Rebel by nature, Righteous by force

Beyond the Static

2012-01-04T06:59:00.000-08:00

"Memories...You're talking about memories".
Deckard - Blade Runner.

For most of us, Christianity was 'learned' as a religion of 'the book' - the things we do, say, and know were often determined by referring to scripture in a 'manufacturers handbook' fashion, but there's a problem with that. Most of us may have guides for all kinds of things in our homes, but real life often has a way of surprising us or circumventing 'the norm' to leave us somewhere totally unexpected (and believe me, I'm writing this on a day when I know this to be so very true).

The people that left Egypt and also those who met in the Upper Room (before and after the resurrection) were not able, in the manner we do, to 'go by the book' - they didn't really have one! What was imperative to their faith was the God who was nurturing them in the womb of fellowship which of necessity would be defined by a living faith in the richness of His care - scripture has always been meant to be an aid to that core reality. As they celebrated passover and then later, the Lord's Supper, it was God 'inhabiting' their communion because of His love that was the vital, reconciling event, and this also marks us, defines us, because it is His love, made evident amongst us, that makes us His - that is the true purpose behind creation and redemption.

It is all too easy to revert to 'procedural' mode when it comes to living the Christian life - prayer, study, church attendance, belief and practice - but God is calling us to something much more profound and, therefore, dangerous. The world we inhabit leaves us with numerous questions, but the reason this world has value is because the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being is also the 'lamb, slain before the foundation of the world' - it is that wonder, that astonishing truth, which lies behind all of our trials, joys and reflections, and truly defines what is of value, especially in our growth and inter-action with life and each other.

What truly matters, amidst all that goes on here, is that we truly see His work - His reconciling of the world to Himself through Jesus Christ. It is that 'holding' of all things, in heaven and on earth, in Christ's own person, that takes our thoughts here into a realm of true value and eternal weight.

Missing the mark

2011-12-17T00:11:00.000-08:00

"The Gospel never tells us something to do - it tells us of something that has been done".
Michael Horton.

In a week when our prime minister has stated we live in a 'Christian' country that must affirm 'Christian' morality and 'Christian' tolerance (what?), here's a refreshing reminder, as we approach Christmas, of what Christianity really is and really is all about...

The Psalm 2 Scenario

2011-11-21T08:40:00.000-08:00

"The rulers take counsel together against the Lord, saying 'let us break His bonds, and throw off His cords from us". Psalm 2:2.

I sometimes wonder why, especially in times of crisis, some passages of scripture go almost entirely overlooked. This is particularly true of the second Psalm. It's a passage which makes me realise the significance of Jesus informing His disciples of days when 'the children of this world will be shrewder with their generation than the sons of light' (Luke 16:8). Why? Because when we live in a day when some clearly see the application of David's understanding in our age, and many of its ramifications - would that more who have the scriptures do, not in some contrived, futurist millennial fashion, but in the concrete world of our times and our generation.

The passage in the second verse couldn't be plainer. "Rulers" in the world will seek to revolt against God in the manner that they rule - in the very culture they seek to permeate within our society. Like a cult which seeks to imprison the very thoughts and actions of its members, such an elite seeks to bend the will of the world to the goal of self-determinism.

We might suggest there have always been 'some' who have given credence to such ends, but the 'real world' is too big, too diverse to be so driven isn't it?
Think for a moment about what Paul teaches us in Romans 1-3 (especially 1:18-25). The reality is that we all share a propensity to that very dark goal, and, apart from God's grace, will all lean towards that miserable end and it's dire consequences. That is the sad tale told so many times in Biblical and more recent history, and it is most certainly the story of our own age.

The 'rulers' of our day are not simply Kings or Dictators bent upon megalomania, though we have our fair share of those - our rulers are the technocrats...the often faceless or obscured who play with the world's power for their own selfish ends, to the agony and suffering of millions of others. The reality of our times is that such conclaves have become masters of our broken realms, puppet masters of the nightmares of our reality.

There is, in all of these troubles, a place of surety and resolve. The Lord whom they scorn still reigns above them, His Son being the one they must surely encounter. He laughs at their frantic programmes to breathe without the air, to live without the one who grants their very breath, and He calls for sober reflection....
Come, recognize His true nature, His true gifting of creation, that genuine freedom can begin. That is where true shrewdness, true wisdom, will always lead.

It all amouts to this...

2011-10-02T03:41:00.000-07:00

"For as, by a man, came death, by another man has come resurrection from death. As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive" 1 Corinthians 15:21, 22.

I was recently on a beach in Cornwall, where I couldn't help but notice the multiple layers of strata in the cliffs, many of which were bent and twisted by, clearly, mammoth forces. It 'speaks' of a time of momentous change in our past, which is commonly defined today as part of the 'natural' ages of convulsion which have shaped and made our world since the beginning. The problem, of course, is if this is the whole picture, as naturalism claims, then Christianity really doesn't have anything to say. If such forces (entropy and decay especially) are what truly, comprehensively, define the nature of reality, then speaking about an answer to death - in fact, speaking about life of any kind having a real value - is truly a non-starter. Life becomes truly meaningless in the face of such comprehensive forces, so why should we even contemplate something other than something which is so overwhelming?
The answer is actually equally all around us - it's just takes a little more thought to unpack. Numerous thinkers have noted that there's enough going on in just the material universe to tell us that as devastating as these forces are, they do not amount to the sum total of reality... something more is really going on.

In the passage referred to above, Paul is arguing for something far more extraordinary than the popular approaches to our current estate. Death, he argues, is not a natural condition - it is a 'futility' that we experience because humanity has broken it's true connection with God. There was a time, right at the start of our history, when there was more than pain and suffering, cruelty and death, and because of what one person in the midst of our history, Jesus Christ, has done, there is another real moment approaching when all that we now deem 'natural' or 'normal' under the realm of death and decay will end.

These are truly staggering claims, and they revolutionise the very nature of our existence. The ramifications of what the Apostle and others seek to declare about three particular moments in time and space are profound. All that we think we know, we presently encounter and understand is but a prelude, an overture, to a far more substantial physical reality. The aim of life now, then, is to see the mystery, to ponder the miracle of what is coming about, and to love the one who is here to rescue us from the darkness and, once again, make us free to live.

Unwrapping the mystery

2011-09-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

"Great is the mystery"
1 Timothy 3:16

At its heart, Christianity is all about matters, which, even when they are plain before our eyes, remain so profound, they actually remain, at least to us, unexplained. Such realities seek to tell us that however hard we look, there are secrets at the heart of existence which we barely comprehend - marvels that are meant to lead us to a place of awe. As creatures intended to truly acknowledge and revel in such splendour, once perceived, we can then use our gifts and lives to magnify the profound nature of such truths.

The Apostle Paul certainly knew the height and depth of this in his own life. In his writings, he speaks of several of the deepest mysteries which surround and encompass all things. To mention a few -

The mystery of God's work of Redemption (Romans)
The mystery of Life (Resurrection) after death (Corinthians)
The mystery of God's goodness triumphing in a realm scarred by evil (Ephesians)
The mystery of Christ's incarnation (1 Timothy)

Underpinning all of these, is the mystery of the nature of God Himself (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and the manner this is expressed to creation in love, especially in Jesus Christ.
When we begin to reflect on the nature of such mystery in the manner Paul encourages us to do, we quickly move from our lack of comprehension to a position of sheer wonder, which no doubt will become the essential character of all actions and culture in the renewed creation.

To some people, talking about 'mystery' as an ultimate reality seems nonsensical... Life is all about 'sensible' things that we can define and measure and predict, but is it? How much of what you and I will do today which we consider 'natural' is actually predictable - do you really know what will occur in the next few minutes? - and how much larger does that ignorance become when we seek to open the essential nature of reality itself and peek inside? Looking hard at such things can be very sobering indeed!

What Christianity teaches is that through the days of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and on to the nativity itself, God has been at work amongst the nations of humanity to express and convey the profound 'weight' of the mystery we are engaged with, and when we stand in silence and contemplate it's greatness, we can no longer escape its pull or the richness of its embrace. Like one consumed, body and soul, in the passion of a lover, the tide of this everlasting ocean will have us, ravish us, in life, death, and resurrection. It is a truth, a love, that envelopes everyone and everything, which never ceases to call, to desire, to overwhelm, so may our twisted, broken lives not fear or hate such a calling, but become consumed by the deepest beauty.

God points us to the 'fixed point' of Jesus Christ to evidence the revelation of the wonder at the heart of all things. If we truly comprehend the mystery that He unlocks, all of life will be rich indeed.

The Overwhelming

2011-08-07T05:08:00.000-07:00

"It's not on it's way.... it's already here".
Twister

London last night.

Back on October 15th, 1987, around 10.30 at night, the United Kingdom was struck by the most powerful storm the country had witnessed in over three hundred years. With winds averaging 110 mph, a force four times greater than that of a hurricane, the country found itself ravaged and its landscape totally changed, a billion pounds worth of damage in just a few hours.
The extraordinary thing about this entire event is no one saw it coming - the weathermen were clueless - the event only became real as it rushed upon the country - total, uncontrollable power.

I recall the next morning. We had escaped lightly at home with a few broken windows and lost roof tiles, but there was carnage everywhere, and when I visited the local woods the next day, I could not believe my eyes. Entire areas of ancient woodland had been uprooted from its place within the earth and thrown around like kindling. The air was heavy with the smell of sap from hundreds of acres of broken trees. I recently visited those same woods again - the old pleasant open broad leaf glades are gone, never to be replaced. Fifteen million trees were lost across Southern England that night (90% of forests), and London was shrouded in black as major power facilities were wrenched from the national grid, and every major road was blocked.

The storm, I felt, was a warning, an omen of change.
I recall a vivid nightmare I had in the weeks following that event - standing on a beach before a rising wave, hundreds of feet high, rushing forward.

London was ablaze last night, not because of a natural occurrence, but due to rioting, violence and looting on her streets. Politicians speak, like the weathermen of 87, as if it was unexpected, but the storm is truly upon us. The economies of the Western world are in disarray, and the consequences are evident - for the very first time in my life, I see a wave of uncontrollable power rising, and our leaders have no possible means to avoid or control the changes which are coming. Like that night of the great storm, we are close to truly being overwhelmed.

It is at moments like this that my thoughts turn to Psalm 46, rightly known as the song of the Reformation. There is indeed only one help in such times of need, only one who, whether in life or in death, can truly be our refuge and our strength.
I listen to the radio now and hear the storm rising. Only He is able, once more, to say "Peace, be still". Let us hope that such a moment comes soon.

Outside of us...

2011-07-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

"Consider the lilies of the field - they neither toil or spin, yet Solomon, in all of his glory, was not arrayed as these". Jesus.

I am not, in any way, shape, or form, a gardener, and yet, once every year, I get a very special pleasure from my property....
Along the front of my house are arranged five large pots, each one housing an azalea plant. I do very little for these residents - I've re-potted them once in the six years I've been here, and occasionally watered them if it's been especially dry - that's it, and yet, every Spring, these amazing plants burst into a splendid display of colour which equals anything coaxed and nurtured by many a patient gardener on my estate. For around the next six weeks, the locals can often be heard making comments on the beauty of the display, and then, for the next twelve months, the Azalea rests, looking a very plain and ordinary plant, and the front of my home goes back to being pretty much ignored.

I recently realised there's a real lesson here. God is a far better gardener - a furnisher of life - than I could ever be, and when He adorns something, it is truly beautiful. Now I'm not for one minute wanting to in any way put down those who truly enjoy gardening as a way of discovering that truth, any more than I would negate the joy for an artist who encounters true moments of inspiration, but creation is truly His work, not just when it comes to my pot plants, but even more when it comes to our redemption.

Much of the time, it probably appears to ourselves and others that not a great deal is going on - we go through our daily routines, seeking to move forward in the faith, but not really aware of much happening, because like with so many things, the real work goes on at a deep level, behind closed doors as it were, until the right time comes for something to be made evident. What really matters here is confidence in the work not of our hands, but of God's.

Jesus knew just how easy it was for us to concern ourselves with all manner of issues that can bury us beneath our anxiety. Imagine what results a gardener would achieve if he spent most of his time pulling plants out of the soil to check if there'd been any change! Worry, not only about earthly things, but often about spiritual matters as well, can amount to our doing something equally as foolish, because there is only one place of true comfort and surety, and that is within the grip of His amazing grace. Here, He grants us a rest, for the burden of being His is far easier than the strife and turmoil which any other "process' proscribes.

Take a look at the beauty that surrounds us, and consider these things...

Light in the Shadowlands...

2011-06-04T05:33:00.000-07:00

"It is perfectly easy to go on through all of your life giving 'explanations' to everything - religion, love, ethics, friendship - without ever having truly been inside any of them. You continue to define something without knowing what it actually is. That is why so much contemporary 'thought' amounts to nothing... you are busily constructing your conclusions in a place without any light".

C S Lewis.

Yesterday was the first true day of summer here - one of those long, bright, warm days, which I sadly had to spend in an office. The forecast was for more to come, so just after 5am this morning, I grabbed my camera to set off into the countryside of the nearby river valley.

After a brisk morning walk, I found I had arrived too early. The sun had yet to rise high enough to paint the area, so rather than being surrounded by the mornings radiance, I walked to my initial destination in conditions that felt somewhat sullen, like an overcast day. It made me keenly aware of what I had come to encounter, and just how impoverished the morning appeared without that morning light.

The return walk could not have been more different. The sun had risen through the trees, and the river and woodland were aglow with the splendor of warm, adorning gold, making everywhere become marked with the glory of a fresh morning. I quickly found myself revelling in the beauty, ambling along to soak in as much as I could with my eyes of this truly enriching moment that speaks so deeply of the goodness of what has been made.

How much of life is defined for us by those two conditions?
We can live in a world in which there is indeed much beauty and grace, but we really do not see it because the light is not defining, not penetrating our vision - the deep, darkest recesses of our minds and hearts. When that manner of light truly fills us, then nothing remains the same - our entire view and vision is totally transformed.

Jesus spoke of Himself as the light of the world, for when we truly comprehend who He is, then the 'darkness' of all smaller definitions of what is actually taking place cannot but vanish in such brightness. The problem is that religion (via, legalism, dualism and other follies) and the 'normal' (fallen) darkness of the human mind so often seeks to put a screen in the way so we cannot encounter the true brilliance of that light - the wonder and marvel of God's grace, astonishingly and totally giving love - in our world, but continue to live, like some stunted caricature of a person, in the darker realms, denying, we think, that such a full and beautiful thing could be there. Thankfully, all too often, the light finds a way through the cracks, and once a glint of the true is glanced, it becomes hard in the extreme (unless we want nothing else) to scurry back into the dark.

The beauty of the morning was a wonder to behold today, and certainly made rising so early totally worthwhile. The invitation to each of us is to step forward and truly encounter the light of God's work in Jesus Christ. If we can do that, then no morning, no day, no experience, no moment, can ever be the same, because the light found there will always vanquish the dark, and that, we know, is what really counts.

You can run, but....

2011-05-11T12:44:00.000-07:00

The t-shirt really said it all...
"live now, pay later".
I guess that's the trade-off some think makes sense, but it's never really that easy. Most of us find (and usually a lot sooner than we expect) that the 'live' part of that equation quickly becomes 'complicated' by all kinds of more immediate effects. It's often now the young rather than the old who are finding their bodies are shutting down because of the sheer amount of 'living' (abuse) they are indulging, and that tells you something major about the bitter sting at the core of what is seen as living without limits.
The reality is that 'going for it' is just a way to try and drown out the cry from within - the need for something truly satisfying. We can look at ourselves, at others, at the world around us, and all of it resonates - booms - at us that there's something truly amazing going on here. The fibres of our flesh, our breath, our soul, tell us we were made for more than just existing in the malady of brief moments of touching true beauty, surrounded by the squalor of pain and dislocation. Why are we this way - why are you and I such a paradox?

The 'pay later' statement gives us a cue to the answer. Death overshadows our current existence because this life is scarred by our divorce from eternity. We are a fallen race, a species broken and ruined by our rebellion and corruption - hence we wallow in the transient. The great need we all have is for rescue, for liberation from the perilous trading of instant gratification before eternal death.

There is a call to each of us to truly be made free - to know the chains of our current futility broken forever, but only if we truly know we're dead men walking - that the answer lies outside of ourselves.

God sent Jesus Christ into the world not to condemn us for our rejection of Him, but to save us from the eternal darkness of cutting ourselves off from His care. He came to truly give us life that will rescue us from the horror of our empty 'living'.

There is much, much more than the broken folly of our ways without God.

It's time to stop the so-called 'living', the mindless running, and come home.

A Second Look

2011-04-25T04:00:00.000-07:00

"Here, the person looks at themselves differently...as belonging to part of a history, which, whilst narrowly defined by call, covenant and promise, spills out into the wider horizon of the world's marvelous creation and redemption. The 'true' person is always defined in relation to this all-encompassing whole".
Jurgen Moltmann.

It's one of the most satisfying moments for an artist,
when, in my case, a subject looks at an image you have taken of them, and they are genuinely changed in that moment by what they see. They look at themselves differently and, hopefully, they actually 'grow', gaining confidence or confirmation about some choice or quality of themselves (perhaps just the choice to get some photos taken) as a result. It can be a truly special moment to share - I've seen it totally impact upon how some people then chose to engage with and use their creativity and how they have gained so much by so doing.

It is often those 'narrow' moments of such definition that lead us into far larger places of totally fresh engagement. This is splendidly expressed in the recent film, The Warrior's Way, where a small, almost insignificant 'encounter' with a cherry blossom petal totally changes the central character's view of his purpose, and sets him on a course where he will truly learn about love and life in an entirely fresh way.

So often, it seems, that the real issue is our actually encountering such moments, especially when it comes to the more spiritual aspects of our existence.

Jesus spoke of how our inclination is to so often go with the flow, to allow life to almost wash over us as we revel in the apparent freedom of 'broad' living -
broad experience, broad opinion, broad satisfaction, but there's a price-tag attached we can all broadly choose to ignore - the destruction of ourselves.
I've come across cases where photography has been used to make people face up to a often harsh and sometimes brutal reality about themselves, because only when such bruising has transpired can true healing begin.

There is, sadly, an ugliness within us that has to be faced, from which we all have to be rescued, but it's by passing through the narrow place, that moment of our ending, as it were, that we come into the realm of truly living, of losing what we could not hope to hold (or actually profit from) so we gain what we can never loose - life by knowing the maker and sustainer of all that is good and will be renewed in the day of His true revealing.

Like someone seeing themselves afresh for the first time, there is a much deeper, richer life for each of us, bought and paid for in the love of God, revealed in Jesus Christ. It begins with soberly facing some realities. It ends with those realities being made anew - forever.

Time to really see what is there.

"jedism"

2011-03-26T03:10:00.000-07:00

"I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer".
Sam - The Two Towers.

I have a good friend who is, to put it mildly, an avid Star Wars fan. He even goes 'trooping' (full Storm-trooper gear) with like-minded folks to raise money for good causes, but none of that bothers me - it's all good fun, and it's all just part of his wider passion for good Science Fiction and meaningful stories in general.

I've watched (the original) Star Wars trilogy of movies several times, and I clearly recall the impact of the opening of 'A New Hope' when I saw this for the first time on the big screen in London in 1977. George Lucas clearly set out to make a mark (as well as a small fortune in franchising), and much of this is due to the employment of 'monomyth' with the classic hero/quest tales of the family of characters employed in the unfolding of the Skywalker story. Many engaging fictional adventures source from that particular stream, and certainly, there are things we can all both enjoy and reflect upon about the nature of existence by viewing such material.
My particular favorite movie was 'The Empire Strikes Back', which provides some truly chilling moments regarding the nature of evil and it's impact upon us.
All of this then, is reasonable, so long as we place such material within the realm of story-telling with the purpose of entertainment that certainly makes us think.

Back in 2001, just over 390,000 people in the UK stated 'Jedi' as their religious view on their census form. There is currently a campaign asking these people to state they have 'no religion' this time around to bolster the secular return for 2011, but something new has come to the fore - an actual religion of Jedism.
I guess I should have not been surprised to find that there is now a 'church', a 'temple', a religious society and a general organization for this idea. It is also not surprising to discover what lies at the heart of this phenomenon - a belief in the 'force' - an intelligent (?) form of energy responsible for life and the universe, which pervades all things and enlightens us to be good, kind, respectful, etc - pretty much the way you'd find in several Eastern and some Gnostic belief systems. Things, then, are just 'there', including evil, so we just have to do our best with it all and hopefully improve ourselves and life in general along the way.

Why?
If there is actually no better ultimate reality than Thermodynamics reducing the universe to a constant state of entropy and decay, why would what you, me, and humanity in its entirety matter a hill of beans before the great forces of futility and decay? Why, in fact, bother "believing" in anything - why not follow the philosophy of someone like Alister Crowley, who taught 'whatever you think to be good, you should do...that is the whole law"?

The frustration, collapse, pain, coldness of life and the universe we inhabit is all to real to adopt a 'just so' philosophy to it all. Like the force in Star Wars, it's something which not only surrounds and penetrates us, but so often originates from within us, however caring and noble our best intentions may be. Evil is real, and Christianity teaches that there are clear, historical reasons why such malignancy has corrupted the created order and benighted our brief time here before we succumb to the consequences of such darkness and die.

We have not actually been left in a world deafened and blinded to our true origins and purpose.
The Apostle Paul tells us that when we begin to see 'with better eyes', that creation argues with us regarding the presence and reality of our Creator, but we willfully bury that sermon and prefer to listen to beliefs of our own devising which allow us to furnish our own poverty in our self-assertion. What is even more shocking is that the God who is there has not merely spoken 'from a distance' regarding the truth of our origins and our rebellion, but has actually come amongst us and spoken to the world face to face in the person of Jesus Christ, and yet, like so many of the philosophers Paul addressed in Athens, we still hobble back to our philosophical hovels, to content ourselves with myths rather than substance of what really matters.

Yes, we can enjoy all the fun of good movies, social activities that express our delight in such fun, and both think and converse deeply about the ramifications that moments from such entertainments place before us, but faith must spring from the deepest source of all, and that - in its most healthy and genuine form - does not reside in some abstract force or our crippled souls, but in the one who truly loves us enough to come and deliver us in our time of greatest need. Not only is that the greatest story ever told, it's the most important, because it is true.

In the thick of it...

2011-03-13T03:47:00.000-07:00

"There's a rugged road, on the prairie, stretching all across the last frontier...

Lyrics by Judee Sill.

"I was born in pain, squeezed out through torn and bloody tissue, and I offered up, as my first evidence of life, a wail. I will likely die in pain as well. Between those two moments, I live out my days limping from the one to the other".

Philip Yancey - Soul Survivor.

"I cried when I was born, and everyday shows why".

George Herbert.

I was talking to a friend recently, and we were pondering the marvel of being here - the wonder of all the profound and exquisite things we can experience and encounter, especially love, and how that furnishes not only our passion for life, but our entirely reasonable attitude of wanting to avoid or escape death. We have such capacity, such a potential to engage with and relish genuine grace, and yet, most of us spend much of our days confronting misery and anguish, either due to physical or inner ailments, and even if resources allow us to evade much of that suffering, there will be a time when that is no longer so.

I once began writing a Science Fiction work where the main causes of physical death (disease, hunger and degenerate aging) had been eliminated, so our external environs had radically changed, but we were, inherently, still as we are now, in terms of our character, skills, passions and desires. The question I was wanting to examine was would life really be any different if we were essentially the same, just potentially immortal? The answer, I concluded, was no - the real pain of our current humanity is not just that we all die and suffer, it is that our present humanity (our actual nature) is a great deal less than it should be.

In the conversation I referred to, my friend was very ready to declare that there was no God - there was no 'back story' behind what we experience as the here and now, but as we talked, I asked what, then, was the true purpose of all the pain, the bleak hardships, the splendor of the genuine affection and care often shown amidst these, if it's all just a mistake - a total accident? If that is so, why do we go on as a race just "living"- there is actually nothing beyond total futility. It is that consideration (and the fact, I would argue, that reality itself questions such a conclusion), when soberly faced, which makes us consider deeply the nature of what it's really all about, especially when life can still can so express the marvel of love, even amidst the pain.

When Jesus spoke to His friends of heaven, of the life that is coming, He didn't convey some conceptual floor plan of the great beyond - He spoke of eternity opening by our encountering the "heaven-ness" of life now engaged with and lived through Him... that is the essential essence of our true and eternal humanity. When direction and the true nature of meaning, of significance, is found in the person and work of Him, then all things become re-defined. That doesn't mean we exit from the present - though we'd often like to, want to, be very far from what we currently experience. It does mean that the pain, the loss, the hardship, the uncertainty, can all become bearable, not in our meager and desperate selves, but in the fact that behind the storm, there is not just a void, a blank, a total loss, but one who wants life to matter, now and forever.

It's easy to use belief in a fashion which is banal or cliche, but Jesus tells us there is a true and viable hope, and it can be found amidst all our dirt and pain - that is where He wishes to speak to us the most.

Just beneath the surface...

2011-03-01T13:39:00.000-08:00

I'm not the only one.

Apparently, fewer and fewer men are attending Christian churches, especially in the UK today.
All manner of reasons are given... poor leadership, the 'feminisation' of services, lack of male definition or activities, even changes in millennial views have all been listed as pragmatic causes, and perhaps these all play some part, but for me it was something much deeper which finally ended my church attendance.

The loss of my wife.
It wasn't just the impact of facing her death head on. It was the way in which others (and by others, I'm sad to say I mean Christians) responded to that. It was as though I'd gained some stigma or become unclean... the responses (lack of them) has been all too palpable.

In the six years since Kay's death, virtually no 'saint' has crossed my door, called me, or sought to check on my well-being. It's almost as though we were both buried on that day.
I've not become an island - I've pursued all manner of connection and made sure I've kept in touch with what's what, in the church and the world, but why the cold shoulder?

