Isaiah 23 – An
oracle on Tyre (23:5-11) and Sidon (23:1-4 and 12-14). Sidon fell first in 701
BC. Sidon traded in the grain of Egypt and now is humbled. Yahweh did this or
permitted it “to humble the pride of all her beauty and humiliate the great
ones of the world” (23:9). Now they must
till the soil because the harbor is gone. Tyre will be forgotten for seventy
years, after which she will again “play the whore” (23:17) to make money, but
this time it will be money for those “dedicated to Yahweh”(23:18).
From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through
Quakerism
Part 23
The way you “see” shapes everything you do—how you interpret
your inner life, how you view events, how you conduct yourself, relate to
others, respond to issues, and make decisions. “The eye is the lamp of the
body. . . . if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light . .
.”(Matt. 6:22). As I saw the landscape in me and around me that I had been
blind to, I was seized with the same
kind of thirst for it that Helen is seized with in The Miracle Worker, a thirst to explore it, to know the words that
could open it, to see everything they could communicate. This wasn’t the same Quakerism I had been around for years. I
wanted to know more about early Friends, more about how they had understood the
Christian gospel, more about how they had put their faith to work in their
lives. The process was not instantaneous, but the rewards it brought from the
very beginning were very great. The changes it helped me make in my life, the
intense satisfaction it brought to my heart as I yielded to it, and the
confirmation it seemed to give to the faith I had learned but then rejected
gave me reasons to trust it in a way I had not been able to do earlier.
There were no outward miracles in the beginning of my
spiritual journey with Christ. I certainly was not called into any of the kind
of ministries we so often associate with conversion, things like feeding the
hungry or helping the homeless. These things were too similar to the kinds of
things I had spent my adult life concerned about as a political radical—not that we ever really fed the hungry or
helped the homeless, but we agitated against the “system” we saw as causing
their hunger and homelessness. Anyway, for a while I found it difficult to
separate even genuine works of charity from my earlier efforts at social
change.
There was in me a
recoiling from the things that I had “fed”, when I was famishing “that which
desired after God” as Francis Howgill had said—the ideologies I had given
myself to—the psychological theories, radical political ideas and the rigorous
materialism I had seen as scientific. These had been my idols, the things I
had used to keep me from God, things that had justified my lack of faith. Now I
saw them as Jeremiah had seen the idols of his day, as “cracked cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer.2:13).
My reaction was so strong that it would be years before I
was able to feel any desire to be involved in political or social activism. I knew how dangerous such activism could be
to spiritual growth and insight. The ideologies propelling the activism had
credibility and stature in the modern world. They were the wind, earthquake, and fire around us that vied with
the still voice of God in us, and I wanted no part of them any more. I confess now that I overreacted, but
that was part of the journey.
What I did feel called to do was just to speak about what
was happening to me. It wasn’t easy to let people know that I had changed. Even
with my own children I felt a sense of discomfort about bringing God into the
conversation. I have noticed this in other people as well. They shrink from
speaking in terms of their faith, even when it is at the heart of everything
they think and do. But it wasn’t just bringing God’s name into the conversation. It was bringing a sense of God’s reality
and presence to bear on everything. It doesn’t do any good to speak about
God when you know people cannot hear the name spoken without thinking you
foolish or crazy, or just dismissing you as irrelevant. You have to find ways
of speaking his name and telling about his work in ways people can hear. I
don’t know how successful I was in this. I
only know it was hard and is hard, but the advantage I brought to the task was
that I knew what it was to be on the other side, to be alienated from God
and talk of God, to put religious people into a category that didn’t require me
to try to understand them or really listen to them. What I am doing in this book is an extension of this calling that I
have felt from the beginning—trying to find a way to let people know that God
is real and accessible, and that our religious traditions are vital and speak
to our deepest human needs.
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