The "Happiness" sinkhole

Incurvatus in se

"Latin: Incurvatus in se" (Turned/curved inward on oneself) is a theological phrase describing a life lived "inward" for self rather than "outward" for God and others.

Paul the Apostle wrote of this condition in the Epistle to the Romans 7:15, 7:8-19

"As you might expect, the incurvatus in se of the human creature runs rampant, producing the twin offspring of entitlement and imperative (Thou Shalt Get Happy!), a combination which ironically doubles as a recipe for misery, it would appear. Lears’ other chief observation has to do with how these books, and perhaps the discipline itself, contain an over-reliance, and ultimately cruel insistence, on willpower as the primary/sole engine of wellbeing. If you don’t have enough, then you’re unfortunately out of luck."

Romans (The Message):

14-16 I can anticipate the response that is coming: “I know that all God’s commands are spiritual, but I’m not. Isn’t this also your experience?” Yes. I’m full of myself—after all, I’ve spent a long time in sin’s prison. What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God’s command is necessary.
17-20 But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
21-23 It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.
24 I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?
25 The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.

The Solution Is Life on God’s Terms

8 1-2 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

3-4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

"I have come home at last."

"I have come home at last!" says a stunned unicorn at the end of "The Chronicles of Narnia." "This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now."

"HE works through gift"

FROM: http://liberate.org/2013/09/03/hear-me-andy/
by Kate Norris

"But “if/then” living will ultimately lead you to the same place with which every “winner” is familiar: dissatisfaction. You can never attain enough or earn enough. There is no earthly badge of honor that will satisfy a soul. It will always demand more.

It is not so with grace. When God unveiled his Son to the world he revealed that he works through gift. He always has, and he always will, until the final trumpet sounds. His gift is grace to a people whose earning and deserving has fallen off the axis of love. "

". . . even this I can not do for myself"

From: http://www.mbird.com
Flannery O'Connor:

“Prayer should be composed I understand of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication and I would like to see what I can do with each without an exegesis.” Confessing that her mind “is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery,” she asks for a faith motivated by love, not fear: “Give me the grace, dear God, to adore You, for even this I cannot do for myself.”…

She reckoned that her success would be the product of a holy collaboration: “If I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.”

"Living your whole life on your knees"

 From: http://www.aholyexperience.com/   

 November 17, 2013 by Ann Voskamp

"Don’t ever forget it:

The real romantics are the boring ones — they let another heart bore a hole deep into theirs.

Be one of the boring ones. Pray to be one who get 50 boring years of marriage – 50 years to let her heart bore a hole deep into yours.

Let everyone do their talking about 50 shades of grey, but don’t let anyone talk you out of it: committment is pretty much black and white. Because the truth is, real love will always make you suffer. Simply commit: Who am I willing to suffer for?

Who am I willing to take the reeking garbage out for and clean out the gross muck ponding at the bottom of the fridge? Who am I willing to listen to instead of talk at? Who am I willing to hold as they grow older and realer? Who am I willing to die a bit more for every day? Who am I willing to make heart-boring years with? Who am I willing to let bore a hole into my heart?

Get it: Life – and marriage proposals — isn’t not about one up-manship — it’s about one down-manship. It’s about the heart-boring years of sacrifice and going lower and serving. It’s not about how well you perform your proposal. It’s about how well you let Christ perform your life.

Sure, go ahead, have fun, make a ridiculously good memory and we’ll cheer loud: propose creatively — but never forget that what wows a woman and woos her is you how you purpose to live your life.

I’m praying, boys — be Men. Be one of the ‘boring” men – and let your heart be bore into. And know there are women who love that kind of man.

The kind of man whose romance isn’t flashy – because love is gritty.
The kind of man whose romance isn’t about cameras — because it’s about Christ.
The kind of man whose romance doesn’t have to go viral — because it’s going eternal.

No, your dad did not get down on one knee when he proposed – because the romantic men know it’s about living your whole life on your knees." by Ann Voskamp

“life often feels like . . ."

“life often feels like an organized assault 

on our sense of control.” 

by DAVID ZAHL on Jan 22, 2013 

                                                   http://www.mbird.com/
"It should come as no surprise that our hardwiring for control informs both of the top entries on the list: 1. the necessity to conceive of our life as a self-propelled narrative of progress (law) and 2. the absurd but no less widespread fallacy that death is  something we can control (rather than the definition of what we cannot). I think it was a certain father figure of mine who once said that “life often feels like an organized assault on our sense of control.” Christianity, of course, is at its most urgent and comforting when addressing people whose lives have not gone as planned and whose sense of control, especially in the face of death, has utterly failed them. "

“Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through,” Conrad wrote in “Typhoon.” “Face it.” He was talking about more than storms.

Yadah in Hebrew . . . to hold out the hand

From: http://www.aholyexperience.com/
            Nov. 11, 2013

"And I peel squash and there is God and yada, yada, yada.

And yadah, it’s Hebrew, and it literally means to hold out the hand in four ways:

1. to bemoan with this wringing of hands.

2. or to revere with an extending of hands.

And this too on the page of the Strong’s Concordance:

3. Yadah means to confess.

4. Yadah means to give thanks.

Yadah –   the whisper of Psalms 92:1:

“It is a good thing to [yada] — give thanks – and sing praises to unto thy name, O most High.”

