When We Want God to Breathe New Life into Our Marriage Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. ISAIAH 43:18-19 WE ALL HAVE TIMES when we know we need new life in our marriage. We feel the strain, the tension, the sameness, or possibly even the subtle decay in it. When there is so much water under the bridge over what seems like a river of hurt, apathy, or preoccupation, we know we cannot survive the slowly and steadily rising flood without the Lord doing a new thing in both of us. The good news is that God says He will do that. He is the God of new beginnings, after all. But it won’t happen if we don’t make a choice to let go of the past. We have been made new if we have received Jesus. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). But in a marriage, it is way too easy to hang on to the old disappointments, misunderstandings, disagreements, and abuses. It becomes a wilderness of hurtful memories we cling to because we don’t want to be hurt, disappointed, misunderstood, disregarded, fought with, or abused again. Hanging on to old patterns of thought and negative memories keeps them fresh in your mind. And you don’t let your husband forget them, either. You remain mired in them because you don’t feel the situation has been resolved—and it still hurts. Only God can give you and your husband a new beginning from all that has gone on in the past. Only He can make a road in the wilderness of miscommunication and misread intentions, and make a cleansing and restoring river to flow in the dry areas of your relationship. Everyone needs new life in their marriage at certain times. And only the God of renewal can accomplish that. My Prayer to God LORD, I ask that You would do a fresh work of Your Spirit in our marriage. Make all things new in each of us individually and also together. Dissolve the pain of the past where it is still rising up in us to stifle our communication and ultimately our hope and joy. Wherever we have felt trapped in a wilderness of our own making, carve a way out of it for us and show us the path to follow. If there are rigid and dry areas between us that don’t allow for new growth, give us a fresh flow of Your Spirit to bring new vitality into our relationship. Help us to stop rehearsing old hurtful conversations that have no place in any life committed to the God of new beginnings. Sweep away all the old rubble of selfishness, stubbornness, blindness, and the inability to see beyond the moment or a particular situation. Only You can take away our painful memories so that we don’t keep reliving the same problems, hurts, or injustices. Only You can resurrect love, excitement, and hope where they have died. Help us to forgive fully and allow each other to completely forget. Help us to focus on Your greatness in us, instead of each other’s faults. Holy Spirit, breathe new life into each of us and into our marriage today.
Every single moment of a person's life, both of the understanding and of the will, is a new beginning.
This is a new year. A new beginning. And things will change.
"Thou hast seen all this; and will not ye declare it? I have shewed thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou didst not know them. They are created now, and not from the beginning; even before the day when thou heardst them not; lest thou shouldst say, Behold, I knew them.
Absolutism tempered by assassination. A Cadmean victory.[807-2] After us the deluge.[807-3] All is lost save honour.[807-4] Appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.[807-5] Architecture is frozen music.[807-6] Beginning of the end.[808-1] Boldness, again boldness, and ever boldness.[808-2] Dead on the field of honour.[808-3] Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.[808-4] Extremes meet.[808-5] Hell is full of good intentions.[808-6] History repeats itself.[808-7] I am here: I shall remain here.[808-8] I am the state.[808-9] It is magnificent, but it is not war.[808-10] Leave no stone unturned.[809-1] Let it be. Let it pass.[809-2] Medicine for the soul.[809-3] Nothing is changed in France; there is only one Frenchman more.[809-4] Order reigns in Warsaw.[809-5] Ossa on Pelion.[809-6] Scylla and Charybdis.[810-1] Sinews of war.[810-2] Talk of nothing but business, and despatch that business quickly.[810-3] The empire is peace.[810-4] The guard dies, but never surrenders.[810-5] The king reigns, but does not govern.[810-6] The style is the man himself.[811-1] "There is no other royal path which leads to geometry," said Euclid to Ptolemy I.[811-2] There is nothing new except what is forgotten.[811-3] They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.[811-4] We are dancing on a volcano.[811-5] Who does not love wine, women, and song Remains a fool his whole life long.[811-6] God is on the side of the strongest battalions.[811-7] Terrible he rode alone, With his Yemen sword for aid; Ornament it carried none But the notches on the blade.
Even if we resign ourselves to the thought that the likenesses and likelihoods which we project upon the unseen and unknown, nay, that the hope of our meeting again as we once met on earth, need not be fulfilled exactly as we shape them to ourselves, where is the argument to make us believe that the real fulfilment can be less perfect than what even a weak human heart devises and desires? This trust that whatever is will be best, is what is meant by faith, true, because inevitable, faith. We see traces of it in many places and many religions, but I doubt whether anywhere that faith is more simply and more powerfully expressed than in the Old and New Testaments: 'For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside Thee, what He hath prepared for him that waiteth for Him' (Isaiah lxiv. 4). 'As it is written, Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him' (1 Cor. ii. 9).
