12/27/2015
#165 THE SAME GOD?
GOAFS II: #165
SAME GOD?
DECEMBER 27, 2015
After the wise men were
gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up! Flee to
Egypt with the child and his mother,” the angel said. “Stay there until I tell
you to return, because Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” That
night Joseph left for Egypt with the child and Mary, his mother, and they
stayed there until Herod’s death. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken
through the prophet: “I called my Son out of Egypt.”
Herod
was furious when he realized that the wise men had outwitted him. He sent
soldiers to kill all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old
and under, based on the wise men’s report of the star’s first appearance. Matthew 2:13-16 NLT
Wherever God is at work, the face of evil is lurking in the
shadows. Satan never sleeps. The following paragraphs are from Christianity
Today articles.
“A recent event at Wheaton College occurred when a tenured
professor decided to wear a hijab over the Christmas holidays. This was
not an issue with the college, but her statements on the theology of God
were.
A tenured
Wheaton College political science professor who pledged to wear a hijab during
Advent in support of her Muslim neighbors has been placed on administrative
leave. Not for donning the Islamic head covering, but over ‘significant
questions regarding the theological implications’ of her explanation of why she
was doing so.” CT
The
college noted, in responding to student and media questioning:
“Faculty
and student expressions of concern about the treatment of Muslims have been
grounded in a desire to live peaceably and respectfully with all people,
including our neighbors of Islamic and other religious faith traditions. While
these commitments are consistent with our Statement of Faith and Community
Covenant, overtures of Christian friendship must be enacted with theological
clarity as well as compassion.” CT
"While
Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental
differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God’s
revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation, and the life
of prayer." CT
If you
are interested in the incident at Wheaton, here is a link to the story:
If you have the time, interest and patience to
understand the differences between the god of Mohammad and the God and Father
of Jesus Christ, here is the content of an earlier article in Christianity
Today:
All of us are much more aware of Islam since September 11. If
we did not know it before, we know now that more than 1 billion people on
Earth, about one of every six people, are Muslims. In the United States alone,
according to Muslim leaders, there are more than 6 million Muslims, a little
less than half the size of our nation's largest Protestant denomination, the
Southern Baptist Convention (at 15 million). Social scientists who count
religious adherents, however, place the number of American Muslims much lower,
somewhere between 1.8 million and 2.8 million. This more realistic figure falls
in the same range as the Assemblies of God or the Lutheran Church-Missouri
Synod. In any case, the faith is growing exponentially in some parts of the
country. Today in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, which some call the
buckle of the Bible belt, there are several mosques and a thriving Muslim
community.
We've also been reminded that
Islam, along with Judaism and Christianity, is one of the three monotheistic
faiths. Some take that fact and assume that all three faiths are just one great
religion, or three equally valid pathways to the same God.
But at this historical moment, when
Islam is in our consciousness as never before, we need to look at that claim
more closely, especially in regard to Islam. One of the better ways to get at
an answer is to focus the question like this: Is the Father of Jesus the God of
Muhammad? And what difference does the answer make?
What We Share
These three great religions share a
number of important traits not shared, for example, by Eastern religions such
as Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Taoism. Even within these agreements,
however, we find significant differences.
First, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are historical
religions. Each claims that God has acted
decisively in human history. When they say this divine action occurred varies
significantly. In Judaism it is the Exodus, God's delivery of his people from
slavery in Egypt ("Let my people go"). For Christianity it is the
Incarnation ("the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us"). For Islam
it is the beginning of the latest and final revelation, as Muslims see it, with
the prophet Muhammad, who was born in 570 in the city of Mecca and died in 632.
Furthermore, Islam adopts essential historical figures from both Judaism and
Christianity. Moses was a prophet of God, Muslims say, who gave the law of God.
Jesus was a friend of God. But when Jesus referred to the Father sending
another Counselor, "who will teach you all things and will remind you of everything
I have said to you" (John 14:26), Muslims believe Jesus was talking not
about the Holy Spirit but about Muhammad.
Second, these three religions are textual (we
might say scriptural). They have holy books. In Judaism it is the
Hebrew Bible, consisting of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. For
Christianity it is the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. For Islam it's
the Qur'an. But the way in which the Qur'an functions in Islam is radically
different from the way the Bible functions in Christianity.
