Been very relieved after making the decision NOT to take the MRCP Paces exam in October this year.....felt like a burden of 100 kg lifted off my shoulders!! Whew!! Felt so liberated.....felt so free to do what I needed to do....and desperately more than anything else, I needed to get back to God....to get a fresh perspective of my life.....to renew my vision and passion........I knew deep in my heart that I was drifting further and further away.....my heart growing colder and more callous each day....the disappointments I felt with the church in general ...... I needed a reminder of the grace and mercy of God in my life......
So one day, after finishing work early.....dropped by a christian bookshop looking for nothing, yet at the same time looking for something specific which would minister to my broken soul.......was so glad when I chanced upon Philip Yancey's book entitled - 'Soul Survivor' , How my faith survived the church....How apt! How appropriate for me at this moment!!!
True to its title....it did wonders for me.....and what was more amazing was how Philip Yancey discovered God and His grace through both Christian and non Christian writers.......and walking with the literary giants from the Hall of Fame did much for me....knowing that they suffered the anguish that I faced....knowing that the issues that I struggled with were not new and alien to the human race....and somehow grasping the insight that these pioneers of faith obtained through their own struggles...... the hypocrisy in the church, amongst Christians......the lies the church tells us......the fact that we all fall so far short of God's commands.....and in that, how the pride of life becomes not just a stumbling block but a sin.........and how each of them responded to these facts in life......some grew stronger in their faith....some crumbled under the sheer despair....... thought I would record some of Philip Yancey's words here as a reminder....
He starts off talking about the church abuse that he encountered in his christian walk. " I have no religious sanction. I am neither pastor nor teacher, but an ordinary pilgrim, one person among many on a spiritual search. Unavoidably and by instinct, I question and re-evaluate my faith all the time....I asked myself yet again,Why am I a still a Christian?' What keeps me pursuing a gospel that has come to me amid so much distortion and static, that often sounds more like bad news than good? "
This question resonated within my soul... Have been asking myself that question over and over again the last few months. And I did not have an answer to that question. Whilst I have stopped going for cell meetings, I still faithfully attend church on the weekend, not so much out of obligation or habit, but because it is one of my life line in maintaining my sanity....yet on the other hand, it is the people in the church that caused me to question my faith most of all.....they are the ones who make me feel that if all Christians are hypocrites, then I would rather not be one.........so how do i reconcile this seeming paradox???
Well, whilst this book did not resolve all my questions....it did achieve what Philip Yancey intended it for....It is a book that demonstrates people from the ages past who were people made fully alive...and credits their personal faith as the reason for that......let's look at some of them....
Martin Luther King Jr
- whilst I never could understand the racism between the white and blacks in America, the fact that this guy stood up for his generation....to stand in the gap....to preach a gospel of non violence...and of grace and mercy.....
- " 'Christianity,' he said, ' has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all its difficulties and agonising and tension-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its mark upon us and redeems us to that more excellent was which only comes through suffering.' "
- When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King referred yet again to the principles he learned from the Sermon on the Mount: " When the years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focussed on this marvellous age in which we live, men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilisation, because these humble children of God were willing to 'suffer for the righteousness' sake ".
- Made me re-consider my own life....of how 'racist' I am towards my fellow countrymen....the bumiputras of my land......how we grumble of how things are unfair and how the bumiputras get all the privilege and concession and not based on meritocracy......how we point the finger at others for being 'racist' when we ourselves are just as equally guilty of being exactly that!!! What hypocrisy! Lord, forgive me and help me to change my worldview!! Indeed, this is why the gospel says -Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. (Luke 6: 41-42)
- I know that you are asking today, 'How long will it take?" I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long , because truth pressed to earth will rise again.
How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.
How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow.
How long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justic.
How long? Not long, 'cause mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightningt of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpets that shall never call retreat. He is lifting up the hearts of man before His judgment seat. Oh, be swift , my souls, to answer him. Be jubilant, my feet. Our God is marching on.
