Have no fear of being thought insignificant or unbalanced, but preach repentance with courage and simplicity. Have faith in the Lord, who has overcome the world. His Spirit speaks in you and through you, calling men and women to turn to him and observe his precepts.
Legend of the Three Companions
I really got a kick of the "unbalanced" part. This is a claim leveled upon Charismatics by one of our prior pastors a few years ago...Veni Vidi Vici !!!!
ReplyDeleteMany people thought that St. Francis was "unbalanced" as well. In reality, it is the world which is unbalanced because of sin. That's why a Francis appears to the world as "unbalanced." It is the world's viewpoint which is skewed.
ReplyDeleteAs my good friend Alice von Hildebrand once said, "Our society is allergic to the truth."
It is this "allergy" which prompted Pontius Pilate to ask Our Lord, "What is truth"? and then leave before the Son of Man could answer him.
It is the "allergy" of being off-balance. Recall what G.K. Chesterton had to say about orthodoxy. He compared it to a chariot reeling throughout the ages and being tossed to and from but always keeping its balance.
That's what orthodoxy is: an adventure of the mind. It is maintaining balance in a world which is unbalanced.
God love you Brother Lesser,
Paul
aka - Brother Least.
The world always sees a St. Francis as "unbalanced" because it is the world itself which is inbalanced.
ReplyDeletePontius Pilate asked Our Lord, "What is truth"? and then walked away before He could give answer.
My good friend Alice von Hildebrand once said that, "Our society is allergic to the truth." And so it is. And this "allergy" results in a sort of inner ear imbalance which ensures that that which is upright is seen as "unbalanced."
But it is orthodoxy which remains erect and maintains its balance. As my good friend Gilbert once said:
"This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect."
But the world will never appreciate this. It suffers from an allergy which has caused it to fall at a variety of angles. It sees the chariot of truth which remains upright from a distorted viewpoint.
The Lord called me into a new way of simplicity and humility...He told me I am to be a new kind of fool in this world!
ReplyDeleteMirror of Perfection 68
BTW Paul: "Brother Least?" lol :-)
Well Brother Lesser, you knw what Romans 12:10 says:
ReplyDelete"Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor."
I figure if I take the least place at the table, no one will recognize my deficiencies and I may be asked to move up to a higher position. And if not, I'm content. Even the dogs are given the scraps from the table. So there's hope for this old war dog...haha.
God love you,
Paul