Scepticism is not an end but a beginning, is as the decay of old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new, wider, and better.
It is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast. Nevertheless, we make a beginning. It is not for the metal alone we go to the Dead Places now — there are the books and the writings. They are hard to learn. And the magic tools are broken — but we can look at them and wonder. At least, we make a beginning. And, when I am chief priest we shall go beyond the great river. We shall go to the Place of the Gods — the place newyork — not one man but a company. We shall look for the images of the gods and find the god ASHING and the others — the gods Lincoln and Biltmore and Moses. But they were men who built the city, not gods or demons. They were men. I remember the dead man's face. They were men who were here before us. We must build again.
Whenever I see a new-married couple more than ordinarily fond before faces, I consider them as attempting to impose upon the company or themselves; either hating each other heartily, or consuming that stock of love in the beginning of their course which should serve them throughout their whole journey.
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
If we feel that this life can only be a link in a chain without beginning and without end, in a circle which has its beginning and its end everywhere and nowhere, we learn to bear it, and to enjoy it too, in a new sense. What we achieve here assumes a new meaning--it will not altogether perish, whether for good or for evil. What is done in time is done for ever--what is done by one affects us all. Thus our love too is not lost--what is loved in time is loved for ever. The form changes, but that which changes, which undergoes change, remains itself unchanged. We seem to love the fleeting forms of life, and yet how can we truly love what is so faithless? No, we truly love what is, and was, and will be, hidden under the fleeting forms of life, but in itself more than those fleeting forms however fair. We love the fair appearance too, how could it be otherwise? but we should love it only as belonging to what we love--not as being what we love. So it is, or rather so it ought to be. Yet while we are what we are, we love the flower, not the sightless grain of seed, and when that flower fades and passes away, we mourn for it, and our only comfort is that we too fade and pass away. Then we follow there, wherever they go. Some flowers fade sooner, some later, but none is quite forgotten.
We have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire. If today, after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see further — we will realize that humanity is indivisible. New threats make no distinction between races, nations or regions. A new insecurity has entered every mind, regardless of wealth or status. A deeper awareness of the bonds that bind us all — in pain as in prosperity — has gripped young and old. In the early beginnings of the 21st century — a century already violently disabused of any hopes that progress towards global peace and prosperity is inevitable — this new reality can no longer be ignored. It must be confronted.
There has been no entirely new religion since the beginning of the world. The elements and roots of religion were there, as far back as we can trace the history of man; and the history of religion shows us throughout a succession of new combinations of the same radical elements. An intuition of God, a sense of human weakness and dependence, a belief in a Divine government of the world, a distinction between good and evil, and a hope of a better life, these are some of the radical elements of all religions. Though sometimes hidden, they rise again and again to the surface. Though frequently distorted, they tend again and again to their perfect form. Unless they had formed part of the original dowry of the human soul, religion would have remained an impossibility, and the tongues of angels would have been to human ears but as sounding brass, or as tinkling cymbals.
Physical religion, beginning in a belief in agents behind the great phenomena of nature, reached its highest point when it had led the human mind to a belief in one Supreme Agent or God, whatever his name might be. It was supposed that this God could be implored by prayers and pleased by sacrifices. He was called the father of gods and men. Yet even in his highest conception, he was no more than what Cardinal Newman defined God to be. 'I mean by the Supreme Being,' he wrote, 'one who is simply self-dependent, and the only being who is such. I mean that he created all things out of nothing, and could destroy them as easily as he made them, and that, in consequence, he is separated from them by an abyss, and incommunicable in all his attributes.' This abyss separating God from man remains at the end of Physical Religion. It constitutes its inherent weakness. But this very weakness becomes in time a source of strength, for from it sprang a yearning for better things. Even the God of the Jews, in His unapproachable majesty, though He might be revered and loved by man during His life on earth, could receive, as it were, a temporary allegiance only, for 'the dead cannot praise God, neither any that go down into darkness!' God was immortal, a man was mortal; and Physical Religion could not throw a bridge over the abyss that separated the two. Real religion, however, requires more than a belief in God, it requires a belief in man also, and an intimate relation between God and man, at all events in a life to come. There is in man an irrepressible desire for continued existence. It shows itself in life in what we may call self-defence. It shows itself at the end of life and at the approach of death, in the hope of immortality.