The Qur'an was given, so Muslims
believe, by the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammad over a period of 23
years. It was revealed in Arabic, a direct, divine transcript of a book in
heaven. Thus the Qur'an is a divine book. In fact, in some ways, Muslims view
the Qur'an as Christians see Jesus Christ: the express image of God, the Word
of God. This fact is so important that early Muslims believed, and orthodox
Muslim scholars still believe, that the Qur'an cannot be translated. It has
been translated, of course, but those translations are not considered
authoritative. It must remain in the language of revelation, the language in
which it was given, to remain a true revelation for Muslims.
Certain Christian groups throughout
history have made a similar claim about the Bible. The Greek Orthodox say that
the Septuagint, the Greek version, is the only divinely inspired translation of
the Word of God. For many centuries, Roman Catholics held that only the Bible
in Latin had that kind of authority. That's no longer true for Roman Catholics.
And indeed, some conservative Protestants say only the King James Version has
authority.
But all three of these are
distortions of the Christian understanding of Holy Scripture. Christians
believe that the Bible can be translated into any human language. Why? Because
the gospel itself is culture-permeable. The Bible, as the revealed Word, has
come to us in Greek and Hebrew, the privileged languages of inspiration. But we
can translate and transmit it to all people groups, no matter their language,
because Christianity says that the gospel we proclaim is world-embracing, as
limitless as the gracious love of the Creator.
Finally, these three great religions are all teleological. They have a purpose, a goal. They are headed somewhere. They
do not say that life is cyclical, going over and over the same experiences we
have known. They do not accept reincarnation. History had a beginning, and God
intervened in it in a certain way and guides it toward an appointed climax.
Naturally, each has its own understanding of what that future will look like,
but all agree that a divine future awaits us.
No Easy Ecumenism
In this post-September 11 world,
when we yearn more than ever for the unity of all peoples, we need to think
about what we hold in common. We can cooperate with Muslims and Jews in many
crucial areas, especially regarding issues that touch on the dignity of human
life and the sanctity of the family (British Muslims, for example, were the
first religious people to publicly protest abortion on demand in England). But we must not be lulled into an easygoing
ecumenism that would amalgamate all faiths into a homogenized whole. The two
problems with such amalgamation are these: (1) It is a distortion; we simply do
not share the most essential things. (2) It is a sign of disrespect; it fails
to take seriously what each religion claims to be ultimate truth.
Among the many distinctive truths
Christians proclaim, and one that sets us apart from Islam, is this: God, the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a God who has forever known himself as the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
This is something that all orthodox Christians believe—Greek Orthodox
Christians, Roman Catholic Christians, evangelical Protestant Christians, and
many others. It is at the heart of the distinctive message we proclaim and what
sets us apart most dramatically from Islam.
Sadly, the doctrine of the Trinity
may be the most neglected doctrine we hold. We are baptized in the name of the
Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We often hear that wonderful Pauline
benediction at the end of 2 Corinthians, "May the grace of the Lord Jesus
Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you
all." The Trinity is essential to our statements of faith, our creeds, and
our confessions. Yet we neglect it.
Why? Partly because we cannot understand
it or explain it. Partly because we forget why it's important. It's one of
those things we have to check off on our list of beliefs, but it doesn't deeply
inform our faith. It's not something that we wake up every day and go to our
knees with in prayer. And so we tend to shove it to the side—until we find
ourselves in a discussion with a Muslim who says to us, "Oh, you
Christians claim to believe in one God, but really you believe in three
gods."
In fact, the Qur'an itself declares
in Surah 5:73 (see also 4:171) that Christians believe in three gods, and that
this is blasphemy against Allah. Islam arose in the Christian era, when
theologians and laity still hotly debated the great Trinitarian formulas. Some
Christians were teaching heretical notions of the Trinity in Mecca, where
Muhammad lived. One such heresy claimed something like this: God has a wife
named Mary, with whom he had intercourse, resulting in Jesus.
This is the distortion of the
doctrine of the Trinity that Muhammad heard. He assumed, as do many others who
call Christians "tri-theists," that this is what we believe and
teach. He may have rejected a distortion, but Muslims reject the orthodox
doctrine of the Trinity as well. And with that, they forsake Christians'
conceptual framework for understanding the story of Jesus as the story of God.
