The River Sweats Oil and Tar

 Hello Peoples,

It has been a little while since I've written here.  I've been busy and I've had a lot on my mind.  I was going to write a post something like this one last week, but I just couldn't get enough distance to be able to express myself well.  I've been ruminating on the following passage all week in my devotions. 

2 Cor. 6 (Selected Excerpts)

What fellowship can light have with darkness?  For we are the temple of the living God.  As God has said: "I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people." Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.  


I love this passage.  Honestly, I hadn't thought of it in a long time until the pastor of the church where we are attending mentioned it in his sermon last Sunday.


Recently I have been thinking a lot about holiness and finding fulfillment.  Somehow I've always either gotten the two confused or looked toward the "next step" in order to find them.  This has always been the wrong move. I've been struggling with the questions of what goodness is and how to find fulfillment.  Sad to say, I thought I had the answers fairly pieced together the other day at breakfast, but found them shattered by lunch.

This latest bout with self reflection started when my father, God bless Him, sent me a great email reminding me to find my rest in the Lord; a rest that I have neglected to find lately.  This got me thinking about  how wrapped up I've been in going and doing, rather than just being.  But I get ahead of myself.  

My self peace was further disturbed this week by the words of two very different artists, Doug Martsch and T.S. Eliot.

In Death By Water,  a section of his poem The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot writes the following about poor Phlebus.

  

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, 

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss

A current under sea 

Picked his bones in whispers.  As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth 

Entering the whirlpool

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look back to windward

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and 

tall as you.

I've literally been reading nothing but this passage over and over again for the past week.  Phlebas, who spent his life on profit and loss, who was once so handsome, is now, like all of the rest of us will be, dead.  And what have his toils earned him?  What has he gained now from his life of work?  Nothing. He now withers away and fades.  Phlebas went, Phlebas did, and it has done him no good.  It has not changed his fate or the nature of it in the slightest.  All men will age, all men will die, and all men will slowly fade away.

In his song, When Not Being Stupid is Not Enough, (on the Built to Spill/Caustic Resin EP for those of you who want to know) Doug Martsch sings

In a world thats so bad its not hard to feel good

You do what you have to, not as much as you should

Just because you're not wrong 

Doesn't mean that you're right

Leave it to Doug Martsch, a man who claims not to pay any attention to the lyrics of his songs, to mess up my whole screwed up sense of self.  And how true these words ring! 
 I, and I think this is symptomatic of all of us at times, have become obsessed with the going and doing for the going and doing's sake.  I have, in effect, been constructing my own crown out of my own good works and rightness.  But am I right?  Am I good?  I may (and that is debatable) be better than some, but to what end?  What of my own good here will change the ultimate end?  And even could I be better than others, it would in no way make me right. No, to find out our goodness we must measure ourselves to a constant scale; a right scale.  When we do that we will find one thing.  No amount of being good compared to the world can make us to actually be good.  There is no way that we can measure up and holding ourselves to the ultimate scale will do nothing but show us our own inherent lack of goodness. 


And isn't this liberating?  Quite honestly, I've never had a realization so refreshing as this one. The very fact that we cannot of ourselves be good leaves us with no other choice but to rest in the goodness of our God.