings that it has a maudlin tone, a sense of regret, yet he and the fiddle accompanying him sprinkle it with just enough hope so as to make it difficult to tell exactly whether the  “if I had listened, no I wouldn’t be here today” line is a lament or something defiantly positive, something like Radney Foster’s line in Half My Mistakes – “half of my mistakes, I’d probably make ‘em again.”

That is, I guess, the funny thing about choices, even choices that can be seen as mistakes.  They are all part of the recipe that creates today, now, the way things are, the way I am – and so we have to be careful about “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”  Or as Foster puts it – “You can lean too hard on regrets, but I don’t recommend it.”

“I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no longer worthy to be called thy son: make me one of thy servants.”  Luke 15:18-19

It is easy to get caught up in the after story, the father’s welcoming the son back, the sandals, the robe, the ring, the killing of the fatted calf, the party, that we can forget that all of that resulted from a realization, then an admission by the younger son (first to himself, then to his father) that he had screwed up.  That can be, is often, such a difficult step.  It is so easy to blame other people, other circumstances, for difficulties in life, and so difficult to admit that the person in the mirror is the one who screwed up.  Yet, as in this parable, it is that step that is often the one required to get to the road back.

Hebrews 13:5, this from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase in The Message:

“Don’t be obsessed with getting more material things.  Be relaxed with what you have.”

Or more traditionally, from the NIV:

“Keep your lives free of the love of money, and be content with what you have.”

Two thoughts occurred to me:

Seems like something you’d read in a self-help New York Times best seller.  Oh, wait….

All due respect to Dylan, are the times really a changing?

“Under everything, just another human being.”  Eddie Vedder

In one of those meandering journeys one can make following one bread crumb to another on the internet, I stumbled across this line today.  It occurs to me that the “everything” is the challenge, not the “human being.”  We take on, project on others, a lot of “everything.”

From Max Ehrmannn’s Desiderata:

“Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

I missed, and a friend reminded me (that’s what friends are for) of the connection between this from Ehrmannn and Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 13:11-12:

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

Reflecting on these It occurs to me that while there is some correlation, the “counsel of the years” that allows us to “put the ways of childhood behind [us]” has less to do with chronological age and more to do with the obstacles we put (or allow to creep in) between us and truth.  Thinking of it another way, no age or generation has “cornered the market” on the inability (or, for that matter, the ability) to see clearly – though I think the 70s disco era may deserve some type of award based on music, clothing, and hair styles alone.