What does the Bible teach about this matter that we say is such a dividing
point with Islam?
One God
We begin with the confession that God
is One. This goes back to Deuteronomy 6:4, the famous Shema:
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." It is repeated
throughout the Old Testament. Jesus quotes it in the New Testament as the first
and greatest of all the commandments in Mark 12:29: "You shall love the
Lord your God; the Lord is One. Love the Lord with all your heart and with all
your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." Jesus
believed that. He taught that. It is foundational to the Christian faith.
How did this belief arise within
the faith of Israel? It arose over against polytheism, which was rampant in the
ancient world. It was a world in which nature—animals, trees, rivers—was
regarded as divine or at least inhabited by divinities. Out of this arose the
tradition of idolatry, against which the Old Testament prophets blasted again
and again with furious power. (Muhammad too was moved by a similar concern when
he destroyed the idols of Mecca, and taught his followers, "There is no
God but Allah.")
At the same time, there are already
hints in the Old Testament that God is more complex. Just as we have
foreshadowing of the Messiah, so too in the Old Testament we have foreshadowing
of the Holy Trinity.
It is there at the Creation. In the
beginning, God created by speaking his word. Genesis 1:2 also notes that the ruach,
the Spirit of God, hovered over the face of the waters. When Christians read
that passage in the light of Jesus Christ, they see there a hint of the
Trinity. It is not spelled out in clarity and fullness. It took time in God's
unfolding of revelation to achieve that clarity. Not until Jesus Christ himself
came, in fact, were we able to understand it. But it is foreshadowed there
nonetheless.
Or take another example, from
Proverbs. Again and again, it speaks about God's wisdom. It says that wisdom
created all things (Prov. 3:19), treating wisdom as a personification of God
himself. In the New Testament, we find that Wisdom is one of the proper names
of Jesus Christ. Jesus has been "made unto us wisdom" (1 Cor. 1:30,
KJV).
Then there are all those amazing theophanies
and Christophanies. Jacob wrestled all night with an angel, and he said the
next day as he limped along the river Jabbok, "I have seen the face of
God" (Gen. 32:30, KJV). It was not an incarnation but a revelation of the
true God. Or consider Nebuchadnezzar looking into the fiery furnace. He sees a
fourth man along with the three Hebrew children walking loose in the flames,
one who "looks like a son of the gods" (Dan. 3:25, NIV; the KJV is
more directly Christological, translating it as "as though he were the Son
of God"). These are foreshadowings in the Old Testament, but none of them
compromise the fundamental unity of God.
Christians, like Muslims, affirm
the oneness of God, but they understand that oneness not in mathematical terms
(as a unit) but in interpersonal terms (as a unity of relationship).
Allah Became Flesh?
This distinction leads us to the
most basic and distinctive Christian belief: Jesus is Lord. The Old Testament
confession is "God is one." The New Testament affirmation is
"Jesus is Lord," declaring the deity of Jesus Christ. It's not a
coincidence that two key books of the Bible start by using the same phrase:
Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning
God created. … " God spoke, and worlds that were not came into being.
John 1:1: "In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, the Word was God. He was with God in
the beginning." This beginning antedates the Incarnation. It goes beyond
and before even the Creation. It is a beginning before all other beginnings.
The Greek is simple: en arche, in the primordial first principle of all
things and all times, in the beginning that we can speak of as eternity—in this
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and (literally) "God
was the Word." In Greek that expression is pros ton theon (face to
face with God).
In John 1:18, which closes John's
prologue, we read, "No one has ever seen God, but God, the One and Only,
who is at the Father's side, has made him known" (NIV). That translation
is just too weak. Here the KJV gets closest to the original sense when it says
Jesus was "in the bosom of the Father."
"At the Father's side"?
You can go to a ball game, and somebody sits alongside you. That's a chum,
that's a friend. This is not the phrase used here. The one "who is in the
bosom of the Father"—that connotes an intimacy, a relationship, a unity
that "alongside of" comes nowhere close to. This God, the One who was
with God, face to face with God, in the bosom of the Father from all
eternity—this One has made him known to us.
