閱讀越悅讀 － 第七天

買這本書的原因很簡單，因為作者是余華。我不是太認識余華，只讀過他的「活著」。不用多說，活著是一個會一直留在心中的故事。

若你在網上找對這本書的評價，你會看見很不同的意見。有些很好的評分，有些說對作者很失望，等；彷彿某些人都對余華就是「期待」著某類型的故事般。我本人卻很喜歡「第七天」這本書，我相信會是另一個，會一直留在我心裏的故事。

讀完這書，我覺得我好像跟很多有著不同經歷的人聊天完一樣。他們的每個故事也震撼著我的內心。雖然，以我的背境和經歷，我無法跟每個主人翁的生命也能感同身受，可是，他們的故事和書中所刻畫的情感，真實地攪動著我的內心。他們的故事是真的、情感是真的、掙扎是真的、那些不公平是真的、那些階級觀念是真的，等等等等都是真的。這樣的故事怎能使人讀畢這書，心能夠平靜下來？無可否認，這本書瀰漫著一份很沉重、很傷痛的感覺，但到最後（第六和第七天），我又不知怎的，從文字裏感受到一份盼望－－－一份期待著、渴望著的盼望。

這書取名「第七天」，作者借聖經的創世記———上帝七天創造天地，講述一個人死後七天的經歷。不禁令有基督信仰的我，把書中所說到的荒誕的事都帶到上帝面前。遇見社會很多荒謬的問題，身邊很多使人抓不著頭腦的事，或許我們在心中有很多問號，但我還是選擇相信，這一切也在上帝的掌權之內。

書背的故事簡介是這樣寫的：
「第七天」就是安息日？！
活著的世界，為什麼比死亡後的世界更令人沮喪、絕望？

閱讀越悅讀 － The Crucified Life

閱讀越悅讀 － The Crucified Life (1)

(...) These questions, and many more like them, are inappropriate. So the question before us, and the question that really matters, is simply, what do you think of Christ? And what are you going to do with Christ? Every question we might ever have can be boiled down to the subject of Jesus Christ. Everybody needs to answer this question of what we are going to do about this man whom God raised from the dead. Christ is the last word of God to humankind.

Some people have been fooled into believing that it was the life of Jesus that saved us. No, He had to die. Some say it was at the death of Jesus that we were saved. No, He had to rise from the dead. All three acts had to be present before we could truly say we have a Saviour we can trust. He had to live among men, holy and harmless, spotless and unveiled. He had to die for man and then rise on the third day, according to the Scripture. He did all three. What the Spirit of God carries back home to the heart the Holy Spirit impales on our consciences, and we cannot escape until we have done something about Jesus.

To those early Christians, Easter was not a holiday or even a holy day. It was not a day at all. It was an accomplished fact that lived with them all year long and became the reason for their daily conduct.
(...) They lived by the fact that Christ had risen from the dead and they had risen with him.
"If ye then be risen with Christ..." The word "if" is not an "if" of uncertainty. The force of the word is "since ye are then risen with Christ." Paul declared in Romans 6:4 Ephesians 2:6-7 and elsewhere that when Christ rose from the dead, His people rose with Him. Mortality rose with Him. Spirituality rose with Him. And this rising from the dead was and is an accomplished fact.

We are always preaching sermons, writing articles and singing hymns trying to equate our country and our modern civilization - or any civilization - with Christianity. It cannot be done. The Christian Church is something apart. It is not black or white or red or yellow. The Christian Church is not for Canadian or Americans or Germans or British or Japanese. The Christian Church is a new creation born of the Holy Ghost out of the stuff of Christ's wounded side, and it is another race altogether.

The Scriptures say "seek" and "set." "Seek... and set your affections on things above" and put off the old ways, forgive everybody in the world and dedicate your time to Him.
Too often, we give God only the tired remnants of our time. If Jesus Christ had given us only the remnant of His time, we would all be on our way to that darkness that knows no morning. Christ have us not the tattered leftovers of His time; He gave us all the time He had. But some of us give Him only the leftovers of our money and of our talents and never give our time fully to the Lord Jesus Christ who gave us all. Because He gave all, we have what we have; and He calls us "as he is, so are we in this world" (1 John 4:17).

Nicholas Herman, who was commonly known as Brother Lawrence, was a simple dishwasher in the institution where he lived. He said he did those dishes for the glory of God. When he was through with his humble work, he would fall down flat on the floor and worship God. Whatever he was told to do, he did it for the glory of God. He testified, "I wouldn't as much as pick up a straw from the follow, but I did it for the glory of God."
One saint praised God every time he drank a glass of water. He did not make a production out of it, but in his heart, he thanked God. Every time I leave my house, I look to God, expecting Him to bless me and keep me on my way. Every time I am flying in the air, I expect Him to keep me there, land me safely and bring me back. If He wants me in heaven more than He wants me on earth, then He will answer no to that prayer and it will be all over - but I will be with Him over there. In the meantime, while He wants me here, I will thank Him every hour and every day for everything.

