Week 34 Sunday
Week 34 Sunday
Relaxed Receptivity
Mark 11:24; Romans 5:11, 17; 8:5; Galatians 3:2; Colossians 2:6
We have studied a ladder for prayer. But ladders are of small use if they suggest what all ladder-climbing must suggest, namely, tense strenuousness. You will not go far in prayer if you go in the spirit of tense strenuousness, as though you were going to wring out of the universe the object of your prayer. The spirit of prayer should be the opposite: alert passivity. Alert passivity means that while your spiritual, mental, and physical sensibilities are awake and alert to God, they are also relaxed and receptive. I say relaxed and receptive, but the two attitudes are really one, for relaxation is receptivity.
And yet there are two sides to real praying. If we are only relaxed, we are weak. Dr. Alexis Carrel says, “Lowering of the blood pressure is also dangerous. Brain and other organs demand a certain tension of the blood.”* That is the alert side. But the brain and other organs demand a certain relaxation to be at their best. Prayer puts relaxation and tension together, and is therefore the perfect instrument of human well-being.
Since prayer has been presented so strongly by so many as strenuous alertness, the parable of the persistent widow being the special text of this strenuousness (see Luke 18:1-8), we must stress the relaxed attitude in prayer. A stenographer who is all tense and keyed-up and anxious will probably be a very poor stenographer, for the anxiety literally ties up the energies.
As they tense, two things happen: blood flows through their fibers less easily, and the taut muscle as a whole presses or strains upon some bone, sinew, vein or artery, thereby lowering all activities in such, at least for a moment. But each lowering of activity tends to block the free flow of the healing secretions and the blood.**
Relaxation is receptivity, which in turn becomes resource. In the relaxed attitude you are allowing God to get to you; it is an invitation to come; you wait expectantly.
Gracious Lord, I come to you to learn to receive. In your presence I let down all the bars of my being and let you into every fiber, every brain cell, every cranny of my being. As the blood courses through my body, cleansing and healing and restoring and empowering, so you are going through me—body, mind, and soul—cleansing, healing, restoring, empowering. I thank you. Amen.
* Man the Unknown, 84.
** Walter B. Pitkin, Your Life, January 1941.
Week 34 Monday
Bodily Relaxation
Psalms 37:11; 119:165; John 14:27; 16:33
In order to put ourselves into a mood of alert passivity, we will begin with the body, the outer framework of prayer.
Jesus said, “When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray” (Matt. 6:6). Shut the door! All outer distraction should be reduced to a minimum. Every home should have a little corner, or room, or private chapel, and it should be understood that anyone who is there is not to be disturbed. That person is in “the Trysting tent” (Exod. 27:21 Moffatt). Who would disturb one who is having an audience, say, with the king of England? To be in that Trysting tent should make one inviolable.
As the surroundings are freed from disturbance, so attend to yourself and relax every muscle in your body. Say to your organs in succession something as follows: “My brain, you are now in the presence of God. Let go, and listen. God speaks, penetrates, heals. Receive, receive.”
And to the eyes: “My eyes, weary with looking at a distracting world, close, and inwardly see nothing except God into whose presence you have now come. God touches my eyes and they are rested and calm and single and healed.”
And to the nerves: “O nerves, intelligence department of my being, strained and torn by living in a world of chaos, I now set you to work on the job of reporting better news; your God comes, comes, comes with the good news of calm, of poise, of resources, of redemption. Open every cell to that healing, to that calm, to that restoration. Receive, receive, receive.”
And to your sex life: “O creative part of me, I surrender you to the creator God. When denied your normal expression in procreation, I know that I can sublimate your power into other forms: art, poetry, music, creating new hopes, new souls, new life; I can become creative on another level. So I put you at God’s disposal. God cleanses, redirects.”
And to the whole body: “God is now in every part, untying knotty nerves in divine gentleness, bathing every brain cell with divine presence, reinforcing every weak place with divine strength, healing all your diseases, coordinating all parts and making them into a cooperating whole. Open every door; give God all the keys.”
O God my Lord, my Life, I open every pore, every cell, every tissue, every artery, every vein, every bone to you. This body, in every part, is your temple—hallowed by your presence, cleansed by your purity, and taken hold of by your purposes. O body, behold your Lord! Amen.