I know I can be pretty difficult to love, but was I really meant to be left in such a void - one that would have been malignantly crippling for so many, and pretty staggering for me when I reflect upon the reality of not only having lost my wife, but, in practical terms, any 'normal' support structure (the community of Christians) during such a trial.

James tells us that true religion is marked by a care for the widow and the orphan, so what's really going on, when non-believing friends and family prove much, much closer to you than Christians? Why in these times of crisis do we find ourselves left so adrift?

It's not the first time by any means this has happened to me or my late wife, and it's pretty clear that many, many others find themselves in the same situation, especially when facing crises of this magnitude, so is it any wonder that the church finds itself diminished by the vital need not only to care for such people, but to learn from them in that work - how much richer a Christian community becomes when its faith and testimony includes the voices of those often broken by life, but remaining kept by God's faithfulness.

It's because of that mercy that I'm here, asking, and hopefully stirring someone to notice those in need in their own neighborhood.

What Really Counts

2011-02-20T05:07:00.000-08:00

"Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
but you have prepared a body for me....

I have come to do your will, o God,
as is written of me,
in the volume of the book".

Hebrews 10:5-7.

"We know that if this present body is destroyed,
we have a permanent body from God,
eternal, and from heaven,
and for this new body, we yearn,
that we might be truly clothed,
when mortality is swallowed, not by death,
but by everlasting life".

2 Corinthians 5:1-4.

I finally managed to get to see the final episodes of the short-lived but so wonderfully crafted TV series, Caprica, this week, and was certainly not disappointed. With true finesse, Ronald D Moore and his team lead us towards a sadly all-too-fast conclusion that marries so well into the prior splendor of the tale of (the re-imagined) Battlestar Galactica. I can only hope that future plans for yet another show (entitled Blood and Chrome) in the genre, come to fruition this year, and that this proves to be as engaging as it's prior stellar renditions.

What was so engaging about Caprica, particularly towards the end, was the issue of life and death, and life beyond death. A holographic 'heaven' is devised and offered by one sect of the monotheists for her martyrs, but the heroine, Zoe, who listens to the angels, knows this is wrong, so as her parents struggle to free her from cyber-space by devising a way for her to become human - to have a body - once again, she confronts the leader of this 'bodiless' contrivance of heaven in V-world and judges her and her creation as wrong - godless, because it denies the realities we all must face, and the hopes beyond these.

I could not help but consider the manner in which such issues impact upon us all.
Everything we know, we experience, is communicated to us through the means of our bodies.
If, at some point in our near future, we encounter the manner of virtual realms available in this show, these also will be possible via a connection to our physical selves. All of life, and the agony of death, occurs this way. The eternal order, as C S Lewis once noted, is about things being far more 'real', far more substantial, than we can see or understand in a our present, impoverished physicality, but it would be foolhardy to conclude then, that the physical is somehow a merely provisional or temporary situation... a 'make do' until the 'better' of incorporeal immortality arrives... that, like the faith of the errant monotheists in Caprica, is a surrender to Gnosticism.

The Scriptures tell us that the physical is good - very good, and even more important, made Holy (sanctified) by God Himself on the 7th day. We were made bodily, and Christ (as the Hebrews reference above shows) became so to redeem the heavens and the earth. This is why Paul teaches us that our future hope is encapsulated in our gaining a new body in the resurrection, for like Zoe trapped in V-world, we indeed see, as Paul states, that creation itself currently yearns for release from corruption and decay into its proper (original/renewed) glory. Only then can the true and full significance of the physical begin to be really seen, considered and enjoyed.

Caprica ends looking at the ramifications of seeking to work out the results of actual resurrection in a fallen world (the overture of war), and that also echoes so much of our current reality.

As I've noted so many times here, we truly need to think well on these matters... they bear on the deepest realities for us all.

The Nitty Gritty....

2011-02-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

What we truly come to value in life often originates from those "what if" moments...
'What if I could do this.... What if he or she feels the same... What if this were true?"...

I've spent the last few weeks working my way through the bulk of Stephen Meyer's very well researched work, 'The Signature in the Cell', which is seeking to make a case that the evidence for the view of our existence known as Intelligent Design is actually all around us, and our cracking of DNA and the complexity of related biological processes has now furnished that data.
It's a book that certainly brings on one of those deep 'what if' moments, not least because Meyer carefully unpacks the current approaches and ideas concerning how we got here, and then seeks to show that not only do such attempts produce very few answers, but that their underlying assumptions actually substantiate that we cannot be here by chance.

I have watched how the ID arguments have shaped-up over the last twenty years. Yes, there are plenty that would like us to out rightly ignore or dismiss them, but that tends to be because time isn't being spent considering the actual state of play now reached in the thorough manner Meyer does in this work. It's pretty heavy going in places, especially when the author delves deep into micro biology (I understand why... it just makes my head spin).
All of this allows him to reach a startling point about two-thirds of the way through this study-

Having shown why ID makes the best sense (even from research generated to show the complete opposite) he concludes:
"The specified information in the cell establishes the existence and past action of intelligent activity in the origin of life. Experience shows that large amounts of specified complexity or information (especially in codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source".
Now that is a major consideration, because as so many working in this and other fields have noted, this is exactly the nature of the fundamental information found in all of life.

Philosophers, Scientists, Thinkers of all kinds, have for centuries looked upon the order and structure of the universe and pondered if this "speaks" of a mind at work - the masterpiece of the greatest artist. It could well be that in our very lifetime, the true 'fingerprint' of our maker has been seen for the first time, and that signature is encoded into every cell in our body...

Strange Cures

2011-01-15T14:09:00.000-08:00

"In this place lay a multitude of the blind, lame and paralyzed, waiting for the waters to be troubled". The pool at Bethesda in John's Gospel.

There's often debate about certain things being of any real value. Homeopathy is one such practice that immediately springs to mind, but it's fascinating how certain other 'beliefs' (of equally if not more dubious suppositions) are peddled publicly without anyone so much as batting an eyelid.

This morning, for example, I was listening to a local radio station which had a guest who works with prisoners, getting them to record bedtime stories to send home to their children. Also on the show was a chap who runs a local zoo, whose biography is about to be made into a Hollywood movie. He kindly offered to bring a 3D audio/visual venture by the zoo into the local prison for the inmates to enjoy - fine - but his reason for doing so? Well, because we've evolved from tree-dwelling primates, so we enjoy viewing other animals... it reaches us at some primal level and refreshes us there! I guess you have to resort to such 'therapy' if you believe we're just animals.

A few minutes later, I flipped channels to see what the local 'Christian' radio station was up to...
any chance they would be giving something like the Gospel of Christ a mention? They were busy on another endeavor... advocating local church unity by looking at common ways that 'all Christians' in the town can be brought together under a common goal to love God and neighbor...that's what Jesus shows us it's really all about. I felt myself groan inwardly. Yes, we apparently can skip over lots of things (as with evolutionary therapy) in our haste to find common cause...like the need for the actual Gospel (we're saved by God's merciful work of Grace, and nothing more). It's the same old merry go-round... the same old message of we can, of course, all help ourselves, but the result is at best a few cracks hidden to our eye.

Jesus approached one man at the pool in the story referred to above. So many, apparently, wanted a cure, but only one of these would actually look and listen to the true remedy to all our ills. It would seem that reality is still very much the case today.

Reaching the Horizon

2011-01-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

"Can you imagine what is to cross an ocean...
for weeks, you see nothing but the ocean,
you live in the grip of fear...
fear... of the immensity,
so you must drive that fear down... study your charts, watch your compass,
pray for a fair wind...

and hope - pure, naked hope,

At first, it's no more than a haze upon the horizon...
So you watch...

Then it's a smudge,
a shadow on the far water,
for a day,
for another day,
the stain slowly spreads along the horizon, taking form,

until, on the third day,
you dare to whisper the word...

land.

Life.
Coming out of the vast unknown...
Out of the immensity.

That is the new world.

Raleigh to the Queen in Elizabeth:The Golden Age.

Back in 2005, I had the joy of traveling West, to find myself encountering some amazing places in Colorado and Oregon. One of the magical moments I recall is removing my shoes and socks on Canon Beach (pictured here - photo by me) to dip my feet in the ocean there, and trying to explain to the daughter of a friend that when I normally paddle in my home country, it's in an entirely different ocean.

Life's journey teaches us that there is so much more we are going to have to encounter, have to understand, and as we grow in that awareness, we begin to realize just how vital it is to have a fixed point, a focus, that allows us to navigate well through what we encounter - a sound chart and compass that not only allows us to engage with both the wonder and pain which becomes part of us, but brings us safely home so we can tell our tale and share the value of that journey.

In the person, the life and the work of Jesus Christ, we find the true fixed point amongst the vast ocean of our journey and life - the means to unravel the experiences, the confusion, the triumphs and the trials that are upon and around us. He is the one master and commander that makes this voyage of lasting value.

There is a moment coming when making the journey will truly be defined by reaching another shore...

Our World's Joy.

2010-12-21T03:23:00.000-08:00

"We must both read and meditate upon the Nativity. If the meditation does not reach the heart, we shall sense no sweetness, nor shall we know what solace for humankind lies in this contemplation. The heart will not laugh nor be merry. As spray does not touch the deep, so mere meditation will not quiet the heart. 'There is such richness and goodness in this Nativity that if we should see and deeply understand, we should be dissolved in perpetual joy. Wherefore Saint Bernard declared there are here three miracles: that God and man should be joined in this Child; that a mother should remain a virgin; that Mary should have such faith as to believe that this mystery would be accomplished in her. The last is not the least of the three. The Virgin birth is a mere trifle for God; that God should become man is a greater miracle; but most amazing of all is it that this maiden should credit the announcement that she, rather than some other virgin, had been chosen to be the mother of God. She did indeed inquire of the angel, "How can these things be?"-and he answered, "Mary, you have asked too high a question for me, but the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you and you will not know yourself how it happens." Had she not believed, she could not have conceived. She held fast to the word of the angel because she had become a new creature. Even so must we be transformed and renewed in heart from day to day. Otherwise Christ is born in vain. This is the word of the prophet: "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given" (Isa. 9:6). This is for us the hardest point, not so much to believe that He is the son of the Virgin and God himself, as to believe that this Son of God is ours: That is where we wilt, but he who does feel it has become another man. Truly it is marvelous in our eyes that God should place a little child in the lap of a virgin and that all our blessedness should lie in him. And this Child belongs to all mankind. God feeds the whole world through a Babe nursing at Mary's breast. This must be our daily exercise : to be transformed into Christ, being nourished by this food. Then will the heart be suffused with all joy and will be strong and confident against every assault".

Martin Luther on the Nativity.

A MERRY CHRISTMAS!

The honorable quest

2010-12-11T13:55:00.000-08:00

"Then your voice will call me, and your hands can lead me home,
like a newborn, awed and naked - bare to the bone'.

Carrie Newcomer.

As I sat watching a favorite film tonight, the words of a school hymn echoed through my mind...
When a knight won his spurs, in the stories of old, he was gentle and brave,
he was gallant and bold,
with a shield on his arm and a sword in his hand, for God and for valor he rode through the land.

Frank Martin (The Transporter) may not strike most people at first sight as such a figure, but anyone in doubt should really give Transporter 3 another viewing. Beneath all the contemporary sizzle, adrenaline chases and martial arts, the sensual sparkle and the pointed statements, there lies a very old, in fact medieval tale of honor and valor, of risking all for the love of a maiden (brilliantly portrayed by Natalya Rudakova - a young lady who was literally taken from obscurity for the role). A telling moment comes when the truly discerning Inspector Tarconi tells Frank that he had always suspected that beneath his abrasive exterior, he was a true romantic.
Contrasted with the still moment pictured above (which grants the movie a moment of true romanticism), these brief but candid expressions unmask a little of the true intent here - a modern telling of an ancient tale - one which not only takes me back to childhood, or to some favorite Victorian paintings, but to the Gospel itself.

It would be easy here for me to make numerous parallels between moments in this movie and the realities of our lives and the defining "romance" of the Gospel message, but only one really matters - that within all our fear, pain, anguish and frustration, there is also hope. When we know genuine affection, we touch something that transcends and overwhelms all that is dark and disparaging in our lives - it assures us there is more, much more, beyond the hurt.
This is so because love finds its greatest expression not in our feelings or our present relationships, however deep and true these are, but in the very nature of a person - our maker and our redeemer, a true and deeply needed person of unshakable valor, honor and total integrity. That is why His promises, His deeds, His bond and affection are sure and true, and why the 'story' truly has weight and endures...
There is a better day ahead, when the darkness ends, and the richest love will be evidenced in all things.
That's certainly worth some moments of reflection...

T h e C u r i n g

2010-11-19T12:56:00.000-08:00

"The final outcome will be a return to the very first condition,
and the pure, unblemished resurrection,
will be the pure, undestroyed Creation". Man & the Incarnation.

"Behold, I make all things new". Jesus.

It never ceases to amaze me.

When we look at contemporary interpretations of our origins, our teetering continuing existence, and the probable ends of our species meager existence, life all becomes somewhat bleak, gloomy and, if we're honest, all pretty pointless. We can quickly compound that realism if we begin to then unpack the many woes and trails most of us face in our daily hunger to escape the pain often defined as 'the norm' of our short time here,
so, one would hope, when it comes to unpacking the marvel of Christian redemption and rescue,
surely we will find something truly wonderful - a rescue so profound that the trauma of this present agony becomes meaningful, even insignificant, in the light of that marvel.

Apparently not.

For some time now, I've wondered why, in the light of the clear teaching in Romans chapter 8, Christians are not deeply animated regarding the glorious work God is soon to bring about within creation in general.

Genesis begins with the astonishing account of the forming of the heavens and the earth, but this is but the prelude to the masterpiece which is going to appear amongst that order on the day when the full 'glory' (significance) of God's work here begins to become evident on the day of renewal, when the creature (humanity) is raised from the curse of death and creation is freed from its bondage to corruption to share in the new realm of liberation.
Well, I now know why many Christians have no spring in their step about this.
In complete concord with that venomous strain of Gnostic evil which has soured God's living word since Eden, the "way" to read such words is allegorically, not really relating to anything but perhaps some form of final 'spiritual' renewal for the few elect that make it into the distant realm of some ethereal bliss...!

I really wonder if such 'interpretations' take anything spelt out in scripture seriously.
As I've noted several times on my entries here and elsewhere, the only thing which taints and corrupts the goodness of God's handiwork in Creation is the invasion of the malady of sin, and that has truly been remedied by the precious, redeeming work of the bodily death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, so if the only impediment to Creation being 'good' again is removed, why are so many 'teachers' so ready to still expel of it entirely, seeing it as only fit for total destruction?

The only reason for such belief is that the material is inherently seen as entirely at odds with the eternal, but this is certainly untrue. The birth and life of the Lord Himself tells us how much God loves His creation, and the whole work of redemption stems from that unceasing love. It is this work which the book of Romans teaches us bears the most glorious fruit - an order truly rescued from futility and restored to forever glorify its Maker and Savior.

So, the next time you hear 'teaching' which wants to make you look far, far away for some vague, dis-embodied hope of some possibility of rescue, come back to the firm promises of God, made sure in the precious gift of His eternal Son.

In times of need...

2010-11-14T01:35:00.000-08:00

"If the Ten Commandments were not impossible enough, the preaching of Christian behavior, of Christian ethics, of Christian living, can drive a Christian into despairing unbelief. Not happy unbelief. Tragic, despairing, sad unbelief. (It is not unlike the [unhappy] Christian equivalent of “Jack Mormons” – those who finally admit to themselves and others that they can’t live up to the demands of this non-Christian cult’s laws, and excuse themselves from the whole sheebang.) A diet of this stuff from pulpit, from curriculum, from a Christian reading list, can do a work on a Christian that is (at least over the long haul) “faith destroying.”

Dr Rod Rosenbladt - The Gospel for those broken by the Church.

I have been sorely reminded of late just how much we poor souls are in need of the balm of God's unmerited grace in our lives, especially in the context of the 'judgment' (teaching and practice) by those who are no doubt seeking to do good, but actually snuffing out the flax and breaking the reeds.
It is with such a context in mind that I am truly delighted to supply this wonderful link to all who, like me, need the richness of God's abundant grace in Christ alone for their aid...

Dr. Rod Rosenbladt on "The Gospel For Those Broken By The Church" from Faith Lutheran Church on Vimeo.

For All Saints Day...

2010-10-30T04:31:00.000-07:00

With thanks for the Reformation.

Intoxication

2010-10-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

"Don't be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit".
Paul to the Ephesians.

A few weeks ago, I found myself calmly and yet eagerly encountering the diversity of a new culture whilst on holiday in Portugal. It's wonderful to have opportunities like that - to truly 'soak up' something of the richness of a place and a people - it truly can help to make you healthy in the sense of discovering more (and thereby affirming the 'rightness') of natural human life. There were plenty of moments - feeling a mild breeze in a glade of village willow trees or the freshness of a day whilst upon a golden beach - when that sense of good indulgence, of vital and healthy interaction struck me, and that has continued to be the case since my return home. Walking into work, for example, this morning amidst some gloriously late mild autumn weather and delighting in the blue skies and the rich layers of colour and texture in the season's splendor once more made me aware of just how good many aspects of our world can be. So often, of course, it's not the natural world that is at fault - it is our abuse of it, or our neglect to 'read' what it is saying to us. We do this on so many levels, particularly with regards to our own bodies, but if we use such gifts well, then life can become a store house of good things.

There is, no doubt, an element of this in what Paul is writing to the Ephesians. Drunkenness is a total folly, because it dis-connects us from the warmth and true value of good wine - we appreciate the deeper value of the world far better when we can employ the good gifts we have been given to properly unwrap and enjoy (and thereby genuinely edify) ourselves and others.
When that inter-action truly begins to arise, then you naturally begin to see the true value, the deep marvel of life, and as you grant it that worth, you cannot help but be thankful to the Lord who gives so many riches.

The new blog...

2010-09-29T00:03:00.000-07:00

On occasion, I've used an entry here to touch upon or discuss the ramifications of redemption with regards to the body and art. Whilst such reflections, no doubt, will still arise in my postings here from time to time, I'm delighted to announce my new blog, especially for that purpose, which you can visit here:
http://nuditusnaturalis.blogspot.com/

The aim is of the new blog is as stated in the heading: Seeking to express something of the splendor of God's handiwork in the human form through art and words.
So this clearly will include examining aspects of art and life which may be deemed taboo by some.
The aim here is not to shock or dwell upon the sensational, but to soberly reflect upon the marvels of God's work and to delight in this - to truly gain insights into the value of this realm, so I hope you drop by, enjoy the material posted there, and perhaps leave a comment or an insight that will assist us in the project.

The Value of it all

2010-09-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

It's my 50th birthday today, and following a week's leave in Portugal, where I've had opportunity to reflect on reaching my half century, on both the frailty and the wonder of life, I wanted to share something to enrich and encourage,
so here's a link to a piece I wrote some time ago that you may find interesting.

A r r i v a l

2010-09-12T23:39:00.000-07:00

"And then, (God's) kingdom will appear in His whole creation,
And then, the devil will have an end,
and sorrow will be lead away with him".

Testament of Moses 10.1

It's no doubt true that much can be said about a generation of people by its aspirations - it's driving "inner" imperatives, displayed in what becomes key to its present and future expression. Listening to the daily reports of the news, it's pretty clear at the present time that one of these key concerns is what might be deemed 'security', not only with regards to living in a 'safe' society, somehow shielded from the bomb and the bullet, but far more immediately, regarding work, home, health and all those daily needs which amount to 'normal' life.
It's pretty clear that whereas those 'external' dangers are still as acute as in my youth (the IRA bombings in London when I worked there spring to mind) these daily matters are fast becoming the realm of greater nightmares.
When government begins speaking quite frankly about a deeper and general impoverishment of not only the present, but the livelihood of future generations (in terms of their lifestyles being less 'comfortable' than our own), then you realize that a serious change is beginning to occur in the world around you, so where is the resolution, the remedy, to such a painful reality - a glowingly insecure world - to be found?

The quote above is from a fictional work dating from the 1st century AD.
In a world filled with many trails, the author, drawing no doubt from the roots of the promises of the ancient faith of his people, pens a passage that would indeed become apt to his times and generation... the appearing of something much greater, much better, than the present tottering 'system'. In that very time came the one, Jesus Christ, who would herald the first 'day', the first true moment of the entry of the Kingdom of God into a world ruined by evil.

Some 2,000 years later, the beginning of that dawning finds us in a strange world, where value is so often placed only in the immediate, and yet, people are often hungry for something deeper - life beyond the hurt and blur of what our present culture can provide.

The day is approaching when God's 'life' will once again become profound and evident in all of His creation, when true liberty, true living can begin - when the suffering, the evil, the insecurity will be over.

Are we living towards that day, finding a mercy, a care in our lives, which marries us to the greatest purpose - to know and share His eternal love?

The longing expressed all those centuries ago still rings deep and true.
A better day is coming, and we can be part of it.

Thinking it through

2010-08-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

It's truly been a week....
From facing possible redundancy again (2nd time in 18 months), to having to cancel a holiday due to a major holiday company going bust, to seeing around a third of my fine art photography vanish from the internet due to the 'Ning' fiasco...
It truly makes you realize (especially when nursing your health through the whole thing) just how frail and fragile the things we think 'just continue' really are. They can literally vanish overnight, and leave you wondering what happened and where to go.

Thankfully, I found many of these trials allowed me to talk quite naturally about my faith and my passion for beauty in my work, and all of the troubles, bar the head cold, are now easing, though it will take time to find new ways to display my art.

I was reminded again today of the superb series, 'Kings', based around the lives of David and Saul - stories which truly say much about how we can respond to life and to God in times of pressure. I featured a video here a while back of scenes from the show - here's the song from that video with the lyrics... they certainly make you think.

Beyond Ourselves

2010-08-18T00:15:00.000-07:00

"What a work of art is man"
Hamlet

It would leave you astonished.
Imagine meeting someone who had returned home to find their wealth taken, their home vandalized, even their loved ones hurt, and yet they carried on as if everything was normal - the only way to view such behavior would be to conclude that this person had serious problems.

To live in denial of our true condition would be folly, and yet, we do it so very often.

Philosophy and Religion often place us in just such a place. Our home, and more to the point, our very nature's, have been broken and ruined by a diabolical thief, but these means of deceit are employed to assure us that everything is fine - just accept that the state of play is entirely natural, says one voice, or if you work hard enough for long enough, things will be much better in a higher state/future incarnation, says another. Both in essence actually despise the true value and worth of the real world, which was made for a purpose and culture so much richer than these approaches can ever provide.

Christ tells us that the thief of this world has not only blinded us to that purpose, but through the lies so common in so many versions of the same belief, he continues to blind us to the real 'message' of creation and it's true Creator - the one who by His goodness and mercy not only made this world, but through His Son, is at work to bring about it's full renewal and redemption.

The day will come when all men will see and understand the actual value and purpose of this world, not a temporal universe in decay, or a mere quick stop on the way to some ethereal paradise, but the home where creation will live in deep fellowship with God forever.
That truly needs thinking about - if we're not just dust, given to eternal decay, or jailed souls, going away, but truly creatures of an earth meant to continue forever, then how much of the world's philosophy and religion is woefully wide of the mark concerning who we are and what is to come.

God loves this world and the people upon it.
He sent His Son here, to rescue us and it from death and decay.
Christ will return to bring the day of renewal, when all things shall know the reality of what was intended from the beginning.

Will we be ready?
Will the lie be broken, and the light of truth be our delight?
Where are your beliefs holding you?

The Reflection that Bleeds

2010-08-15T02:08:00.000-07:00

“A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?"

Charles Darwin.

No matter where, no matter who, when it comes to the children of Adam, we are all trying to hide from a reflection of our true selves - our real purpose.

Reflecting upon his countless observations, Darwin himself could not escape what Paul defined as the 'knowledge of God' written into creation. He wrote in the Origin of the Species of: "the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist".

The issue which truly troubled him in the light of that reality, as it should do us, was the amount of pain, misery and chillingly cold suffering within the universe, which simply did not appear to marry with the Christian concept of a caring God, leaving him questioning, arguing, protesting against such seemingly blind ugliness and pointless destruction - the tyranny of death.
Will not the judge of all the earth do right? asks the scripture, and as we look upon life which is so tethered to the ruin of physical extinction, often after a long process of decay, it is a matter which must weigh upon us. That very concern, that very response to such a calamity informs us of something - that we require, we expect, something better than such futility, and such a response raises an equally telling issue about ourselves - why, if death and decay are merely natural, would we desire, even demand such a thing in our cold universe?

It is because, even amidst the coldness, as Darwin himself noted, we see something more - a power and a 'glory' which makes our cry for right and an end to the injustice of death even more vital and acute. Though we only glimpse it, that vision 'speaks' of a nature and character above and beyond the futile and the miserable - something which resonates at the deepest point within us, reflected in our need and our desire to be creatures which care, which know that we have a Creator and Father beyond the present pain.

Christianity provides us with two key answers regarding the nature of this present evil.
Evil itself is not eternal - it derives from fallen created creatures - particularly ourselves - and its working is therefore limited to the present age. It will be removed, and creation will be freed from bondage to this futility.
Evil was stripped by the work of God in Christ, especially at the cross. A new age has begun, and the resurrection of Jesus points to the day to come, when such pain and darkness will be gone.

These truths bring the entire issue back to our own doorsteps - to what we see in ourselves when we seek to deny our true nature, reveling in the mire of unbelief, or equally, when we stand, aghast at our ability to love and to see and receive love from others.

Life teaches us, amidst the bruises, to look harder and deeper - the truth may hurt, but it is indeed the fist steps to a deeper healing.

It's just unfair... Life.

2010-08-11T10:52:00.000-07:00

"I've led such a little life. And even that will be over pretty soon.
I have allowed myself to lead this little life, when inside me there was so much more. And it's all gone unused. And now it never will be.
Why do we get all this life if we don't ever use it? Why do we get all these feelings and dreams and hopes if we don't ever use them? That's where I disappeared to. I got lost in all this unused life."