The primary difficulty in the evangelical Church is that we have been trying to think our way into God. Nothing could be more futile and frustrating.
It is only through grace that you can have the fullness of the knowledge of God, but of God Himself can no man think. You cannot think around Him, equal to Him or up to Him. But that hunger for Him in your heart will reach out and search until it finds the object of His love, which is God Himself.

____________

while reading this book, I still constantly ask: "yes, but HOW?" and then I am reminded: the question that really matters, is simply, what do you think of Christ? And what are you going to do with Christ?

閱讀越悅讀 － The Crucified Life

"What I mean by 'the crucified life' is a life wholly given over to the Lord in absolute humility and obedience: a sacrifice pleasing to the Lord."

"The crucified life is a life absolutely committed to following after Christ Jesus. To be more like Him. To think like Him. To act like Him. To love like Him. The whole essence of spiritual perfection has everything to do with Jesus Christ. Not with rules and regulations. Not with how we dress or what we do or do not do. We are not to look like each other; rather, we are to look like Christ. We can get all caught up in the nuances of religion and miss the glorious joy of following after Christ. Whatever hinders us in our journey must be salt a deathblow."

"One important point may fail to understand is that the Bible was never meant to replace God; rather, it was meant to lead us into the heart of God."

"Among the thirtyfold Christians, there is much joy that they have been saved but no anticipation of continuing on the journey toward spiritual perfection. They are so happy they are not what they used to be that they cannot see what God wants them to be."

"Quite simply put, a Christian is one who sustains a right relationship with Jesus Christ. A Christian enjoys a kind of union with Jesus Christ superseding all other relationships."

(more to come...
keep praying for God Himself!!!!)

閱讀越悅讀 － 人鼠之間

讀完＜人鼠之間＞一書，心裏的第一個叫喊是「很殘忍」。
擱下手上的書，坐在床上呆了好半天，心中很不好受⋯⋯內心酸酸的⋯⋯
＜人＞很殘忍，同時很真實、很有人情味。
是一本能觸動人心的書。

那天買這本書的原因很簡單，只不過是給那個書名和故事簡介吸引了。今天讀完才到互聯網去找關於這本書的資料，才知道這是榮獲1962年諾貝爾文學獎的作品。這書也曾因「語言褻瀆，帶攻擊性，並有種族主義傾向」被視為禁書。



更多資料：
wiki
博客來

閱讀越悅讀 － 夜行馬戲團

終於再一次讓自己停下來，重拾這本小說好好享受一個晚上了⋯⋯

「夜」是一本充滿幻想、充滿神秘的感覺、充滿藝術的氣氛、能帶我遨遊到一幅又一幅美麗的影像的書。
雖還沒有讀畢，但一段段能使我留連與回味的章節及情感，讓我盡情享受讀這書的過程。

推薦給同樣喜歡讓思想去旅行的你們。

be well...

my dearest friend,
be well.... in Him....
you have my prayers... as always...

magical sound

ran into this song by coincidence yesterday... it stopped me once again...
it is a song that I liked since I was 12 - the first time I heard it played by a friend...
that was also my first year in Canada...

I almost have forgotten about this song... how could I...?
listening to it again... so many feelings, so many faces come into mind...
though it is not directly related to this song, but some sounds in this world are just magical...
O how I miss my youth... my childhood... my dearest friends...

 

幸福就是

閱讀越悅讀 - The Jesus I Never Knew

Around a month ago, I had the urge and the need to know more about Jesus.
Back at that time, I was reading the Gospels, reading how Jesus came to earth, how people rejected him, mocked him, but he kept doing his best to love these people, to heal these people and to bring these people back to Father God. I just couldn't make sense of it, I just couldn't imagine how a person could love as he did.

Yes, true, Jesus is God, but then, Jesus was also a human with flesh and blood, born from an ordinary family, raised up by an ordinary couple; in another words, he was a human being! I kept wondering how could Jesus do that?

I was amazed by his love and trust for his Heavenly Father. It is so easy for us to picture Jesus as a person with no emotion because he is the "Son of God". However, looking at Jesus' life on earth, I am constantly reminded that he is, like us, a human with flesh and blood, that thorns could go through his flesh, nails could go through his palms and bled... then how could he be so obedient? How did he feel back then? How were his chain of thoughts like? What was in his mind?

We, Christians, always say we want to be like Jesus, how could we be like him if we don't even know him? Indeed, I really really really want to be able to love like him, I pray to be like him...

I shared some of these thoughts in my oikos (small group), and my small group leader introduced this book to me: The Jesus I Neve Knew by Philip Yancey. I am more than half way done now and would like to recommend this to you.

