Last Sunday I wrote about my book club, Biblically Literate, and this Sunday I’m starting my Bible study for the book club in 1 John. I read through the book, only five short chapters long, this afternoon, and the first thing I noticed was all the contrasts that John draws in his letter. It’s a message full of stark contrast: love vs. hatred, light vs. blindness, life vs. death, truth vs. lies, righteousness vs. sin, forgiveness vs. condemnation, true worship vs. idolatry, confidence vs. fear, real vs. counterfeit.

We tend to think we live in a moral universe of grey tones. Situational ethics and the dangers of legalism have taught us that nothing is as simple as it seems, that no one is completely good or wholly evil. It’s a grey world for most of us, most of the time. Or as Paul said in I Corinthians, “Now we see through a glass darkly.”

But someday, according to both Paul and John, we will see God, the Maker and Lover of the Universe, face to face. John says, “We know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” Then the contrasts will be clear: Truth on one side, Evil and Deceit on the other. Men will be without excuse, having chosen either goodness and truth and forgiveness or evil and deceit and condemnation. No in-between, if there is a purgatory, that medium state will be over and done with; we will be known and we will know the Light of the World is Jesus.

We may value ambiguity in our literature here and now because the world looks ambiguous through that dark glass, but it won’t always be so. In fact, if John is right, Reality isn’t ambiguous even now; it only looks that way to us on this side of eternity. Oh, how I want to see everything in contrast, even if people call me simplistic and unsophisticated; I want to see everything through the Light. John declares, “God is Light; in him there is no darkness at all.” No shades of grey at all.

In other news, Hurricane Gustav looks like a near miss for Houston, where I live about thirty miles from the coast. Pray for the people of Louisiana and other points east who may be inundated by wind and rain this Labor Day weekend.

Someone referred me to this blog, written by Director of Missions Joe McKeever, who lives and works in New Orleans, right after Katrina. I’ve kept reading it ever since because Pastor McKeever has such good insights about both New Orleans and the Christian life. (He also makes me homesick for being a Southern Baptist.) Now he’s writing about the stress of living in a New Orleans under hurricane threat —again.

I have this children’s fiction book about the Galveston hurricane of 1900 on my shelf. I think I’ll give it to the kids, maybe Karate Kid, to read, since they’ve all heard enough about hurricanes this week to make them curious about what a real hurricane would be like. I also read and wrote about this nonfiction book on the same storm a couple of years ago that some of the adults might want to read if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

I found this You-Tube video at the blog Mommy Life and had to share it:

What’s your cardboard testimony?
Mine: I thought I had it all together/
I learned that God is not a tame lion, but He is faithful.

Thoughts on chapter 2, Method, of Christianity For Modern Pagans by Peter Kreeft, a commentary on Pascal’s Pensees.

Kreeft quotes Kierkegaard: “Therefore, create silence.”
The purpose of the silence is to make a space for the truth to be heard and experienced. We are so busy, so innundated with material goods, entertainment, educational experiences, and just plain noise, that we lack the silence that is needed to contemplate the basic, important questions of life. A couple of weeks before I went on a blogging sabbatical for Lent, Cindy at Dominion Family made a decision, along with her husband Tim, to stop blogging. If I read her final post correctly, it was a desire to create just the kind of silence that Kreeft and Kierkegaard are writing about that led her to give up blogging altogether.

In the end, it was not the evil things on the Internet, not even the arguments and negativity, but rather the good things that bogged me down. So many, many good things. Pictures of decorated houses, libraries, recipes, book suggestions (this alone has been enough to almost drown me), crafts, knitting, aprons, sewing, frugality, weather, poetry, audio files, friends, homeschooling suggestions, music and the ideas, the wonderful, wonderful ideas. . . . And in the midst of my small world comes the Internet, almost like a god, vast, unmeasured. Always like a siren wooing me with good things, great things, better things.”

Read Cindy’s entire post.

I’m not feeling called to give up blogging, but I do respect Cindy’s decision to do so. And I challenge you and myself to make space for silence, which is another way to say to make space for God to speak.

In this chapter Kreeft and Pascal are writing about methods of evangelism, about how to bring men to a confrontation with the Living God, by whom they are naturally appalled and of whom they are afraid. The first step is the afore-mentioned silence. And the next is what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication” and what Pascal terms “talking like an ordinary person.” Kreeft mentions Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, subtitled The Last Self-Help Book as an example of this subtle way of bringing people into an encounter with first of all, themselves, who they really are. (Eldest Daughter is quite fond of Walker Percy, but I have yet to taste his writings; another author to be added to the list.)

Another part of method for the Christian apologist is to see things from the point of view of the atheist or agnostic, to enter into a pagan world view in order to counter that worldview effectively. Pascal says, “We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.” Kreeft amplifies by advocating, “indirect comunication, spying, looking at things from your opponent’s point of view and drawing out the consequences of his premises.”

This indirect communication is part of what I am trying to accomplish here at Semicolon. To read books from all sorts of viewpoints, to write about them, think about them, draw out the consequences of the ideas and premises presented therein: this work is worthy, even if the writer herself is sometimes flawed and inadequate to the task.

Finally in this chapter Pascal has a thought, a pensee, about saints and sinners, and Kreeft interprets Pascal: “The world thinks men are good and saints are better. Pascal knows men are sinners and saints are miracles.”
I thought immediately of Mother Teresa and the hullaballoo a few months ago about some writing she had done that revealed her doubts and her spiritually dark times. Of course, she had doubts. Of course, she was a sinner, fallible, sustained by the grace of God. Only a modern secularist would be surprised that a “saint” would weather times of spiritual confusion and doubt, or that a “good man” would commit acts of which he is ashamed. Others delight in demonstrating that C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist whom Eldest Daughter calls the Only Protestant Saint, was not a perfect man, intimating that he was sexually immoral or relationally confused.

What does this uncovering of sin and confusion and lostness in even the greatest of saints mean except that we all need a Saviour?

Keith Buhler at Mere-O on Fasting and Silence