Admittedly, I am not much of an artist... Stick figures is about it. I have found a channel, though, for my creativity through video production.
The following is a music video I created -- synchronizing David's Wilcox's very meaningful "Show the Way" with images from the Internet... and Disney's "Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe." Altogether, it serves to undergird this week's "Sacred Romance" message on our "Maverick of a God" -- a Trinity that is beyond our domesticating... and, yet, remains on our side. What was it that Mr. Beaver said about Aslan, the Christ figure, in Narnia: "He's not safe, but He's good!"
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
The Problem of Pain
I have no doubt that the greatest roadblock to believing in the God affirmed by Christians: how a loving, all-present, and all-powerful Deity could tolerate pain and suffering. It’s an issue, if not the issue at the heart of this week’s focus on “A Maverick of a God.”Reading Yancy’s Where is God When It Hurts? a few years ago had me finding a partial answer and resolution, at least for me. At one juncture, I found myself journaling:
“As deeply, now, as I ask ‘Where is God when it hurts?,’ I ask ‘Where is His Church – His People – when it hurts?’ We, you see, are the answers to both questions. God is not on trial in our sufferings as much as we, the Church, are. And, to the extent that we are THE CHURCH, the question of meaningless suffering is radically diminished.”
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Evil Cast Among Us
A small group study on EPIC (a sister work by John Eldredge, the author of The Sacred Romance) provoked one teen to produce the following video about “The Entrance of Evil” in that Story in which we find ourselves. It’s worth a watch for the ways it captures and conveys the interplay of foci from the previous two posts: there’s an adversary in our Story… and there are ways in which this adversary, like other elements of our “meta-narrative” finds its way into our lesser stories and the Arts.
(Note, as well, what I said earlier about the White Witch [from Disney’s first Narnia film], a main focus of the second half of this video: namely, the fact that she’s not ugly or repulsive in appearance and that she offers something so tasty as Turkish Delight. It speaks of the real ways that Evil can deceive and seduce. It’s very much in touch with Paul, writing in 2 Cor. 11:17: that “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.”)
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Reel to Real
“…we need to hold the creeds in one hand
and our favorite forms of art in the other.”
--John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance
It’s a basis for this sermon series being so filled with and complimented by film clips and my recommending movies for various age groups:
What we are talking about here goes far beyond entertainment, though. It was, in fact, the basis for the conversion of C.S. Lewis to Christianity. While Lewis’ art form of choice was mythology, it was nonetheless his conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien about his favorite Myths that led to his embracing Christ and Christianity.
In a letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves, Lewis recounts a watershed conversation between he and Tolkien and Hugo Dyson on the famed “Addison’s Walk” on the grounds of
"I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ--in Christianity... what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all: again if I met the idea the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself ... I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god . . . similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho' I could not say in cold prose "what it meant". Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened...."
-- C.S.Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 18 October 1931, in
They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis
to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), p, 427.
For Lewis, like Tolkien, then, the Gospel was a “True Myth” – God’s historic fulfillment of all the truths embedded in the lesser stories, myths, and even movies composed by men.
Of course, the words “myth” and “Gospel” in the same sentence can be offensive and treatening to some – as, indeed, they would have been for me a few years ago. “Myth” connoted, in these earlier years, fantasy and fantastical stories disconnected from reality. To associate the Gospel with “myth” would have sent me reeling… and had me disconnecting from such a teacher/preacher. “Why, them’s fightin’ words, Preacher!,” I can hear someone out there saying.
But, here me out… or maybe hear Lewis out – as I think he might say it best:
[t]he heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. … God is more than god, not less: Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about "parallels" and "pagan Christs": they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic?
--C.S. Lewis, "Myth Became Fact," in God in the Dock
“He has set eternity in our hearts” (Ecclesiates 3:11)
“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands…
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.”
(Psalms 19:1,4)
And, across the ages, sensitive spirits have sought
to define the stirrings of their hearts
and contain the voice of the Heavens
in story, in song, in art.
But, their's were only dim echoes and shadows.
The Real, I mean THE REAL—
Word and Truth and Very Spirit of God—
Could never be captured or confined or contained.
So, in the midst of frustration—His… and ours—
God spoke the Word into our lives.
But, as always happens when He speaks,
That Word was active and alive
And lived and breathed and walked among us.
So that, seeing the Truth enfleshed and risen,
Our hearts saw the Source of all stirring
And our Souls, the Voice of the Heavens.
And still, my Soul craving the Heaven’s voice,
I go to the movies and the lesser fictions,
heart stirring…
And, I go to the Bible to understand why.
O come, Thou Author and Perfecter,
Fulfillment of every truthful story,
And write my story,
Perfect my part in Your greater play.
And carry me beyond the “title page” of this world!
Monday, January 12, 2009
Arrows and Adversaries
I have to admit: I’m proud of the image I came up for this last week’s sermon. The one about there being arrows and an adversary in that story we are living in—the Sacred Romance we’ve been talking about. I took an image of the “White Witch” from the Chronicles of Narnia movie… and superimposed a broken heart that I tweaked from another site.
