Dazzled

"Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,
God like erect, with native honour clad,
In naked majestic seemed lords of all,
and worthy seemed, for in their looks divine,
The image of their glorious maker shon"."

John Milton

This week, a photographer friend of mine won acclaim for one of his fine art figure images he's taken this summer. It was well deserved, but what made me smile was his comment on what occurred when taking the image - "this was one those moments when you looked through the view finder, and the hairs on the back of your neck stood up".

It caused me to reflect on another incident. Back prior to the strange events of the present, a certain politician was making an inaugural address in February and when it came to the growing concerns about the storm approaching from China, he briskly shooed any worries aside, saying that, like Clark Kent, we would go on to don our best superhero kit and quickly see such a minor trouble quickly set aside as we got on with the far greater task of building an international network for growth. Some months on, and the picture looks very different to what was anticipated in such a statement.

Two very different incidents, but both derived from the same fundamental subject - one which in reality defines so much of what we're about.

Here's how the Psalmist frames it:

"What is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him? You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings, and crowned him with glory and honour. You have given him dominion over the works of your hand and you have put all things under his feet".

(Psalm 8:4-6).

What a work we are!

This strikes down into the manner of our true dilemma - when we see humanity, we see something which clearly speaks not only of the greater at work through the lesser, but, far more troubling, the greater within the lesser.

Consider...

Having reached a point where we see that something as extraordinary as life requires something even far more astonishing to devise and produce such complexity (see below for more (1), we then see something divine amidst all the perils of our tumultuous natures. Fractured and constantly obscured, no doubt - but there. This shock is what unnerves us artists as we encounter beauty and what causes others (when power goes to their heads) to often believe, mistakenly, that we can of ourselves stem any threat. 

We were made to be so much - hence the horror of what our current smallness so states about our present disarray.

We of course see this magnificent truth writ large in all the world, but it is within ourselves that we confront this axiom in its untarnished force to leave us either soberly staggered or erroneously swaggering underneath the intoxication that we are still captain's of our souls.

The fool seeks to erase this realisation, or contort it to hell-bent ambitions, but its true shock remains, and provokes each of us to see further than our pretences - to consider how staggering is our existence and how profound its ramifications. Beauty and inclination prompt us to the fact that we are part of a far larger drama.

This is why Christianity has to be given a true hearing - it wants to bring these realisations home, and it does so in a manner that brings God Himself into the very centre of the the greater being evident amongst and within the lesser.

Jesus Christ enters flesh and lives amongst us fully human because the totality of what was intended for us will be realised in His work of redemptive rescue.

In Jesus Christ, Paul informs us, humanity is renewed in regeneration to prepare her for the fullest and richest expression of all that she was intended to be - regents over a renewed material creation that will eternally reflect the richness of The Trinity's supremely good will for us - to express something truly divine in respect to truth and beauty within the material.

It's a vision philosopher's have often sought to repudiate, and the modern world is dull to see, but it bristles with awe and wonder... humanity will be part of an eternal unveiling of something extraordinary.

This is how the New Testament touches on it as it picks up the theme of the Psalmist:

"Now in putting everything in subjection to us, he left nothing outside. At present, we do not yet see this, but we look to the one who for a season was made lower than the angels -Jesus - now crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death, because by the goodness of God He experienced this for each of us". Hebrews 2:8-10.

The intention here is clear. Jesus gave Himself to put us back on the way to what we were intended to be - "lesser" beings, because we are created, but clothed with destiny and eternal purpose.

That's our true riches.

(1) This has been expressed in many theological, philosophical and scientific assertions in the past century, but one of the most comprehensive was highlighted by David Berlinski in his recent work Human Nature where he notes in the sixth chapter how Alvin Plantinga has recently developed an "ontological argument" in which in the very existence of our world, it is by necessity key to also have the existence of that which can conceive of and thereby furnish that said world. Clearly, via physics and other 'hard' sciences, we have shown the world exists, and also had a beginning, and therefore the provider of that realm must therefore equally exist. Berlinski then proceeds to say how the power of what Plantinga is stating is such that he himself has had to begun to reflect much deeper on the possibility of there being an infinite being who created us.