Week 34 Tuesday
Relaxed in Spirit
Romans 15:13; Philippians 4:7; Colossians 3:15; 2 Thessalonians 3:16
Dr. Alexis Carrel says, “No attempt has so far been made to create, in the midst of the agitation of the new city, islands of solitude where meditation would be possible.”* Both the city and the home are impoverished without these “islands of solitude,” hence a surface civilization and surface personalities are produced. As Kenneth Fearing says:
And wow he died as wow he lived,
going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
zowie did he live and zowie did he die.**
We must have these “islands of solitude,” or we shall produce just such frantic personalities! In these “islands of solitude” the body can be relaxed and restored, as we saw yesterday. But, deeper than the body, the spirit must be relaxed. As the body becomes tied up with physical tensions, so the soul becomes tied up in moral and spiritual tensions. These tensions of the soul are passed on to the body. No amount of techniques of bodily relaxation will avail if the tension is in the soul. Many modern techniques deal with the outworks and neglect the citadel. It is impossible to have a relaxed body if the mind and soul are full of conflict and tensions.
In Romans 12:2 (Moffatt) we read: “Instead of being moulded to this world, have your mind renewed, and so be transformed in nature, able to make out what the will of God is.” Note, “have your mind renewed, and so be transformed in nature.” Evidently the renewed mind can renew the nature. The mind is the key. The mind decides what shall or shall not be the nature of your nature. It decides to what molding influences the inmost and the outmost nature shall be exposed. But the mind cannot be told to be calm and reassured and relaxed unless it rests in some assurance beyond itself. So its final calm is found in being “able to make out what the will of God is.” It must ultimately acquire its poise and calm by linking itself to and having the backing of an eternal Purpose.
My Lord, I see that I need all the techniques I can master; but in the ultimate analysis my surest technique is that which gives me alignment to your purposes and to your plans. I cannot be anything but frustrated if I am at cross-purposes with the universe. So I would be right with you in order to be right with myself. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
* Man the Unknown, 49.
** Kenneth Fearing, “Dirge,” Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (New York: Random House, 1940), 60.
Week 34 Wednesday
Settling Down in God
Psalms 37:7, 9; 62:5; Isaiah 40:31; Lamentations 3:23-26
Yesterday we saw that you must not try to get merely a foothold in life by techniques of relaxation, but a foothold in the nature of Reality. Only then can you be unshakably calm and poised. Unless you can trust and surrender to the nature of Reality and believe in it through thick and thin, you have no secret of victory. “How did you like the airplane ride?” was asked of a nervous man who went up for the first time. “Very well,” he replied, “but I never did put my whole weight down.” There can be no enjoyment of an airplane ride, or of this larger journey through life, unless you learn to put your whole weight down. Obviously there is nothing, absolutely nothing, upon which you can put your whole weight down, except God.
Those who refuse to do as the Quakers suggest—“settle down in God,” or “center down in God”—but keep their troubles and disappointments in their own hands, are frustrated. The most frustrated, disrupted woman I know believes that, if she should let go and turn over these frustrations to God, her universe would go to pieces. She has to hold it together, and is intensely and pathetically trying to do so. One of the most nervous and frustrated men I know feels that, if he did not worry about the matter of his wife’s business affairs, they would go to pieces. His wife is poised and able and more businesslike than he is; but it satisfies his self-respect to think he is holding their world together by his worrying. The fact is that his worrying nervousness is self-defeating and making him a problem, instead of solving any. He says that his “pet aversion is that faith is optimism.” He doesn’t see that faith as pessimism is producing a person who is a problem to himself and to others. All the attention given to the nerves of these two people will be in vain unless at the center they let go and let God; unless they surrender in complete confidence to the will of God, and live and work as joyous children in line with that will.
O God, how can I be assured and relaxed unless I am sure that I am completely and utterly committed to your goodness and your power? Forgive my little antics of self-dependence—how invariably they let me down! Let me live on God-dependence, working out purposes not my own. Then shall I live, for I shall live in you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 34 Thursday
Relaxed, Even if Not Released
Psalm 27:1-3, 5, 13-14; Isaiah 30:15; Hebrews 3:6; 10:35
Yesterday we saw that there can never be complete relaxation unless that relaxation rests ultimately in the love and goodness of God. That love and goodness may deny the thing asked for, but only in order to give something better. The Hebrew young men could say: “God . . . is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace; and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, . . . we will not serve your gods” (Dan. 3:17-18). “But if not”—if our confidence in this immediate deliverance is unfulfilled—nevertheless we go straight on. They did not rest their confidence on immediate deliverance, but in the ultimate love and goodness of God. That is faith. Don’t rest your faith in some particular happening, but in the goodness of God, which will be the same whether or not that particular thing happens. God will deliver . . . “but if not”; sometimes you will have to live on “but if not,” and go straight on.
Rows of beautiful trees were laid low in a storm. Reason? The water was too near the surface, so the trees did not have to put their roots deep down to find water; hence the tragedy. God may deny us a surface answer in order to get us to put our roots deeper into eternal reality, so that in some future storm we shall be unmoved.
Nothing that happens can hurt me,
Whether I lose or win.