Shirley Valentine.

It's one of the ways that C S Lewis used to speak of evidence for God -
when we have a genuine need or desire for something (food, drink and the like), it is because
that need is there to be fulfilled, and our inner 'hunger' for a communion with God is that deep and that real. Perhaps that is part of the reason why this life is never as 'big' as at should be, and most certainly why it's scarred with pain and anguish instead of intensely lasting, satisfying joy. To paraphrase Lewis again, its similar to when we are seeking to enjoy nature - we sense its great beauty, but we still find ourselves detached from it, dislocated because we are, indeed, disconnected from the level of inter-action which should be ours.

Lewis was spot on, and that's why there's such a real dissatisfaction with countless 'religious' or 'philosophical' solutions to the problem - they want us to look elsewhere for comfort, for our time here is brief, merely to be transcended in some form.
Is what we are, what we long for really that meaningless?
There are plenty, when you weigh what they have to say, that are actually replying 'yes',
but the Gospel of Jesus Christ sees things very differently...

Christianity directly addresses the 'Shirley Valentine' issue head on. Life is meant to be totally satisfying, totally significant, totally meaningful, but it can't be until it's rejuvenated by truly deriving from its source - a world made whole by God in Christ.

Our bodies fail us. Our minds become weak. Life is quick and fleeting, so reflect upon what that deep inner hunger for more life is really trying to say. Where is the solution? It's certainly not within ourselves or those who would merely seek to talk it away!

It's at moments like that I'm so grateful to know that my redeemer lives, and that one day, I will stand again clothed in my flesh upon the earth because of Him, and because of Him, I will be able to revel in creation and in life as it was intended to be.There is something beyond the sorrow, and it can aid us in our time of trouble.

Shirley Valentine's question matters, so think long and hard about where the answer lies...

H o m e C o m i n g

2010-08-08T04:44:00.000-07:00

"Haven't we all thrown our coinage, down the wishing well?"
From 'Double Cure' by Vigilantes of Love.

I came across this today - it pretty much says everything about why Christianity matters.
Enjoy.

Significance

2010-08-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

"Those that dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined"
The Prophet Isaiah.

It never ceases to amaze me just how wretched and blind we can be.

An artist friend of mine decided to show support on one of his pages for the theory of evolution.
Not something that I see any need for an artist to do, but that's up to him.
He then decided to crown that with support for Richard Dawkins miserably wide of the mark publication (even criticized by his home team), the God Delusion, so I thought it was time to raise a question...

Do we really want to admire someone who profoundly believes we are merely "robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve selfish molecules...we merely exist for this and are nothing more than throwaway machines......in a world of savage, selfish competition, ruthless exploitation and deceit" (The River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins).

To which a total stranger replied that everything is futile, so just live for the moment:
Everything is futile, but it's worth doing. If everything is pointless then put emphasis on enjoyment and spend as little time as possible in the mire, that's a great game

I responded with a comment to the effect is that really all there is,
but it made me stop and consider....
can we really look at life, at the world, at ourselves, and see so little?

Clearly we can - that's why we need G R A C E,
why we need a Savior, and why we so need rescue,

so with that in mind, here's a few images by me which I hope will cause us to recognize the one who has made everything beautiful in its time and placed eternity in our hearts, that we might know Him and truly have life...

Find more videos like this on Miss Online

Sola Deo Gloria!

A n q u i s h

2010-07-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.
Bob Dylan

So, there you have it...
A new skull discovered in Saudi Arabia, dated around 25 million years old, is determined to be a primate (Saadanius hijazensis) which brought about the evolution of apes and humans.
Meanwhile, after the recent production by Craig Venter of a synthetic cell, scientists like Jack Szostack are eagerly engaged upon work which forces strands of DNA and RNA to compete in Darwinian struggles for existence whilst experiments like those at the University of Manchester, using raw biochemical pools as a means to re-create the conditions that first formed life, have given many scientists the view that we will be truly creating life ourselves in a few short years.

So that's it then - game over, isn't it?
We know all about life, about how to make it, and that effectively means, as naturalists have been claiming for over a century, that you certainly don't need the divine - just some trial and error combining of the basic building blocks, and you're on your way...

Except, of course, there are a few problems with all of this.
Take the synthetic cell. It's already been admitted that the 'computerized' genetic chain used to devise this was incredibly more simple that the far more complex natural cell that acted as its host. And what about that latest skull fragment?
Well, just place it alongside Geologist Virginia Steen-McIntire's findings in 1966 in Mexico.
The United States Geological Survey Society dated the various tools and spear points she and her team had unearthed by radiometric means to be 250,000 years old - some 235,000 years before modern men were supposed to be in this location.
One is readily accepted a great find because it apparently verifies the consensus theory regarding our development (even though there have been several other such 'finds' which, upon further examination, have been discovered to be no such thing), the other is comprehensively ignored because it argues with convention and therefore is dismissed.

Of course, the thinking goes, there can only really be one way to look at ourselves - as little more than a fluke; animated cosmic dust upon a very tiny ball which just happens to support such a random event - nothing of any lasting consequence, either as individuals or as a species - it's all destined for decay...
but what if another story about us is true, that we are actually skipping the real history of who and what we are in our rush to make a particular "dream" stick?

The Psalmist, so aware of His creator, asks, what are we, that we should even be considered of worth? The New Testament echoes the question, but also posits an answer - we are actually defined now by a single man, a single moment in the history of our race.
The Man is Jesus Christ, and the moment is His life, death and resurrection.

It's not an answer some dare contemplate, because if true, it means there is far more to contemplate beyond our interpretation of bones or biological codes -
it means we were made by One who requires us to know a life defined by more than our present pain, suffering and death - a redeemed creation beyond tarnish and decay.

Life has come, not in an experiment or a theory, but from heaven to earth,
and that life, that light, can crush the darkness of our broken world.

Nothing to say (or just saying nothing)?

2010-07-07T11:11:00.000-07:00

The two women watch a full moon rising...

Finn -Oh, god. Look at that.

Aunt Pauline -I never liked full moons. They give people an excuse to do foolish things.

Finn -I'm young, I'm supposed to do foolish things.

Pauline -And spend the rest of your life paying for them.

Finn -Well, it's better than spending the rest of my life wondering what I missed.

Pauline -I'd rather wonder than kick myself.

Finn -Well, I'd rather kick myself.

Pauline (clearly irritated) -Fine. You will end up with a deeply sore backside.

From 'How to Make an American Quilt'.

There used to be a word for it - lunacy; a condition when you abandon sanity because something else (an immediate madness) overtakes you and blurs what really counts. That's what is so excellent about the scene that the above speech comes from - Aunt Pauline knows what life is about, and that it's just stupid to short-cut that.

We can so easily find ourselves entwined in the immediate like the young writer in this story - and that's fine, so long as we have the kind of people she has around her to help us navigate our way through to genuine definition and understanding, but what if that isn't the case?

What if, individually and collectively, we mute and neglect those means which truly foster well being and just wallow in the immediate and the superficial - moon-struck, in all the ways that phrase originally meant?

In a truly clarifying passage about the present, writer Peter Hitchens really sums up the results:

"Orwell feared those who would ban books. Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban - there would simply be no one interested in reading them. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared a time which would give us so much that we would become reduced to passivity or egoism. Orwell feared the truth would be withheld. Huxley feared that truth would become drowned amidst an ocean of irrelevance".

Like that horrifying moment in H G Wells', "The Time Machine", when the scientist from the past discovers that an entire culture - the Eloi - are literally being preyed upon by others - the Morlocks - so our times have become overcome by the liquefaction of Huxley's definition of lunacy - the "drip, drip" of a realm which makes so much of the immediate at the expense of the imperative.

We rake at the moon in countless distractions, and all too often, there are no voices of trust and actual understanding to talk us off the edge, or bluntly wake us to the folly often paraded as 'good'.

What poison has become the succor of our times? How many would, in effect, remain asleep in a burning house, unaware of danger?

How dreadful it is, noted Jesus, when a man comes to call light darkness, and darkness, light -

how great that peril will be!

We need more Aunt Pauline's in our times - maybe then, we'll spend a little less time craving the dimness of the night, and encounter the glory of the sunlight...

Heaven's Open

2010-06-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

"He also, in the end of times . . . became a man among men,
visible and tangible,
in order to abolish death and bring to light life,
and bring about the communion of God and man".

From a creed of Irenaeus of Lyons

I've had a quote at the start of one of my Photographic art portfolios for some time now:
"The motivation behind creation..is to give of ourselves. Creation is the highest act of giving".
The statement is from a book by William Dembski, and like Irenaeus' words of nearly twenty centuries ago, it makes us look at the 'bigger picture'.

I find that particularly so when I'm creative 'mode' - that's when Dembski's words ring so true.
If I am not seeking to truly connect to my subject in a manner that isn't really giving creatively, then I find I don't get very much back. Creating and probably just enjoying art means that a deep inter-action is under way - one which usually engages us, heart and soul.

And that brings us back to Christ and the 'big picture' of creation as a whole. The Lord made all things good for a very crucial reason - to express Himself...to give Himself to the world and life which He had made. Corruption often bleeds into every corner of our current existence and stains the glory of that reality, but creativity can often cause us to snatch a glint, or a brief sniff of this great and underlying truth so clearly declared in the Gospel, as expressed in the above creed.

The day approaches when of all of life will be replete in such artistry.

What it's really all about...

2010-06-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

Now, we see dimly, like a reflection in a mirror,
but the day comes when there will be total clarity,
Now, we know only in part,
but then we shall know fully,
for love never ends -
all that is partial fades,
but perfection will come,
for the greatest is love.

Paul - 1 Corinthians 13.

How do you make sense of this crazy, messed up world?
What is it that makes life worth living, when you see the sheer ugliness we not only encounter,
but can generate from our own hearts?
When you see a tragedy like the shootings in Cumbria last week, how do people find the strength to get out of bed in the mornings?

The brilliant 20th century physicist, Richard Feynman, who had some pretty genius ideas in his life, said something major in a letter to a friend:
"Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science — for to fill your heart with love is enough".

When you see the pain of our world touched by love, then even pain becomes worthwhile.

The message of Christianity is essentially about that - God has come to heal a broken world, not through rules and regulations, but through totally unmerited love.
Here's a new song by Amy Grant which touches on the value of such love in our darkest moments...

Giving it all away...

2010-05-25T00:15:00.000-07:00

"We are creatures that are totally alone,
precariously living upon a realm of myths - our fabricated realities".

Andrew Marr -BBC radio.

Edmund Burke famously once said that the only thing needed for evil to prosper is good men to do nothing, but as we touched on in a recent post, there are no good men, so evil is easily and often done, especially by those who deem it good to define our present alienated condition as the only reality we can know.

In His ministry amongst us, Jesus spoke of the true purpose of evil - like a thief, it comes amongst us to steal our actual identity, kill our longings to be more than strange, half-life creatures of the night, to destroy us, body and soul, by incarcerating us in the lie that we are no more that a bag of animated dust, limited to a brief moment, then gone.

Evil, a friend used to say, is de-personalization...defining ourselves in such a way that, in effect, we have no value beyond the moment - the thoughts and appetites that pertain to this instant. Christ tells us something very different. We are fallen, lost, broken and corrupted children, victimized and plagued by a lie that we can become 'free' in our rebellion by being less than we are - the heirs of a realm provided by a Creator who has entered into our very meaninglessness in order to rescue us from our terrifying peril, at a great cost to Himself.

The real fear of redemption, I sometimes think, is not that there is a God, or that He loves us so deeply, but that it carries such a great 'weight' of recognition - that we mere shadows of humanity were made and delivered for so much more, and the broken creatures we now are cannot but wail at but a glimpse of such vision - better to order and discipline ourselves in misery and pain, to inhabit the realm of non-being - the sphere of evil.

The call of Christ challenges our reality. It decrees such usurpation cannot last...
That the day approaches when all creation will once more be granted its full worth.
Only His renewing mercy can clothe us well for such a day.

Buried within the bruises.

2010-05-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

"Deprived of older loyalties, tribal sensations of a 'generation' -
the fashions, the trends, the propensity to the illicit - becomes the badge of the day".

Peter Hitchens - Born Yesterday.

How do you speak to these "interesting" times in a way which actually 'says' something about the truth and the human condition?
I often find moments in Science Fiction shows which resonate, but aside from the occasional block-buster, you need something a little more universal to appeal to most people,
but this certainly says you can use media well.

Recently, a friend introduced me to a 2009 American TV production which ticked the boxes and showed just how contemporary the truth can be.
Based around the Biblical story of David and Saul, if somewhat dramatized, Kings really shows us that aside from driving cars rather than riding chariots, our condition and needs as people haven't changed at all from those times.

There are way too many excellent scenes in this production to select the best, but there won't be many who can watch the first few episodes and not identify with the trials and triumphs of the characters - it is simply compelling viewing, which, in my own case, has lead to several deep conversations already - and I'm only half way through the season so far. This manner of drama really asks us to think about ourselves - how we view who we are, what we aspire to and, most important of all, if such a state is opening or closing us to deeper realities.

I highly recommend seeing this if you get the chance... it will get you thinking.

Beyond the noise and fury...

2010-05-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

Larry Norman once wrote some telling lyrics...
"I've been shot down, kicked around,
some people scandalize my name,
but here I am, talking about Jesus just the same"

In a day when the message of Jesus Christ is very much, as always, the target
of derision and 're-interpretation', here's a reminder of what it's really all about...

The Present Danger?

2010-05-09T04:17:00.000-07:00

"The Bible clearly testifies of numerous supernatural events,
and if God doesn't over-rule the natural, we have to throw the book away,
and its God...
We would have to eliminate our belief in all of Gods miracles, including the resurrection,
in which case, we might as well reject the message of Christianity altogether".

Chris Tiegreen - Love, power and a whole lot of evil.

Back in the mid-1990's, journalist John Horgan produced an intriguing work entitled The End of Science, in which he postulated that we were reaching the limits, empirically, of what science could actually tell us about a vast range of observations, and that the 'gap' left would therefore have to be filled by 'detail' which some observers rightly have noted would temper certain theories as immune to falsification - in reality, leaving these approaches redundant, because their assertions do not really explain anything.

It's not the first time humanity has found itself here. The 'whole' world view our culture generally espouses today bears traits of commonality to those propounded in some of the early Greek states, as does the amount of confidence invested by many in such ideas, but perhaps the most telling thing about all this for me is the impact such suppositions have upon many who apparently express 'christian' beliefs which seek to adapt to these assumptions.

Take this morning, for example - a television discussion on whether we are born good or evil.
The majority present who were 'religious' ('christian', Muslim, and Hindu) held we are born good, seeking to express this in a fashion which didn't cause any real opposition to atheists, who saw such matters as derived in a small way through genes, but predominantly through learning. What was clear was they all saw 'traditional' Christian belief - that we are born with corruption - as wrong and entirely irrelevant - the important thing was to live liberated and without any guilt.

I truly worry when Christians start teaching me that 'what Adam did doesn't matter' - that, in effect, we were not 'conceived in sin', but I'm no longer really surprised. After all, the Eden record, in this view, is just a story, like the Creation or Noah's flood and the tower of Babel, the offering of Issac or the Exodus - these things didn't really happen... they're just what was written down (we're not sure by whom) in 'special language' to tell us our lives mean... something.

I understand the logic. For the world to be "safe" to our natural way of navigating it, there just cannot be any real place for the miraculous - for a God who acts directly in our world - any notion of that kind would have to entirely conform to a spirituality that would be to 'our' benefit (how we see and understand things now). Christianity actually unseats us there.

How can God fashion something complex as our universe in six days, or then destroy the earth bar what He held safe through a great flood? Why make a place as perfect as Eden and allow such a location as the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to be visited by the Serpent?
Why demand of Abraham the life of his son? These are deep questions, which 'speak' of far more going on than what is defined by science, so they are certainly not going to be faced well by a modern approach which, like that of the Epicureans, views such 'history' as impossible, because naturalism has no place for the miraculous or the non-material in the manner the Bible speaks of it.

The God who caused the light to shine out from the darkness, notes Paul, is the same God who causes the light of the knowledge, the true significance, of God, to shine into us through the truth concerning Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). Christianity is inherently marked and defined by this - there is simply is no other 'message' of value, for this alone gets to the very core of our reality, not only in the 'here and now', but regarding our origin, our departure from that realm, and how all creation will be returned to it.

We cannot escape what the New Testament defines as 'the truth that is in Jesus Christ'.
The time has come, for us to face this.

It's not what it looks like...but it's exactly how it works.

2010-05-02T01:37:00.000-07:00

Talking to a friend I turned around,
and found a total stranger,
hiding out for safety's sake I found,
I'd put myself in danger...

I saw somebody earning more and more,
and he was getting poorer,
it seems the more things that you know,
the less you can be sure of.

From Dancing in the Shadows by After the Fire.

Human Beings.

We are the epitome of spin.
I've watched, often with frustration, these past few weeks, as British politicians have employed
lashings of craft and 'smoothiness" to expertly weave and dodge the public on the crucially painful questions of what life is really going to be like as one of the darkest economic periods truly begins to bite in the next few years (yes, that's right - the reality of the recession hasn't even begun yet). Deftly poised on their proverbial pin-heads, the leaders of the main parties would have left the pied piper of Hamlin redundant, until this week, when an unguarded moment disrobed the Prime Minister. The mask dropped, and we saw what really goes on.

Of course, none of this is new - I've had a good dose of the West Wing over the past few months - we can 'look' into the machinations if we so choose. What amazes me is that we so often choose not to, and not just about politics. It's common for us to embrace the naive notion that everything tomorrow will just carry on like it did today - that everything will be fine, but it really isn't so. Scratch the surface just a little, and there's a broken, wounded world right here - it's bleeding to death, and applying the trite responses wheeled out by politicians and the like just won't fix it - or you.

Another blog this week raised an interesting question.
In a traumatic situation, if someone asked you "Why do you believe in God", what would you say?

I know that part of the answer is what God reveals to us about ourselves - that we are broken, and we don't like to go there. We equally live in a world which scurries away from seeing humanity where it should be - "crowned" with a particular 'weight' (significance), but beneath the domain of heaven.

For the last 30 years (at least), I've lived in a society where 'freedom' has been defined by some very narrow ideas which derived from Game Theory and have been woven into every field of policy in America and the UK, whatever the political stripe. This is still the case, but such issues are just not touched upon, even in the heart of an election.

Larry Norman said it right:
you say all men are equal all men are brothers
then why are the rich more equal than others
don't ask me for the answer I've only got one
that a man leaves his darkness when he follows the Son

The Great American Novel.

If the Son shall set you free, you shall be free indeed.

The Borderline

2010-04-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

"love dares you to care for
the people on the edge of the night".
From the song, Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen.

Strange times.
I heard today how an anti-theist is challenging religious folk to show a particular kind of 'evidence' to thereby validate the premise that God could exist. It brought to mind a statement by C S Lewis - "God is the only witness who has to remain silent until proven guilty".

The uncomfortable truth, of course, is that He does not remain silent.

Walking home from work today, some favorite tunes playing on my CD as I imbibed the splendor of a spring afternoon, the world bursting into life in gorgeous displays of colour and fragrance - it made me realize just how squashed human existence has become, when apparently people are fortunate to be happy for a maximum of eight seconds a day!

We're a broken people, but there's still a world, however hard we've scratched to de-face it, which shouts at us regarding the glory of our maker - that's why the bark of the materialist has no bite - it denies the entire purpose of the glory which surrounds and penetrates our deepest reflections when we allow it do so. They speak of a Creator's power and marvelous provision, and a longing, a yearning, for a brighter day...

The darkness and the pain are terribly real, but the light is radiating on the horizon,
from just across the border.

Seeing Faith

2010-04-04T01:20:00.000-07:00

"These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, made it clear that they were looking for a better homeland".
Hebrews 11:13 & 14.

"If only in this life we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied but in fact Christ has been raised from death, the first fruits of those who have died".
1 Corinthians 15: 19 & 20.

In the early 1500's, at a monastery hospital in Isenheim which cared for the incurable, Mattias Grunewald created two altarpiece images for the aid of the dying, one of the crucifixion, showing Christ as the bearer of our diseases, and one of the resurrection, conveying that something wonderful was beyond this present suffering:

It poignantly speaks to the question which would dominate that era - "how can I be saved?", one that often seems strange to many of the popular trends and views of our age, but as we look at these images and consider our own mortality, we can begin to see afresh that the faith which inspires such passionate art and deep considerations is not that foreign or alien at all - it is as necessary as our next breath, and something which actually causes us to become troubled, to question, when we become too at ease with our place in the world.

The 16th century would become a harbinger for both the necessity and the vitality of such issues, especially in the work of Martin Luther.
Luther, as one scholar notes, became an 'ardent proponent of the sacred, spiritual nature of the material', not just because Creation was the good handiwork of God, but because it was the 'Unique means of God's intimate presence in the world - the means of God's redemptive and justifying activity" (Hendel - Luther's radical Incarnational perspective). Whilst this allowed Luther to renew an Apostolic approach to ministry (in use of both the Word and the Sacraments), it also informed a fresh approach towards faith and art.

The first common German Bible, translated by Luther, included numerous woodcuts by Lucas Cranach (the Elder), but as the genuine tangibility of faith was no longer defined merely by 'religious' practices, so all of life itself became the purview of artists who drew from faith in the redemptive work of God amidst creation, and thereby gave birth to a new realism in many schools and movements which arose across Europe.

By truly looking at the beauty of the created order, artists were seeking to make statements about the true 'weight' of these things, by seeing them inherently as good, in spite of the ruin of the fall, for just as they had been made good by God, they were equally redeemed by Christ, and therefore, the richness of common life becomes a foretaste of the splendour of resurrection life.

In his masterful depiction of God's creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, Michelangelo challenges us with revelation of God's character, not remote from us, but right here - the true source of all life and living, of all care and renewal, of all beauty, in it's deepest expression.

On a day when, by such faith, we can look to a crucial reality of our history - that Jesus rose bodily from the tomb - that can indeed be the well-spring that heals us in life, death, and the new day which is fast approaching.

(Images: Luther preaches Christ by Cranach, The Resurrected Christ by Grunewald, Venus by Cranach).

Seeing Straight

2010-04-01T13:26:00.000-07:00

We're dreamers in castles made of sand,
The road to Eden's overgrown,
Don't you sometimes wish your heart was made of stone.

Cher - Heart of Stone

I seem to be only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself by every now and then only finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay still undiscovered before me”.

Issac Newton.

Hindsight.
It's often spoken of as a wonderful thing, which has often struck me as odd.
In most cases, to 'edit' another famous phrase, another statement would seem to apply -
"If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that we learn nothing to change history".

And why should it not be so?
Gaia enthusiast James Lovelock spoke candidly on British radio this week regarding the issue of global warming, noting that just as, of necessity, we 'pulled the hammer' (caused what is currently deemed climate change by our actions), so we will have to live with whatever comes next, and to seek to propound the notion that we can just resource our way out of such a crisis, somehow turn back the clock, is plain nonsense.

The thing is broken, and no amount of hindsight or even sober thinking is going to change things - we all eat due to sweat and toil, bruised by the thorns of briers of this life, until death claims us,
so why not just forget the past, live for the moment, and 'burn out rather than fade away'?

As an artist, I know well how the desire to somehow draw alongside the deep, profound undercurrent of reality resonates. Like Newton on his beach, holding the few things gathered in a lifetime, I can look with wonder at the future, because there are 'pointers' in what's discovered about who and what we are, and these truly make a person both tremble and laugh at their very core.

On the night of His betrayal, Jesus used a very simple, common moment in a meal to announce the astonishing event that was about to happen. Through what He was about to do and undergo for us, what seemed totally beyond repair was about to be eternally fixed - God would once again 'tabernacle' with humanity, not just on brief moments, or tents, or via other means of mediation, but by living with us in our decimated world, redeeming our very death-struck lives and making us ready for the great age that is closing - a world made anew by Christ.

Hindsight, then, is good, at least in one context - when it placards how we were created, how we fell from there, and how we were rescued from that plight.

Like some of the disciples, no doubt, who dined with Jesus that very night, I often don't understand the mechanics of how the cycle can be broken amidst all the overgrowth, the dreamers in castles, the sheer callousness we can convey,
but Easter Sunday is close by, and after the desolation of the garden, of Good Friday,
it tells me that I can look beyond the here and now,
and to do so isn't pie in the sky.

Easter Thinking

2010-03-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

"If our flesh is not renewed, then the Lord has not actually redeemed us with His life and death; then the Eucharistic cup does not make us sharers in His blood, and the broken bread, sharers in His body.
The heart of the truth is that the Word of God actually became flesh, and it was with that body, He actually redeemed us in His life, death and resurrection. As Paul puts it, 'In Him, though His blood, we have been redeemed".
Irenaeus of Lyons (2nd century Christian theologian).

With many thanks to Kayceeus for permission to use her image.

Isn't it lovely, wrote an artist friend to me today, to sense the regenerative power of Spring in the air again?
We all know there's something pretty amazing about this time of year - the days becoming longer, warmer, the earth bringing forth a plethora of colour and richness. Everything speaks of a fresh encounter with the marvel of life, which breaks out from the coldness and seemingly iron grip of winter. It's not much of surprise, then, that many ancient religions cycled around the 'magic' of nature's fertility, but as the wise Epimenides pointed out to the Athenian Greeks around 600 BC, to reside at such a level is to stay in ignorance of the One behind such marvels.
The 'natural' victory of life over death we see creation play out every year whispers loudly concerning a deep reality at the heart of things - death is a usurper, preying upon our current demeaned "life", but things were and will be very different.

The heart of Christianity is an event that truly staggers us. The God who made us was not prepared to leave us in a state of futility and destruction when we walked away from His care, but this God Himself came to us, became as us, to suffer, to draw the sting of sin and death, to overcome these, and to give us a new life as real as the renewal of spring.

