Category: books

decisions, decisions

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Sitting on my bed-side table is:

Guess which one kept me up half the night until the wand broke?

Never was ‘lead me not into temptation’ so fervent in Morning Prayer.
The rest of the book must wait for tonight.

10.17pm.  It’s time…

worth trying?

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Someone was telling me about a book on change called One Small Step can Change your Life. I’m not sure I’m going to rush out and buy it, but there were a few tidbits worth experimenting with.

Apparently, the idea is (obvious enough): big change means big fear. Little change means no fear. It seems to have to do with primitive survival instincts. Too much disruption and our fight-or-flight mechanism sets in. The flight-mechanism diverts all our energy from the parts of our brain that could respond creatively or wisely, so we run away from change rather than engaging with it productively. But apparently, if the change is small enough, the panic response lies dormant, and we can get on with being creative, adaptive human beings. Now I have no idea if this is scientifically true, but it sounds intuitively plausible, which is good enough for now.

So that means we need to look for tiny little steps towards change — something I suspect we all know, but often fail to apply.

The other helpful reminder was about how easily our brain can be programmed. Apparently, if we ask ourselves the same question every day, our brain learns to track the information for us throughout the day. That means that if we ask the question, ‘where was God’s blessing’, our brain will tag and sort blessings throughout the day; whereas if we ask ‘how have I failed?’ our brain will tag all our downfalls. (This is ‘Pavlov meets Ignatius’, isn’t it?)

If that’s true, it means we need to choose our questions wisely. But imagine if by the simple act of asking, we found that our brain got in the habit of noticing blessing, or beauty, or laughter, or forgiveness… if we got in the habit of noticing God.

So, here’s a one-off question (or two) for anyone who will join in:

What’s the best question we could ask ourselves each day? What will draw us closest to God?

a better quot.

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Now you see, if I had kept reading last night instead of stopping to blog, I could have offered you this instead:

… there is no point arguing with a watertight argument, since those who produce such arguments are, by definition, the sort of people whose first reaction when challenged by something different is to see it as a threat, and to circle the wagons.  It is only when the Indians ride on by without paying them any attention that they may be drawn out of their circle and nudged by a timorous curiosity into the free flow of grace.  And if they don’t come out, judging an invitation to play to be a threat to their goodness, well, that’s God’s problem, not ours, and they are well in God’s hands.

James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment 

jonah

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For reasons that I would not like to examine too closely, Jonah has always been my favourite prophet.   It is a book to read while sulking.   A space to wait till God’s laughter becomes my own.

And I haven’t been reading it lately (before you all jump to conclusions).  But I have been reading James Alison’s Faith Beyond Resentment, which made me think again about that great whale.  Alison says this, of Jonah’s fish-failed drowning:

Jonah had thought he was plunging to his death.  There must have been something of relief in his descent.  At last it was all over.  But it was not.  Unknown to him, while he thought he had engineered his death, setting it up so as to avoid finding himself in the presence of the Lord, God had a different idea.  His plan was to tag along while Jonah would not allow himself to be reached, and then, when he had plunged into the deep, to hold him in being while he was devoured by all that tumultuous fear, hatred, and darkness which had glowered beneath the surface of his faith.  The great fish is nothing other than God holding Jonah in being in the midst of the darkness and fear…
I imagine the great fish to have been transparent, so that Jonah was not aware for a good part of those three days and nights that he was anything other than being lost, utterly swept away by forces whose swirling he had always dreaded.  He could see and feel the darkness, and yet not be aware that, in the midst of that, he was being stitched together, reached, held at a depth which he had been unable to imagine.

The wisdom of pastoral counseling and spiritual direction has always been to stay with the darkness, not to flee.   But Alison has now given me an image to hold onto — a whale shaped space in which to wait, and to encourage others to wait, for God.

Faith Beyond Resentment is the most interesting bit of theology I’ve read in a long time.   I keep reading thinking, ‘this is all so obvious, so true.  Why have I never heard it said this way before?’