Pray when he is on his way to work. Pray before he is about to pursue something ambitious. Pray when he is having a rough day. Pray when you are fighting.
Pray for his health. Pray for his success. Pray for the love you two share. Pray that God will guide him to be more like Jesus everyday.
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
- W H Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
It’s an odd fact that the Christian faith played out unpredictably in the later life of the English poet, W.H. Auden. Being gay made Auden feel claustrophobic in socially constricted England and so off he scuttled across to America just before the outbreak of the war in 1939. Some thought he was a coward for fleeing just as Britain faced its darkest hour and never forgave him.
But more than his gayness, another reason given for why he left for America is that he had grown weary of being lionised by the London literary chattering classes as his generation’s great left wing prophet. If anything he felt like an imposter. That self doubt served him to distance himself from the visceral and vicious debates raging across England’s cultural and political landscape as Europe fell into turmoil and crisis from the bitterness of the Spanish Civil War to the growing onset of war with Nazi Germany.
Auden’s literary friends didn’t grasp what he saw: Evil has a habit of infesting on all sides of ideological battle. No nation, political party or individual was pure and innocent. The ferocious rise of Nazism could happen anywhere, not just Germany in the 1930s. Nihilism was everywhere from the distinct Italian fascism of Mussolini’s Italy to the bloody brand of Communism in Stalin’s Russia.
Auden’s answer was to put his faith in Christianity, of the very English kind. Auden embraced the consolations of the Christian faith as the only mature way to understand human darkness and potential. The point of Christian belief, he argued, was to challenge our self-deceptions and self-pity and keep us focused on the only thing that matters - Jesus’ love command. Auden wrote: “For one thing, and one thing only, is serious: loving one’s neighbour as one’s self.”
Auden thought supernatural arguments and jargon distracted from real religion. Christian faith obliged believers to face the facts of this suffering world, not veer from them. He practiced numerous acts of charity anonymously. He didn’t like praying if it meant asking God to bend the universe to his own little purposes. Auden prayed as a way to pay deep attention to something other than himself. He prayed to God in order to forget his own ego.
"So, his advice for showing love to an LGBT person is disagreeing with their 'behavior', meaning sexual orientation or gender expression, and befriending them in order to help them not do that anymore."
As I'm on this road to allowing my faith to blossom and getting closer to Christ, I want to attract a like-minded man that is on the same journey and willing to walk it with me.
A beautiful thing about the love of God is that He knew what each one of us would do. Still, through the blood of His begotten Son Jesus, He paved the only way to salvation. That despite it all, all who would believe in Jesus could be saved, forgiven, and no longer separated from Him. What a mighty good love☺️
From the Daily Office of the Book of Common Prayer this morning, a section of Romans that emphasizes Pauline theology is not different from the Way of Love. Love to you!
Sorry about yesterday.I know you've been sad alot.It wasn't right of me to talk about that stuff on your birthday.I will also add you are and will always be a brother to me don't ever think otherwise. @gothictragedies