C S Lewis puts this so well - a quote which came swiftly to mind when I viewed the image above this morning:

"One has the image of a diver, stripping off layer after layer until naked,
going down through the green, sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing depths,
down, to the very mud and slime,
and then, up again, lungs almost bursting, breaking back into the sunshine,
holding the dripping thing taken from the depths...
The thing is us, but with it, all of nature - the redeemed creation"

(The Grand Miracle).

As the flowers bloom, and the beauty clothes our world, that's worth thinking about...

Getting it...

2010-03-16T01:32:00.000-07:00

"It's not the Sun up in the sky.... It's the Son of God".
Uhura - Bread & Circuses.

A faith that is based on love - revealed by God's Son,
that enables unity that transforms the world....

James T Kirk is right - won't it be wonderful to see that come about in it's entirety?

Twixt the Pain and the Passion

2010-03-12T00:20:00.000-08:00

Faith, which springs from charity is so very necessary to this present life,
that without it, we cannot continue in the world". Martin Luther

Last summer, amidst some very sorrowful weather, the gray days were suddenly warmed
when a new drama was shown on national television. Whilst providing a somewhat embroidered rendition of its subject, it spoke loudly of how, amidst the mess and chaos of this world, we can all be touched by the unmistakable, and on occasion overwhelming beauty and grace which we see woven into so much, especially amidst the pain and passion of our lives.

This superb video, taken from images from the drama and focusing on one strand of the story, which was certainly about the great need for redemption, reflects something of the delight of this production.

Desperate Romantics, which reveled in the highs and lows of the Pre-Raphelite artists, resonated deeply regarding the roots of my own artistic inspiration, and spoke well of how, amidst my work as a photographer now, artists are commonly seeking the deeper gems.

Christ, in His nature and work, shows the world how faith, working through love, transforms the tatters of our splintered existence to radiate something restored and whole - as with the light seen through a rainbow. Perhaps our gaze is still often small, only seeing a reflection of this, in a puddle on the ground, but once that 'rainbow' is there, the promise of a day when our sight is clear, our heads look up, is certain and sure.

Beauty can be a balm to our weary journey, when true faith and love are at home in our souls.

ears to hear, eyes to see.

2010-02-20T13:07:00.000-08:00

"The God who made the world and everything in it...He Himself gave to mankind life and breath and all we see". Acts 17:24.

Why is it that 'religion' can be little more than candy floss, which is employed for all the wrong reasons, to cover the cracks?

I was reading a book today, supposedly giving a 'christian' insight into beauty. The introduction jogged along about our living 'between' awakening and sleep (birth and death), and how we found our ground of meaning, our shelter, here, by observing beauty, which granted some insight to the divine - the beauty of God. The author referred to the ancients, especially the Greeks, as an example of that, but there's the problem.

The Greeks certainly had a notion of the order of things, and sought to emulate that in their religion and art, but it was a beauty which alienated, not genuinely esteemed the value of the world. Women were viewed as an ultimate embodiment of evil - the physical incarnation of all that was vile- the physical world itself, and artists were only tolerated because of their skills to express the true goal - to step beyond the immediate to the spiritual perfection beyond.
It amazes me just how much Christian spirituality still hankers after this dualistic nightmare, but Paul before the Greeks speaks of a very different beauty - a God who works with the earth, and redeems only by the salvation of all He has made, for this is His work.

Genuine truth and beauty can never be divorced from the 'common' life we have been given - the bestowal of charisma, notes Paul, to all men because of God's grace. It is amidst the bare breath, the whole of life that we are to see something of His work, not merely in some ecstatic moment of gnostic transport.

Beauty of any import is found here, amidst the trial and the joy.
Philosophy or religion may wish us to divorce God from such a vision, but life teaches us differently.

Beyond these small conceits...

2010-02-14T03:39:00.000-08:00

"Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are religious".
Paul at Mars Hill -Acts 17:22.

It's always popular to adhere to what is commonly termed as "spirituality" - the notion that we genuinely enrich ourselves and others by ascribing to the 'good' aspects of our humanity... employing our virtue or morality, perhaps ascribing to some (not to determined) perception of the divine - deism or gnosticism perhaps, but in truth ascribing to something which never totally or radically impinges upon the here and now, in the 'lifestyle choices', the compass of our own suppositions on the nature of things.

In the week before His death, Jesus challenged those who held a similar status quo in Jerusalem,
telling the people that these 'spiritual' folk were truly to be avoided for there was no genuine substance to their words or deeds - they went through the motions, but there was nothing but a void, a total lack of genuine spiritual insight and maturity at the heart of who they were and what they did.

In the same fashion, Paul comes before the 'learning' of his age, and finds it wanting. Why?
Because it does not address aright the basic questions of who and what we are - of how we were made and why we now have a propensity to a 'spirituality' that is crooked. It also fails to understand that the world in which we live is not a 'closed' system, but one often touched and thereby altered by the work of God.

The same man, notes Paul to the Athenians, that God raised from death, calls us to change, for there will be a day when our race will be judged by Him. Jesus Christ calls us to move beyond the shallowness of what is deemed 'right' - spiritual, by us, to a life replete with the significance God has given.

The day is approaching when God breathes new life into all He has made and redeemed. Does our 'vision', our first steps into spirituality begin to furnish us for the 'largeness', the totality of that reality, or actually diminish and negate the true 'glory' of His handiwork?

Amidst the lovers and the mourners

2010-01-27T13:21:00.000-08:00

"Are you alive ?"
Caprica 6 - Battlestar Galactica

Almost a decade ago, my wife and I ended our twenty years of living in the South Eastern counties of England with a trip to the movies to see the splendid Bicentennial Man. The film is filled with memorable moments, but what makes this tale resonate so deeply is the desire, the journey, of the central character, Andrew, from being an oddity as a robot, to fulfilling his actual potential by becoming fully human.
Through the traumas of the Martin family that originally purchases, then adopts, and finally marries this person, we gain an insight into the 'natural' human condition - one marked by pain, suffering and death, interwoven with the precious richness of love, communion and intimacy.
It is as Andrew begins to imbibe both the beauties and tragedies of our kind for himself, that his goal becomes singular - to be one of us, fully human, even to the point of death.

I left the cinema that evening deeply moved, reminded not only of the wonder of our lives, but also reflecting upon the one who came as a man and truly tasted death for us all.

I had no idea at that time, as life changed from what it had been for the two principal decades of my adult life, that Kay and I were about to be taken by currents which would change everything - that I would loose her to cancer within a few short years, but I often think about how that film, and other events that followed, sought to impress the theological weave of creation, fall and redemption I had become aware of in the 90's, into the very fabric of everyday life - Christ, like Andrew in the film, would be there to not simply witness but profoundly accompany us through those days so pierced with joy and pain.

There is a certain excitement to sharing the truths that underlie our faith when unwrapping them properly for the first time - a little like children at Christmas - but that is very different to the moments when God truly becomes the Paraclete upon the threshing floor of experience.
The realities with which we have to do impinge upon our breath, our bones, as well as our thoughts and deeds.

Christianity teaches us well; much of life now must necessarily remain unfinished - sin and death prevent completion, but the love He sheds abroad within our failing hearts is a sure and certain investment of what will come to be.
The dreams, the joys, the ardent promises that mark our times, that define our intent, are now broken pieces amidst a pavement cracked by the woes that wound, and the fury of doubt and fear which assault and assail us with the taunt of physical death. The darkness, indeed, is often palpable, and within ourselves, there is no aid, but there is more to be said, even before the of very claim of death.

Amidst the inspired words of Solomon. we find a mercy which will bind the broken heart -
Such waters cannot quench your love. These floods cannot drown it.
There is a love which is stronger than death.

Andrew's story ends in death, as, naturally, all ours would as well, but the true man, the 'proper' man who came from heaven has conquered death itself in His own death, and His life truly allows us to become the people of a renewed, restored creation.

The future not only of this world, but of the Godhead itself, will be expressed in a love that has redeemed heaven and earth. There, then, is something that ultimately empties of all woe, and qualifies in fact, all our present trials, making them truly of value, and opening the door to becoming fully ourselves, through His love.
There is a better day, a better ending, and it is found in the God who reconciles by love.

Seeing True

2010-01-14T09:54:00.000-08:00

"That's the day I realized that there's this entire life behind things...this incredibly benevolent force... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it".

Ricky Fitts - American Beauty.

I was very interested to learn this week that some of those who had seen the stunning movie Avatar, had been feeling greatly troubled, and in some cases, suicidal, as a result, seeking to equate such wonder with the pain of our own world.

One viewer wrote: "I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning...(we) live in a dying world".

This rings true to something I have been reflecting about for sometime.

In 1 Kings chapter 10, we read of the royal visit of a Queen to the court of the great King, Solomon. This state visit occurred because news about the wonder of Solomon's great city had traveled across the ancient world, and people wanted to see such a spectacle first hand.
The impact of not only the buildings and wealth, but the wisdom this man had gained was palpable. Not unlike those so deeply struck by the film, the Queen herself was overwhelmed by the unique and distinct splendor of this place, which created genuine happiness in all of those who lived within its scope.

I've often wondered if the reaction of the Queen was in some sense a seed of inspiration for one of Solomon's own marvelous works - the poetry of devotion found in his Song of Songs, but one thing is for certain, the encounter with such beauty is both overwhelming and life-changing.

Perhaps it is one of the great sorrows of our times - that we very often cannot 'see' beauty in the fashion that many, like the astute Queen of Sheba, have done in times past. The encouraging gem gleaned from the Avatar example is that beauty can still overwhelm us, and thereby open our lives to a far richer and deeper reality woven into the fabric of our currently broken world.

There was a moment in the life of Jesus where His disciples were allowed to see Him transfigured, expressing something of His true glory and majesty to them. The result was immediate - they wanted to stay in that spot, in that moment, for the rest of their lives. I've often found when I'm confronted with the real Jesus of the Gospels, there is a two-fold response: a drawing that resonates in the deepest part of my soul, and a realization that I am not worthy of the wonder of the pure character of this Man - God's beloved Son. When we truly confront Jesus Christ, we encounter something which leaves that ancient Queen's encounter plain in comparison, for as Paul declares, all the marvel and beauty of creation is made and sustained by Him.

This world, even amidst all it's trouble, often furnishes us with moments of striking clarity, where we glance upon that deeper realm, which this earth, this tent of flesh we inhabit, is meant to know, meant to share, meant to make us truly whole.

If inspired by the beauty which surrounds us, rest a while beneath the shade of the Gospels, and learn of this one that the whole world has been talking about for some 2,000 years. Truly, there is a beauty here to make us all what we were intended to be.

And that's because...

2010-01-03T02:59:00.000-08:00

"Sin is primarily located...in our spiritual pretensions and ambitions. It is our god-like aspirations which destroy our life here and seduce us to make life miserable for our fellow man". Gerhard Forde - Where God Meets Man.

It's always good when this time of year unwraps something to get you thinking.
It happened twice for me this season.

The second occasion was watching James Cameron's new epic, Avatar, which I'll come to shortly,
but the first was watching a TV documentary entitled 'Tsunami - where was God?'
Visiting that still wrecked part of the world where this nightmare disaster struck, the presenter sought to look at the horror through Muslim, Hindu, Catholic and Buddhist eyes and answer the question if there is a God, why does He allow such dreadful events.
It's a question that my Father used to ask me in my teens when I was called by Christ all the time - he was never happy with my answers! - but this program at least tried to go further, asking about the nature of evil itself and why evil exists in our world.

The responses, in general, were pretty passive and deterministic - life is the way it is, it's just God's will, or things are the best they can be, so until something better comes along (paradise, nirvana, or the like), we just have to knuckle down, carry the pain, and get on with it.
Human ideology in general has little choice here, whether that's expressed religiously or not, but when 'Christians' turn around and say that's essentially all they have to say as well, that's a serious cause for concern!

The Biblical view is that there is a very key reason why our world is in this state, and it's wholly related to human rebellion. That reason is actually so key, in fact, that Paul informs us that the whole of creation, the very fabric of nature, has been subject to futility, to decay, as a consequence, so this is most certainly NOT how the world was made, or how things should be.
Our evil as a race lies behind the problem - nothing more, nothing less.
It simply won't do for 'Christian' theologians or scientists to stand up and say to look at the book of Genesis as history is folly - The writers of the New Testament would then be fools, and the entire structure of historical Christianity would be scuttled beyond salvage.
We may face a time when the Biblical understanding is certainly being challenged in a comprehensive fashion, but it remarkable how quickly our so-called 'wisdom' about who and what we are can be changed.

Back in the 1990's, Egyptologist Dr David Rohl presented a new case for much of Biblical history which challenged the classical understanding of ancient history and introduced an stunning new chronology for our past. Over a decade later, whilst still controversial, his approach had now been expanded not only to include the history of the Old Testament, but of the ancient world as a whole in a very comprehensive fashion - all because one man started asking very pertinent questions about the 'established thinking' (His second book, Legend, also gives a key pointer as to why our 'reading' of earth's past itself may be in trouble).
The scriptures leave no doubt that when we're talking about such matters, we are dealing with history.

There's probably another reason that the concept of human rebellion being behind our current state is not popular.
In the movie, Avatar, we're presented with a world which, whilst it has it dangers, is actually viewed as whole by the natives - a symbiosis of consciousness in all living things which equates to the divine - a harmony broken by the arrival (surprise, surprise) of humanity.
What is interesting here is that there are parallels to some of the "Gaia" type thinking that underlies some of the approaches to the issue of climate change - it's our world, we are breaking it, and we can and will fix it. Of course, it's never as easy as we think, and in the movie, there has to be a redemptive work to heal the broken world of Pandora, just as for our earth, the answer to our evil, our detachment, our blindness, must come from outside of ourselves.
"Grace", notes Forde, "saves nature not by adding to it, or by raising it to some higher level, but by allowing it to be, once again, what it was intended to be - the good creation of His handiwork".

The aim and intention is not some human utopia, where we tame and master the world to our liking, but the splendor of all things truly expressed in a manner that reveals the profound 'weight' and majesty of His nature.

As I watched the movie, I marveled at the wonder of the realm created before my eyes, and pondered on the work that is to come - when all will be made new.
In this world where evil and its results are so apparent, we need to recognize the God at work through such trial - the depths of the cross - to herald the wonder that approaches.

Emperical Limits?

2009-12-21T09:28:00.000-08:00

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed". Albert Einstein.

"When the evening arrives, you say ' it will be fair weather' based upon the colour of the sky, and in the morning, 'it will be stormy today', based upon what you observe. You know how to interpret these things, but not the deeper signs" Jesus (Matthew 16:2&3).

We spend a fair amount of time in England talking about the weather - it's certainly a feature that throws up constant variations, even regarding just what kind of rain we'll have today - I understand that someone has even sought to provide a dictionary of words just to define that one aspect of our climate!
One consequence of this is the interesting relationship we have to our weather forecasts - not only because this gives us lots to complain about (MORE rain!), but for those occasions when the weathermen makes absolute howlers in terms of miss-judgments or mistakes, especially with regards to 'freak' incidents on a local level. It reminds me, somewhat of the variation in the 'themes' of a realm like physics, where Einstein's general image may apply for the 'big' view of the universe, but Quantum mechanics are a must when we seek to scrutinize the 'micro verse' that makes that much larger picture possible. Weather forecasting may give me a general idea of whether its OK to hang the washing out today, but it's often not that good at telling me how much frost or ice to expect on my drive this morning.

The reality is, however good our research, our data, our scrutiny of the information at hand, our understanding of what we even deem as basic reality is pretty limited, and it's even more stifling, as Einstein noted, if it doesn't lead us to a sense of wonder about what we are involved in. There needs to be something deeper going on here, and science itself is beginning to express some of the reasons as to why wonder lies at the heart of it.

In the last twenty years, the 'message' encoded within the language of DNA (and therefore, in every cell of our bodies) has begun to 'speak' plainly, showing that there is, in effect, a 'non-material aspect to all living systems' (Andy Mc Intosh - information & thermodynamics), and this discovery, as William Dembski, Stephen Meyer and others argue, places an intelligent origin of information at the very core of the existence of life.

We can view the world, be it through telescope or microscope, umbrella or sun shade, as merely something 'there', something we inter-act with from the cradle to the grave, and that's it,
or, we can begin to recognize the fact that there's something bigger going on here.

Don't merely read the natural 'signs', says Jesus - that makes us terribly limited.
Look deeper, look harder, look with fascination at the wonder of what we are, of where we are, and you will begin to realize that all of this is but a slight reflection of a far greater, deeper reality, a truth that can truly free us to appreciate the wonder not only of ourselves, but of the God who is there.

The Vital Realization

2009-12-20T00:22:00.000-08:00

Watching history documentaries, this time on the second world war, certainly gets you thinking...

When engaged in a conflict, you quickly become aware of the fact that your defenses are only as good as their weakest point - a reality, for example, all to painfully realized by the French and the British when facing the Nazi onslaught in 1940.
The same reality is evident when it comes to measuring the health of of our understanding of the Christian faith. There are clear reasons why we need to be those clothed in the armour of God. The Apostles identify many high minded schemes abroad in our world which are, in effect, strongholds against the truth of the Gospel, and only those fully equipped in the totality of truth can hope to stand against such bastions and engines of fatal deceit.

The imperative of being so adorned and trained to fight raises a question that many theologians and teachers of our day avoid, hence showing their resignation to alien concepts, adopted from outside of the faith.
What would Christianity have become if Paul and company had not contended against the supposed insights and imperatives of the philosophical and religious arguments of their day, but had merely responded to these with a welcoming accommodation of such views? What would have become of the uniqueness of the revelation of God working through creation, especially the Incarnation, to redeem the world?

The pain of falsehood, evidenced even amongst that first generation of Christians who departed from the Apostles doctrine, would have overwhelmed the faith, and would have left the modern world with nothing but the slightest echo of the marvel of God saving our wretched race from its own blindness and poverty.

Falsehood, of course, has made itself keenly felt over the centuries within Christendom - the blanket of error and deceit which descended, especially from the early third century onwards, as dualism became the source of so many 'christian' beliefs and practices, leaves no doubt where such murderous accommodation leads. It drains the essential Christian message regarding our creation, our fall and our redemption through God's love and reconciliation of this world of it's strength, and leaves us aspiring to some vague hope of a saving of the soul, not the actual handiwork of God, made very good for His refreshment and purpose.

It is with these considerations in mind that we would do well to take account of the inroads of theistic evolution into the contemporary Christian fold.
As several theologians have recently affirmed in the work, Should Christians Accept Evolution, the real poison here is not the acceptance of some 'new' understanding, supplied by science, of our nature and purpose, but the accommodation of a very old lie concerning life and humanity - that we are merely 'natural' creatures, entirely defined and constrained by the 'natural' realms of death and suffering, and that the Biblical message concerning a good Creation by a good God has no viable bearing on such realities - salvation, if real at all, merely equates, as it did for the Greeks, to an escape from such an inherently dark and consistently cruel world.

There can be little doubt that modern science raises questions that may indeed be hard to answer regarding the nature of our planet, but faith answers first and foremost with a clear and certain response - that a Good God framed and formed the heavens and the earth at the beginning,
that He made us, placed us in the midst of the good work, and it was then that we marred this realm by our deeds, bringing death upon it and ourselves. This is the malady that the one true remedy of Christ's redeeming work resolves, and to empty the faith of this reality is to leave us bare, clutching the merest leaves of religion in an entirely bleak and barren world.

The Gospel is unchanging, and our faith, our living and contending, must always derive from this unchanging reality.

Immeasurable Grace

2009-11-29T03:22:00.000-08:00

"Creation is the highest act of giving" William Dembski.

It's been a pretty intense month. Amidst extra early morning work shifts, fighting off viruses, and networking through a new local arts group, I've have spent the last fortnight working my way through William Dembski's new work, "The End of Christianity - Finding a Good God in an Evil World", a Theodicy in response to several recent atheist attacks on the relevance of Christianity in the 21st century.

There's plenty here that will trouble Christians - it certainly raised questions for me - as he seeks to reconcile the origins of natural evil through the fall with the "if" of an old creation, seeing the effects of Adam's transgression being applied to the world in the same fashion as Christ's work of redemption - both forward and backward in human history.

Whilst I'm certainly not sold on this approach (though fascinated to study more regarding the distinctions between chronological and kardiological time), it would be entirely wrong to dismiss this work purely on that basis. Mr Dembski entirely embraces the critically central foundation of God as Creator, of a historical fall and of a redemption of the created order through the work and righteousness of Jesus Christ (the first four chapters of the book), and this means that amidst the outworking of his arguments, this work is laden with a rich understanding of the nature of the Godhead and the work of the trinity within our world.

The third section of the work really focuses upon this, looking at how the 'knowledge' of God has invested creation with the Creator's life, hence, our ability to see so much wonder, wisdom and beauty, even in our broken world. Dembski then argues how our own desire to create - to give deeply of ourselves to the benefit of others - stems from that same source. It is because God is at work here and now, that Christ is reconciling the creation to Himself, that Creation "speaks" so deeply to us of Him as His handiwork, granting us that glimpse that beyond the horror of what we now are, there is a sure and certain hope - a world remedied and healed, yet also enhanced by the harvest gleaned through the pain and the sorrow.

As someone seeking to work artistically in this environ, I found much of this aspect of the book deeply true and compelling, allowing insights into the wonder of both God's character and His mercies to us.

"The ultimate expression", writes the author in the final chapter, "of our divine image is to allow ourselves to be moved (by the love of God conveyed in Redemption) to the point of sacrifice, with the motive of moving others to a point of union with... that love".

May our lives indeed share the richness of that 'sweet savor'.

Tumbling Down

2009-11-08T03:12:00.000-08:00

Some walls are built on pride
Some keep the child inside
Some walls are made in fear
That love let go will disappear

How will we ever know what might be found
Until we let the walls come tumbling down

Walls by Cara Dillon

The world is filled with them - barriers, gates, fences - a plethora of means designed for one single purpose: to keep things out, and yet, in most cases, such barriers fail. We remain completely naked before a barrage of all manner of possible troubles, within and without,
but we still keep building our walls, outside and in, with stone and cement, and philosophy and vain invention.
What was it the song said:
I've built walls, A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.
I am a rock, I am an island.

It's no wonder the next verse begins 'don't talk of love'. Love is the only 'house' where we can truly find a refuge from this pain, and that is because love defines the eternal relationship and actions of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - love they wish to convey and share with this broken, fenced-up world.

The gospel informs us that in the moment of His death in the crucifixion, the thick, heavy veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom, meaning that the ultimate wall of division between God and Man, the huge chasm made by our rebellion in Eden, had been healed. Because of this, Paul informs us that the wall of division between people, whatever their creed, culture or colour has been removed, and humanity will be made anew in the new man, Jesus Christ.

At a time when so many of our barriers, our troubles, seem insurmountable, be it the crisis of the world, our own family, or just our own hearts, here is our one true hope - a haven in the storm.

The walls are going to fall, soon enough. Embrace that reality, and that day will truly come with joy.

The 'inventions' of reductionism

2009-10-31T07:43:00.000-07:00

Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people "Peace, peace," and there is no peace! Luther's 95 theses.

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published his work on the movement of the celestial spheres, and thus was born the modern understanding of our universe and the contemporary approach to astrophysics. Copernicus, like Kepler and Newton, believed that his discoveries and observations allowed insight into a wisdom and knowledge inherent within the very design of the physical universe, so it's certainly strange that in our own times, the view known as the 'Copernican Principal' actually asserts that there is nothing special regarding the position/location of the earth within the universe.

This is a fascinating example of endeavor (in this case, to study the wonders of creation, and gain insight into their source) where the original intent is lost or entirely over-written for another purpose, and it happens all the time.

This week, for example, I learned about the new literary movement entitled "mundane" science fiction. Rather than applying the 'grand' themes and ideas of prior (golden) eras of the genre - space travel, bold adventure, and the like, the aim here is to confine writers to works which are possible to known science. It sounded of interest, but when I began to listen to those talking up the new aim, I quickly became aware of flaws and worryingly demeaning blind spots in the philosophy of such a venture - errors which effectively blight an understanding of what inspires and produces not only good material in this genre, but painfully obvious mistakes about the links between "pulp" and "pop" sci-fi, and fields such as technological advance - just look, for example, at the 'predictions' regarding future technology on the original series of Star Trek, and our present generation to see how many have become everyday items.

This week, a respected report was issued here in the UK which strongly advocated that human beings end eating meat to aid in halting - you've guessed it - climate change. Apparently, our use of livestock in this fashion is simply placing too much strain on the environment in producing certain greenhouse gases, so the responsible answer is a scheme to remove the problem entirely.

Now let me say I love science - the sense of wonder gained from learning new things about this world is often truly marvelous - and I love science fiction (I'm very much a 'golden era' man) and I'm happy to apply common sense to how I use things - food, energy and the like, but all of the above ventures strike me as having a common flaw.

In the 1500's, Rome decided to set upon a great scheme to build a new basilica, and to use the ecclesiastical machinery at its disposal to literally indulge upon the population of Europe to finance such an enterprise. Mercifully, there was a young monk who was troubled and able enough to raise concerns about the whole matter, and the results, as they say, are history.

There's been much written to say that what troubled Luther is old news, that whilst 'minor' matters may need attention, what happened then is pretty over and done with, but that is effectively looking at the matter, like the others I've touched on, from a very narrow and therefore dangerous perspective.
The major question of those times was what truly makes a person right before God, and Luther's answer stems directly from the Gospel - unmerited grace, imputed to us through the gift of faith.

It may not be popular to hold to certain views right now - in some cases, it's actually becoming quite dangerous! - but they need to be expressed none the less.

Luther stood against the power and authority structures of his time, and thereby allowed a renewing of faith in the undiluted riches of Gods justifying work which aided in generating a flowering of rich spirituality in the contemporary world. It is imperative that such standing to be counted regarding the inherent nature of the gospel be evidenced today, so with that in mind,
I'm delighted to be writing this on Reformation day.