In verse 14 is the linchpin of this
whole passage. This one verse, more than any other, summarizes the Christian
faith. The Word that was in the beginning with God, that was face to face with
God, that was in the bosom of the Father, this "Word was made flesh and
dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of
the Father), full of grace and full of truth" (KJV).
This is what Christianity teaches:
God Almighty, the one and only Allah (Allah is simply the Arabic word
for "God"), took upon himself humanity. But not just humanity. Some
translations read, "And the Word became a human being." That's too
weak. It's not deep or strong enough. No, the Word became flesh.
Flesh is different from human being. Flesh is that part of
our human reality that is most vulnerable, that gets sick. It gets tired. It
experiences decay and death. But this is the stupendous claim the Bible makes,
and if you don't feel the absolute horrible force of this statement, you'll
never understand why orthodox Islam finds Christianity so abhorrent: Allah
became flesh. This is a blasphemous thought to orthodox Muslims. But it's a
remarkable claim that Christianity makes.
How does this relate to the
Trinity? People ask why God made the world. Some believe he was lonely and
decided that he needed something to love, so he created the world. Some people
preach that, and it's well meant, but it is heretical.
God was never lonely. The doctrine
of the Trinity says that within the being of God from all eternity there has always
existed this bond of relationship—Father and Son and Holy Spirit, the bond of
love and unity—so God never was lonely. There has always been in the being of
God a reciprocity, a mutuality, and a dynamism of relationship, of community,
of love.
Several radical implications
proceed from this. One of them—a rather humbling one—is that we are not
necessary. We are utterly unessential. God could get along quite well without
us. It doesn't boost our self-esteem to say that, but it's true. If God had
never created the world, or indeed, if God had never redeemed the world, God
would not be any less God. He does not need us to fulfill some inner inadequacy
in his own being.
Paradoxically, this truth makes the
Good News good. God has chosen to love us, out of his own free will. He
decided deliberately not to remain a divine cocoon within himself. Instead, he
chose to make a world apart from himself, to become a part of it and take upon
himself the burden of loving it back to himself—because he wanted to, not because
he lacked something in himself.
This is the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the Good
News that we have to proclaim: the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is
not a unit. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not a monad, a sterile
one-thing that exists apart from a relationship, but has a dynamic relationship
of love and reciprocity within his own being—and that as a relational being he
has reached out to us in love.
Many are familiar with George
Eliot's character, Silas Marner. Everybody thought he was poor, but he was
rich. He was a miser. He kept gold coins in a chest under his bed. And every
night, before he went to sleep, he'd take out his gold coins, count them,
stroke them, and admire them. Then he'd put them back under his bed. He never
spent one. Some people think of God that way: He hoards all his power, all his
might. He's a miser god—a Silas Marner god. This is not the God of the Bible.
The God of the Bible is a God of utter graciousness and love, who chooses to come
into our world and to experience what we have experienced—our alienation and
estrangement—and do everything necessary to redeem and love that world back to
himself.
Personal Spirit
Some people think that in the Old
Testament we have God the Father, in the New Testament God puts on the mask of
the Son, and now, in the age of the church, we have the Holy Spirit. The
technical name for that heresy is modalism, and it's widespread among
Christian believers. No, the Trinity is not three different masks that God
wears at different times in salvation history. From all eternity, before there
was a world, before there was anything else, God, the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, was—is—in a bond of love and unity and reciprocity and community that
exceeds our ability to comprehend and describe.
These first two Christian
affirmations—God is one, and Jesus is Lord—have been denied and doubted and
fought over by Christian theologians. In the second century, a heretic named
Marcion was excommunicated from the church. Marcion said, in effect, I like
the God of Jesus. He's a God of love; he's a God of mercy, a God of tenderness.
But I don't like the God of the Old Testament. He's a mean God. He's a mad God.
He's a God of war and violence. So Marcion cut the Old Testament out of the
Bible. But the church said, No, we're not going down that road. It was
perhaps the single most important decision made in the history of Christian
doctrine—to say that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God of
Israel, the God of the Old Testament, to affirm that there is a fundamental
connection between creation and redemption.
