“God has made me his target; his archers surround me.” (Job 16:12)
In Renaissance art one of the most commonly portrayed martyrdoms was that of St. Sebastian. The sight of this great lover of God with his body riddled with bloodied arrows is a shocking one, as the artists intended it to be. Yet how much more shocking it is to state, as Job does, that God Himself is the cruel archer who so tortures His own saints to death.
In 1998 Loretta Ross-Gotta began spending time alone in prayer at a hermitage. Before long she found herself immersed in a deep, extraordinary conversion of soul. I love the following passage from her wonderful book, Letters from the Holy Ground, which describes this early period of getting alone with God:
Last week I described the difference between logos and rhema: logos referring to the whole of scripture, and rhema to those verses which from time to time light up for us. The whole Bible is the word of God, but a particular verse may be His personal word to us at a certain time.
As a young teenager who was just discovering the joys classical music, I decided to join the all-male choir at our Anglican church, where every week a Welsh choirmaster brought forth the beautiful sounds of English choral music from a handful of men and boys.
Dale Ahlquist has written an excellent one-volume introduction to G.K. Chesterton called The Apostle of Common Sense. Here’s just an excerpt on GKC as prophet:Continue reading
Have you ever had a cancer scare? Or any sort of brush with death? Are you, perhaps even now, facing a sentence of only so many more months or weeks left to live on this bright earth?
“We write this to make our joy complete.” ~1 John 1:4
Like John in this verse, I too wrote a book—called Champagne for the Soul—with the motive of completing my joy by sharing it. Happiness, oddly enough, can be a lonely business, because so few people share one’s joy.
Once upon a time I had a tattoo. I got it in 1977, long before tattoos were chic.
In November of 2016 Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
If only there were someone to arbitrate between us,
to lay his hand upon us both,
someone to remove God’s rod from me,
so that his terror would frighten me no more. (Job 9:33-4)