Table Talk

2009-10-25T03:05:00.000-07:00

"Sounds just like old times"
Aunt Meg - Twister

I love this scene from this wonderful movie. In the midst of all the chaos and mayhem of a world invaded and torn by tornadoes, equally mirrored by the trails and joys of the relationship between Bill and Jo, this eclectic and bold band of brilliant yet flawed people take time to break off from their venture to sit, eat, and enjoy the richness of their friendship, their bond, and the goals which unite them.

Over the last decade and a half, I've had the joy of spending time like this a few times a year with friends from all over the UK as we gather to engage in our fondness for Science Fiction (yes, especially classic Star Trek). There's lots of fun moments, lots of debate, lots of watching of new shows and discussion of new books, but what really has grown from a common interest is enduring friendship.
Last year, one of my longest standing friends in the group got married, and we all attended and certainly gave a particular wrinkle to the day. The wedding, and the groom's stag day (where the highlights were Laser quest and Bowling) a few weeks before were moments that were drenched in the richness of friendship - surely, one of the greatest gifts of life.

Towards the end of their three years together, Jesus spoke of how the men and women He had spent so much time with on the road, in strange and adverse situations, were not just disciples, but His friends. That's a remarkable truth, but it's a wonder that God has wanted to share with us ever since those first days, when He would walk with Adam in the garden.
There is something just so genuinely good, earthy and so deeply enriching about genuine friendship, and God, in spite of our fall, our distance from His marvelous goodness, is gracious to us, and seeks to restore all that is good through the one who has truly become the friend of sinners through His death and resurrection.

It means that there really is a deep significance to our lives, our inter-connection here, and that just makes these marvelous moments even more special...

Anyone for steak and eggs?

In Small Corners

2009-10-03T03:07:00.000-07:00

"I just want her back"
Agent Tom Greer

Whilst Director Johnathan Mostow's latest Sci-Fi release gained only mediocre reviews from the critics, Surrogates raises some major issues in relation to human identity.
Set around a decade from now, we are presented with a society where people appear cushioned from pain and harm by living much of their lives via the safety of being wired to a substitute alter ego - a robot which engages with the world, allowing dreams and fantasies to be fulfilled without danger or, apparently, remorse or guilt. Into this paradise, however, comes death, a murderer which destroys both ghola and user in an instant, exposing the terrifying frailty of the 'system' that everyone considers 'safe' and strengthening in our principal characters the fact that this virtual existence has merely distracted from but in no way dealt with the true wounds and trails of being human.

Key to the story is the manner in which two leading characters deal with the agony of loss.
Detective Tom Greer, played by Bruce Willis, and Inventor of the Virtual life, Dr Lionel Canter, come to epitomize two very different reactions to our reality, and in Greer's final choice in the film, we find ourselves facing a hard question - 'how real about ourselves do we really want to be'?

The issues raised in Surrogates will become pressing to all of us during our lives. Amidst the bobbing and weaving to solve the crime, Willis' character seeks to look beyond the immediate and the superficial (both in the case, and in his experience) to reach for deeper answers to the void of his society and his life.

As someone who knows well the manner of personal trails conveyed here, I've found myself several times this week pondering several of the issues the movie raised. How many of us are reduced, even imprisoned, through the tragedies that real grief and loss bring upon us? How often can life become little more than a nightmare to be avoided as much and as often as possible?

Tom Greer, like us, whilst having moments of brilliance, is a deeply flawed and wounded man, but that realization motivates him to ask the right questions and to seek a better answer.

At its very heart, Christianity is about facing the real world. It's not about fanciful illusions, where we just accept ourselves as a slightly evolved species, essentially just here for a good time, but a faith which drags us before the deepest longings and understanding in our souls - that the beauty we know in love, the majesty we view in creation, the passion we encounter in life, resonates with the fact that there is much, much more going on than the oft vaunted facile/popular escapism (philosophically and practically) often tagged 'life'.

Jesus Christ came to not only return significance to His handiwork, but to define that 'weight' in our lives - intimacy, profoundly genuine, with God, with each other, and with creation. That is the objective of divine redemption.

Facing the pain of who and what we are is not easy, but as in the movie, it is as this is done, in the light of Christ's teaching regarding our true wonder (made by God) and our catastrophic fall (rebellion from Him), that reality will once more fall into place, and freedom can be found in God's healing grace and mercy.
Life now is stained by the horror of our enslavement to lies and their consequences, but the day is approaching when that will be over, and humanity will start afresh, healed from these times.

No One

2009-09-19T05:30:00.000-07:00

"I'm gonna find someone, someday, who might actually treat me well".

Taylor Swift - White Horse.

This week, a mother killed herself and her disabled child in a car fire after enduring almost ten years of continuous bullying and intimidation by a local gang of youths.
Fiona Pilkington had called the police to intervene in this matter many times, but nothing was ever done.

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of this kind of cruelty (and I have) knows how soul destroying just a few incidents, never mind a decades worth can be, but why, why, was the only way out for this poor woman to take her own life? Why do we continue to live in a world so scarred by the vile cruelty that one person can inflict upon another?

It stems from not loosing, but clinging to our own religion - the one we garbed ourselves with once we'd rebelled. The immediate consequence of our fall was that we were entirely and totally naked, not just outwardly, but at our very core, and so, because of that horror, we are inherently crooked and divorced when it comes to any form of true intercourse with our world, our neighbor, and especially our Creator, as well as ourselves. In every way, the beauty of the intimacy that was to mark us as being made in God's image has become torn and lacerated, so the natural reaction is to react selfishly, cruelly, towards anyone or anything we deem 'dangerous'... an image of the better creatures we are meant to be.

The flip side of this pain is the need to be what we should be, to know genuine warmth, love and care - to move towards a genuine intimacy in life, and that can often seem so beyond us; an empty dream in a broken world.

Within all the ugly mess, there is hope, for there is a healer, and that person is Jesus Christ.
His broken body, His cruel and ugly death, His giving of Himself, was God bringing genuine,
redeeming love back into our darkness and despair,
to lift eyes, given new sight, to see a day when this broken thing is healed,
and the connection, the beauty, we so deeply crave, will be the reality of heaven and earth.

Beyond all the pain, there's a new day coming.

Gone for Good?

2009-09-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

"For the things we see are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal"
Paul.

Have you ever tried living in a home that is undergoing major renovation? Perhaps you have been spared the total mayhem, frustration and sheer 'scream-ability' that can ensue from such a venture, but it can also give us an image of the spiritual realities of the present - life going on 'between' the two realms of the fallen and the redeemed. It can also give us a better way of approaching the apparent contradictions we face in the tension of this existence.

Some things seem pretty 'solid' within such a project - the foundations of the house, the ground floor, those things which are tenable and immediate that we readily depend upon to give us reference and an amount of definition in our everyday lives. Grace is most certainly found here. The God who placed the seal of His promise in the sky equally hallows every day with the provision of sun and rain, seed-time and harvest, and uses the fruits of that order, bread and wine, to speak to us of the marvel of His redeeming work. Such mercies cannot help but to raise our eyes, and make us wonder about other "levels" of the 'house' we have been promised;
surely, we now have no abiding place here, so should we not climb the stairs....

The Apostle who spoke, guardedly, of the wonders to come, also spoke of how, by experience, he came to learn that God's grace in the here and now, is entirely sufficient, for the present, and there is a key reason for this...

After His feeding of a great crowd, Jesus commanded the disciples to collect all that was left from the feast. Whilst all the Gospels record the event, John tells us that the reason for doing so was so that 'nothing may be lost' (John 6:12).
When Jesus spoke about Hell, He often used the image of Gehenna, the local rubbish tip outside of Jerusalem, which was filled with things which had become spoiled and wasted.
The focus of Christ's great work amongst us is to truly SAVE that which was lost, corrupted by sin and death. There is, then, a 'gathering', a 'reconciling' aspect to our current engagement with this present temporal realm, a life which can savor and fragrance what would otherwise be fit only for the fire, because it can bring heaven down to earth, and grant us to glimpse how God, in Christ, has made the way open to the 'many realms' that are coming.

In His good work, nothing shall be lost.

Art and Grace

2009-09-07T03:37:00.000-07:00

"Look at the world around you. It supplies all your bodily needs. It feasts your eyes with beauty. It's glory reflects the glory of God, and so it feasts your soul".

John Chrysostom.

Last week brought a time of trail and challenge leading to unforeseen assistance and rich creativity in my seeking to run an arts workshop, (which I've written about further here).
It reminded me, once again, just how important it is to recognize the deeper, the spiritual, within all that we do, especially our creative activities, which it's easy to mis-construe due to certain forms of spirituality as alien and excluded from the Christian life.

With those considerations in mind, I've placed below a paper on the subject that you might find of interest, and I'd be happy to hear your feedback, thoughts and comments. I hope it proves useful to anyone thinking about or engaged in this field:

Seeing the Rainbow
Redemptive Insights for the Arts.
By Howard Nowlan

“Although we live in the present, we do not contend according to the current trends or views. The instruments we employ in our struggle are empowered before God to demoralise and confuse those theories and world-views that suppositionally work against a true knowledge of God. Our testimony seeks to bring everything to the Lordship of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).

“Regarding life in general, whatever is true, worthy of reverence, honorable, lovely and lovable, whatever is pure, whatever is kind, winsome or gracious, wherever there is virtue or excellence, if there is something worthy of praise, consider and weigh up such things and fix your thoughts upon these”. (Philippians 4:8).

Introduction

Some years ago, I had an experience that has always remained with me when I consider my engagement with art. I was on a visit to the British museum, and had spent a few hours exploring the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian galleries – countless stele, inscriptions, sarcophagi and the like. I then came to a point of transformation. I entered a small, circular room, which contained a single sculpture – an almost life-like white marble representation of Diana bathing. This simple but striking moment informed me that I had moved into the realm of the Greeks.

My immediate impression in that room was that I had crossed a threshold; from the dark, somewhat primitive ancient past into the era of modern civilisation. Here was clearly something that looked more human, more natural, than all those strange galleries that had preceded this vision. I was transfixed – the very response, no doubt, that the artist had hoped for. It was only later that I reflected on the problems with the startling image in that room.

Genuine divinity or humanity, of course, have to be something deeper than that marble vision, and whilst I still revel at such beauty in art, this image serves us well in this session, and I will explain why.

I often recall that very experience when I think of the day when Paul found himself troubled amidst the numerous supposedly ‘divine’ figures in the city of Athens (Acts 17:16). Outwardly, no doubt, many of them were as beautiful as the sculpture of the naked Diana I viewed in the British Museum, but like that image, they spoke of something far deeper to the Apostle, an inherent (often willful) ignorance within that particular culture when it came to the issue of very nature of reality.

In unpacking the reasons behind Paul’s grief and anger on that day, we can really begin to gain an insight into some of the problems we face with some of the attitudes and intentions in a diverse array of artistic endeavors in our own age, and equally, I think, begin to glean something of a understanding of the way we can productively engage with and involve ourselves in art – in terms of either examination or participation. So let’s look at the Athens incident a little deeper.

The Broken Fiber
Inherent in our tasting and testing of all things will be a discernment regarding both the structure (the composition and nature) and the direction (the objective) of the item or supposition that is before us. That may sound a little complex, so think of this in terms of applying a ‘salt and light’ test of the kind that Jesus Himself provides (Matthew 5:13) to Paul’s day and encounter at Athens.

Calvin Seerveld notes that when it comes to Greek art, there was an inherent fracture that essentially tainted their entire world view.

Plato, for example, viewed poets and the like as mad, and sculptors and artisans were generally tolerated as menials, hired labour; indulged because of their product.
The West today tends to admire the Greeks for their achievements, but in this quite common aristocratic attitude of their day, which actually abhorred direct labor within the physical world, we can identify a key problem in Greek living and gain our first foothold into Christianity’s aversion of this philosophy.

The artists of that time were not seeking to fashion a genuine expression of either their own world or the divine; they were conforming their work to an ideology where, as Paul would write to the Romans, the genuine glory of both God and His creation is exchanged for forms and images that conform to our present demeaned notions of spirituality (Romans 1:23).

The Christian’s concern regarding the images that surround us today, equally cannot be merely at the immediate level – the ‘who, why and where’ are going to be key in how we view and weigh these things.

Paul was angered not because what he saw had no artistic form or skill, but because these very gifts were being employed to propagate a lie concerning the nature of God and Mankind.

How is it really possible for a culture to adore and venerate a female persona as divine, for example, when its most inspired teachers declared women to be ‘mutilated males, without souls’ (Aristotle – De Generatione Animalium)? Amongst the Greeks, the female actually represented the realm of “matter and the body, of imperfection” (Phillip Samson – The Body), only enlightened men were close to truth.
How different to the Biblical understanding, where, for example, in Ephesians we are informed that in the physical union of man and woman as one flesh, brings us the closest image possible of the spiritual bond that has occurred between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:31,32).

The inherent lie within so much ‘beautiful’ art and philosophy is that the material world does not really matter; we can spurn its claims either by Platonic or Epicurean belief and thereby dissect the body and the soul. The world denies the God in whom we now ‘live and move and have our being’, and that is bad enough, but the pain for the Christian seeking to be true to their faith in understanding and action does not end there.

Hollywood film producer Ralph Winter notes that the place where there is least understanding of His work and vocation is amongst those that he encounters at church. How can a Christian, they ask, be involved in making science fiction or supernatural comedy? How can someone like Rene Russo, they ask, claim to be a Christian and appear unclothed on screen?
The assumption, of course, is that true righteousness views such activity as unclean, but as we hinted at the beginning, could it be that this ‘do not’ approach has actually swallowed the same poison as the Greeks? It is time to face the full force Paul’s message to the philosopher’s head on!

Tearing Down and Building Up

Sharing the Christian message, notes John Frame, is all about meaningfully expressing the reason that we have the hope that we do, so, what kind of argument is Paul making for our faith against the reasoning of his day?
It’s actually quite familiar. Here’s a snippet – a slightly amended rendition - of a recent popular version entitled The Unquiet Dead:

Charles Dickens: We must be under some mesmeric influence
The Doctor: No we’re not, this is really happening
Dickens: Poppycock! – I saw nothing but an illusion
Doctor: If you’re going to deny what really happened, don’t waste my time
Dickens: There must be some mechanism behind all this
Doctor: Oh come on Charles, you can see what’s happening
Dickens: Can it be that I have the world entirely wrong?
Doctor: Not entirely – there’s just much more to learn

The shock of Christianity is that it brings us to realise that the forces we often take for granted – the power of sin and death – are not natural or good; they are alien to the life God created and is seeking to renew through His redemptive work in Jesus Christ. This world will be a place where landscapes and life exist unbent by the forces of entropy and decay. What will it be like to inhabit such a universe?

The conclusion of all human understanding of the present is that it is fleeting, leaving us like the teacher in ecclesiaties, with nothing of value; so we must merely enjoy the moment or transcend to a higher realm, but that is not the case. Paul tells the wise of his day that God has concluded the entire value and meaning of history in an event in the life of one man – the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ (Acts 17:32).
No more disembodied realms beyond, no more about it being over at the grave – this man defines the future – and the future will be as real as our being here now.
The entire realm of creation, writes Paul, is currently groaning for the day when this same Jesus will bring about the resurrection of God’s children, that this order may become the delight that it is truly meant to be. God is revealed in Jesus Christ for a specific purpose – to reconcile this world, and all creation with it, to Him.

Perhaps now we can also begin to see why the Christian who seeks to totally rubbish those involved in the arts is actually on very thin ice. The attitude toward life and the body imported from the Greeks into Christianity by Augustine and others does not sit well with the actual kind of life that is supposed to be seen amongst us.

Don’t allow your faith to become spoiled, notes Paul, by deceitful ideas that miss-understand the nature of the spiritual. Do not accept the notion that by abiding to countless rules with regards to diet, clothing, religious duties and the like, you will become a more ‘spiritual’ person; these things are like specters before the substance found in Jesus Christ. You have escaped this nonsense, so do not give ground to the ‘do not touch, do not taste’ fraud again, because there is no value in it (Colossians 2).

It is only when we see God’s work impacting upon our lives in this direct and relevant way that we can take up our vocation – whether that be dancing, writing, painting or preaching – and use it well, invest it with value. If we ignore or spurn the Apostle’s guidance, then we will effectively bury the very resources that God has granted each of us to express the richness of His life within the world.

What is needed, then, amongst Christians is a creational approach to life, what some have called the ‘Reformation of the Natural’ (Wittmer) because God’s work in creation is established, underpinned and finally brought to full expression through the Redemptive work of our Lord and Saviour.
Christ, the one who made all things, came as the peacemaker that all things in heaven and earth may be reconciled to Him (Paul to the Colossians).

“Picture a diver”, writes C S Lewis, “stripping off his clothes until naked, then hanging for a moment as he jumps high into the air, before going down into the deep pitch black – cold, freezing as he descends to the bottom, to the very mud and slime, and then up, back towards the light, his lungs aching, as he bursts out upon the surface, holding in his hand the thing he went so deep to gain. This thing is our redemption, but not only ours – all things: a renewed universe”. (The Grand Miracle)

A Few Pointers

When we look at Christianity, we see that this revelation is at the heart, not only of God’s general revelation of Himself (Genesis 1&2), but equally in the acceptance of the revelation of Jesus Christ. The Word, notes John, is the one who made all things, so we have to forsake any secular or dualistic attitude to vocation that inherently detaches itself from Him.

Through Christ, we will reject a deformed or negating understanding of what has truly occurred on earth in the events of creation, fall and redemption. Our lives will seek to express and address these things, and art can be a very striking and viable means of doing so. The Christian true to their calling will live in interactive correspondence with the passages we read at the beginning, and that flavour will prove to be something savouring and telling to those we encounter.

If we really are those who trust in the one who has made everything beautiful in its time and placed eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), then our engagement with life will provide some insight to others that will aid against, as one scientist puts it, “the key human illness of fragmentation” – the inability to genuinely “assimilate the experience of the depth of beauty and meaning” around us (Bohm – Creativity). “If we understand that all matter is God-breathed, we will not merely view it as a vehicle for an idea, or an inconvenient veil to be penetrated and then abandoned. We will discover ‘the fascinating, the mysterious, oft times frustrating and occasionally exhilarating experience of being lead along ‘in conversation’ with the material realm, so that our engagement works best as one dancer put it, when the dance has danced you” (Brand and Chaplin – Art and Soul). This will undoubtedly involve risk-taking and learning from what people state that will bring about constructive, valid changes to our work. Because of where our certainty lies, our engagement with the arts, whether it is in the form of writing or performing, painting or merely understanding, can be true and honest, because our conviction and confidence rests within a certain reality concerning the nature and future of all things.

Let me summarize through the words of a favorite artist:
"An artist explores enlightenment through the material world. Unfortunately, the nature – the material of us is often dismissed as ungodly. It's an old concept in our culture that the material world is the work of the devil and to be seeking after God, you have to dismiss this. I think the opposite is really true. The material world is really something both sacred and spiritual, and the artist, if he neglects that, is being driven by cultural forces that are making a mistake. We explore our spirituality through the material". (Roger Dean: Views DVD Biography)

God, in Christ Incarnate, is reconciling the material world to Himself.
May our lives and our enjoyment and engagement with art reflect this.

Reference Material:

Calvin Seerveld – Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves – Piquant 2000
Philip J Sampson – Six Modern Myths – IVP 2000
John M Frame – Apologetics to the Glory of God – P&R 1994
BBC Television – Dr Who: The Unquiet Dead – Aired April 2005
Michael E Wittmer – Heaven is a Place on Earth – Zondervan 2004
C S Lewis – God in the Dock – Harper-Collins 1971
David Bohm – Creativity – Routledge Press 1998
Hilary Brand & Adrienne Chaplin – Art & Soul – Solway 1999
Roger Dean: Views: The Authorised Biography (DVD) – Classic Rock 2002

The Powers at Work

2009-09-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

This song has been playing on my thoughts a great deal of late. I first heard it in the 1970's, when studying some of the horrors of the modern world, but it could have been written this week.
As someone wisely commented on You Tube, it's not about politics, but the inherent human condition which motivates us to so butcher our world and each other.
As another famous sixties song put it, 'there has to be a way out of here', and it has to be changing the human condition, and there's only one person who has ever lived who can truly do that.

"From the heart of man", noted Jesus, comes all this darkness. Christ alone is the light that will herald a day beyond such pain and blind folly.

Until that day, the words of this song will continue to tell it as it really is -
a race on the brink....

The eastern world, it is exploding
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’
You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’

But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

Don’t you understand what I’m tryin’ to say
Can’t you feel the fears I’m feelin’ today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save, with the world in a grave
[Take a look around ya boy, it's bound to scare ya boy]

And you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

Yeah, my blood’s so mad feels like coagulatin’
I’m sitting here just contemplatin’
I can’t twist  the truth, it knows no regulation.
Handful of senators don’t pass legislation
And marches alone can’t bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin’
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’

And you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama
You may leave here for 4 days in space
But when you return, it’s the same old place
The poundin’ of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead, but don’t leave a trace
Hate your next-door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace
And… tell me over and over and over and over again, my friend
You don’t believe
We’re on the eve
Of destruction
Mm, no no, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

(There was a video here, but the powers that be have removed it's use on You Tube, etc... I wonder why).

The Glory of it All

2009-08-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

"What God esteems beautiful is that which presents in its perfection all the fitness of art, and that which tends to the usefulness of its end.
He, then, who proposed to Himself a manifest design in His works, approved each one of them, as fulfilling its end in accordance with His creative purpose".

Basil - The Hexameron.

"Life", said Marvin (in Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy) - "don't talk to me about it".

It certainly can be a struggle at the best of times. Whatever we do, or try to do, we live
in the knowledge that everything is surely running in a particular direction - and if we think about it, it's very disquieting. You could actually define the future as when everything now living will be dead, and what natural order remains, due to entropy, will be truly and entirely diminished.
No wonder Marvin felt so constantly depressed regarding the general futility of it all -
global warming and climate change are peanuts before such forces.

It all seems a very, very long way from the 'very good' final day of that original creation week,
when everything was marked by a very different state of play - a creation that could have known an existence marked by the absence of the death and corruption that now so scars our times.

It's almost impossible for us, beyond teasing 'glints' through imagination, to conceive of such a world - where death and decay as the dominant forces of existence would simply have been unknown - but we most certainly long for such a splendor. Our deepest joys and aspirations resonate with the possibility of once more tasting and knowing such a reality - a harking after a moment encountered by our race, so long ago in the garden.

It would be easy for us to just seek to ignore that call - to just live within the tunnel of the here and now, but most of us know that simply just won't do - to become so narrow in our aims leaves us like Marvin, totally depressed. We know there is more, even here, amongst the wastelands of a realm gone bad. The rain may make most days gray and miserable (we can tell you all about that here in England!), but when the dawn breaks upon a fresh, bright day, we are reminded that there's something more.

There's a verse in one of Paul's letters to the Corinthians that is truly amazing.
Referring back to the original moments of the creation work itself, the Apostle states:
"God, who commanded the light to shine out of the darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Right back at the start, Genesis says, the earth was created 'without form, and void'.
Right now, we have a universe scorched by chaos, corruption and decay.
It would be the easiest thing to look at such desolation and conclude it was valueless - naturally, there's nothing to be done with it, but the same miracle, notes the scriptures, that brought light and thereby order into the original wasteland is now at work once more in this fallen order, and so there's a way which will allow us to look and to take the first step once more beyond the corruption.

The futility of this present life can often leave us so wanting, needing, a release from the bondage that the consequences of our fall has placed upon us, but even the fragile moments of beauty we occasionally encounter now profoundly affirm that 'the old field' of time, space, matter and the natural senses can be 'weeded, dug and sown for a new crop.... We may be tired of this old field, but God is not' (C S Lewis: The New Creation).

Beneath the 'natural' state of play - the cycle of mortality - there is another power at work in our benighted realm. The goal is renewal and redemption of all that was intended and purposed for good, and the guarantee of that end is the person and work of Jesus Christ.

As I face yet another 'summer' week of bleak skies, heavy with yet more rain (Marvin would approve), I reflect on the fact that the dawn is approaching where that marvelous light, which clothed creation before the sun and moon, will once more adorn this realm - the light which rises in us when we understand that through Christ, God breaks the slavery of our bondage to this present terrible decay.

Christ's life, death, resurrection and ascension marks the fact that this present realm is not the conclusion of existence - we were not simply made to be bent low beneath the tyranny of the temporal, but to live, boldly and brightly, as whole creatures within a glorious creation, infused with the marvel and the splendor of its creator and sustainer. That is what is on the way.

Till the day truly dawns, we have a hope that keeps us from being very depressed -
something to ponder amidst the gray.

Piercing the depths...

2009-08-09T03:03:00.000-07:00

"In this - the initial work of Creation - as elsewhere, we see the familiar pattern -
descent by God to the formless earth and re-ascent from the formless to the finished.
In this sense, a certain degree of 'development' is inherent within the Christian faith".

C S Lewis - The Grand Miracle

"Christ took the bread from Creation and said of it, "This is My Body".
In like manner, he took of the wine, made by the earth and said, "This is my Blood".

Gustaf Wingren - Man and the Incarnation

The deepest riches of our lives here are not determined by our 'possessing' a particular amount of things (because, in reality, we only borrow such things for a time, and that even includes the very time and frame we currently inhabit) -
but those precious moments when we so powerfully and honestly taste through giving of the true marvel and affection of another.

During my years as a married man before losing my wife to cancer, I came to understand how extraordinary it was to truly share yourself with another person - to truly love. The bonds which grows through such a fusion truly infuse life with a beauty and a wealth which, even in the case of loss, continue to motivate and drive a person. This has certainly been the case for me, not only in my continuing after losing Kay, but in both my creative work as a photographer and in my forging new relationships with new friends.

Marriage, genuine relationships, and, hopefully, our communion with each other in the faith, allows us to form ties with each other that carry the potential for something astonishing - our continuing to be 'clay jars', but earthen things which actually house a 'taste' of something truly profound - the weight of the gift of God's love, shed abroad within us.