Here is (part of) one of the chapters that captures my mind a lot:

A Revolution of Grace

As my class in Chicago read the Gospels and watched movies about Jesus' life, we noticed a striking pattern: the more unsavory the characters, the more at ease they seemed to feel around Jesus. People like these found Jesus appealing: a Samaritan social outcast, a military officer of the tyrant Herod, a quisling tax collector, a recent hostess to seven demons.

In contrast, Jesus got a chilly response from more respectable types. Pious Pharisees thought him uncouth and worldly, a rich young ruler walked away shaking his head, and even the open-minded Nicodemus sought a meeting under the cover of darkness.

I remarked to the class how strange this pattern seemed, since the Christian church now attracts respectable types who closely resemble the people most suspicious of Jesus on earth. What has happened to reverse the pattern of Jesus' day? Why don't sinners like being around us?

I recounted a story told me by a friend who works with the down-and-out in Chicago. A prostitute came to him in wretched straits, homeless, her health failing, unable to buy food for her two year-old daughter. Her eyes awash with tears, she confessed that she had been renting out her daughter --- two years old! --- to men interested in kinky sex, in order to support her own drug habit. My friend could hardly bear hearing the sordid details of her story. He sat in silence, not knowing what to say. At last he asked if she had ever thought of going to a church for help. "I will never forget the look of pure  astonishment that crossed her face," he later told me. "'Church!' she cried. 'Why would I ever go there? They'd just make me feel even worse than I already do!'"

Somehow we have created a community of respectability in the church, I told my class. The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from following in his steps today?

Someone in the class suggested that legalism in the church had created a barrier of strict rules that made non-Christians feel uncomfortable. The class discussion abruptly lurched in a new direction, as survivors of Christian colleges and fundamentalist churches began swapping war stories. I told of my own bemusement in the early seventies when the redoubtable Moody Bible Institute, located just four blocks down the street from our church, was banning all beards, mustaches, and hair below the ears of male students—though each day students filed past a large oil painting of Dwight L. Moody, hirsute breaker of all three rules.

Everyone laughed. Everyone except Greg, that is, who fidgeted in his seat and smoldered. I could see his face flush red, then blanch with anger. Finally Greg raised his hand, and rage and indignation spilled out. He was almost stammering. "I feel like walking out of this place," he said, and all of a sudden the room hushed. "You criticize others for being Pharisees. I'll tell you who the real Pharisees are. They're you [he pointed at me] and the rest of you people in this class. 85 You think you're so high and mighty and mature. I became a Christian because of Moody Church. You find a group to look down on, to feel more spiritual than, and you talk about them behind their backs. That's what a Pharisee does. You're all Pharisees."

All eyes in the class turned to me for a reply, but I had none to offer. Greg had caught us red- handed. In a twist of spiritual arrogance, we were now looking down on other people for being Pharisees. I glanced at the clock, hoping for a reprieve. No such luck: It showed fifteen minutes of class time remaining. I waited for a flash of inspiration, but none came. The silence grew louder. I felt embarrassed and trapped.

Then Bob raised his hand. Bob was new to the class, and until the day I die I will always be grateful to him for rescuing me. He began softly, disarmingly, "I'm glad you didn't walk out, Greg. We need you here. I'm glad you're here, and I'd like to tell you why I come to this church.

"Frankly, I identify with the Chicago prostitute Philip mentioned. I was addicted to drugs, and in a million years it wouldn't have occurred to me to approach a church for help. Every Tuesday, though, this church lets an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter meet in the basement room we're sitting in right now. I started attending that group, and after a while I decided a church that welcomes an AA group cigarette butts, coffee spills, and all—can't be too bad, so I made a point to visit a service.

"I've got to tell you, the people upstairs were threatening to me at first. They seemed like they had it all together while I was barely hanging on. People here dress pretty casually, I guess, but the best clothes I owned were blue jeans and T-shirts. I managed to swallow my pride, though, and started coming on Sunday mornings as well as Tuesday nights. People didn't shun me. They reached out to me. It's here that I met Jesus."

As if someone had opened an air lock, all tension discharged from the room during Bob's speech of simple eloquence. Greg relaxed, I mumbled an apology for my own Pharisaism, and the class ended on a note of unity. Bob had brought us back to common ground, as sinners equally desperate in our need of God.

(...) Reading about Jesus' assorted dinner companions, I search for a clue that might explain why Jesus made one group (sinners) feel so comfortable and the other group (pious) feel so uncomfortable. I find such a clue in one more scene from the Gospels that brings together Pharisees and a blatant sinner simultaneously. The Pharisees have caught a woman in the very act of adultery, a crime that calls for the death penalty. What would Jesus have them do? they ask, hoping to trap him in a conflict between morality and mercy.