Though life may be changed on the surface,
I do my main living within.*
Said some Christians when the storm of war was raging over Europe and engulfing everybody: “On the surface there is storm, but twenty fathoms down it is quite calm.”
Someone asked a poor but happy man how he remained calm and poised and cheerful; to which he replied, “I have learned how to cooperate with the inevitable.” That is the secret! You cooperate with the immediate inevitable because you know that in and through things God’s will is being worked out, and that Will wills your good.
My God and Lord, I shall have to center down in you. I cannot center down in the immediate, so I will have to center down in the ultimate. My faith looks, not at a panorama, but at a Person. “Change and decay in all around I see; O Thou, who changest not, abide with me.”** Amen.
* Published source unknown.
** Henry F. Lyte, “Abide with Me,” 1847.
Week 34 Friday
The Secret Companionship
Psalm 27:10; Isaiah 42:16; Daniel 3:24-25; John 16:32
We saw yesterday that we must learn to live in time and in eternity simultaneously. If the time-side of life is all awry, then the eternity-side holds us steady and lets us relax “in spite of.” If we cannot live “on account of,” then we must learn to live “in spite of.”
“Christianity is a secret companionship,” said a Chinese missionary; “hence when I am out for months where no one of my race is found, I am not lonely. I have a secret companionship.” It may be that you will have to walk through life arm in arm with disappointment; but on your other side, holding your arm, is the Secret Companion, and “he who believes in Him will never be disappointed” (Rom. 9:33 Moffatt). You are disappointment-proof, for you always have an appointment with the Secret Companion. Since that center holds steady, you need not grow tense at the unsteady happenings around you.
An intelligent woman told me she was so wrought up and tense over what she thought was an inevitable marriage for her son that she began to have terrible pains in her head, and was soon in the hospital, unable to breathe. Pneumonia developed, and she continued tense until she became unconscious. Only then did she relax. When she came out of the unconsciousness, she surrendered the whole affair to God, and came back to poise and health. She came near to choking herself to death by her resentments, which produced inner tensions of soul, which in turn produced a disrupted body. She allowed her life to go up and down with outer happenings instead of basing it on the Secret Companionship. If your happiness is based on happenings, it will be a fleeting, evanescent thing. You must have a love for God so strong, so elemental that if everything around you were stripped away—your work, your family, your prestige, your power—this thing within would go on, regardless.
“Your strength is quiet faith” (Isa. 30:15 Moffatt).
Gracious God, I rest not in the immediate; I rest in the ultimate—in you. I am therefore impregnable. I view the panorama of life in quiet confidence that the last word will be spoken by you. That last word will be for my ultimate good. So I wait as a weaned child in quiet confidence. I thank you. Amen.
Week 34 Saturday
Self-reference or God-reference
Matthew 6:1-4; 19:22; Mark 9:33-34; Luke 18:11-12
When you are tense and unrelaxed, you are still centered in yourself. You are the center of reference; you are trying to hold your world together. When you relax, you shift the center of reference from yourself to God. You are no longer a self-centered person, but a God-centered person. Relaxation means release from yourself. When you are unrelaxed and tense, you are like a person who holds his breath in order to save his lungs. The lungs are saved only as you allow them to take in and give out. So you, too, are saved only as you take in prayer, and give out service to others.
When you live in a state of self-reference, you automatically shut yourself off from the guidance of God, and hence from God’s resources. The town of Lyons, Iowa, was situated at the narrow place in the Mississippi River where the railway bridge was bound to be built, so the citizens thought. They held up the railway company for an exorbitant price for the land. The railway company therefore decided to cross at Clinton, which offered them land for free. Clinton has prospered; Lyons has withered. If you live in a state of self-reference, you will end in self-impoverishment.
Dr. Alexis Carrel says, “Thus, psychoanalysis, in directing the mind of the patient upon himself, may aggravate his state of unbalance. Instead of indulging in self-analysis, it is better to escape from oneself through an effort that does not scatter the mind.”* The only way to escape from yourself is to make God and God’s will the center of your consciousness and your life plans. You then live in a state of God-reference instead of in a state of self-reference.
We can make no impression on a tense conscious mind. Relaxation is receptivity. “These people won’t let me do anything for them; neither will you,” said Christ to a distracted soul bowed in a cathedral. When she inwardly let go, then the power of God poured into her, lifting her up out of depression and defeat into release and victory. She now has a soul leisured from itself, the instrument of God’s power to others.
My Gracious and Redeeming God, I have been blocking your power in my life by my tense fears and withholdings. Let me this day be as relaxed and as receptive as a little child. Then life shall become play, and my hardest tasks simply joy. Spontaneity will bubble in every act and thought as I go on my released and happy way. I thank you. Amen.
* Man the Unknown, 146.