The divine lordship and the deity
of Jesus Christ were denied in the fourth century by a man named Arius. He was
sincere. He was well read. He did not deny that the Bible was true. But he
said, Jesus Christ is a creature. He's higher than any other creature. But
he is not God. Arius denied that Jesus was the same essence, the same
fundamental reality, as God. At the Council of Nicea, the church had to say, No,
we can't go that way either. The one we adore and worship and love in Jesus
our Redeemer is of the same essence as the Father. We're not talking about two
different gods. We're talking about the one God, but the one God who has
forever known himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This says to us that the
fundamental reality of God is relationship—it's community. If we can ever grasp
that, we'll understand what our fundamental differences are with Islam.
The third central Christian
affirmation is that the Holy Spirit is personal. This affirmation also has had
a divisive history. About 70 years after the Council of Nicea, some people said
they would go along with God the Father and God the Son, but they could not
affirm that the Holy Spirit is God—that was just too much for them. They
claimed that the Holy Spirit is a force, an energy, a power, but not God. Over
against these people, who were known as the Spirit-fighters (because they
fought against the deity of the Holy Spirit), the church declared that God is
one in essence, and three in person—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit
as a person. He baptizes (1 Cor. 12); he can be grieved (Eph. 4); he groans
(Rom. 8). These are things a person does, and the Holy Spirit is a person and
in relation to the Father and Son—yet one God, forever and ever.
Space constraints preclude saying
much more about the place of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. The larger point
here is simply this: God does not exist alone—"the alone with the
alone" as Arius referred to his god—but rather exists in community, in
love, in reciprocity and mutuality. It is this God who has, of his own free
will, opened his heart to this world he has made, and who invites us to know
him, to love him, and to respond to him. He is a relational God.
Affirming The Mystery
Ultimately, we have to admit that
the Trinity is a mystery. Even in eternity, we will never comprehend it. But we
are called to affirm it and believe it. And we are called to hold it
without compromise in a world of religious pluralism.
Let's go back to our question: Is
the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? The answer is surely Yes and No. Yes,
in the sense that the Father of Jesus is the only God there is. He is the
Creator and Sovereign Lord of Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, of every person who
has ever lived. He is the one before whom all shall one day bow (Phil. 2:5-11).
Christians and Muslims can together affirm many important truths about this
great God—his oneness, eternity, power, majesty. As the Qur'an puts it, he is
"the Living, the Everlasting, the All-High, the All-Glorious"
(2:256).
But the answer is also No, for Muslim theology rejects the
divinity of Christ and the personhood of the Holy Spirit—both essential
components of the Christian understanding of God. No devout Muslim can call the
God of Muhammad "Father," for this, to their mind, would compromise
divine transcendence. But no faithful Christian can refuse to confess, with joy
and confidence, "I believe in God the Father. … Almighty!" Apart from
the Incarnation and the Trinity, it is possible to know that God is, but
not who God is.
Long ago, Gregory of Nyssa put it
this way: "It is not the vastness of the heavens and the bright shining of
the constellations, the order of the universe, and the unbroken administration
over all existence, that so manifestly displays the transcendent power of God
as his condescension to the weakness of our human nature, in the way sublimity
is seen in lowliness."
This does not mean that we should
condemn every Muslim believer as an idolater (see "Does God Hear Muslims' Prayers?"). And we are wise to remember that sometimes the best
way to address these issues is to move from theological abstraction to story.
I've found one story from Richard Selzer's Mortal Lessons, as good as
any:
I stand by the bed where a young
woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A
tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of the mouth, has been
severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious
fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the
tumor in her cheek, I had to cut that little nerve.
Her young husband is in the room.
He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in
the evening lamplight, isolated from me. Who are they, I ask myself, he and
this wry-mouth that I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so
generously, greedily? The young woman speaks.
"Will my mouth always be like
this?" she asks. "Yes," I say, "it will. It is because the
nerve was cut."
She nods, and is silent. But the
young man smiles. "I like it," he says. "It is kind of
cute."
All at once, I know who he is. I
understand, and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god.
Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I [am] so close I can see
how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss
still works.
Isn't that what the Christian God
is about? God was in Christ, reaching out to us in love, accommodating himself
to our condition, to save us.
This is what we are about as
ambassadors of Christ and his gospel: to go into the world, into the prisons,
into the barrios and the ghettos and wherever it is that human beings exist in
alienation and separation from God, and to tell them that the relational God is
reaching out to us, and that the kiss still works.