Chapter iii.--Here the nation is personified as a man (cf. Hos. xi. 1), who laments his own calamities. In view of i. 12-22, ii. 20-22, this is hardly a serious deviation from the strict form of elegy (_Klagelied_). Budde makes much of "the close external connexion with ch. ii." The truth is that the break is as great as between any two of these poems. Chapter ii. ends with a mother's lament over her slaughtered children; chapter iii. makes an entirely new beginning, with its abruptly independent "I am the Man!" The suppression of the Divine Name is intentional. Israel durst not breathe it, until compelled by the climax, verse 18: cf. Am. vi. 10. Contrast its frequency afterwards, when ground of hope is found in the Divine pity and purpose (verses 22-40), and when the contrite nation turns to its God in prayer (verses 55-66). The spiritual aspect of things is now the main topic. The poet deals less with incident, and more with the moral significance of the nation's sufferings. It is the religious culmination of the book. His poem is rather lyrical than narrative, which may account for some obscurities in the connexion of thought; but his alphabetic scheme proves that he _designed_ twenty-two stanzas, not sixty-six detached couplets. There is something arresting in that bold "I am the Man"; and the lyrical intensity, the religious depth and beauty of the whole, may well blind us to occasional ruggedness of metre and language, abrupt transitions from figure to figure and other alleged blemishes, some of which may not have seemed such to the poet's contemporaries (e.g. the repetition of the acrostic word, far more frequent in Psalm cxix.); and some disappear on revision of the text. Entry: O
The poverty of the country was very great in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth. Adversity then taught the people new manners, and households became more simple and thrifty. In the reign of James I., with enforced economy and thrift, a "slow but substantial improvement in agriculture" took place, and a new growth of commercial enterprise. The vigour of the municipalities had abated, so that in Henry VIII.'s time they had become the very humble servants of the government; and the government, on the other hand, had become strongly centralized--in itself a sign of the general withdrawal of self-sustaining activity in all administration, in the administration of charitable relief no less than in other departments. A system of endowed charities had been built up, supported chiefly by rents from landed property. These now had disappeared, and thus the means of relief, which Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth might have utilized at a time of general distress, had been dissipated by the acts of their predecessors. The civil independence of the monasteries and religious houses might have been justified, possibly, when they were engaged in missionary work and were instilling into the people the precepts of a higher moral law than that which was in force around them. But afterwards, as the ability and intelligence of the community increased, their privileges became more and more antagonistic to charity, and tended to create a non-social and even anti-social ecclesiastical democracy actuated by aims and interests in which the general good of the people had little or no place. There was a growing alienation between religious tradition and secular opinion, as Lollardism slowly permeated the thought of the people and led the way to the Reformation. While this alienation existed no national system of charity, civic and yet religious, could be created. But worse than all, the ideal of charity had been degraded. A self-regarding system of relief had superseded charity, and it was productive of nothing but alms, large or small, isolated and unmethodic, given with a wrong bias, and thus almost inevitably with evil results. Out of this could spring no vigorous co-operative charity. Charity--not relief--indeed seemed to have left the world. The larger issues were overlooked. Then the property of the hospitals and the gilds was wantonly confiscated, though the poor had already lost that share in the revenues of the church to which at one time they were admitted to have a just claim. A new beginning had to be made. The obligations of charity had to be revived. A new organization of charitable relief had to be created, and that with an empty exchequer and after a vast waste of charitable resources. There were signs of a new congregational and parochial energy, yet the task could not be entrusted to the religious bodies, divided and disunited as they were. In their stead it could be imposed only on some authority which represented the general community, such as municipalities; and in spite of the centralization of the government there seemed some hope of creating a system of relief in connexion with them. They were tried, and, very naturally, failed. In the poverty of the time it seemed that the poor could be relieved only by a compulsory rate, and the administration of statutory relief naturally devolved on the central government--the only vigorous administrative body left in the country. The government might indeed have adopted the alternative of letting the industrial difficulties of the country work themselves out, but they had inherited a policy of minute legislative control, and they continued it. Revising previous statutes, they enacted the Poor Law, which still remains on the statute book. It could be no remedy for social offences against charity and the community. But in part at least it was successful. It helped to conceal the failure to find a remedy. Entry: 1