(King , frm The New Yorker, 6 april 1987)
- I like what Yancey writes :
A prophet calls us to daily acts of obedience, regardless of personal cost, regardless of whether we feel successful or rewarded. And a prophet also reminds us that no failure, no suffering, no discouragement is final for the God who stands within the shadows, keeping watch above his own. A prophet who can convey both these messages with power just may change the world. While Martin Luther King Jr lived on earth, I, his neighbour, did not listen to what he said. I was quick to pounce on his flaws, and slow to recognise my own sin. But because he stayed faithful, in the short view by offering his body as a target but never as a weapon, and in the long view by holding before us his dream, a dream of a new kingdom of peace and justice and live, he becomes a prophet for me, the unlikeliest of followers.
GK Chesterton
- Yancey writes:
I learned not to laugh or smile, and not to cry. I tried not to care or react: to cold or heat, to good smells or bad ones, to beauty or ugliness, to love or hate. In a perveted experiment, I broke my own arm against the metal frame of my bunk bed to test my mastery of pain.
I see now what I could not see then, that I was erecting a strong stone fortress against love, for I thought myself unlovable......
- Sounds exactly like me!!... u mean I am not alone in feeling this way?!?
- Yancey found optimism in Chesterton's writings, esp in Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday, where Chesterton makes a case for optimism amidst the gloom of the world.... he also found that asking the question : ' Where does pleasure come from?' eventually led him back to God.... and that there are many good gifts - nature, music, romantic love, etc....which ultimately originates from our Creator...
- 'I am ordinary in the correct sense of the term. said Chesterton, 'which means the acceptance of an order; a Creator and the Creation, the common sense of gratitude for Creation, life and love as gifts permanently good, marriage and chivalry as laws rightly controlling them.'.......
- Yancey : Under his influence I too realised the need to become more 'ordinary'....
- 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult ; and left untried, ' he (Chesterton) said. The real question is not 'Why is Christianity so bad when it claims to be so good?' but rather 'Why are all human beings so bad when they claim to be so good?'... Chesterton readily admitted that the church had badly failed the gospel. In fact, he said , one of the strongest arguments in favour of Christianity is the failure of Christians, who thereby prove what the Bible teaches about the Fall and original sin.
- How true!!! In fact listen to what Chesterton writes when The Times asked a number of writers for essays on the topic, 'What's Wrong with the World?' :
Dear Sirs:
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G.K Chesterton
- Would loved to have seen their responses to that line! But indeed, how true it is, isn't it?
Dr. Paul Brand
- does this guy even need any further introduction?!?
- Loved reading 2 of his books which was co-authored with Philip Yancey- The Gift of Pain and Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and In His Image.... He is one of my favourite and most celebrated Christian doctor that I know of.....
-"The most precious possesion any human being is his spirit - his will to live, his sense of dignity, his personality. Though technically we may be concerned with tendons, bones and nerve endings, we must never lose sight of the person we are treating."- Dr. Paul Brand
- As Brand reflects now, the process of following his patients through the full rehabilitation cycle ultimately challenged his whole approach towards medicine. Somewhere, perhaps in medical school, doctors acquire an attitude that seems suspiciously like hubris: 'Oh, you've come just in time. Count on me. I think I'll be able to save you......Brand began to see his chief contribution as one he had not studied in medical school: to join with his patient as a partner in the task of restoring dignity to a broken spirit. 'We are treating a person, not a disease,' he says. 'That is the true meaning of rehabilitation.'
- Like Yancey, I was beginning to see my problem....I was wrestling with issues facing humanity, yet I have not learned to love individuals....well, not in the manner that God requires of me....not in the way that glorifies Him....and His created beings.....and to make matters worst, I was in the healthcare profession where we are expected to 'care' and love people.....have I lost the vision along the way? Have I got so disllusioned and disappointed that I forgot why God called me to this particular profession?!?
- I love this quote of Dr. Brand's.....
' Because of where I practised medicine, I never made much money at it. But I tell you that as I look back over a lifetime of surgery, the host of friends who once were patients bring me more joy than wealth could ever bring. I first met them when they were suffering and afraid. As their doctor, I shared their pain. Now that I am old, it is their love and gratitude that illuminates the continuing pathway of my life. It's strange - those of us who involve ourselves in the places where there is the most suffering, look back in surprise to find that it was there that we discovered the reality of joy.'
