In his book, The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton makes an interesting comment, almost as an aside: "Nature is always looking for the supernatural." And so it is; therefore, a concise statement such as this is easy to brush over. But, like so much of Chesterton, upon closer examination, this little phrase gives us much to think about and, when comprehended, is able to rock the very foundations of conventional thought about nature and its connection to God. (For most think that nature stands alone, unknowing, and even Christians think that nature stand aside, unneeded.)
My first thought was admittedly a bit mundane -- "that's how God feeds the animals." Psalm 104 teaches us that God is the almighty caregiver to all of nature; he provides water for plants, plants and water for birds, fish and animals. "These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things." (v. 27,28) Nature is not conscious of God's person, as we are, but it operates under his presence, ever sustained by his rule. Because it was not blinded by sin, nature unrelentingly gazes upon its Creator; yet the veil of our sin often blurs that view.
Still, the beauty of nature reflects the glory of God through its steady gaze upon him. It points to the Creator and calls to us to look upwards as well. "I lift up my eyes to the hills -- where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth," affirms the Psalmist. The prophet Isaiah tells us that trees do not merely sway in the wind; they "clap their hands." Mountains and hills do not just rise majestically above the landscape; they "burst into song." Nature praises God unknowingly, for all that it is, and all that gives to us is wrapped up in the Creator's work within it. If you take him away, all of nature disappears; it cannot stand alone. Nature reflects God's purposes on a cosmic stage, as the dialogues in the book of Job reveal to us: Elihu says, "[God] brings the clouds to punish men, or to water his earth and show his love. Listen to this, Job; stop and consider God's wonders." (Job 37:13,14) Nature has not only a supernatural view, but a supernatural revelation as well.
And mankind, God's own, created for fellowship with him, yet fallen into alienation and disobedience, also seeks (sometimes purposefully, often unknowingly) for God. Blaise Pascal wrote, "There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled be any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus." This hole in our hearts was formed by the destructive forces of sin that distance us from God and fill us with an undefinable despair. We try to fill this void with other things; either created things that we have twisted to fit our dark purposes, or fallen ideas that rise from the dregs of our troubled selves. Even when we see a connection to God in nature, we try to strip that away because we do not want to face God. Like Adam and Eve, we are still hiding in a beautiful, but shabby garden.
Jesus alone is big enough and holy enough to fill the hole in our hearts. As he, by faith and with grace, enters in, he pushes aside the emptiness within our lifeless souls, and fill us with a glorious re-creation of life. Our nature now has not only sought but been found by the Supernatural. Jesus said, "But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." The gospel account adds that he said this to prophecy his death upon the Cross. A cross is a violation of nature; a tree that once rejoiced in the wind brutally twisted into a tool of destruction; a "cursed" thing as Paul said. But reaching high in hope and stretching wide with love, the Cross expands to fill all that we had lost. "But God forbid that I should glory," Paul declares, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." (Gal. 6:14, KJV) We only regain our vision of God and see his vision for us through the Cross, and in seeing this, we look away from the natural world to see the supernatural.
But this is not the end of the story. As believers, we know that a great resolution is coming, the redemption of all things, in which "the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality." (1Cor. 15:53) Nature, faded and torn, looks wistfully for that day. An unwritten longing hangs over creation, a desire to be delivered from death and decay, to be formed at last as new in a new heaven and earth. And we, who also now look towards heaven by the gift of grace, may articulate what nature cannot say, "Even so come, Lord Jesus." Make us whole again, give us rest in you as our eyes look to you -- "I wait for the Lord, my soul waits...more than watchmen wait for the morning." (Ps. 130:5,6)
Showing posts with label The Everlasting Man. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Everlasting Man. Show all posts
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Friday, January 24, 2014
Perspective
On Sunday, we took a look at one of Chesterton's most well-known stories; "the Lamp Post", from his book, Heretics. In the introduction to The Everlasting Man, we encounter two more tales: "the boy who leaves home to find a giant" and "man meets horse." All of these stories are about perspective and how we see the world, especially how Christians should see the world or, as the Apostle John put it, the cosmos. ("The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." 1John 2:17)
The main premise of The Everlasting Man is that the world, as well as many who claim to be Christians, do not see the Church correctly, and therefore do not understand it or follow it, because they are viewing it from the wrong perspective. He writes, "The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it." (p. 9) And to illustrate this he tells a little tale about a boy who leaves his family farm on the hillside in search of "something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant." Having traveled far and long, he turns around to catch one last glimpse of home, only to see a gigantic figure carved in the hillside above the farm. The traces of the giant had been with him all the time; he had been to close to them to see it. Chesterton is telling us that, in order to get a firm grip on what Christianity is and what it means, we must every so often step back from it and see it from a perspective that is far removed from it or what it has become. Then we well see the faith with a renewed clarity -- we will dive again into the wonder of all the things we have yet to know, learn and experience.