The Creation account in Genesis tells us something stunning in this regard.
The Almighty God does not merely conceptualize and then just 'speak' the realms into existence in an instant. Those opening verses speak of the initial work becoming an act -
the Spirit brooding over the formless and the crude,
the Word, present from the beginning, being the very means to bring order to that initial mass.

Here we see how the very act of God in this work is one of Sovereign yet intimate care, of a giving to bring about a 'glory' that, through ages we have yet to comprehend, will truly express and honor the character of the love shared within the community of the Trinity.

The deep works of God are often a mystery -
Creation, Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection.
They all resonate with the truth we witness even in nature, that the yielding to something greater than ourselves, even to death, brings the miracle of something more significant.

There are moments, when working with a camera, where I can glimpse the intended significance of another human being, made to carry the image of their Creator. It is both overwhelmingly attractive and shockingly alarming at the same time, for those moments so poignantly connect to the reflections of the Psalmist - 'what is man, that you are mindful of him?'

The book of Hebrews tells us that we have yet to see the fulfillment of work of God that will herald the day when humanity become the creature that the psalmist snap-shots: truly 'crowned' with its true significance, but Hebrews confirms our expectations by telling us that we now see Jesus - the one humbled to death for our redemption, now risen and glorified - the first, and equally the finisher of that deepest of works within all that He has made.

The world is twisted in the futility and the frustration of being still so distant from its true estate, but within the deep things of God, worked within the very midst of creation from the very moment of the initial beginning, we can find aid and comfort, direction and assurance, in this, our time of need, for the aim of 'all things' is to allow us to see Jesus, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, who has come to make, by means of redemption, creation all that it was intended to be -
a realm suffused with the affection and character of its maker and savior.

Beyond immediate pretense...

2009-08-02T04:11:00.000-07:00

"The hunger, and the longing, everyone of us knows inside,
Could be the bridge between us".

Amy Grant - Turn this world around.

As a photographer, the tools of my trade are often those elements which might be deemed 'beautiful' - light and shade, texture and tone, form and posture, but just having certain elements around you does not equate to actually making a good image - they certainly help, but you have to break some eggs to make a good omelet!

I recall listening to the photographer Jock Sturges recently, and how he was commissioned to work with a very famous model on a fashion shoot, which he dutifully covered, but there was no 'connection' between himself and the person in the images, and because of that, he would never use the work himself and viewed the event as meaningless.

We often work at a pretty superficial level in secular society. The goal much of the time is to fulfill immediate wants and needs without delving deeper into why or what such attitudes (living for now) really say about us - what are we actually running away from, and why this addiction to the immediate instead of deeper pursuits?

There is clearly a difference in our relationship to others and to life in general when we not only interact with them in a transitory fashion, but begin to appreciate, to value them, for who or what they really are - that the beauty of a personality, of the world around us, is an astonishing, intricate and complex reality, that can consume our own selves in the wonder of a more richer and satisfying contemplation, making us truly wealthier people.

The art of photography has really brought home to me the fact that the person before me is not just an object - a 'body' to photograph and then ignore. The joy of this craft is to discover the treasure of the person which embodies the physical 'frame', and to seek to bring out the far weightier beauty of who they are in what is captured in the images.
It is what is within that animates and 'clothes' the outward grace of our bodies, and if there is no one at home, then you will only capture dull photos, no matter how long you photo shop them!

In the early chapters of Genesis, there is a clear illustration of the difference between the genuinely enriching and the grotesquely, inherently contrived.

When Adam looks upon Eve for the first time, he comprehends a person who is totally unique and yet entirely compatible with his own existence. The response is one of immediate worship, for he recognizes the profound richness and significance of this woman, and the desire within him is to truly know her, in a profoundly deep and rich fashion.
Contrast this to the image not much further along, where these two same people are seeking to run from such a reality, to hide and cover themselves from each other, to act in an entirely pretentious and superficial fashion in response to the nature of their crime - the demeaning of all which God had so graciously given them.

We do a great violence to ourselves, to our existence, when we exist at the level of the trite and the supposedly irrelevant. It stains our broken souls with a stupor to dull our deeper needs - a malady that will drown a much deeper need if unchecked.

There have been countless times in the last few years when I have seen people sit in front of a camera and gain a fresh awareness or confidence regarding some aspect of themselves.
Sadly, there have also been occasions when the person has been 'dead' - they have no desire, no hunger to do anything beyond what is immediate.

Jesus Christ holds a similar mirror before us. He wants us to see the pain of our crippled lives, to really understand our condition, but to also see the wonder of our lives when they are set free by God's care, mercy and grace, to escape the superficial and really to become human.

The 'joy ride' of the noisy rush to ignore our reality can only last so long.
Like the best image, it will fade into dust,
but life can be about a richness, a reality, that will last forever.

Earnestly desire, says Jesus, those things,
and life will certainly take on a value beyond the immediate.

Strange Days

2009-07-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

"The State of affairs in which ordinary people can discover the supernatural only by abstruse reasoning is recent and, by historical standards, abnormal.
In the conditions produced by the last century or so, plain men are expected to bear the burden - we must get to the truth or go without it....

If we are ready to climb and struggle, as a society, to this height, all can be well, but a state where we neither gain wisdom nor venture to find it for ourselves is fatal.
On or back we must go; to stay here is death"

C S Lewis - Miracles.

I finally had the opportunity this week to view the Ben Stein investigation into the field of Intelligent Design and contemporary science. I watched Expelled with a friend who is open to exploring such issues, and he and I then discussed at length the issues - theological, scientific, philosophical and social - raised by the material the documentary covered.
In a week where two new books on the matter have been published - Atheist Bradley Norton's 'Seeking God in Science', which argues I D does have something to say that needs to be heard, and Stephen Meyer's 'Signature in the Cell' - I was strongly reminded of C S Lewis piece on how the 'myth' of Darwinism (that we are 'naturally' improving, heading for a better world) is keenly in need of a death and burial. The tyranny of that line of thought has often been used to empower the most darkest of chapters in our times.

What was equally fascinating from the viewing was to reflect on just how philosophically empty the Darwinian approach to existence really is. It does not actually tell us how or why we are here,
it makes life inherently one-dimensional and ultimately purposeless, and it clearly is merely a caretaker in situ until a far more robust and comprehensive understanding can take up residence.

The good side of the present situation is that, in spite of various trip-wires, the debate is beginning to filter into the public realm, allowing people, like my friend and I, to begin to weigh up the present situation. The concern, as Lewis described it so well, is that the majority of people in our times are still outside of such inquiry and debate, and that cannot be good either for them or our times.

The window allows us to view a splendor beyond - a marvel that will certainly cause many to be astonished at what discoveries are currently being made. The trail of our times is the drone of dicta, popularized in so many ways, which tells our generation that the window does not exist.

May the one who fearfully and wonderfully made all things, allow the light to topple such darkness.

Book Links:
Bradley Norton: https://www.broadviewpress.com/product.php?productid=952&cat=0&page=1
Stephen Meyer:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Signature-Cell-Evidence-Intelligent-Design/dp/0061472786/ref=wl_it_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3W4WQRC2KRXO0&colid=YJ9RQ1CUX7RU

Weathering the Storm?

2009-07-19T00:59:00.000-07:00

Why do I feel like a ship on the Ocean, controlled by winds that I cannot see, bound by chains, lashed to a yard-arm, all I want is to be free

From a poem by me.

Ever feel overwhelmed by life?
Recall that moment towards the end of the movie, Deep Impact, when Jenny Lerner and her father await certain death as an enormous tidal wave rushes ashore - there are aspects of life that can almost certainly assail us in that fashion. Fear and uncertainty have certainly encroached in new and unexpected ways as I've grown older, causing me to often be troubled about issues that seemed much more straightforward in youth. As a result, it can often feel that I'm standing on a similar beach before an inescapable wave - the floods of uncertainty and death - held fast in a quicksand of anxiety.

There appears no relief in the natural. When much of contemporary theology encourages me to accommodate a theistic evolutionary approach to our origins, or to re-define my understanding of human sexuality to see the biblical material is entirely cultural and therefore dead in the modern context, what am I to make of the claims, the authority of scripture, on such matters? Are they merely empty sets to our lives, to the issues of our age, or are they in fact living words that we must approach and consider with care?

If the entire goal of the drama we term history is to marry those two key themes of essential truth - Creation and Redemption - then can we really dislocate the Biblical material on such issues from the story of mankind or the condition of ourselves? Do we gain anything by doing so, and equally important, what do we loose?

I ask these questions because it seems to me that unless we are indeed 'held' by the God who reveals Himself in these revelatory works, we are indeed horribly adrift and without any true hope of refuge.

Where does the church go from here?

The Deadly Years

2009-07-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

"Now the Spirit instructs us that in the later times some will depart from faith,
devoting themselves to deceits - the very teaching of darkness.
Liars will inspire such to seek to determine who can marry whom,
forbidding not only such union, but also the eating of foods which have been clearly
given by God to be received with joy.
Remember that every good thing is created and given by God to be received in this fashion,
and should not be renounced or rejected". Paul to Timothy.

Genuine faith, Luther once noted, can be a pretty unsettling thing.

Try and imagine what it must have been like for Peter, for example, that morning before he met
Cornelius, when he was presented with a requirement to partake of food to eat which, to his manner of thinking was 'unclean'. It must of shaken him deeply, when God not only required this of Him, but sought to teach him three times that what God makes clean can no longer be excluded.

Peter, like so many of us, could operate quite safely in a sphere where piety and devotion, duty and dedication, are all neatly defined by a 'belief' which compartmentalizes the sacred and the secular, but God is far, far too near for such 'neatness'. He is the Lord who rescues the miserably lost, the entirely ungodly. He comes amongst us, into the very dirt of this sin-sick place, and redeems and restores all that we have muddied by our externalizing of sanctity - our 'fig leaf' pretensions of religion. He takes the life of our world, so sickened by sin, and by giving Himself, changes the very common into the framework of eternity, the theater of His Kingdom.

Paul's warning, then, to Timothy, is so pertinent.
Ungodly religion is marked by an ethos which radically denies the sovereignty of God in what He has redeemed. By talking up our piety, our rules, our impetuous attempts at self-righteousness, it lacerates and murders the banqueting table of grace, furnished by our Great God and Saviour.

Redemption takes us beyond the fallen practices which has marked our race since our death in Eden - it calls us to return to life in the giver of all that is good.
Secularism and Legalism simply cannot hold or contain the depth or richness of the gift He gives to each of us - no apparatus of our invention can come close to supplying true confidence in His great and precious promises - it can only continue to deform us into creatures which spurn the beauty of grace.

Peter, (no doubt like us), spent a lifetime learning just how amazing God's work is, both with him and in the world. Are we learning those lessons, or are we buried in pretensions that effectively blind us to that good work, burying our lives beneath a lie of 'godliness'?

Leaving the comfort of our own 'gods' to journey to new lands...
it's a disturbing call.

SHATTERED

2009-06-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

"Like an endless dream,
life suspended - left undone.
To hold the sands of time, but never more to see the sun...

We are broken, without feeling,
left to walk the night, in endless centuries".

Magenta

I watched the young women, covered in black like some funeral shroud, speak of how she dressed this way for the benefit of others - for women should not show themselves, so no desire is aroused.
So why should men not also be covered, asked the interviewer.
The response was a telling silence.

I read the blog which sought to inform me that our eternal annihilation, following the resurrection, was a mercy - better that than some form of just (note that word) punishment which continued forever. Why would we wish such a destiny to be true?

I listened to the rock group, talking about our alienation, searching for an answer.
The woven tapestry of words and sounds pushes deep, and reminds me of what we are really about....

We are indeed a broken people. We long for the 'wings' we lost so long ago, to be whole, safe, cared for, but equally free to play, to dance, to look deep into each others eyes without fear or danger.

The beauty which we taste, perhaps bitter-sweet amidst our pain, entices us to a greater reality.
When we view reality, however flawed or partial our perception of the whole, brief hints or pointers to the truth - we register a deeper truth. The 'text' seeks to express the presence of the author - a Creator we can treat as background noise if we so wish, but whose wisdom and nearness is expressed in so very many ways.

The reality is that we can behave in a manner (religious or secular) which amounts to attempting to detach ourselves from creation, but creation itself - in the eyes of the veiled woman, in the very pulse of the one who believes it ends in non-existence - "sings" with a greater reality.
We live in One who made us, who gave of Himself to deliver us from futility, and His return will herald a day when all things will be exposed to that unshakable reality.

Sing that sweet, sweet song of Salvation!

Thoughts and Conversations

2009-06-21T05:26:00.000-07:00

"Though every thing's broken, your beauty remains"

Krystal Myers.

Whilst on a two-day photo project in Cornwall this week, I found myself seated near Padstow harbor amidst principally non-Christian friends, enjoying the warmth and the charm of the place as I tucked into a locally made pastie. As we ate and enjoyed the moment, one of my friends asked me a very deep question. He'd been considering the beauty of the almost idyllic scene before us, and asked me, as a believer, what I felt heaven had to offer beyond what we were encountering.
I sought to explain that surrounding us as keenly as the serenity we enjoyed was a universe in decay, a race in rebellion, a 'natural' condition in need of deep healing, and this is exactly what the Gospel promises - a realm in which all that is good and beautiful will be so without the current darkness, without the pain of corruption and evil.
The conversation then went on to familiar 'roundabout' questions with others who were present, but that initial question touched upon something I had been considering earlier in the week on the issue of beauty.

I'm currently reading Roger Scruton's study of the subject, and amidst many thought-provoking observations, he notes "We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves".
The thought immediately shunted my mind back to the seventh day of the first week of Creation.
Genesis informs us that God inhabits this day, as He is 'refreshed' by the goodness, the beauty of all He has made. This 'inhabiting' sanctifies the day, filling it with the weight and significance of holiness, that sublime, supreme aspect of the character of the persons of the Godhead.

We live in age where so much of what is defined as elegant and even beautiful is only done so in a detached, utilitarian manner - it is 'function' that counts, but on that day, it was the inherent goodness of all things that so delighted it's designer.
We all depend upon the 'use-ability' of the realm around us - our environment, our bodies, the functional aspects of life, but all these 'good gifts', sent from above, are not merely a device for our well-being; they were made to serve a higher purpose, to 'glorify' their maker - something currently hindered by our fall from that original goodness tasted in Eden.

The view at Padstow was splendid, and rightly caused my friend to ponder on the place of such beauty, but the true wonder has yet to be seen, soon to be made evident in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Subversion!

2009-06-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

"When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer,
Superstition ain't the way". Stevie Wonder.

The better weather has allowed for healthier outdoor pursuits, and that usually marries for me with some deeper thinking and reading.
I picked up Sci-Fi master Robert Heinlein's 'To Sail Towards the Sunset' this week, and was interested in pondering the key character's re-vamping of the Ten Commandments. What was especially intriguing was the thinking behind this, given by the character's father:
"The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be".
As someone who has spent many years of my Christian life facing "turbulence" with 'the powers that be' (church doctrines and leadership), there's certainly a truth here (with regards to mis-applying the Law), but I quickly realized that, especially in this moment, there is equally a wider application.

There are 'new' commandments, heard everyday on my local radio station, and woe betide the transgressor who questions or slights one of these rules...

1.You shall not doubt the doctrine of anthropocentric (man-originated) climate change.
The fact the CO 2 increases follow temperature changes shall not be spoken!

2.You shall advocate anthropocentric schemes to revert these changes, whoever, wherever and whatever their origin (and however hair-brained they may be - I'm staggered at just what is getting funding).

3.You shall always talk up 'sustainability' (even if the 'facts' to support what you've placed under that banner are flaky at best, and may be costing us a heck of a lot more, in both the short and the long term).

4.You will ensure ALL 'sensible' input on these subjects, be it social, scientific, political or artistic, speak with the same common voice (as per commandment 1). Dissent of any kind is mis-placed and 'primitive' (even when presented by experts in their fields!).

5. You will IGNORE all data to the contrary - and if it is raised, it will be ridiculed as mistaken.

These rules took a couple of minutes to assemble after listening to a week of local radio 'entertainment' on "Green" issues and the celebration of Naturalism here (the Darwin 200th anniversary dramatizations, arts festival, and discussions). There were moments when I wanted to switch off the radio for good, as I realized that any other view on such issues is already totally marginalized.

The call to stand fast in our liberty has never been so pertinent!
We're close to a time when almost everything you do will be under the scrutiny of the powers that be, and not for good reason - but because of a fiction that WE determine the nature of things, and can therefore control our world. History is replete with examples of moments when we have thought that way - it has always ended in horrible tragedy.

Watch the signs, listen to the 'thought' dictation occurring, and discern the darkness, so sweetly wrapped in the opium of common sense!

The Best Things...

2009-06-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Paul Simon

It's there everyday as I walk into work -
a sign that boldly declares free entertainment, amenities and other enticements, all sure to draw folks in. I just wonder how many (if any) of those attracted by the 'free'(dom) offered here take any notice of the small print - 'subject to the terms and conditions of the establishment'.
That sums up our current 'freedoms' so well - you can 'externalize' liberty, making it about how you look, what you wear, what you chose to do (when you have 'free' time), but usually, this amounts to traveling the well-worn route of subjection to what is deemed 'free' - pursuits that are, apparently, expressions of freedom. The moment may be wild, a real high, but the 'terms and conditions' soon kick into play, and the reality is that we're far from free - our choices and our actions count.

It's stunning to reflect on what is often considered vital or important to our times -
theories of our origins, which, even if accepted, leave huge gaping questions about who and what we are,
it all gets pretty bizarre.

I was reflecting today on how Peter informs us how our age will be marked with a mindset which views it as 'freeing' to deride the notion of purpose ( - that we were designed to be here and that life amounts to much more than a instinctive, biological continuation of a species).
The neglect of our most inherent aspect of identity here, notes the teacher, is palpable.
The earth was created, and we are part of that work - a work which has been shaken when it has fallen and deviated from it's design - and the day of realization of that reality is fast approaching.

We can pursue the satiation of the 'hunger' we all have inside to be truly free, but (as Lewis notes), we were made to burn a particular fuel. Atheistic, Gnostic and Pantheistic notions all pander to quelling our deepest ache, but only Jesus Christ can stand before us and truly declare 'I am meaning'.

It's pretty clear to me that so many people who reject or leave Christianity behind do so not because of Christ himself, but because they have been burned or crushed by the weight of a 'terms and conditions' religiosity. Most of us have known the weight of that trial, but if we come back to the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament, we are soon shocked by something very different in nature - a call to a human reality that will mark us with a freedom defined by love, purchased and freely given through unwarranted, unmerited mercy.

Those are terms and conditions that make me truly smile.

The Darkness

2009-05-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

"A positive mind anticipates happiness, joy, health, and a successful outcome to every situation and action" Ramez Sasson.

"I was blinded by the devil, born already ruined,
stone cold dead as I stepped out of the womb". Bob Dylan.

Ever pondered what exactly gets you out of bed in the morning (assuming you are able to sleep at nights)?
The mind 'games' we usually have to play are pretty elaborate - presumptions that spin a fabric of social and personal 'norms' by which we can not only face but hopefully invest something into each fleeting moment called a day - granting the game some worth, so long as we do not probe or question too deeply.

The problems come, often, as we grow older. The mask of such illusion begins to slip as we become aware that the value of such a dance is flawed, and that so much of what is deemed 'the norm' is but a pretense - a device to keep us busy, distracted, from facing reality. The cracks are always there - the perpetual corruption in every aspect of life, whilst it may seek to change it's spots, continues apace, and the reality of decay and death encroaches, however we seek to project the 'I'm fine' persona to ourselves and to others.
In an honest analysis, we quickly find ourselves in agreement with the sobering analysis of Solomon - all of life amounts to no more than a painful futility.

The broken record of 'normal' life leaves us there, stranded and abandoned in a world which has us reaching for something to dull the pain - a darkness too terrible to comprehend - fueled by the misnomer that there is no true remedy. In the modernal mind, there is no actual escape - no aid or answer to this tragedy. Life becomes little more than 'dodging the bullet' for however long this can be achieved, until the moment when death slams us against the darkness from which there is no return.

Jesus Christ entered the arena of this dreadful malady and extinguished its rule.
He seeks to confront each of us with a greater reality - that our lives are not meant to be marked by such pathetic tragedy, but with life that has enduring value.
His death and resurrection reveal that the pain and misery of the present darkness have sought to usurp our true purpose and connection to what we are and are meant to be.

The choice is stark - a world enshrouded in a darkness which holds and devours all, or one marked by ultimate freedom from pain and sorrow, because of the one who has made us free, even in the midst of this present trial, to taste of eternal life.

In our mad world, that truth conveys a goodness and mercy which allows our troubled days here to be savored with a richer meaning than any broken dream.

The M a l a d y

2009-05-05T02:38:00.000-07:00

"There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other"

Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart.

Some years ago, a popular 'voice' in the UK for atheism bewailed the fact that TV shows like the X Files and Supernatural were becoming so popular amongst young people. Why is it, he posited, in an 'explained' universe that we have this irrational need for the unfounded notions of there being something 'above and beyond' the observed and the understood?

A few days ago, I fell quite badly whilst at home, stubbing my toes and bruising my arm. There were certainly consequences of this action - pain being the immediate one! - and I understood what had occurred, but in no manner would I ever be able to equate such "accidents" as being responsible for anything beyond the momentary trial and current physical bruising I encountered - such events do not give rise to my "becoming" more 'developed' in any way as a physical creature.
The quote above really strips bare the 'supernaturalism' of the naturalists argument - "accident" (or to be more precise, chance) is essentially all they have to explain who and what we are, why we are and it is an entirely empty premise. That is why they fail to understand the need to empower the world around us with a reality that is unseen - why we inherently 'know' there is more to our existence than what immediately meets the eye.

Whenever we truly begin to encounter the complexity which furnishes our world, we are left wondering why materialists want us to believe that any information within this which 'speaks' of the possibility of design, of intelligent intent, is mute - is 'accidental', that the reality we must accept is that we merely exist by fluke. The human condition, however bent or burnt it may have been by the reality of our corrupted universe, knows that this is not the real state of play. The answer to US does not lye in our merely knowing all the facts and figures about our world. It doesn't explain those moments when we encounter something deeper, and we find ourselves pondering a truth which, as Einstein would have put it, points to a far greater intelligence than our own.

Book, TV and Movie fantasy and science fiction allow us to 'open a window' to a larger universe - one which the skeptics may hate, but we all understand, in that deepest place, is really there...

Life IS inherently spiritual, and the need of our times is to marry that profound need to the greatest reality - the life which comes from God, revealed and made ours, here and now, through Jesus Christ.

"There's another force at work here...there always has been. It's undeniable, we've all experienced it, everyone...has witnessed events they can't fathom let alone explain away by rational means. Whether we want to call that God or some sublime inspiration, or a divine force that we can't understand, it doesn't matter. IT"S HERE. IT EXISTS. And our destinies are entwined in its force"

Gaius Baltar - the Finale of the recent TV series, Battlestar Galactica.

Amidst perilious waters

2009-05-03T03:53:00.000-07:00

"It's not supposed to be this way" Frodo Baggins - The Two Towers.

I received a circular e-mail this week which, using images of the holocaust, sought to raise concern that this dark chapter of history had been removed from the UK's national education curriculum.
I proceeded to check these claims and whilst they proved incorrect, there are concerns that some schools are not teaching on such events as they may be deemed 'difficult' for students with certain cultural or religious views to deal with.
I'm not sure anyone with a conscience wouldn't find scenes from a film like 'Schindler's List' most troubling, but the reality of that event, of the Killing Fields in Cambodia, the atrocities in Bosnia and the extermination of the Armenians, and many others besides needs to be part of our understanding of the 'modern' world, where certain beliefs and ideologies have generated such horror.

The mailing brought to mind a scene from the aforementioned film, of the children from the factory being rescued literally from the jaws of death at the gates of Auschwitz. I wondered in the light of over a century in which these dark actions of genocide have pervaded humanity what is the real value of such a moment? If modernism is correct, and history is merely as Darwin and others have defined it - a survival of the fittest - then the actions of one man in seeking to rescue a few lives from extermination is pointless - the universe is merely a large scale story of cold and dreadful cruelty with no purpose, so why should we seek to fashion ourselves as something garbed in virtues of altruism - the only absolute reality is death for the individual and extinction for all life, now or in the future.

And what of contemporary Christianity? What of those known figures from this field who say they believe in Christ and salvation yet inherently advocate peace with the very notions of our existence that have essentially invigorated such evil - that 'god' uses pain and suffering and death over millions of years as the means of His work - that this amounts to His "good" creation? What does redemption from sin and death, from a FALLEN creation mean in such a context? What are you left with beyond a "god" of the extermination camp?

Such approaches are doomed to fail us, because they merely leave us where we already are, trapped in the vicious cycle of corruption that now taints creation.

Christianity points us away from such to a greater reality -
a first, mature creation, made good, which then became corrupted.
It points us to promise in the healing of that first order, through the 'seed of the woman' - the man, Christ Jesus.
It points us always to miracle - creation, promise, incarnation, resurrection, glorification - those things which lie beyond the futility of the now - only there can this reality be granted viability and meaning, only then does saving lives become truly meaningful.

Our times are in great need for a reality that invests true meaning and worth into existence, that allows us to truly enjoy the goodness of life and earth knowing that these things truly have a value which goes beyond the misery of death and the trials we all encounter.
If we seek to remain locked into an understanding of reality derived from the same notions as the ancient pagans - that the universe essentially perpetuates itself, and we are no more than a fleeting 'blip' on that scope - then no action, no value, truly has meaning.

Christ has come and revealed to the world the glorious surety of a greater truth.
We are here by design, and our lives therefore have purpose. The key requirement now is for us to recognize that greater truth.

Exposure

2009-04-23T02:06:00.000-07:00

"When the light exposes who we really are, we may not like what we see - it may be threatening.
Such light is greater than our darkness - the smallest ray is able to pierce us deep...
it brings hope, for its true exposure opens the means to a greater reality"

Krystryna Sanderson.

