Manna In the Wilderness
The Discipline of Surrender by Douglas Webster: Chapter 4


It strikes me that God will create a hunger in our souls - make us fully aware of it - and then, just as we become desperate to fulfill the need on our own, he satisfies that same need with his miraculous provision.

This creation of the soulish hunger comes through something we hate: humiliation. Why is it that God has to go to such extremes to cause us to look fully into his Son Christ Jesus? Webster at P.37: "The only way out of humiliation is to have humility before God."  Humility of course is something that doesn't come naturally. Humility would suggest that we are dependent on God for daily provision, that we succumb to the holy currents of Sabbath Taking regardless of the 40% Off sale at Macy's, or that we humble ourselves afresh each Sunday morning and Wednesday night when we gather to understand we have no life whatsoever outside the Life of Christ, graced to us in the Eucharist.

Yet it's not until we experience the futile fast food experience of materialism (and are left devastated by its empty promises - even to the point of being humiliated because we have hung our very existence on its crumbling foundation) that we can begin to see through its facade and into the Deeper Reality. Our two-dimensional realities shatter to the floor and then - there, just out there in the lingering fog, beyond all we knew, is the face of God. Smiling. Compassioned. Most likely relieved to see that we finally "caught it". He rushes to us, swoops us away from our dying world and tells us how he was there all the time, yet crippled behind our stubborn insistence to feed ourselves from the delicacies of Egypt. 

Why is it that we tend to look for life in things that make us die?

Now onto the Book:

Firstly, any comments about the paragraphs above? 

Secondly, What part of Chapter 4 strikes you? Being daily dependent upon his provision? The discipline of taking a Sabbath? Being nurtured by the Bread of Life in the Eucharist? And why IS it that humiliation see,s to be the doorway into spiritual growth?