Robert Coles
- this was a Christian psychiatrist who became famous after deciding to interview children from various background (Children of Crisis) and found that those from disadvantaged families to have greater inner strength that he has not seen in others....whilst those from privileged backgrounds were more bored, alienated.......and came to this : It was true that the poor were cursed......Yet in a strange but undeniable way, the poor were also blessed, for whatever reason, with qualities such as courage and love and a willing dependence on God. The irony: good humanists work all their lives to improve the condition of the disadvantaged, but for what? To raise them to the level of the upper classes so that they too can experience boredom, alienation and decadence?
- At the end of his research, he had discovered that the poor are mysteriously blessed and that the rich live in peril. He learned that what matters most comes not from without - the circumstances of life- but from within, inside the heart of an individual man or woman or child. He had begun his research with a head full of phrases such as 'guilt complex', 'character disorders' and 'response to stimuli'. He had emerged with old fashioned words like 'conscience' and 'sin' and 'free will'.
Tolstoy & Dostoevsky
- In his spiritual autobiography, A Confession, Leo Tolstoy mentions that Christians sometimes treat each other worse than they treat people of other faiths.....
- Yancey goes on to say ...." As I think about individual Christians I know, I see some people made incomparably better by their faith, and some made measurably worse. For every gracious, kind-spirited, forgiving Christian, I can point to a proud, mean-spirited, judgmental one. In my own experience, those who strive the hardest and believe the most fervently are sometimes the least attractive persons. Like the Pharisees of Jesus' day, they get caught up in competition and end up self-righteous rather than righteous. Politicians tell me their nastiest letters come from people who quote the Bible and claim to speak for God - which I easily believe since my mailbox shows the same pattern. How do I resolve the tension between the ideals of the Gospel and the actuality of those who profess it?"
- Indeed, how do we resolve that conflict? In fact, I think most of the time, I err on the 'legalistic' and Pharisaic side of the coin...... I judge others by their failures whilst forgetting the grace of God in my own life...... For Tolstoy, this apparent discrepancy finally tore him apart, whereas for Dostoevsky, he found the grace of God in his own failures.....he saw grace in the lives of his prison cell mates....in many of his novels- Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov..... he learned in prison that the gospel of grace infiltrates this world not primarily through words and rational arguments but through deeds, through love.....
- As Yancey aptly puts it : 'Today , I claim these two Russians as my spiritual guides because they help me accept a central paradox of the Christian life. From Tolstoy, I learn the need to look inside, to the kingdom of God that is within me. In that glance, I see how miserably I fall short of the high ideals of the gospel. But from Dostoevsky, I learn the full extent of grace. Not only the kingdom of God is within me; God himself dwells there. Where sin increased, grace increased all the more - is how Paul expressed it in Romans.'
Mahatma Gandhi
-Though Gandhi was not a Christian by belief or practice, he attempted to an impressive degree to live out some of Jesus' principles.........he modelled his principles on what Jesus taught.....love for your enemies.....non violence... he once said ; ' No cause, no matter how just, merited bloodshed. I would die for the cause, but there is no cause I am prepared to kill for. '
- Yance asked a very valid question as he read of Gandhi's life : 'When I read the history of Mahatma Gandhi alongside the history of the Christian church, I cannot help wondering what went wrong. Why did it take a Hindu to embrace the principles of reconciliation, humility and vicarious sacrifice so clearly modelled by Jesus himself? Gandhi credited Jesus as his source for these life principles, and he worked like a disciplined soldier to put them into practice. What has kept Christians from following Jesus with the same abandon? '
- Indeed, I ask myself, that very same question....What has kept ME from following Jesus with the same fervour and abandon???
- Sadly, it was the church itself that turned Gandhi away from Christ....the failure of man, caused this Hindu to reject Christ.....in Gandhi's words - 'The church did not make a favourable impression on me,' he remembers, citing dull sermons and a congregation who 'appeared rather to be worldly-minded, people going to church for recreation and in conformity to custom.'
- It's amazing....because I once remembered how I had those same exact thoughts....the only difference, I cling on to Christ even more tightly despite my experience in church....whilst Gandhi chose to walk away....How tragic!
Dr. C. Everett Koop
- I have never heard of this name before I read this book....and I did not know who he was, but after reading this excerpt, I found inspiration in this man- a paediatric surgeon who managed to reconcile the fact that a man of faith can get involved in politics without making crucial compromises........ He walked the difficult road of a public person with a Christian faith....and he spoke out for what he believed, no matter how unpopular it would make him.....and he emerged a winner.....the best Surgeon General America has ever had...a man of integrity.......How we need more people like him!!