It is a good thing to yada: in the midst of the wringing of hands, to extend the hand.

It is a good thing to yada: hold out the hand — not as a fist to God, but in praise to God.

It is a good thing to yada: give thanks — to brazenly confess that God is wholly good though the world is horribly not.

You hear it — this scoffing yada, yada, yada — as if much and everywhere is banal, this aching meaninglessness that drones on and on.

And in the midst of genocides and suicides, the divorce and disease, the death and dark, we understand the yada all around us,  the holding up of fists at God instead of extending the hand in thanks and we empathize with the unbeliever’s confusion, because it’s our own confusion, and in this struggle to be grateful to God for always and for everything, we pray with humble earnestness for the unbeliever: because before a Good God haven’t we all been been momentary unbelievers?

And yet there it is, and you hear it now, at the cusp of the feasting, the yada, yada, yada, that sings relentless and bold:

We won’t stop confessing He is good and we won’t stop thanking Him for grace and we won’t stopholding out our hands — and taking His hand. We won’t stop believing that “God is good” is not some trite quip for the good days but a radical defiant cry for the terrible days.

That “God is good” is not a stale one-liner when all’s  happy but a saving lifeline when all’s hard.

And we will keep giving thanks, yada, yada, yada, because giving thanks is only this: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God.

I’m holding the squash in hand. That’s what the mother had said standing there in her tsunami of grief: “I believe God is good. I believe that is all there really is.”

And every time I give thanks, I confess to the universe the goodness of God. I had touched her hand.

She had said it, her eyes so clear, like you could see straight into her, into all that remains.

The morning fog ebbs across harvested fields.

Thanksgiving in all things accepts the deep mystery of God through everything.

And there will be bowed heads around all the tables.

And there will be lights flickering brave to burn back the black, and there will be a believing in relentless redemption and a reaching out and around of all these hands,  reaching out in this yada, yada, yada, this steady confessing of the goodness of God — come whatever.

And there are leaves fallen frosted across the lawn.

Their confession glinting on and on…."

"Love Alone is Credible"

Reading the Signs of Love: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Forgiveness

by WILL MCDAVID on Nov 7, 2013 • 1 Comment   From his short meditation on love, titled Love Alone Is Credible:

“The first thing that must strike a non-Christian about the Christian’s faith is that it obviously presumes far too much. It is too good to be true: the mystery of being, revealed as absolute love, condescending to wash his creatures’ feet, and even their souls, taking upon himself all the confusion of guilt, all the God-directed hatred, all the accusations showered upon him with cudgels, all the disbelief that arrogantly covers up what he has revealed, all the mocking hostility that once and for all nailed down his inconceivable moment of self-abasement – in order to pardon his creature, before himself and the world…

No one can resolve this mystery into dry concepts and explain how it is that God no longer sees my guilt in me, but only in his beloved Son, who bears it for me; or how God sees this guilt transformed through the suffering of love and loves me because I am the one for whom his Son has suffered in love. But the way God, the lover, sees us is in fact the way we are in reality – for God, this is the absolute and irrevocable truth.”

"I'll take Grace" (Mary Oliver)

                           “You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity.                         I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it. ”

― Mary Oliver

               “Sometimes I need

               only to stand

             wherever I am

              to be blessed.”

           ― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

"Married to amazement" (Mary Oliver)

From:  http://www.aholyexperience.com/

What had Mary Oliver defiantly scratched down with an inked stick of her own?

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.”

Everyone’s wild to stop feeling overwhelmed – but nobody ever wants everything to stop and be over.

Mama walks like that through the woods. Like she knows it’s going to be over someday, all over. That your face will come tight right up to it and there’s no stick you can fine anywhere to fight time off. Here will be over.

And then there’ll be that stark moment when you turn and see what you were married to. You can live your life as the bride married to Hurry, having affairs with Not Enough, Always Stress, and Easy Cynicism.

Yeah, I guess we all get to choose our own bedfellows.

Mama always said it and she didn’t care what anyone thought of it: God was her husband. And that ain’t just some metaphor to get the Pharisees all in a prudish knot – it’s brazen Scripture. Take it or go ahead and leave it. We all get to choose our own bedfellows – and who we’ll give our soul to, who or what will get our life.

Mama’s standing there, already decided.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement, vowed to Awe Himself, covenanted to Christ –and I took the whole of everything He gave in this gloried world into my open arms with thanks.

Because really? Anybody can be a cynic. Cynicism is laziness in every way.

The real heroes are the ones who never stop looking for the possibility of joy.

Grace is never passive. Grace is a hijacker. Grace hijacks the dark, hijacks the looming forests, hijacks the sins. Grace hijacks the impossible, the unlikely, the angry, the cynics, the doomed.

Your calling is radical: gloriously hijack every darkness with grace.

To love mercy and do justice and follow Christ means to be the Revolutionary Guerillas of Grace — radically turning the fallen world Upside Down.

There are always the quiet revolutionaries who give thanks for grace in the unexpected.

There are always the real revolutionaries who know this overthrows all the pressing dark.

There are, even now, the revolutionaries who know salvation is no cheap gift; they know what they were saved for. They choose to give glory with the breaths given. They choose to be married to amazement because only amazing grace divorces souls from the dark.