Timothy George is a CT executive editor and dean of Beeson Divinity School at
Samford University. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book Is
the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? (Zondervan, Spring 2002).
Note: The census statistics in the article are circa 2000.
The 2013 world population of Muslims is estimated to be slightly over 2
billion. Emphesis in bold added--JS
Jerry Sweers
GROWING OLD
AIN’T FOR SISSIES
Sailing directions for Pilgrims of the Heart.
Remembrances, reflections and rants
of an endangered species;
Curmudgensis Americanus
Bibliophilius
site: crmudgeon.blogspot.com
12/20/2015
GOAFS II #165 HUBRIS:SUPERSIZED
|
O
|
n Sunday, December 15, Almost 200 0f The Masters of the
Universe, led by America’s self-proclaimed Young Messiah of Hope and Change, announced grandly from Paris that they
are officially taking creation’s thermostat out of the hands of its Creator and,
with the various High Priests and gods of science, aided by the Anointed
Sorcerers and Wizards of the gods of Political Correctness, will henceforth
keep the globe from getting overheated and out of control.
For historical background and perspective on what The One Triune
God, Maker and Sustainer of All That Is, All That Ever Was and All That Ever Will
Be, thinks about this kind of
presumption please refer to The Book
of Genesis, Chapter 11, verses 1-9:
At one time, the whole Earth spoke the same language. It so
happened that as they moved out of the east, they came upon a plain in the land
of Shinar and settled down.
They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks and fire
them well.” They used brick for stone and tar for mortar.
Then they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a
tower that reaches Heaven. Let’s make ourselves famous so we won’t be scattered
here and there across the Earth.”
God came down to look
over the city and the tower those people had built.
God took one look and said, “One people, one language; why,
this is only a first step. No telling what they’ll come up with next—they’ll
stop at nothing! Come, we’ll go down and garble their speech so they won’t
understand each other.” Then God scattered them from there all over the world.
And they had to quit building the city. That’s how it came to be called Babel,
because there God turned their language into “babble.” From there God scattered
them all over the world.
THE
MESSAGE, Eugene H. Peterson
Jerry Sweers
GROWING OLD
AIN’T FOR SISSIES
Sailing directions for Pilgrims of the Heart.
Remembrances, reflections and rants
of an endangered species;
Curmudgensis Americanus
Bibliophilius
site: crmudgeon.blogspot.com
12/12/2015
AMONG THE HALLOWS
GOAFS II: #164
AMONG THE
HALLOWS
DECEMBER 13,
2015
Clematis Seeds
AMONG THE
HALLOWS
Ordinariness, in a word, opens out into mystery, and the
thing that men are supposed to do with mystery is to hallow it, for it all
belongs to the Holy One. Tom Howard
Beyond the veil of ordinary
things,
The door, the room, the meal,
the work, the play,
There press in on every side…
Mighty Mysteries, Ineffable
Immensities,
Heavenly Places, Spiritual
Forces,
Rulers, Powers, Princes,
Glorious Habitations
Incandescent Vistas,
Consuming Fires, Unbearable Splendors,
Seraphim, Cherubim,
Archangels, Angels,
Eternity Incomprehensible,
Unapproachable Light,
Shekinah,
Glory, Glory, Glory!
The sounds of…
Celestial Dancing
Myriad Hallelujahs
Trumpets
Flutes
Timbrels
Lyres
Harps
Bagpipes
Tambourines
Cymbals
Silent Thunder,
Echoes of…
Camelot…
Narnia…
Perelandra…
The New Heaven…
The New Earth…
We walk among the hallows
In the presence of the unseen
That would ravish and terrify
us
Were
the veil stripped away.
We are the poorer for our
eyes
That often seeing, do not
see,
Our ears that often hearing,
do not hear,
Our hearts that all too often
stop
On the surface of
The ordinary things.
12/02 js cc
Clematis blossoms
Jerry Sweers
GROWING OLD
AIN’T FOR SISSIES
Sailing directions for Pilgrims of the Heart.
Remembrances, reflections and rants
of an endangered species;
Curmudgensis Americanus
Bibliophilius
site: crmudgeon.blogspot.com