John Donne
- Yancey found John Donne - the Elizabethan poet four centuries ago who wrote 'Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions'.......with the most appropriate 'message' which he used while speaking at a friend's funeral.....a man with AIDS .... who was also a Christian.....
- I on the other hand had experience of Donne (unknown to me at that time!) through a movie/ play that I watched at one of my oncological posting... 'Wit' which was written by Margaret Edson.......
- It was in this book that I discovered the life of John Donne... a dean who lived in the time of the plague in London...and who contracted the illness in his service to the people that he served......
- Yancey writes : ' The central reason I keep returning to Donne's Devotions , as on the night of David's funeral, is that the book recounts each crisis in detail (a crisis of fear, crisis of meaning and a crisis of death), and continues to yield new insights into these primal confrontations with the mystery of suffering.....Although Devotions does not answer the philosophical questions, it does record Donne's emotional resolution , a gradual movement towards peace. At first - confined to bed, churning out prayers without answers, comtemplating death, regurgitation guilt - he can find no relief from fear. Obsessed, he reviews every biblical occurence of the word 'fear'. As he does so, it dawns on him that life will always include circumstances that incite fear: if not ilness, financial hardship, if not poverty, rejection, if not loneliness, failure. In such a world, Donne had a choice: to fear God, or to fear everything else......Donne concludes his best course is to cultivate a proper fear of the Lord, which fear can supplant all others: 'as thou hast given me a repentance, not to be repented of, so give me , O Lord, a fear, of which I may not be afraid'. I learned from Donne, when faced with doubts, to review my alternatives. If for whatever reason I refuse to trust God, what, then, can I trust?'
- Donne suffered pain and illness....and questioned the meaning of it all.....he knew the crisis of fear...and the crisis of meaning....he struggled to accept death.....and emerged with a 'holy indifference' to death...not by discounting death's horrors, but by a renewed confidence in resurrection.....'O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? ....... God knows all this world's weight and burden and heaviness, said Donne in a sermon; 'And if there were not a weight of future glory to counterpoise it, we should all sink into nothing.' ...
- I love this quote...which reverberated in my mind whilst watching 'Wit' - "Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so...One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die."
Annie Dillard
- yet another unsung and unknown hero......how the modern world has suffered for the lost of the love for reading.....the classics i mean..... I was introduced to Annie Dillard by Yancey.....and the 'rebellion' which she went through sounds very much like mine....
- Yancey writes: ' Annie did have one short fling of rebellion against God, she told me. After four consecutive summers at the church camp, she got fed up with the hypocrisy of people coming to church to show off their clothes and wanting to make a major statement, she decided to confront the ministers head-on. The senior minister terrified her, so she marched into the assistant minister's office and delivered her spiel about hypocrisy. A wise man, in one fell swoop he accomplished for her what took me many years: he separated the church from God, and did so in a dignified way, rather than demeaned, his teenage critic. 'He was an experienced, calm man in a three-piece suit; he had a moustache and wore glasses. I was this little high school kid who thought I was the only person in the world with complaints against the church. He heard me out and then said, " You are right, honey, there is a lot of hypocrisy," Annie felt her arguments dissolved. Then the minister proceeded to load her down with books by C.S. Lewis which, he suggested, she might find useful for a final-year essay....To Annie's consternation, he was right....After ploughing through four straight volumes of C.S.Lewis she fell right back in the arms of Christianity. Her rebellion lasted one month. '
- Hehe.....sounds like me....only difference was there was no such minister to counsel me......and I stumbled upon C.S.Lewis by accident....through a friend of mine.....
- I like her quote: ' I alternate between thinking of the planet as a home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.' ...pretty much sums up the description I have of this blog.....
There are many many more giants of faith out there...people like Frederick Buechner, Henri Nouwen, Shusaku Endo, etc ....there would not be enough pages to write about them....but I must say that I am totally awed by this book....and would like to read all their writings for my ownself......and to collect my own 'Hall of Fame' of literary Christian writers....giants of faith who stood in the gap for their generation......and impacting their world for Christ......
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