Jesus pauses, writes on the ground for a moment, then says to the accusers, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." When all of them have filed away, Jesus turns to the cringing woman. "Where are they? Has no one condemned you?" he asks. "Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin."

This tense scene reveals a clear principle in Jesus' life: he brings to the surface repressed sin, yet forgives any freely acknowledged sin. The adulteress went away forgiven, with a new lease on life; the Pharisees slunk away, stabbed to the heart.

Perhaps prostitutes, tax collectors, and other known sinners responded to Jesus so readily because at some level they knew they were wrong and to them God's forgiveness looked very appealing. As C. S. Lewis has said, "Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger."

(...) In short, Jesus moved the emphasis from God's holiness (exclusive) to God's mercy (inclusive). Instead of the message "No undesirables allowed," he proclaimed, "In God's kingdom there are no undesirables." By going out of his way to meet with Gentiles, eat with sinners, and touch the sick, he extended the realm of God's mercy. To Jewish leaders, Jesus' actions jeopardized the very existence of their religious caste system—no wonder the Gospels mention more than twenty occasions when they conspired against Jesus.

(...) At times, I do not find it easy to believe in the love of God. I do not live in poverty, like the Christians in the Third World. Nor have I known a life of rejection, like Shusaku Endo. But I have known my share of suffering, a fact of life that cuts across all racial and economic boundaries. Suffering people also need grace-healed eyes.

One terrible week two people called me on successive days to talk about one of my books. The first, a youth pastor in Colorado, had just learned his wife and baby daughter were dying of AIDS. "How can I possibly talk to my youth group about a loving God after what has happened to me?" he asked. The next day I heard from a blind man who, several months before, had invited a recovering drug addict into his home as an act of mercy. Recently he had discovered that the recovering addict was carrying on an affair with his wife, under his own roof. "Why is God punishing me for trying to serve him?" he asked. Just then he ran out of quarters, the phone went dead, and I never heard from the man again.

I have learned not even to attempt an answer to the "Why?" questions. Why did the youth pastor's wife happen to get the one tainted bottle of blood? Why do some good people get persecuted for their deeds while some evil people live to healthy old age? Why do so few of the mil-lions of prayers for physical healing get answered? I do not know.

One question, however, no longer gnaws at me as it once did, a question that I believe lurks behind most of our issues with God: "Does God care?" I know of only one way to answer that question, and it has come through my study of the life of Jesus. In Jesus, God gave us a face, and I can read directly in that face how God feels about people like the youth pastor and the blind man who never gave me his name. By no means did Jesus eliminate all suffering—he healed only a few in one small patch of the globe—but he did signify an answer to the question of whether God cares. 

Three times that we know of, suffering drove Jesus to tears. He wept when his friend Lazarus died. I remember one dreadful year when three of my friends died in quick succession. Grief, I found, is not something you get used to. My experience of the first two deaths did nothing to prepare me for the third. Grief hit like a freight train, flattening me. It left me gasping for breath, and I could do nothing but cry. Somehow, I find it comforting that Jesus felt something similar when his friend Lazarus died. That gives a startling clue into how God must have felt about my three friends, whom he also loved. 

Another time, tears came to Jesus when he looked out over Jerusalem and realized the fate awaiting that fabled city. He let out a cry of what Shusaku Endo has called mother-love: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing." I sense in that spasm of emotional pain something akin to what a parent feels when a son or daughter goes astray, flaunting freedom, rejecting everything he or she was brought up to believe. Or the pain of a man or woman who has just learned a spouse has left— the pain of a jilted lover. It is a helpless, crushing pain of futility, and it staggers me to realize that the Son of God himself emitted a cry of helplessness in the face of human freedom. Not even God, with all his power, can force a human being to love. 

Finally, Hebrews tells us, Jesus "offered up .. . loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death." But of course he was not saved from death. Is it too much to say that Jesus himself asked the question that haunts me, that haunts most of us at one time or another: Does God care? What else can be the meaning of his quotation from that dark psalm, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" 

Again, I find it strangely comforting that when Jesus faced pain he responded much as I do. He did not pray in the garden, "Oh, Lord, I am so grateful that you have chosen me to suffer on your behalf. I rejoice in the privilege!" No, he experienced sorrow, fear, abandonment, and some-thing approaching even desperation. Still, he endured because he knew that at the center of the universe lived his Father, a God of love he could trust regardless of how things appeared at the time. 

Jesus' response to suffering people and to "nobodies" provides a glimpse into the heart of God. God is not the unmoved Absolute, but rather the Loving One who draws near. God looks on me in all my weakness, I believe, as Jesus looked on the widow standing by her son's bier, and on Simon the Leper, and on another Simon, Peter, who cursed him yet even so was commissioned to found and lead his church, a community that need always find a place for rejects.

far far...

 "how can you stay outside when there is a beautiful mess inside?" just gotta believe in myself while none believes in me... but how...