Three thoughts that need to be shared.

From Larry (over at The Old Adam Lives) in a recent discussion on Creation:
"We might even by analogy picture the entire cosmos in our mind’s eye like this great shiny perfect fruit that was “very good”. Then one day the parasitic catastrophe occurred and we immediately, from our high vantage point begin to see the decay take place in all realms. Picture a time lapse movie real of a decaying fruit. Something catastrophic and very unnatural has occurred as we see it rot more and more. But it will be raised incorruptible and very very good for ever and ever, and it will have the very good earthy qualities".

I think that's a very useful analogy of the current futility which besets creation, and a good summation of the hope which Paul unpacks for us regarding the breaking of these bonds in Romans 8. It makes you ponder on what the 'natural' is really meant to be like.

I also received an interesting quote from a friend, David, on the nature of seeing creatively:
"As the eye is a sense faculty of the body, so is the healthy imagination a sense organ of the spiritual mind. It can receive spiritual truths from the material world. But purity of heart is required for such a healthy functioning of the imagination. Without this purity, the ever active mind and imagination construct disjointed thoughts and representations that bear little resemblance to reality. Such images debase rather than dignify; they vandalize rather than draw people closer to the spiritual logoi within creation". By Aiden.

Having our minds redeemed and renewed by Christ allows us to see, through the 'window' of creation, something of a foretaste of the glory that truly resides in the fellowship of the Godhead and the genuine 'embeddedness' of our (true) natures within creation. Whilst I'd argue that purity only resides (until the day of glory, when it will permeate all things) in and through Jesus Christ, salvation allows us to take our first steps in this larger world. Some of these steps are sublime...

From Anne, over at the 'Heart, Mind, Soul and Strength' Blog, on a favorite composer:
"He did understand the basics of liturgy: that Scripture is not just for analyzing, but for praying and for singing. A musician and a poet notices things that an analyst does not: that the Psalms were originally for singing and are still best appreciated when sung, that the prophesies were originally announcements and are still best understood when proclaimed, that the imagery and symbolism of Scripture is more similar to a fugue with deep, hidden themes than it is to a textbook...Handel knew that, rightly understood, Scripture does not cause only analysis but ultimately it causes celebration. Rightly preached, the Word of God does not cause people to dedicate themselves to analyzing the Scriptures, but to go out into the world celebrating the glory of God".

This is a fascinating insight, and made me reflect deeply. When we 'study' the scriptures well, they lead us to the person of Christ - to a relationship with one who is Creator and Redeemer, to the God who is living amongst us and wishes us to know this and rejoice in such life.

Like sitting in a quiet woodland glade in a mellow, sunlit afternoon, I trust these thoughts will allow you to ponder and delight in a beauty and a joy that truly furnishes the soul and allows us to see a little more of the glory and wonder of our Great God and Saviour.

Reflections

2009-04-16T05:27:00.000-07:00

"The Easter story answers their questions about the spiritual aspects of humanity. It changes people's lives because it helps us understand that we, like Jesus, are born as spiritual beings.

Every inner prompting of conscience, every glimmering sense of beauty, every response we make to music, every experience we have of love - whether of physical love, sexual love, family love or the love of friends - and every experience of bereavement, reminds us of this fact about ourselves.

The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are".

A N Wilson on the relevance of Christianity today.

There are moments in a year when what might be termed the 'spiritual' dimension of life seems to become truly interlocked with the natural. Easter is a key example of this. The beginnings of Spring had commonly been revered as a point of devotion in the ancient world, generally to some personified deification of nature due to the miracle we encounter at this time of year - the regeneration of the land after the 'death' of winter. It is hardly surprising that we mark such a moment - the harbinger of longer, warmer days, when creation is adorned and enabled to bring about a richness of fruits which, when harvested, allow us to live.

The seasons are no accident. They speak to us of deeper truths - the redemption that is only made ours by the death and raising of Christ Himself, which brings about the new 'day' foretold in the forming of the heavens and earth itself (Genesis 2:1, Hebrews 4:1), to be fulfilled in the 'day' which is fast approaching.
As the re-birth of Spring is at the heart of the natural world, so the Redemption of that Creation through the work of Jesus Christ is at the core of our existence - the one who holds together the very fiber of every particle in the universe is the one who overcame the power of sin and death for every one of us. This allows a new life, an 'alien' righteousness, to justify the lost (we who are dead in sin) and to redeem us that we may become adopted into the wonder of the new day, when we are truly new creations, which is coming.

When our lives are furnished by such richness, then so much will 'speak' (resonate) of the great reality - that we are indeed the work of His hands, and as such, are honored with this day, this moment, to look to the depth of care and love that has been bestowed upon us, by the living Creator and Redeemer.

Staying Alive

2009-04-05T01:59:00.000-07:00

"Having travelled thus for many days, at last they came within
sight of Mansoul; the which when they saw, the captains could
for their hearts do no less than for a while bewail the
condition of the town; for they quickly saw how that it was
prostrate to the will of Diabolus, and to his ways and
designs." John Bunyan - The Holy War

It's amazing to see what happens in a crisis.
I was intrigued to learn yesterday that as a result of the current recession, councils in my part of the world have been inundated with requests for allotments, so that people can go out and grow their own fruit and vegetables. What's particularly of interest here, is that whilst it's not really that more cost effective (in terms of the weekly budget) to do this, it is of enormous benefit to the people who do it - they live and eat better as a result, and the land is put to good use.

It's interesting to seek to apply this example to the modern church.
Like the bulk of our present society, popular spirituality has taken a 'fast food' approach when it comes to its delivery of the Christian message and practice. Having a 'take away' meal, as we all know, once in a blue moon, may be convenient, but imagine trying to live on that (remember the movie, 'super-size me'. Scary stuff!).

I understand it's possible to poison certain grains in such a way that the more you eat, the more hungry you become, until you ingest enough of the poison that you literally eat yourself to death.
We can all point to examples where the church is suffering from this form of spiritual obesity, so what is the solution?

One of the exciting aspects of the modern era is our astonishing ability to communicate. People walk around with phones on their ears all day, with Lap-tops on the trains and buses, with access to literally billions of pieces of information, but they're often 'fat' or 'anorexic' in their lives as a result of the diet they get here.
We need to harness such means and use them as a window into a larger world - a point of access to a place where we can feel and smell, handle and engage with the true benefits of the faith that has once been given for our benefit.

If you are ready to get your hands dirty, so to speak, in such an engagement, here's a sight I can recommend:
http://theoldadam.wordpress.com/

It's not for the faint-hearted - it'll require thought, inter-action and, possibly, quite a lot of change,
but it (along with the many other people and places you can link to through it) may encourage some real health in these trying times.

The crisis is here, and it's very real, but the remedy is where it always has been -
in the depths of His mercy and the riches of His grace.

The E N L I G H T E N E D

2009-03-29T04:49:00.000-07:00

"That's our motto here at the Tyrell Corporation - more human than human".
Dr Eldon Tyrell, in the Ridley Scott film, Blade Runner.

"See to it that you do not become a captive of empty and deceitful philosophy which detracts from the substance of the faith. Watch out for those who would woo you with such 'spiritual' teachings, for they would draw you away from the truth.

The whole fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily in Christ, and He is within you, allowing you to put off the old and avoid the false, so that you can live in the faith...
So mark those who seek to pass judgment on you regarding what you eat and drink or your 'spiritual' activities, for these are nothing compared to the reality now yours in Christ....

No one must be allowed to disqualify or berate you because you are not an ascetic or dualistic about spiritual things. You are united to Christ, so reject submission to their taboos regarding what you shouldn't touch or taste which derives from their folly.
They may have an appearance of piety and godliness, but they are of no value to your faith".

Paul to the Colossians.

Ever have a moment in the theater or the cinema where you encounter a sense of wonder at something 'larger than life'? It usually happens for me when I'm engaged with Science Fiction, and, because I have a pretty vivid imagination, I've found it can and does occur when I'm reading a good novel or enjoying a piece of music or a work or art. There's nothing wrong with that - in fact, some aspects of creation are most certainly 'there' to assist us in elevating our thinking to a place of astonishment and reflection. There's a difference, however, between something that makes us truly engage with reality and a device which encourages us to totally escape from it.

I'm currently re-reading Umberto Eco's dazzling series of essays, 'Faith in Fakes', in which he reflects upon the growing popularity in our times of what he defines as 'hyper' reality - experiences or frames of reference which are deemed 'better' (more stimulating and engaging) than what they represent - a trend evidenced, for example, in museum exhibits, total immersion entertainment and holographic development. Whilst much of this is fascinating and intriguing, Eco raises the question as to why we are so enticed by the entirely false - devices which are deliberately engineered to deceive us.

Such a propensity has to be a consequence of our current condition.
"in some sense", notes C S Lewis, "as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings,
we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all - utterly and absolutely outside. On the other side, we can be called in, welcomed and received: we walk along that razor's edge between these two possibilities. Our longing is to be re-united with something in the universe from which we know we have been cut-off" (the weight of glory).

The deep need is for remedy, but the spoiling of nature - of the very fiber and propensity of each of us - means that the 'pull' is towards a fake rather than substance, to revel in the 'appearance' of wisdom rather than the astonishing and actual embodied appearance of THE reality.

Christianity leaves us with no confidence in our own abilities or activities.
If we fall prey to the conceit of self righteousness to any measure, the scriptures make it clear that
we have totally fallen prey to the illusion of being 'good' when whilst we avoid His explicit summation of what and where we are whilst so distanced from Him.
Salvation is not in ourselves - we must be found and rescued to be called and welcome.

Christ in the flesh - and the profound ramifications of this - is where the Gospel begins.

The same is true amidst the earthly church.

Deceit leads us to seek harbor in the perilous zone of our notions, dreams and aspirations, to view godliness as something we acquire by Gnosis or obtain by pious merit. Reality is something both far more troubling and truly correcting.

"We can truly become human because He became so - to conform us to life through His death and resurrection. We were never intended to become gods. That is the illusion".
(Deitrich Bonhoeffer - Ethics).

Longing has it's place. Dreams can allow us to look further and deeper, to remind ourselves there is more behind the daily grind, but such gifts must never bend us away from the true nature of life, or deeper still, the reality and nature of our redemption.

Seeing the Splendor

2009-03-16T04:39:00.000-07:00

"The world is a smiling place, when we recognize the one who lavishly furnishes it with such good gifts". Augustine.

I find myself often being reminded these days how easy it is for spirituality to be deemed 'right' in such a manner that it essentially 'falls between two stalls ' - that of the Gnostic, on the one side, who teases with the promise of a higher existence or purpose if we abandon the material, and the legalist on the other, censoring anything and everything with an 'infallible' list of things that are never allowed. The language and methods may vary, but the results are always the same - closure of the material world as the principal means to us of conveying the spiritual.

It's amazing, when we consider the vital truths of our faith - of God making the material, inhabiting it in the staggering event of the incarnation that He might redeem it from a real event - the fall - that we can be so closed to the testimony of the 'natural'. The Psalmist knew how immediate this testimony is in so many of the deepest moments of worship, and the Prophets follow suit, often using this canvas as the backdrop to bringing the word of God. The Apostle begins his major apology on the very nature of essential truth by starting here (Romans 1) and Jesus Himself teaches us often about what the coming kingdom is like by drawing from this source.

The reality, of course, is that like those outside of the faith, we often chose a course of detachment from these aspects of the physical because they bring God too close - they make the measure of the message of the Word too immediate for comfort - that He is here, and walking amidst what we encounter.
In a world which is constantly drowning out the 'message' of creation through urbanization, we can often stifle or almost entirely silence that testimony, but it leaves our souls bereft of wealth.

The beauty of life is indeed seductive - it is easy, as Solomon notes in his observations, to become woven into a revelry in the tangible benefits of life which numbs the truth they point to,
but they can also awaken and refresh the soul to the abundant supply of the one in whom we 'live and move and have our being'.

As we travel through this realm, enjoying all the grandeur, the sensual richness of its diverse tapestry of 'moods' and treasures, let us engage with such in a manner that makes us, as those truly made free by the one who is renewing all things to Himself, delight in our Lord and Saviour, that the wealth we share now, may become but the foretaste of the marvel that is fast approaching.

The Sweet Foretaste

2009-03-05T02:41:00.000-08:00

"Whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is lovely, whatever is pure, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things".

Philippians 4:8.

We all have them - those moments of deep 'stillness' and reflection, usually when we're sitting amidst creation, soaking in something of the majesty and wonder of this place we inhabit. My late wife often spoke about how 'getting philosophical' (considering what we are) often seems so natural when we're in those times.
The psalmist, of course, knew all about this.
From the cry of a babe, to the magnitude of the expanse above, David observes the significance of a divine work which both humbles and delights his soul.

Whilst beneath the throne of heaven, we have been given a place amidst creation that literally 'crowns' us with a role and value that is astonishing - to be able to understand and express the marvel of being the handiwork of God.
We interact with the world and its domains in a manner that is unique - for either good or ill - something we perhaps are beginning to appreciate as we take in a small amount of the astonishing diversity and splendor which surrounds our days.

The marvel does not end there. As we consider our own existence - the well-nigh miraculous manner in which our own bodies and minds are woven, we can again agree with the poet that we are designed with a gently present yet awesome intent - to be creatures which truly honor our relationship to our Creator through the realization such reflections provide.

We witness futility and wickedness in ourselves and the world, and we know that it requires release from these evils, due to our waywardness and refusal to seek peace with the one who adorns all things with beauty in its time, but we cannot run from the tug (which He has placed) of eternity in our hearts.

There is mercy and freedom from the tyranny of sin in His redemptive work in Jesus Christ, and this alone allows us to truly begin to inter-act with life once more as those adopted into the joy of it's approaching redemption.

This is the context, the framework, which allows us, when we taste the excellence of the earth, to turn heavenward with our musings, and marry them to genuine thanksgiving for who we are, and what is to come.

Fit for Purpose?

2009-02-22T01:13:00.000-08:00

"Every time we make a choice, we are 'turning' the central part of us into something a little different to what it was before". C S Lewis - Mere Christianity

How would you feel behind the wheel of a formula 1 racing car,
or an armored vehicle,
or an articulated lorry?

For most of us, such an experience would be totally out of our depth
(if it isn't for you personally, just 'up' the example - a captain of a super tanker... an astronaut of a space shuttle...a pilot of an huge airliner).
The fact is that we all face experiences, often in our daily lives, which totally overwhelm us, and they can be in very ordinary moments - starting a new job, dealing with a family crisis, the experience of getting older.
Usually, we just sigh and seek to do the best in these moments, but we often feel deeply 'out of step' with the frustration such points of change - often painful or very difficult moments - bring upon us. We sense a real and deep lack or 'rightness' about all this, as if something is seriously out of step, leading to such events.

Christianity teaches that the reason such 'indecency' constantly breaks in upon us at every level of life is because life itself now has been twisted by a malady, so that whilst we recognize within that things shouldn't be this way, we are also chained to this labyrinth of futility.

Some of my recent postings here have looked at the reasons behind this state - that real people, in real events, set things in motion that have impacted upon us all,
but the good news is that because of the life and work of Jesus Christ, a resolution to this has been put into motion, and the day will come when we're no longer living chained to futility.

We all encounter the trails of this life,
but God wants us to know there is an answer!

The day approaches when we'll once again be able to live, to work and play, without feeling the pinch of a world imprisoned by fear, pain, misery and death.
That certainly brings hope in the days when we're just trying to keep above the waves!

Beauty amongst the ashes.

2009-02-17T01:42:00.000-08:00

I'm no great fan of contemporary Christian 'worship' music - it generally lacks both the depth and sublime majesty of the great psalms and hymns of previous times - but there have been some very 'on track' Christian musicians over the last 30 years when it came to "speaking" the truth (both to our times and to the church), using the medium of the day -rock music - to do so.

Here's a recent find that confirms that just such an art is alive and well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhfvfyQEOmI

Christians can, indeed should, engage with the culture well, and artists like this show we can 'say' something today.

W a r Z o n e

2009-02-08T04:36:00.000-08:00

“Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.”

The Duke of Wellington.

The daily grind - facing the weather, the stress, the ups and downs....all that life tends to throw at us, whether we're ready for it or not. It can be hell, but then, what else would you expect on the front line?

It's pretty amazing, when you consider the amount of sheer misery and grief many of us encounter that we miss that - life doesn't make much sense otherwise. This planet and our race have been at the very heart of a conflict which literally is about the true nature and identity of existence itself, yet most days the 'gray' of our current condition keeps us looking at the pain and chaos like spectators at some diabolical and twisted version of the Roman games - something we're almost content to observe until we discover we're next into the arena!

It's those 'you're next' moments that quickly shock us to our senses. Just look how close we all are to that precipice of death - the pain-numbing mantras of atheism don't seem anywhere near as good when that reality bites: life is pointless, and the universe is just a fluke - what a comfort when you're facing such a moment!

The only place we gain true insight into this war is at the Cross.
Jesus Christ takes all the darkness - the pain and misery of our fallen lives, our scorched world,
and quenches it in His death and resurrection. He lays down His life to terminate the hostilities, to open the way back to a world where His scars, His emptying of Himself, insures that ours will be gone.

Life is pretty bleak here sometimes, but just like the moment when the allies arrived on d-day, the entire nature of this war has changed - the victory is certain, whatever comes now.

Thanks be to God, who has given us this great victory through His Son, Jesus Christ.

M e r c y

2009-01-21T11:55:00.000-08:00

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is…
We are more sinful and weak than we ever dared to admit and…
We are more loved and accepted than we ever dared to hope.

(Tim Keller with thanks to J Spadino)

So there we all were, a group of Christian men, aged from early twenties to late forties, on a gorgeous summer day in London attending a theological conference. It was the lunch break, and we we're heading down the main road towards a sandwich bar, passionately discussing the content of the morning papers, when the mood changed.
Walking towards us in a short dress which fitted in all the right places, was a totally stunning blonde. In a moment, the conversation had virtually stopped, as our attention was clearly taken elsewhere... for a few seconds.... then we all smiled at each other, and carried on.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not giving this example to lecture on looking at women (actually, when things were good in the garden, we were certainly meant to look), but to touch on what we looked at last time - how when Adam and Eve took their eyes off of how things were meant to be and then neglected this due to a 'promise' of something else, the whole world spun out of control.
It's a reality that is often pretty well dismissed as incorrect today - we're not the way we are because of a some story about naked forebears stealing fruit from a tree! We're just, well, naturally selfish - it's just part of what makes our species good survivors.
The whole point of the Genesis record, however, is to say we didn't survive.
We were alienated totally from our true humanity, our true connection to life, creation and each other. Everything became tainted with death because of that one catastrophe, which then lead to countless others (just read through from Genesis 3 to 11 to get the big picture).

The point here is that rebellion has made everything rotten to the core, and there's no known remedy for that. You can seek inner peace, work down to your bones doing good deeds, be as pious as please, but it won't change what's true at the heart of us. As Bob Dylan once phrased it so well, "I was stone cold dead when I stepped out of the womb".

We have to start there. We have to start there, because only then, when we see just how far away we are from what is meant, when we understand how far we have fallen, can we really have our eyes open to the answer.
When you're in a hole that deep, then you understand that the only way out is rescue - someone has to come to your aid, and that is what the message of Jesus Christ is all about.

We're pretty good at distracting ourselves, often for all sorts of 'good reasons', but God wants us to look squarely and deeply into this reality, so we go running to him for mercy - for rescue.
Look hard there, and then turn and look at the person of Jesus Christ.
He came that we might know life again, and know it in all of it's beauty.

S E V E R A N C E

2009-01-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

"There must be some way out of here".

Have you ever viewed the world through pieces of a broken mirror?
The vision - usually many images of the same thing - strikes you, because even though this fractured view is a distortion of what is actually in plain view, it 'speaks' of something true none the less - a world painfully real to each of us, brutally etched with pain, suffering, brutality and the ever-encroaching reality of death.
Like the images of broken glass, it speaks so clearly that something is terribly wrong.

The clues should tell us how far we have disconnected from where we began.
One of the things which so strikes me about the opening account of the creation in Genesis is just how close the realms deemed 'heaven' and 'earth' were at the start.
When creation was complete (that included the realm we call heaven - angels and the like), God would literally walk in the garden at the end of the day, to enjoy His handiwork.
The very realm that we now find incredible in our 'sophisticated' society was as close as the dawn or as tangible as the earth beneath us. That should cause us to pause, to begin to glimpse just how far we have fallen.

For thousands of years, we have employed every means at our disposal to seek to gain some insight into who and what we are, into finding our place amongst all that's there, but however hard we look, the answers are damned unsatisfying.
Life equates, apparently, to no more than a cosmic accident, with no intent, real value or purpose, so we might as well just get used to it, make the most of the brief span we have, and try not to think about it too much. Is that it? The universe is meaningless.
That is the death of our race in Eden.
We were murdered by the lie that we are meant to merely be what we now are - pained, crooked things, empty of any true value. Heaven and Earth within its sphere have become a foolish dream, a myth for the foolhardy.

But God comes, not to a garden, but to this barren world.
He faces us as ourselves - as what humanity should be - and calls us to turn from the dark.

Jesus Christ teaches us that there is an end to this nightmare of corruption and death - if we but trust in His saving care.

The world empties us. It leaves us stripped bare of all that is good, for it leads us all, without fail, to the grave, and to all that death truly entails,
but that curse, that emptiness, is broken, by He who knew no wrong, breaking what we could not break, healing what we could not heal, and now, there can be reconciliation.

As the world staggers on, we can either continue to look into it's broken shards, or we can glimpse a deeper, harder reality - that beyond pain, beyond death, beyond our own corruption, there is a new life that makes a call upon each of us.
The days are approaching when heaven and earth will marry once again.

Opening Creation

2009-01-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

"The instrument or means which God made use of is His omnipotent Word, thus Paul notes that through Him all things are made".

Luther on Genesis 1:3.

It's been a pretty chilly winter here, but the bright days have meant that braving the cold reaps a reward.
This last weekend, I ventured out with a friend to view the magnificence of Bedruthan Steps on Cornwall's West coast - one of the most spectacular landscapes on these shores, where huge stone pillars rise from the golden sands, like titans marking the limits of the land and sea. I always feel inspired at that spot, nature is so immediate, and it helps to remind me just how normal the miraculous actually is.

It's often hard in our modern world to see all that we touch, taste, smell and view as a miracle, but the revelation of Old and New Testaments speak together with a clear voice - God formed these things by His Word - the very same Word which generates faith in us to trust in His mercy and redemption. When we look upon the majesty of creation, bare of our pretenses or impositions, we are encountering a life, a miracle that is akin to regeneration, and that is why both Creation and Redemption "speak' so loudly of the nature and closeness of God - they are both formed and sustained by the same living Word.

The saints have always known that this 'Word' is not some ethereal or obscure esoterica, some elite, occult prize for the odd adept that aspires high enough. This Word walked openly with Adam and Eve when they were naked in Eden, met with Abram as that man became the father of a nation, and appeared many times to His people throughout the history of redemption. His visage is so deep, so real, that even death could not mar it but for an instant, affirmed so clearly by His friends who recognized Him when risen from the grave.

The instrument of all things good is the person of Jesus Christ - He was as much in the knitting of the weave of time and space as He is in our breaking bread and sharing life.

When He walked this earth in flesh, He showed us that as In Eden, all of life was meant to be good and meaningful - that Creation itself should indeed be the theater for an eternal unfolding of God's working in the very tapestry of our culture - work, rest and play.
Because of the disruption of sin, we have barely witnessed the overture, but the surety of redemption informs us that the true grand performance is not far away.

We need to look upon the world, upon our lives, as something integral to a great work - the eternal unfolding revelation of the love and communion of the Godhead, through the Word and Spirit, to the work of His hands. That is the abundant life we now begin to share.

Deeper Truths

2009-01-04T01:21:00.000-08:00

“I have tried to stress throughout the inevitableness of the error made about every transposition by one who approaches it from the lower medium only. The strength of the critic lies in the words “merely” or “nothing but. He sees all the facts but not the meaning. Quite truly, therefore, he claims to have seen all the facts. there is nothing else there, except the meaning. He is therefore, as regards the matter at hand, in the position of an animal. You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning. And in a period in when factual realism is dominant we shall find people deliberately inducing upon themselves this dog-like mind. A man who has experienced love from within will deliberately go about to inspect in analytically from outside and regard the results of this analysis as truer than his experience. The extreme limits of this self-binding is seen in those who, like the rest of us, have consciousness, yet go about the study of the human organism as if they did not know it was conscious. As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry.”

C S Lewis - transpositions.

At the end of the Victorian era, when the West was at the height of its growth and dominance,
it became popular to aspire to a philosophy of the ascendancy of 'civilized' humanity. Popular authors and writers sought to advocate such views and 'new' schools of philosophical and 'scientific' study aimed to define us in solely materialistic terms - the chief of these being the works of Freud, Marx and Darwin. It was all expected to herald a new age, a new order, where man would finally become the defined (and thereby truly free) creature he was meant to be, no longer chained to myth or superstition.

The reality was very different. The 'new age' gave birth to the most destructive century in modern history, where war has become the currency of a world in which genocide, displacement, poverty and disease are the grim reality we see everyday. The illusions of modernity have merely allowed the secular society the freedom to seek to obscure the reality of human nature and thereby the human condition, thereby incarcerating many to a world-view in which there is no true understanding, thus no meaning or remedy.

The 'modern' thinkers of our times wish to brush such realities aside and continue to advocate the contemporary myth of our nature, but there is actually nothing new or unchallenged about an ideology which, in essence, would have comfortably rubbed shoulders with the stoics and epicureans of ancient Greece. The inherent 'myth' of this view is unmasked by the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 1 - a 'humanism' which denies the most profound reality of our existence - that we were designed and created, and we have rebelled against that designer. The consequence is terrible - the construction of our realities, individual and corporate, become founded and raised upon a lie, that we can become 'gods' in determining our own existence, our own purpose, our own ends.