To further illustrate this point, Chesterton remarks that perhaps we should look at Christianity from some sort of alien viewpoint, say, that of a "Confucian." He is so sufficiently different from a Christian that his line of thinking on our faith will open up new vistas of understanding for us; he will, quite innocently, help us to see the Cross, "towering over the wrecks of time." Several years ago, when I was teaching a high school Bible class, I had an experience that illustrates this perfectly. In an attempt to get my students to see Jesus as the unique person who he truly is, I showed them clips from the movie Godspell. The music from this work had greatly influenced me as at teenager, when it opened my eyes to the greater world of Christianity beyond my rigid Baptist upbringing. ("All good gifts around us, are sent from heaven above -- So praise the Lord, Oh, praise the Lord, for all his love.) But when my students saw it, they laughed, nervously, really, because it was so unlike any mundane Sunday School story of Jesus they had ever heard. They weren't ready to sing and dance and wear the colorful clothes of what redemption really is and to know the Christ who invites us into his unending joy.
And herein lies Chesterton's most important point -- most of us are neither too close nor far enough way in our view of Christianity. We "...cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy... [we] live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith." (p. 10,11) Chesterton linked this to the theological controversies of his day, but this intermediate view, this preoccupation with minor persuasions, has dogged the Church from the beginning and follows us still. Everybody seems to have something fixate upon -- music, money, lifestyle choices, social issues, even the fundamental meaning of the fundamentals themselves. But to see the faith in the clear light of the Gospel, we must travel to a far-off point indeed, one that stands outside of this world, somewhere in the neither-land between here and Heaven.
We should see this as a great, overwhelming vision of hope; a vision not unlike ancient man seeing a horse for the first time -- a great and powerful beast, looming above his head, yet inviting him to sit upon his back and go for a ride. As the cosmos presses in on us with ever-increasing intensity, we must with equal desire, as our Lord instructed us, "...lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." If we are looking towards heaven, or taking the view from heaven, we will see life in the proper perspective. To do so is to repossess the hope of Christianity, the certainty of the Kingdom that comes, a treasure "still as new as it is old." (p. 19)
Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man. San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1993, 2008.
The main premise of The Everlasting Man is that the world, as well as many who claim to be Christians, do not see the Church correctly, and therefore do not understand it or follow it, because they are viewing it from the wrong perspective. He writes, "The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it." (p. 9) And to illustrate this he tells a little tale about a boy who leaves his family farm on the hillside in search of "something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant." Having traveled far and long, he turns around to catch one last glimpse of home, only to see a gigantic figure carved in the hillside above the farm. The traces of the giant had been with him all the time; he had been to close to them to see it. Chesterton is telling us that, in order to get a firm grip on what Christianity is and what it means, we must every so often step back from it and see it from a perspective that is far removed from it or what it has become. Then we well see the faith with a renewed clarity -- we will dive again into the wonder of all the things we have yet to know, learn and experience.
To further illustrate this point, Chesterton remarks that perhaps we should look at Christianity from some sort of alien viewpoint, say, that of a "Confucian." He is so sufficiently different from a Christian that his line of thinking on our faith will open up new vistas of understanding for us; he will, quite innocently, help us to see the Cross, "towering over the wrecks of time." Several years ago, when I was teaching a high school Bible class, I had an experience that illustrates this perfectly. In an attempt to get my students to see Jesus as the unique person who he truly is, I showed them clips from the movie Godspell. The music from this work had greatly influenced me as at teenager, when it opened my eyes to the greater world of Christianity beyond my rigid Baptist upbringing. ("All good gifts around us, are sent from heaven above -- So praise the Lord, Oh, praise the Lord, for all his love.) But when my students saw it, they laughed, nervously, really, because it was so unlike any mundane Sunday School story of Jesus they had ever heard. They weren't ready to sing and dance and wear the colorful clothes of what redemption really is and to know the Christ who invites us into his unending joy.
