It occurs to me…

“Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.”  St. Augustine

Okay, this one seems like the “gimme” in the group – “obey the laws.”  Short of driving the speed limit and pulling those tags off of mattresses (okay, the list may be longer), I and most others generally “obey the laws.)  But then it occurs to me that there are various lawbreakers we owe a debt of gratitude to.  On occasion in history it was time to not “obey the laws” as then written – Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. come to mind.  Which of course leads us logically to the last of the rules.

“Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.”  St. Augustine

Reading this again this morning I decided to look up “Christian” in Wikipedia – where else right? I got a chuckle out of this comment: “While there are diverse interpretations of Christianity which sometimes conflict, they are united in believing that Jesus has a unique significance.”  I love that understatement – there are diverse interpretations of Christianity which sometimes conflict.”  But I can’t let that cause me to lose sight of the reality that there are similarities also – the “believing that Jesus has a unique significance.”  (I can only assume the author of the Wikipedia section took an understatement pill that day.)

While it is true that spending time in a garage won’t make me a car, walking into a library tends to make me quieter.  I do think that spending time with other Christians, particularly when that somehow (the Holy Spirit?) inherently causes us to focus on and reflect the teachings of Jesus and his “unique significance,” helps.  St. Augustine may be on to something.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.”  St. Augustine

Well, to look at this one I had to look up “charity” and refresh myself as to its meaning.  Per my on-line dictionary:

Charity: “the voluntary giving of help, typically in the form of money, to those in need.

It is easy for me to focus on the “typically in the form of money” part of charity, but it occurs to me that the form charity takes is less significant than the “voluntary giving of help” part.  As I contemplate “live in charity” further, what jumps out is not the “charity” part but the “live in” part.  I am not just supposed to “live in charity,” I am supposed to “LIVE in charity,” as a fish lives in water.  Charity is not a place to visit when convenient, comfortable, or when I need the tax deduction, it is not just a place to visit, it is where I am supposed to LIVE.  I hear it is a really good neighborhood.

“Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.”  St. Augustine

“Reduce your wants.”  Now there’s a rule to live by.  I can only think, however, that it needs a bit of a reminder beside it, like – “Reduce your wants; recognize, acknowledge, and celebrate your haves.”

“Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.”  St. Augustine

Who doesn’t love a good set of rules to live by, even a set of rules that is some 1,600 years old.  (I guess “time-tested” would be preferable to “old.”)

“Order your soul” seems like a tough one to start with.  First I have to identify my soul, then the contents, then put them in the proper order.  My on-line dictionary defines the “soul” as the spiritual or non-material part of a human being.  With that in mind, as I read “order your soul,” what comes to mind is the more colloquial “get your s$#t together,” “s$#t” being not so much “tangible stuff” as the intangibles.  In this (here I go mixing saints) what comes to mind is the concept of “disordered affections” of which St. Ignatius wrote.  “Disordered affections” are, as one commentator wrote, not generally when we choose bad things, but when we put the good things in the wrong order.  Or, as he wrote, when “we make good things god things.”  There is nothing wrong with liking a sports team, alcohol, work, fishing, etc., but if I set those up ahead of God, if they start to control my life, then I engage in idolatry, so to speak, and I have a problem – a disordered affection.

How is my soul ordered?

Too often I think of God as a vending machine – put something in, get something out.  Heck, I suppose sometimes I don’t even put anything in, but as I walk by I look to see if by chance something has come out of the machine for me to take.  Yet it occurs to me that merely possessing the object that comes out of the “machine” is not the point.  Having a quality, a blessing, a skill is of little use unless and until it is exercised.  I could be a great painter, but have to pick up the brush and paint.  I have to do something with what I have, with what God gives me, otherwise the gift is of no real value and the chain ends there.

All that to say that merely having is only part of the story.  What I do with what I have is the rest.

Listening to Don Williams (along with Willie, perhaps the last of the living country singers worthy of only one name) recently I came across these lyrics from The Answer, a song of his I had not heard before.  I can’t determine who wrote the song:

The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know.  But I’m close to understanding just how far I have to go.  We give our hearts.  We take our chances.  And know the fool ain’t the one with all the questions.  To tell the truth, its someone who believes they have the answers.

It occurs to me that I am about there also, “there” being “close to understanding just how far I have to go.”

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens….”  Ecclesiastes 3:1

I have a client/boss retiring today after twenty-eight years with her company.  I have worked with her all of those twenty-eight years.  Two thoughts came to mind.  Well, more than those two came to mind, but among them were these two.  First, it occurred to me that I have been involved in or attended a lot of events lately related to retirement and death.  If I thought about that much it would certainly make sense to me, but I am choosing not to do so.  Second, it occurred to me how little I respect time.  As I contemplate that I realize that what I focus on are events in time, those things that are talked about in Ecclesiastes 3:2-8:

“a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace”

I focus on those events as they occur, worry about them occurring, or fret that they did/did not occur.  Somehow I fail to see that “time” is involved in all of those events.  The one constant throughout that passage is that word – “time.”  Those events are markers of time, but time is the constant.  In that sense, time has its meaning and its own intrinsic value, whether a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, or twenty-eight years.  Time has meaning.

Photo taken in Puerto Vallarta late last year.

“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”     Bill Watterson – Calvin & Hobbes

I sigh deeply and relate to Calvin’s comment to Hobbes with some frequency.  I mean, if you were capable of building a vessel that could transport you across the universe over a course of light years, and then, having gotten in the neighborhood of earth, observed a bit of what is going on here as this mass orbits the sun, would you want to stop and strike up a conversation?  I fear extra-terrestrials see the earth as the (warning: dated societal reference)  Stuckey’s of the universe, and the ETs are not hankering for a pecan log roll.

Of course, who knows.  There’s a chance we are the best the universe has to offer.