The Cave

The silence of the soul is the sought after victory

Lord in solitude and darkness,

you meet with us

Stripped of senses,

I can no longer see or hear

Stripped of thought,

my mind is blank

Stripped of your touch,

my heart numb from despair

I sit in the darkness of the cave

Surrounded by ashes left from a smoldering fire

I sit in the ashes,

and use a stick to scrape my scabs…

I’m too tired to argue

I’m too hopeless to care

My soul is utterly destroyed

like a conquered city; the paltry scraps of gaping walls lie dead in the rain…

And then you come

As a small child,

ash on your cheeks

hair long and unkempt

And you sit beside me in the darkness,

The darkness of the cave

I cannot see you,

and yet I see you clearly

clearer than in the noon day sun

You stare into my soul

no smile of comfort on your lips,

but compassion pours from your eyes

You know, you feel it,

I know you feel it.

Gazing around, you pick up a stick

A child’s stick…

And you begin to scratch my scabs.

In the darkness of the cave,

A child scratches my scabs.

And as you die slowly each day, as you allow a child of the Kingdom to scrape the scabs off of your weary and broken soul, as you give up all your logical common sense, all your distorted understandings of life or God or discipleship or love or pain or death or grief or family or work or ambition or relationship or money or service or compassion or sex or whatever else, as you give it all up, you say “God, you define how life shall be. Every second I breathe, it is you breathing through me.”

Every moment that you think this thought, that you pray this prayer, as you walk further down the road of surrender, dying to what you want, to what you desire, to everything about you which relates your experience to this universe, then in return he will fill you with himself, his values, his being, his Spirit. His logic will become your logic. His understanding of life, of the world, of how to live and love, will become yours…and it is so much better.

It is painful, but it is better and it is how we were created to live—the logic of God.

Then, no longer will you think self-centered thoughts like, “I want to serve him.” Because you know you cannot serve him. You are utterly inept to serve him and serve him well. And moreover, you will know that he is not calling you to serve him.

He is calling you to himself, to first let him love you, to understand who you are within his family, his kingdom, how valued and treasured you are to him; and then, by the shattering newness of this undeserved and limitless love, only then, to love everyone in return.

 

Notice the order of the Great Commandment. ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is like the first; love your neighbor as yourself.’

If you love others before you love God (as noble as that sounds), your reserves will be depleted; you will quickly exhaust yourself for you will be loving out of your own power which will evaporate and betray. But if you fall in love with God first, as you were created to do, as he is calling you to do, then, the only possible response of this overwhelming, inundating love is to allow it to flow out of you onto everyone you meet. God’s love is inexhaustible, it is the wellspring which never runs dry.

It is infinite, like him.

You cannot serve him. You can only let him love you.

And if you do that, and trust me there is nothing more difficult and more putrid and degrading to the world than to declare that you are incapable of living apart from him (which is accepting his grace and his love), then you will have to love everyone else. If you let him love you first, then you will have to serve him. And to serve him in a way that acknowledges that the world will never be right until our King comes back and finishes his Great Story.

You will do what little part you can because you are one with the living God—you and you, the Church. But you will not become disappointed with yourself as the poor become poorer and hope drains in this world…because the Great Story is not over yet. And therefore, when he loves you first, when your living Father whispers to you over and over how dear you are to him, you know that truly this is the answer to the world’s grief, to the waging war; and this is the simple, child-like way in which you can live freely, humbly, and joyfully as his salty beloved in his Spirit-infused, misunderstood but transformative Church.