And herein lies Chesterton's most important point -- most of us are neither too close nor far enough way in our view of Christianity. We "...cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy... [we] live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith." (p. 10,11) Chesterton linked this to the theological controversies of his day, but this intermediate view, this preoccupation with minor persuasions, has dogged the Church from the beginning and follows us still. Everybody seems to have something fixate upon -- music, money, lifestyle choices, social issues, even the fundamental meaning of the fundamentals themselves. But to see the faith in the clear light of the Gospel, we must travel to a far-off point indeed, one that stands outside of this world, somewhere in the neither-land between here and Heaven.
We should see this as a great, overwhelming vision of hope; a vision not unlike ancient man seeing a horse for the first time -- a great and powerful beast, looming above his head, yet inviting him to sit upon his back and go for a ride. As the cosmos presses in on us with ever-increasing intensity, we must with equal desire, as our Lord instructed us, "...lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." If we are looking towards heaven, or taking the view from heaven, we will see life in the proper perspective. To do so is to repossess the hope of Christianity, the certainty of the Kingdom that comes, a treasure "still as new as it is old." (p. 19)
Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man. San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1993, 2008.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Beyond the gods
(Equip class 4/14/13)
St. Augustine begins his book, City of God, by addressing the argument that the city of Rome had been attacked in 410 by the Goths because the society had been dissuaded from worshiping their traditional gods due to the influence of Christianity. The Christians were being accused of contributing to the downfall of Rome, even though they had provided shelter and sustenance to both pagans and Christians during the attack. St. Augustine begins by encouraging his readers to take a closer look at the pagan gods -- were they really powerful enough to prevent an enemy invasion?
He states (in his very forthright and blunt way) that the pagan gods were a sorry lot: "Just think of the kind of gods to whose protection the Romans were content to entrust their city! No more pathetic illusion could be imagined." (p. 42) He goes on to point out that it was not just the Christians who were critical of the gods; even the great poets had expressed their doubts as to the true power of the deities. The pantheon of gods had degenerated into petty, infighting, fictional characters, devoid of real virtue and strength. It seems that the ancient Romans worshiped their gods as a matter of habit or rote without taking them very seriously. But when bad things happened and the gods were expected to come to their rescue, they fully expected a mighty show of power. As Rome fell, and no answer came from the pagan gods, they began to blame the "atheists," the Christians who revered the one true God, believed to possess all power.
This story reminded me of the question G.K. Chesterton poses in his book, The Everlasting Man. Did polytheism, the worship of many gods, arise prior to monotheism, the worship of one God? Or is it the other way around? Now, bear in mind that Chesterton did not consider himself to be an expert in these matters. He was, however, an incredible observer of human nature, and his observations were not limited to his own time and place. He was able to sit back and analyse history from the vantage point of timeless, orthodox Christianity.
Chesterton contends that, behind the pagan mythologies, there stands a knowledge of the one true God, which mankind held for such a short time before the Fall into sin. But this knowledge was very "big," and it was remembered more by its absence than its remembrance. The knowledge of God was lost, abandoned, turned away from. Down through the ages, it has manifested itself in a great and profound "silence." (p.92) God had been among men, but when Heaven and Earth were torn apart by the Fall, a vast emptiness opened up and all the remembrance of God poured into it. God had planted "eternity into the hearts of men (Ecc. 3:11), but their recollection of it became a shadowy sort of de ja vue.
Chesterton goes on to argue that mankind had to somehow fill up or block this abyss into which they fell, so they covered it with talk; contrived tales destined to divert our attention away from the silence of Heaven. These stories, found in every nation of the world, are known as folklore or mythology. The powerful, authoritative main characters in the stories emerged as the pagan gods. Personally, as a children's librarian, I find many of these stories delightful. My favorites are the tales of the Native Americans. Yet, beyond the gods of all mythology, there stands an unanswered and unutterable question -- who is the greatest God and why do we not remember him?
Today we live in a world (or a city) very much like the one where St. Augustine lived and worked. Paganism, mystery religions and Christianity interact in a swirling, confusing melee. We are daily confronted by stories that try to gloss over the empty hole in the world. We try to use words to bridge the infinite barrier between heaven and earth while heaven bears down on us with all those great and troublesome questions that have plagued mankind for so long. And, now, with technology as our tool, we are creating a monstrous, unceasing buzz of words aimed at silencing the silence forever.