All that pride stuff behind, it’s an image that helps me get to this week’s topic: the hindrances and roadblocks to our living in this great “Love Story.” The causes are multiple, as we’ll see. But, chief among them is the fact that our hearts are scarred from past words and experiences… and there’s a distorter of truth out there who wants us to forever live under these “lies.”
As an aside: looking at the image, above, I am struck by the fact that Disney gave us an attractive “White Witch.” And, then, there’s that Turkish Delight she offers: so tasty! It serves as a good reminder, doesn’t it: that the “adversaries” out there are subtle and deceptive—often appearing as our friends and as something desirable in our lives!
More to the week at hand, though.
Excited as I am as we continue to explore this story we Christians find ourselves in, there’s a certain trepidation and caution. I’ve been around enough to know that anything that promises real breakthroughs can also spark real upheaval in people’s hearts and souls.
Even so, as we advance to talk about scarred hearts (and the memories attached to those scars) and a strain of Evil woven into our reality. There’s demons in this stuff! (And here, we are going to have to find some way to affirm that there’s Evil and “demons” in our stories without getting carried away!) Yes, there’s demons in this stuff and “they” are provoked when we ask people to think about the arrows in our lives… and to ask God to enter our pains and do something about these arrows. Whatever Evil is… whatever Satan is (and here, we’ve got to get beyond the guy with the goatee and horns and cape and pitchfork!)… Whatever these things are, there’s something woven into our stories which desires to hold us back. (Just ask the recovering addict who seeks a new life!)
And so I enter this week very prayerfully—leery of the ways some might be provoked and unsettled but ultimately grateful for the power of our God over the slings and arrows and adversaries!
Along these lines, I leave you with a story that Neil T. Anderson tells in his best seller, The Bondage Breaker. (It’s a book, by the way, that many may find of value in this week of letting go of arrows.)
IN MY EARLY YEARS OF understanding, I was asked by a local Christian counselor if I could provide some spiritual assessment of one of his clients. He had given her several psychological tests but never got to the root of her problem. After four years of counseling with no results, he finally considered the possibility that his client could be in some kind of spiritual bondage. During those early years of counseling, she wrote the following prayer to God, then ten minutes later tried unsuccessfully to kill herself with an overdose of pills:
Dear God,
Where are you? How can you watch and not help me? I hurt so bad, and you don’t even care. If you cared you’d make it stop or let me die. I love you, but you seem so far away. I can’t hear you or feel you or see you, but I’m supposed to believe you’re here. Lord, I feel them and hear them. They are here. I know you’re real, God, but they are more real to me right now. Please make someone believe me, Lord. Why won’t you make it stop? Please, Lord, please! If you love me you’ll let me die.
—A Lost Sheep
The kingdom of darkness was far more real to her than the presence of God…
The woman who called herself “A Lost Sheep’’ finally gained some measure of freedom. She was sitting in church one Sunday four years after she wrote her desperate prayer when she sensed God’s leading to write His response to her. This is what she wrote:
My Dear Lost Sheep,
You ask Me where I am. My child, I am with you and I always will be. You are weak, but in Me you are strong. I love you so much that I can’t let you die. I am so close that I feel everything you feel. I know what you are going through, for I am going through it with you. But I have set you free and you must stand firm. You do not need to die physically for my enemies to be gone, but be crucified with Me and I will live in you, and you shall live with Me. I will direct you in paths of righteousness. My child, I love you and I will never forsake you, for you are truly mine.
—Love, God
(Neil Anderson, The Bondage Breaker, p. 17, 28)
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
"The Life of the Beloved"
As we make our way into this series on "The Sacred Romance," my heart is drawn to the words of a favorite mentor, Henri Nouwen from a sermon he gave in 1991. (Time does not permit to tell you more about Nouwen... and all the ways he's spoken to me through the years. Alas, I see another post [or two... or three... ] coming!)
I would like to speak to you about the spiritual life as the life of the beloved. As a member of a community of people with mental disabilities, I have learned a lot from people with disabilities about what it means to be the beloved. Let me start by telling you that many of the people that I live with hear voices that tell them that they are no good, that they are a problem, that they are a burden, that they are a failure. They hear a voice that keeps saying, "If you want to be loved, you had better prove that you are worth loving. You must show it."But what I would like to say is that the spiritual life is a life in which you gradually learn to listen to a voice that says something else, that says, "You are the beloved and on you my favor rests."
You are the beloved and on you my favor rests.
Jesus heard that voice. He heard that voice when He came out of the
I want you to hear that voice. It is not a very loud voice because it is an intimate voice. It comes from a very deep place. It is soft and gentle. I want you to gradually hear that voice. We both have to hear that voice and to claim for ourselves that that voice speaks the truth, our truth. It tells us who we are. That is where the spiritual life starts -- by claiming the voice that calls us the beloved.
--from the “Life of the Beloved,”
Henri Nouwen, May 17, 1991
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