In a year when such voices will no doubt seek to make themselves heard, yet again, loudly and, on occasion, selectively, through the popular media, let's begin by taking a leaf from the observations of Solomon - that wisdom, there amongst our streets and everyday lives, is not something so brash and arrogant, but like the serenity and grace of a gentle woman, is seeking to address us, calmly yet deeply, to open our eyes to a far larger universe.

The God who is there, is indeed the God who is here.

In with the new

2009-01-01T01:42:00.000-08:00

"The room is full of silence - it's getting hard to breathe.
Take this gilded cage of pain, set me free,
Take this overcoat of shame, it never did belong to me.

I need to go outside, I need to leave the smoke,
I cannot go on living in the same sick joke,

It seems our lives have taken on a different kind of twist,
Now that you have given me the perfect gift.

For we have fallen from ourselves, to face the truth about ourselves....

So let's go out, into the rain again, just like we said we always would".

The Gift by Annie Lennox.

So here we are, the world of 2009, and the news is already filled with all the strife and woe that so marks the human condition.
The remedies, the policies, like resolutions (interesting that's what they're called at the UN), come and go , are made and broken, but we're still the same sin-sick race we've always been, in a hole, wanting the stars, but without the nature required to truly dance amongst them.

So much was lost, in the garden.
The only solution is a Saviour.

Christmas already seems old, but the God revealed in that moment is closer than our slight moments, our oh so brief pauses, when we truly 'catch' ourselves in our own reflections or the mirror of our thoughts - all to brief encounters which so tightly speak of our need - a inner scream for rescue.

The world, the ragged thing we term life, the identity of our soul within it, all need something greater than any scheme or sham we can devise.

In 2009, may inner eyes and inquiring minds, amidst all of earth's tribes and tongues, be turned to look to Jesus Christ, the great Lord and Redeemer of the lost.

Behold!

2008-12-20T03:41:00.000-08:00

"I would not have you contemplate the deity of Christ, the majesty of Christ, but rather his flesh. Look upon the Baby Jesus. Divinity may terrify man. Inexpressible majesty will crush him. That is why Christ took on our humanity, save for sin, that he should not terrify us but rather that with love and favor he should console and confirm.

Behold Christ lying in the lap of his young mother, still a virgin. What can be sweeter than the Babe, what more lovely than the mother! What fairer than her youth! What more gracious than her virginity! Look at the Child, knowing nothing. Yet all that is belongs to him, that your conscience should not fear but take comfort in him. Doubt nothing. Watch him springing in the lap of the maiden. Laugh with him. Look upon this Lord of Peace and your spirit will be at peace. See how God invites you in many ways. He places before you a Babe with whom you may take refuge. You cannot fear him, for nothing is more appealing to man than a babe. Are you affrighted? Then come to him, lying in the lap of the fairest and sweetest maid. You will see how great is the divine goodness, which seeks above all else that you should not despair. Trust him! Trust him! Here is the Child in whom is salvation. To me there is no grater consolation given to mankind than this, that Christ became man, a child, a babe, playing in the lap and at the breasts of his most gracious mother. Who is there whom this sight would not comfort? Now is overcome the power of sin, death, hell, conscience, and guilt, if you come to this gurgling Babe and believe that he is come, not to judge you, but to save". Martin Luther on the Nativity (Christmas Sermons).

Gift-wrap. It's used by the store-load this time of year, but have you ever thought about why we find it so important to use it?
What is it that requires us to take up our time and make so much effort to insure that all those goodies we buy for others is so nicely (in my case, not so much - I'm pretty dreadful with paper and tape) wrapped?

It's all about marking something as special.
When we hand over that little box of something in that brightly colored sheet, it says 'here's something to say you're special', and because of that we (usually) know a moment of delight: an affirmation that we are loved.

Christmas is a moment when we can look with amazement upon the most beautiful and total gift that has ever been given.
The one whom the Apostle John describes as 'The Word' - the one who makes all things and holds them together - is 'gift wrapped' to come amongst us.
Now it's important to reflect on this, because it says something wonderful about the handiwork of God.

The Lord does not come amongst us as some strange, extra-terrestrial like creature, or as an "Angel", just to proclaim a message and go. Christ is given to us flesh and blood - to live like us, to encounter first hand all the pain, frustration, fear and futility that define our lives in a fallen world.
The gift the world received at Christmas is truly miraculous.

What always astonishes me is how so much of the time, we want to 'wrap' God up in some other way - we want to make Him remote or distant, strange and aloof; a being far, far away in some remote spot we tag 'heaven' - certainly not a naked child feeding at a bare human breast!
The truth that Christianity conveys is that human redemption is that real.
It was a real child that came to rescue us, a real man that walked and lived amongst us, attending our weddings and feasts, our funerals and days of illness. It was this man who was to be crucified upon a Roman Cross, buried and then - raised from death, truly alive!

Amidst all the usual things that happen this Christmas, take a moment to reflect on the greatest gift that God wants us to unwrap -
that we can have life through the love and salvation provided to us in His only Son.

God is with us, and that makes life here hallowed indeed!

T h e M e d i a t o r

2008-12-11T10:18:00.000-08:00

“No material thing is strong enough to bear the burden of the world. But the everlasting Word [logos] of the eternal God is the firmest and surest support of the whole. He stretches to reach from the middle to the edges and from the heights to the middle, uniting and binding all the parts with nature's unfailing course. For the Father who begot Him made Him the unbreakable bond of all".

Philo of Alexandria.

So what's it really about then?

Spending too much. Eating too much. Totally forgotten nights at New Year's because of way to much drink?

It's all just a jumble of old traditions - mistletoe and mince pies, Santa and carols. The 'religious' bits are unnecessary - irrelevant really. Family and friends and "happy" moments - that's what it's actually all about.

The contemporary Christmas certainly wants to substantiate a new myth - that Christianity's 'idea' of us being visited by God Himself was some kind of much later invention - Jesus really wasn't important in that way - just a nice guy to think about now and then, a little like father Christmas!

It's a lie that is quickly (and rightly) binned in a few moments.

A century before the nativity, the Jewish scholar Philo wrote the above words, echoing something which had been recognized in Judaism from the days of Moses and earlier - the issue of the 'mystery' of the persons of Elohim (the Lord God), touched upon so clearly in the passages of the Old Testament (Isaiah 44:6).

Within the very first days of the church beginning to proclaim Jesus as Lord (supreme authority), it was clear that such statements and hymns spoke of such Lordship being expressed in Christ's life, death and resurrection (Philippians 2:5-11) and that this therefore became the source of our understanding of the nearness and purpose of God - to draw close to us that we might touch and see His goodness and intent; to rescue us from darkness by His love.

The very 'Word', which both Paul and Philo remind us holds all things together to do the Father's will, came amongst us - that is the intent of the season, to reflect upon how the one who perfectly reflects and conveys the astonishing fellowship and nature of God came to us, lost souls that we are, that we might touch, might see the reality of God's love.

History and revelation bear witness to this truly supernatural fact - a truth which should season our days here with a sense of what, thankfully, truly resides beyond the often pantomime-like 'festivities' that parade as Christmas.

"God of God, Light of Light, Lo He abhors not the Virgin's womb,

Very God, begotten not created,

Oh come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord".

The Joy

2008-12-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

"Seeing, then, we are surrounded by this great company of witnesses,
let us lay aside every hindrance - the sins which like heavy garments, cling to us,
so we can run, free and well, on the course before us,
looking to Jesus, the originator and the finisher of our faith,
who, for the joy which was set before Him, endured the cross".

Hebrews 12:1 & 2.

Life - it's both amazing and terrifying.
In a few hours, you can read of some amazing discovery, and some dreadful deed, almost on a daily basis. Our reality is literally staggering.

Sometimes we can get pretty overwhelmed by the trail of such an existence. Life can certainly be hard when the trials become something that directly impact upon us, leaving us wondering if there is really any purpose or design in a world where you can literally be joyful one moment and in misery the next.

In the night before His death, Jesus sought to show and teach His disciples that even in the midst of such moments, life does have eternal significance; that beyond our few frail moments here and now, there is something far more substantial coming, and that sharing life together in the reality of that hope helps us to prepare for what is to come.

Like the runner engaged in preparing to get ready for the big event, there are going to be many moments when the pain and trails seem overwhelming, but the trails which engulf us are not the conclusion to this moment - there is one who stands with us, one who liberates us from the shackles of our own decay, who makes running this race to the end possible!

Jesus Christ went to the cross because He foresaw the prize which was ahead - and that 'seeing' had begun in the very first moments, when Father, Son and Spirit determined to fashion the heavens and the earth.

"Creation anticipates a telos...The God who freely, graciously and powerfully rules has a goal - the new creation, in His Son, Jesus Christ (Galatians 6:15). Even though we await the full revelation of the new, God assures us of His covenant care for all of creation in general and His children in particular" (Willem Van Gemeren - The Progress of Redemption).

There will be an terminus to the alienation we know, and that day will see something truly marvelous - the creation heavy with the glory of God, woven with the fragrance of His redemption.
We can run, like the unclad athletes of old, not because of our capacity, but because He runs with us, He has claimed the prize, and He will herald the day when it is shared with those that He has so graciously and mercifully set free.

What a day is coming!

The Calling

2008-11-29T03:49:00.000-08:00

"It is the mark of a good story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however . .. terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears".

J R R Tolkein

In art and life, noted C S Lewis, we are always trying to glean from successive moments something beyond those moments. Children who relish the opportunity to hear a story over and over again understand this, that it is the 'quality' of something unexpected, not the fact of it, which truly delights us. Like Tom hearing the clock strike thirteen (Tom's midnight garden), we know that such a point opens a window to something astonishing, something which deeply resonates with our 'sense of wonder' and meaning with regards to existence.

This week saw the release of some research into our reality that takes us 'beyond the moment'.

Andrew Sibley at the Uncommon Descent blog reports:

Researchers from Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology and Mind have found evidence that children are predisposed to believe in God or a supreme being. This is because of a natural assumption that everything in the world exists for a purpose and was therefore created.

Dr Justin Barrett was reported in the UKs Daily Telegraph as saying that young children appear to have an inherent faith even when it has not been taught to them by family or school. Even children raised on a desert island without any external influence would start out with a belief in God.

Commenting on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he said

“The preponderance of scientific evidence for the past 10 years or so has shown that a lot more seems to be built into the natural development of children’s minds than we once thought, including a predisposition to see the natural world as designed and purposeful and that some kind of intelligent being is behind that purpose…if we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God.”

We have lived through a time when there has indeed been much "surprise" - where the developing image of our universe is not of a place which chaos and chance have thrown together to remain remote and transient, where life is a mere spark that will simply die. Life, in all it's balance and complexity, is here by design - and it is the quality of this truth which urges us to return to the true source of life and wisdom, the one Paul describes as 'made plain' by what we know and understand (Romans 1).

Christmas is a time which invites us, like the children in a nativity play, to learn still more about the 'quality' of such a surprise - that the very wisdom and nature of God is not merely something remotely observed in our studies via microscope or telescope, or even something we all deeply recognize for our earliest days - it is a reality that was 'made flesh' amongst us in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The great 'story' that we are all a part of, is imbued with a marvelous reality - there is a conclusion to this saga that brings eternal purpose, if we but open our eyes and like a child, step into a deeper world.

POISON!

2008-11-23T04:27:00.000-08:00

"The body was created as an inseparable part of what makes us human...
We don't just have a body - we are bodily....
The good news is that, in spite of death, the body will be re-united in all its goodness and splendor one day...
Sexual organs, which God created and clearly included in His pronouncement "Good", we now refer to as 'naughty' (or worse)".

Michael Horton.

Sometimes, you read something, like the above, which makes you want to shout "YES!" with your whole being, and sometimes, you read something which hits you right between the eyes, and makes you realize just how impoverished we can make ourselves when we miss 'joining the dots' to unpack the true ramifications of our redemption. Today was certainly a latter encounter.

For several years, I've been receiving and on occasion writing for the excellent Fig Leaf Forum - a regular newsletter for Christian Naturist's. Now I know that the practice itself raises eyebrows amongst many (those who want to know more as to why it shouldn't , please get in touch), but the inherent and underlying supposition of the practice regarding the nature of the body is something ALL Christians need to understand, which brings me back to today.

This month's forum contained an article on the issue of the nature of shame, especially body shame, and how we as believers can so easily miss the necessary understanding of this and end up in a cul-de-sac of mistaken identity - where we have ill-defined what modesty and piety are and thereby totally missed the inherent nature of godliness.

The piece makes you look forward - to the bodily life that is coming - so that we can properly evaluate where we are right now, and what actually occurred in the fall. It's when we make this study that we are so pointedly reminded that shame (something we've all known) is a consequence of sin (severance from the genuine reality of Creation, both in the Beginning and in the coming renewal).
Now, it's imperative we understand this, because it's so easy to confuse shame with modesty, and then become a casualty of a mis-placed 'holiness' - outward dos and don'ts we believe are correct, but are seriously flawed.

When we look at the Biblical perspective, we see that humanity, male and female, naked and unashamed, is the definition of what is 'very good', but, we continue, those days are gone, so we reason, fallen beings that we are, clothing has become a kind of moral duty - a 'protection' against giving way to evil.
Whilst a considered reading of Genesis 3 itself should give us serious doubts about that understanding (and raise other questions - what 'nakedness' is in focus here?), this really doesn't sit too well with how the body is understood in the New Testament itself, or the nature of the resurrection hope which Paul unpacks in Romans and Corinthians (another great area to study).

What this really shows is that the Fall has entirely broken what was meant (and will be) our natural relationship to the created order, to one another and to the physical body, but that this is what has been redeemed and will be made evident in the approaching 'glorifying' (re-instating of proper significance) of God's handiwork. It also shows us that we can allow badly informed piety to become our schoolmaster with regards to our bodies, fueling a distaste for God's gifts which mars and demeans what we should truly honor.

What struck me was just how crucial such insights have to be when we begin to look at the practical aspects of Christian living. Paul speaks of us giving our bodies as a 'living sacrifice to God' - you actually cannot do that if you hate the physical, the sexual, the natural part of what you are. God is calling for us to show Christ through these very means - in the manner in which we share God's life and love to the world around us. "Denying ourselves" in the sense of cutting ourselves off from the life we are rooted in removes the very means whereby God wants this current world to be 'savored' with the richness of Christ and His redeeming work.

There's a great deal to unpack here, and all I've done so far on this is really get my toes wet.

What comes to mind when you begin to consider how we may have mis-placed godliness?

Savoring the world

2008-11-16T03:58:00.000-08:00

"Medieval Europe not only created the experimental science of optics and initiated surprisingly modern-sounding discussions about cosmology, but began the systematic teaching of astronomy to university undergraduates.... All this was done with the full encouragement of Christianity - for without that, there would never have been the physical resources nor the intellectual initiative to follow this path...
The disciplined search for truth which we call science, therefore, is not the natural foe of such faith, and to see it as such is to commit a serious injury to those historical forces which have produced Western civilization". Dr Allan Chapman.

Something is finally dawning in some quarters of our culture regarding the bareness of atheistic secularism, particularly with regard to its caricature of the significance of Christianity.
Today, a review was published in a popular paper here of a new television drama, some seven years in the making, to be aired this week, which seeks to challenge our incorrect assumptions on the Purtian period in England, which actually marked the beginnings of enriching society in ways we would all value as good.

"The Puritan conviction", writes Lucy Powell, "was that beauty was God-given, not man made. This meant that women could loosen the punishing pinch of fashionable, tight-wasted bodices, ditch the cumbersome hoops and bustles in their skirts, and forgo the established practice of dropping arsenic into their eyes to make them wide. They also stopped dousing their faces with acid to make them white and wrinkle-free... the period saw a radical shift in the idea of what the role of a woman would be".

The first real 'sexual revolution' occurred at this time. Puritan Men and women were able to 'socialize' in a manner which shocked at the time, and within marriage, the Puritans also encouraged sexual pleasure and satisfaction for both men and women as an inherent part of love making. Far from being the dismal characters we think them to be, they merely sought to show that all of life is best within its proper context, and key to this was an understanding of the relationship of the created order to its Creator.

Modern history is replete with examples of this 'savoring' of our world by Christianity. From the abolition of slavery, to the beginning of trade unions and social welfare, from the rich development of our language, to the origins of the first modern schools of learning for science and the arts, all stems from this same weaving of life and faith.
Is it then, perhaps any wonder, that in a time when there has been very active attempts to dis-engage such association and dismiss these connections that our culture has become more fractured and dis-membered and life has become more demeaned?

Jesus told His disciples that they would become 'salt and light' in this world, and history shows us the reality of what transpires when His body enriches the days and times around them.
Rather than becoming removed from these days, let's seek to do our best to value and season the lives of people and the opportunities we are given with the meaning of all those good things which come down to us from our Father, through His redemption, made ours in Christ.

The continuing collision

2008-11-08T03:18:00.000-08:00

"Western Civilisation had an innate dynamic drive whose deepest source was its sense of direction and purpose - a confidence in its destiny. This came from Christianity".

Historian John Roberts.

"And I will bring division between you - between your offspring and hers". Genesis 3:15

I was fascinated to read these remarks this week by Dave Scott on the Uncommon Descent website:

"Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for (the modern world). Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held (mythic) structures. They are profoundly conservative belief".

We live an in a day which seeks to define itself as inherently pluralistic, where 'spirituality' is either deemed as inherently viewed as an evolutionary miss-demeanor, or essentially practiced as nothing beyond a dualistic 'merging', amidst the illusion of the material, into the ultimate state of non-existence. Within such a context, it is fascinating to see what Mr Scott has touched upon, that the almost gravity-like pull of the Biblical message of Creation, Fall and Redemption cannot actually be exorcised from our lives - it has to be re-defined, made manageable and, of greatest import, achievable by the 'natural' human community - able, it is said, to achieve this goal through its own common will.

In the 15th century, prior to any contact with the West, the Incan king, Pachacuti, builder of the famous city of Machu Picchu, renounced his culture's worship of the sun god, Inti, and for good reason. He understood that the sun was merely part of the physical order, which like himself, was bound to the realities of that realm. In a hymn composed by the king, he renews the almost extinct memory of Viracocha, the omnipotent creator of all things. "He is ancient, remote, supreme and uncreated", noted the king, "He manifests Himself as a trinity when He so wishes. He created all the peoples of the world by His word. He alone is our origin, ordaining our years and causing us to be sustained and grow through the gifts of His creation.He has pity upon our wretchedness and alone judges and absolves us. He should be revered with awe and humility".

We recognize our need for the very 'pattern' which scripture conveys, but like the fallen of Eden, we quickly seek to re-define such matters via the fig-leaves of our terms, our misguided understanding. Only those, like Pachacuti, who stand before the naked truth of our reality can hope to gain true wealth and wisdom - we are either made by one who has marked us with destiny, or we and all we inhabit are inherently irrelevant. These are essentially the only two players in the room. The age-long truth, so mirrored in the aspiration of eternity in our hearts, is that there is indeed one in whom we live and move and have our being, and though He is far above and beyond our most determined means to ignorantly define, He has made Himself known through the coming of the Word.

The Necessity

2008-10-31T02:13:00.000-07:00

“For nearly half a century, the church was split into two or three obediences that ex-communicated one another, so that every catholic lived under ex-communication by one pope or another and in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which one had right on his side. The church no longer offered certainty of salvation. She had become questionable in her whole objective form. The true church, the true pledge of salvation HAD TO BE SOUGHT OUTSIDE the institution.

It is against this back-drop of a profoundly shaken ecclesiastical consciousness that we are to understand that Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the church ultimately came to experience the church not as the guarantor but as the adversary of salvation”.

Historical assessment of the reason for the reformation by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
(now Pope Benedict XVI).

It's something the media age has made us live with - national and international convulsions of crisis and upheaval which seem immediate, if mostly conveyed in a detached, almost remote fashion, where we can sit and watch but feel disconnected. It can even occur regarding things that are literally happening under our noses.

Yesterday, I watched with disbelief as a small town around an hour's drive from my home was bombarded with a month's rain in under two hours, a foot of hail and ice, and lightning that sheeted the night sky so long that people there thought the end of the world had arrived... Meanwhile, most of us in the same county slept quietly in our beds, unaware of what had occurred in our backyard until the news reports the next morning.

It is the strangest thing to visit a place where some great event has occurred. In the last decade, I recall walking through a forest the morning after a great storm - the strongest of its kind, they believe, in over a thousand years. Great old trees had been uprooted and tossed around like kindling, famous landscape markers had vanished overnight and the whole place smelt of the sap of a broken, torn place.

There are moments when such a conflagration is not only necessary, but demanded amongst the Christian church; a 'breaking' of bones in order that they may be re-set and bound to heal and grow well. The events in medieval Europe, from the preaching and ministry of John Wycliffe and the Lollards, through the sacrifice of Jon Hus, to the protest against indulgences by the Augustinian, Martin Luther, were the birth bangs of the long and hard work of seeking to bruise in order to mend, that those of us living may genuinely be exposed to the radiance of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and be made free by this alone.

The struggle has not changed. The church still creaks and teeters, as it so often seems overloaded by those who teach another Jesus, another 'gospel', but some 500 years on from that morning in Wittenburg, when Luther took the bold step of expressing concerns due to his conviction that Apostolic truth was at stake, there are still voices who wish to affirm the message of the New Testament - the just shall live by faith alone - that we may truly do each other good.

On this day, when our world dallies with fear, superstition and the eve of another year, let us look towards a greater truth, a greater day, when the healing of Christ through the good news heralds the renewal of the Lord's good handiwork....

From earth's wide bounds,

from oceans farthest coast, through gates of pearl stream in the countless host,

singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Hymn: For All the Saints by Vaughn Williams.

"Herein is wisdom..."

2008-10-20T12:34:00.000-07:00

"But He, in Himself, after a fashion which we can neither describe nor conceive, predestinating all things, formed them as He pleased, bestowing harmony on all things...
in this way, in short, He formed all things that were made by His Word that never wearies".

Irenaeus.

I've carried it around for most of my adult life - a little green card that says I'm disabled. Most of the time, I forget about it, and most of the people I meet everyday probably never see me that way, but in my case it's something that's been true since birth, and there are mornings where I really know it's true.

It's like that in all kinds of ways in life - we suddenly find ourselves facing a trail or a circumstance which leaves us way out of our depth, but what do we do in that moment?

Sometimes, we can see things coming. I can recall my visit to America in 2005, and the friend I was staying with telling me in no uncertain terms that the growing 'sub prime fiasco' was going to wreak havoc on the global economy.
Occasionally, perhaps because of hindsight from another event, we correctly read part of what's shaping up and can thereby anticipate what's required next. A good sailor, I'm told, can tell in many cases what the wind is probably going to do, and what that means for the day at sea.
It's useful to be a good judge of such things, but however good a prospector we may be, life will always have something up ahead that catches us out - because of who and what we are.

The tendency of human nature is to put everything into a box - a scheme entitled 'modernism' or 'secularism' or a plethora of others; whatever 'suit' we think will fit the moment, but at the end of the day, our Politically Correct 'dress codes' will leave us bare before the harsh realities we all face, for they contain no remedy.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, as Christianity wrangled with the belief that the physical was irrelevant, Irenaeus sought to guide our view beyond such trends to a touchstone that will leave us awe-struck when truly realized.
Beyond the meager limitations of our defining, our scheming, our oh so real frustrations, there is the revelation of the Word (John 1:1).
It's really worth doing sometime - sit down with your study guides and begin unpack what this definition of the character and nature of God is seeking to express to us - it's astonishing.
Of course the amazement does not end there - this Word was made flesh, and because of this, the 'stuff' we inhabit and are made of will not be forever bound to futility and frustration, but will be liberated from such misery and decay.

It certainly gets harder to do things as we get older (except have a good moan, perhaps!), but the truly good news is that there is genuine hope for our poor race and this maligned world we inhabit.

It may be hard to start tomorrow, but it may help to see each day as a moment heralding that great redemption - an opportunity for us to truly see, to taste, to know, the glory of the one revealed as the Word.

In proper context

2008-10-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

"From the fourth century onwards, there took place what some have termed the paganizing of the church. It adopted beliefs and practices that were wholly alien to the Gospel".

Jacques Ellul

"Be on your guard against the ferment, the teaching, of these men".

Jesus.

Last month, new evidence was released that a certain chemical used in common plastic items, including water bottles, can under certain conditions leach into the contents of the plastic container and end up within our bodies, causing a much higher likelihood of heart problems or cancer.
The very items we use everyday to help us keep healthy could in fact be responsible for major health problems and deaths, all because there is a fault with the container the 'healthy' product is provided in.

The same is so abundantly true regarding the very nature of the Christian church.

Why is it that the essential message of fundamental freedom (the redemption in Christ that once again allows us to love God and each other) is so buried beneath an unbearable weight of provisos and conditions which are strenuously advocated amongst the various 'traditions' (ancient or modern) in the majority of variations in Christendom? Why would an Apostle like Paul once again find himself standing almost alone if here today because of his bold and clear affirmation not only of the Gospel itself, but of the ramifications regarding Christian liberty, now so rigorously deemed 'outside' the remit of 'piety' assumed and shored-up within the niche of most churches?

The answer is because we have so often been told to avoid the plain statements of Christ and His Apostles and to place confidence in the leaching of folly into the instruction of leaders and institutions - poison which makes us numbed and dulled to the real power and nature of the vital Christian life.

Dualistic and Gnostic 'purity' has murdered our faith for centuries, and it must be denounced as the dark mesmerism which defrauds so many into swallowing whole a mime, a hideous and hollow imitation of a faith which wishes to drive deep into our flesh, our deeds, in a fashion that reveals mere external 'display' as a toxic, malevolent mantle.

The requirement of our generation, as we fast approach another anniversary of Luther's issuing of a thesis toward liberty, is to recognize the true responsibility of Christian discipleship, to stand sure in the freedom we have, and to teach and live from within that freedom, never again giving ourselves to the horror of dead religion.