Yet, there is and always has been a Word spoken into the void. It is the Word of revelation; the declaration of nature, Christ the Word incarnate, the Word of prophecy recorded and preserved. God speaks and tells us not a story, but the truth, a Word so powerful that it mends what was broken and brings Heaven and Earth back together again. This Word is Gospel -- "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried , that he was raised on the third day..." (1Cor. 15:3,4) This is the message that gives us power in an impotent world, the knowledge that imparts hope, and invites us into fellowship with the Lord of All.
St. Augustine, City of God, abridged ed., trans. by Walsh, et.al. New York, Doubleday, 1958.
Chesterton, G.K., The Everlasting Man, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2008.
St. Augustine begins his book, City of God, by addressing the argument that the city of Rome had been attacked in 410 by the Goths because the society had been dissuaded from worshiping their traditional gods due to the influence of Christianity. The Christians were being accused of contributing to the downfall of Rome, even though they had provided shelter and sustenance to both pagans and Christians during the attack. St. Augustine begins by encouraging his readers to take a closer look at the pagan gods -- were they really powerful enough to prevent an enemy invasion?
He states (in his very forthright and blunt way) that the pagan gods were a sorry lot: "Just think of the kind of gods to whose protection the Romans were content to entrust their city! No more pathetic illusion could be imagined." (p. 42) He goes on to point out that it was not just the Christians who were critical of the gods; even the great poets had expressed their doubts as to the true power of the deities. The pantheon of gods had degenerated into petty, infighting, fictional characters, devoid of real virtue and strength. It seems that the ancient Romans worshiped their gods as a matter of habit or rote without taking them very seriously. But when bad things happened and the gods were expected to come to their rescue, they fully expected a mighty show of power. As Rome fell, and no answer came from the pagan gods, they began to blame the "atheists," the Christians who revered the one true God, believed to possess all power.
This story reminded me of the question G.K. Chesterton poses in his book, The Everlasting Man. Did polytheism, the worship of many gods, arise prior to monotheism, the worship of one God? Or is it the other way around? Now, bear in mind that Chesterton did not consider himself to be an expert in these matters. He was, however, an incredible observer of human nature, and his observations were not limited to his own time and place. He was able to sit back and analyse history from the vantage point of timeless, orthodox Christianity.
Chesterton contends that, behind the pagan mythologies, there stands a knowledge of the one true God, which mankind held for such a short time before the Fall into sin. But this knowledge was very "big," and it was remembered more by its absence than its remembrance. The knowledge of God was lost, abandoned, turned away from. Down through the ages, it has manifested itself in a great and profound "silence." (p.92) God had been among men, but when Heaven and Earth were torn apart by the Fall, a vast emptiness opened up and all the remembrance of God poured into it. God had planted "eternity into the hearts of men (Ecc. 3:11), but their recollection of it became a shadowy sort of de ja vue.
Chesterton goes on to argue that mankind had to somehow fill up or block this abyss into which they fell, so they covered it with talk; contrived tales destined to divert our attention away from the silence of Heaven. These stories, found in every nation of the world, are known as folklore or mythology. The powerful, authoritative main characters in the stories emerged as the pagan gods. Personally, as a children's librarian, I find many of these stories delightful. My favorites are the tales of the Native Americans. Yet, beyond the gods of all mythology, there stands an unanswered and unutterable question -- who is the greatest God and why do we not remember him?
Today we live in a world (or a city) very much like the one where St. Augustine lived and worked. Paganism, mystery religions and Christianity interact in a swirling, confusing melee. We are daily confronted by stories that try to gloss over the empty hole in the world. We try to use words to bridge the infinite barrier between heaven and earth while heaven bears down on us with all those great and troublesome questions that have plagued mankind for so long. And, now, with technology as our tool, we are creating a monstrous, unceasing buzz of words aimed at silencing the silence forever.
Yet, there is and always has been a Word spoken into the void. It is the Word of revelation; the declaration of nature, Christ the Word incarnate, the Word of prophecy recorded and preserved. God speaks and tells us not a story, but the truth, a Word so powerful that it mends what was broken and brings Heaven and Earth back together again. This Word is Gospel -- "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried , that he was raised on the third day..." (1Cor. 15:3,4) This is the message that gives us power in an impotent world, the knowledge that imparts hope, and invites us into fellowship with the Lord of All.
St. Augustine, City of God, abridged ed., trans. by Walsh, et.al. New York, Doubleday, 1958.
Chesterton, G.K., The Everlasting Man, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2008.
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