14. The Last Fragile Threads
The Last Fragile Threads
See in the wild irish pods how the last fragile threads must be broken, and with that loosing, all that they have is free for God’s use in His world around. All reluctance, all calculating, all holding in is gone; the husks are open wide, the seeds can shed themselves unhindered.
BLAISE PASCAL, AUTHOR OF THE Pensées, was born in Clermont, France, in 1623. His mother died when he was three years old. Educated by his father, who was a government official, he was exceedingly precocious to the point of actually damaging his health by his intense application to studies. He became one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians of all time. When he was thirty-one he had a mystical experience while reading the seventeenth chapter of John, feeling the emptiness of his life suddenly filled with the presence of God. He called this his “second conversion,” so crucial that he wrote notes about it which he sewed into the lining of his coat. It was found in the coat he was wearing when he died. The notes, in part, were these:
Year of Grace 1654, Monday 23 November…. From about half past ten at night to about half an hour after midnight,
FIRE
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob (Ex 3:6),
not of philosophers and scholars.
Certitude, heartfelt joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
God of Jesus Christ.
“My God and Your God” (Jn 20:17).
“Your God shall be my God” (RU 1:16).
The world forgotten, everything except God….
Joy, joy, joy. Tears of joy.
Jesus Christ.
I am separated from him; for I have shunned
him, denied him, crucified him.
May I never be separated from him.
He can only be kept by the ways taught in the gospel.
Complete and sweet renunciation.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Everlasting joy in return for one day’s striving upon earth.
I will not neglect your Word (PS 119:16). Amen.
Pascal endured many kinds of suffering throughout his life, and during the last six months his physical suffering was intense. He prayed that he might endure it like a Christian. “Sick as I am, may I glorify You in my sufferings.”
Here is one of the fifteen prayers he wrote asking God to use his sickness for His glory:
Take from me, O Lord, that self-pity which love of myself so readily produces, and from the frustration of not succeeding in the world as I would naturally desire, for these have no regard for your glory. Rather, create in me a sorrow that is conformable to your own. Let my pains rather express the happy condition of my conversion and salvation. Let me no longer wish for health or life, but to spend it and end it for you, with you, and in you. I pray neither for health nor sickness, life nor death. Rather I pray that you will dispose of my health, my sickness, my life, and my death, as for your glory, for my salvation, for the usefulness to your church and your saints, among whom I hope to be numbered. You alone know what is expedient for me. You are the Sovereign Master. Do whatever pleases you. Give me or take away from me. Conform my will to yours, and grant that with a humble and perfect submission, and in holy confidence, I may dispose myself utterly to you. May I receive the orders of your everlasting, provident care. May I equally adore whatever proceeds from you.
(The Mind on Fire, An Anthology of the Writings of Blaise Pascal, Multnomah Press, 1989, p. 291)
To Pascal, as to all in greater or lesser measure, it was given to suffer—“Unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake” (Phil 1:29, AV). He relinquished his hold on his own life, his ambitions of accomplishment. All reluctance, all calculating, all holding in was gone.
“Unto you it is given … to believe … also to suffer.”
The apostle who wrote those words was chained in prison because of his bold proclamation of the gospel. He was writing to believers who were suffering opposition as they contended for their faith, although they were not in prison. Suffering, he tells them, is a privilege.
Is it legitimate to apply his words to other kinds of suffering, such as Pascal’s illness? We may well wonder how our particular kind of trouble (especially the trivial ones) can in any sense be said to be for Christ’s sake. We are not in prison for speaking the truth. We are not being persecuted for our faith. Many in the world today endure great suffering that we in North America have never known. We have not been vouch-safed that privilege. Yet it seems to me that having something we don’t want or wanting something we don’t have, no matter how insignificant, is like learning the scales on the piano. They’re a far cry from a fugue, but you can’t play the fugue if you haven’t mastered the scales. Our Heavenly Father sets the lessons suited to our progress. All are of His grace.
He whose heart is kind beyond all measure
Gives unto each day what He deems best—
Lovingly its part of pain or pleasure,
Mingling toil with peace and rest.
(Lina Sandell Norman Clayton’s Favorites No. 2, Norman Clayton Publishing Co, Winona Lake, Indiana, 1959)
Paul tells the young Timothy to be ready to take his share of suffering (2 Tm 1:8). I believe it is something given to us to be given back to Him. It behooved Him to suffer. Shall it not also, in some form, behoove us, His servants? We are not greater than He, and He knows our frame, knows best what kind to give. The writer to the Hebrews refers to the “race we have to run” implying that each has his own race, some one, some another, but all must run with faces toward Jesus Himself who gives the strength needed.
A friend wrote to tell me how she had been helped in the matter of irrational jealousy. Irrational though she knew it to be, her suffering was nevertheless very real and incapacitating. She simply could not bear to see her husband across a room talking with another woman. She knew very well that there was nothing inordinate in his relationship with this woman or any other woman, and recognized the problem as her own and her reaction as neurotic. Nevertheless it was there, it caused real pain, and she did not know what to do about it. One night after an evening in which she had seen him in conversation with several women, she and her husband had gone to bed, he to sleep and she to lie awake tormented by this demon of jealousy. She got up and went to another room where she knelt, and, placing in her hands, as it were, the emotion that seemed to be conquering her, she lifted her hands to the Lord, prayed aloud, and offered the whole matter to Him. Like the wild iris pod, she let go of the last fragile threads. Her testimony was that He simply took the offering, then and there, and in its place gave her peace. The plain physical act of turning the thing over to Him and receiving His peace in exchange helped to make it definite and final. She would not take it back, even if Satan tempted her later to think that she had not “really” committed it. She went back to bed relieved of her burden, and went peacefully to sleep.
Because we have such a staggering volume of information nowadays about other people’s “problems,” due to the inescapable bombardment of the mass media which includes daily screenings of emotional strip-tease on the talk shows, it is easy to assume that the gospel can’t possibly be relevant to all of them. After all, it was written too long ago. Lie has become overwhelmingly complex. Problems have arisen in our time that our grandparents never heard of. Everybody needs a specialized support group now, with an expert who is trained in “handling” their particular need. No doubt support groups can be helpful. Experts know things the rest of us are ignorant of. People are always asking me (I’m no psychologist and have never claimed to be one) to answer questions about their peculiar situations. Each time I think I’ve heard the worst, the next story tops it. I have no authority except the Word of God, but as I pray for help and search it for answers, I often find truth that applies. There is nothing new under the sun, as The Preacher said thousands of years ago, and “whatever is has been already, and whatever is to come has been already, and God summons each event back in its turn” (Eccl 3:15). The gospel is still the power of God for salvation—for all of us and for all of our needs.
Pascal’s description of man in the seventeenth century perfectly describes man at the end of the twentieth: “dependency, desire of independence, need.” His prayer gets at the heart of the solution: “You are the Sovereign Master. Do whatever pleases you. Give me or take away from me.” Acceptance and relinquishment are the keys to our peace.
“May God show us every withholding thread of self that needs breaking still” (Trotter: Parables of the Cross).