Accordingly what is in one sense the revival of classical learning is in another a recourse to what inspired that learning, and so is a new beginning. There is no place for a reformed Aristotelian logic, though the genius of Zabarella was there to attempt it. Nor for revivals of the competing systems, though all have their advocates. Scientific discovery was in the air. The tradition of the old world was too heavily weighted with the Ptolemaic astronomy and the like to be regarded as other than a bar to progress. But from the new point of view its method was inadequate too, its contentment with an induction that merely leaves an opponent silent, when experiment and the application of a calculus were within the possibilities. The transformation of logic lay with the man of science, hindered though he might be by the enthusiasm of some of the philosophers of nature. Henceforth the Aristotelian logic, the genuine no less than the traditional, was to lie on the other side of the Copernican change. Entry: C
Bacon was no mathematician, and so was out of touch with the main army of progress. By temperament he was rather with the Humanists. He was content to voice the cry for the overthrow of the dominant system as such, and to call for a new beginning, with no realist presuppositions. He is with the nominalists of the later Scholasticism and the naturalists of the early Renaissance. He echoes the cry for recourse to nature, for induction, for experiment. He calls for a logic of discovery. But at first sight there is little sign of any greater contribution to the reconstruction than is to be found in Ramus or many another dead thinker. The syllogism is ineffective, belonging to argumentation, and constraining assent where what we want is control of things. It is a mechanical combination of propositions as these of terms which are counters to express concepts often ill-defined. The flight from a cursory survey of facts to wide so-called principles must give way to a gradual progress upward from propositions of minimum to those of medium generality, and in these consists the fruitfulness of science. Yet the induction of the Aristotelians, the dialectical induction of the _Topics_, content with imperfect enumeration and with showing the burden of disproof upon the critic, is puerile, and at the mercy of a single instance to the contrary. In all this there is but little promise for a new organon. It is neither novel nor instrumental. On a sudden Bacon's conception of a new method begins to unfold itself. It is inductive only in the sense that it is identical in purpose with the ascent from particulars. It were better called exclusiva or elimination of the alternative, which Bacon proposes to achieve, and thereby guarantee his conclusion against the possibility of instance to the contrary. Entry: C
An Animal that knows who it is, one that has a sense of his own identity, is a discontented creature, doomed to create new problems for himself for the duration of his stay on this planet. Since neither the mouse nor the chimp knows what is, he is spared all the vexing problems that follow this discovery. But as soon as the human animal who asked himself this question emerged, he plunged himself and his descendants into an eternity of doubt and brooding, speculation and truth-seeking that has goaded him through the centuries as relentlessly as hunger or sexual longing. The chimp that does not know that he exists is not driven to discover his origins and is spared the tragic necessity of contemplating his own end. And even if the animal experimenters succeed in teaching a chimp to count one hundred bananas or to play chess, the chimp will develop no science and he will exhibit no appreciation of beauty, for the greatest part of man's wisdom may be traced back to the eternal questions of beginnings and endings, the quest to give meaning to his existence, to life itself. -- Selma Fraiberg, _The Magic Years_, pg. 193
The Bible on letters of reference: Are we beginning all over again to produce our credentials? Do we, like some people, need letters of introduction to you, or from you? No, you are all the letter we need, a letter written on your heart; any man can see it for what it is and read it for himself. -- 2 Corinthians 3:1-2, New English translation
This is obvious enough in the _Metaphysics_: it has two openings (Books [Alpha] and [alpha]); then comes a nearly consecutive theory of being ([Beta], [Gamma], [Epsilon], [Zeta], [Eta], [Theta]), but interrupted by a philosophical lexicon [Delta]; afterwards follows a theory of unity ([Iota]); then a summary of previous books and of doctrines from the _Physics_ ([Kappa]); next a new beginning about being, and, what is wanted to complete the system, a theory of God in relation to the world ([Lambda]); finally a criticism of mathematical metaphysics ([Mu], [Nu]), in which the argument against Plato ([Alpha] 9) is repeated almost word for word ([Mu] 4-5). The _Metaphysics_ is clearly a compilation formed from essays or discourses; and it illustrates another characteristic of Aristotle's gradual method of composition. It refers back to passages "in the first discourses" ([Greek: en tois protois logois]) --an expression not uncommon in Aristotelian writings. Sometimes the reference is to the beginning of the whole treatise; e.g. _Met_. [Beta] 2, 997 b 3-5, referring back to [Alpha] 6 and 9 about Platonic forms. Sometimes, on the other hand, the reference only goes back to a previous part of a given topic, e.g. _Met_. [Theta] 1, 1045 b 27-32, referring back to [Zeta] 1, or at the earliest to [Gamma] 2. On either alternative, however, "the first discourses" mentioned may have originally been a separate discourse; for Book [Gamma] begins quite fresh with the definition of the science of being, long afterwards called "Metaphysics," and Book [Zeta] begins Aristotle's fundamental doctrine of substance. Entry: G
1:1. In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God.
2:11. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.