Perception and Understanding

‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.’

William Blake, Selected Poetry and Prose (ed. Northrop Frye; New York: Modern Library, 1953), p. 125.

‘We take from others only what we already have in ourselves.’

Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1978), p. 111.

‘The soul of the beholder must … gradually be changed so that it is likened to the constantly ascending forms of beauty.’

Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (trans. Jules L. Moreau; New York: Norton, 1970), p. 86.

‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.’

Anaïs Nin

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’

Jesus (Matthew 5:8)

Prayer

‘In prayer we intend to leave the world of anxieties and enter a world of wonder. We decide to leave an ego-centered world and enter a God-centered world. We will to leave a world of problems and enter a world of mystery. But it is not easy. We are used to anxieties, egos, and problems: we are not used to wonder, God, and mystery.’

Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God: Learning to Pray from the Psalms (London: Marshall Pickering, 1989), p. 23.

Reversed Thunder

I finished Eugene Peterson’s book Reversed Thunder today. It is a meditation on Revelation that is well worth reading. Peterson has some interesting comments on St John, the theologian, the poet and the pastor. But the bulk of the book follows Revelation section by section, considering each in turn as the last word: on Scripture, Christ, the church, worship, evil, prayer, witness, politics, judgment, salvation and heaven. This is a most stimulating and spiritually engaging book. Peterson stands in the tradition of John himself in engaging our imagination and making us spiritually alert to the reality of God and heaven (though not understood in the ‘traditional’ sense).

The full bibliographical details are: Eugene H. Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (Pb. ed., New York: HarperOne, 1991).

Heaven

The biblical vision of heaven is shorthand for the new creation, heaven and earth, nature and culture, the garden and the city, renewed, restored, redeemed, transformed, fulfilled, beautified. The biblical vision of heaven is not an escapist utopian fantasy of what might be. It is far more: it is a vision of what will be. No, it is far more than that even: it is a vision of what is! As the poet Robert Browning once said: ‘earth is crammed with heaven’. Heaven is now, ‘barely out of the range of our senses’ (Eugene Peterson) and not yet for us to enjoy in its fullness, but none the less real for that.

Heaven

‘Heaven is not what we wait for until the rapture or where we go when we die, but what is, barely out of the range of our senses, but brought to our senses by St. John’s visions. We are now able to look upon the events around us not as a hopeless morass of pagan deception and human misery, but as the birth pangs of a new creation and a beckoning to participate in God’s remaking of God’s creation.’

Eugene H. Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (Pb. ed., New York: HarperOne, 1991), p. 172.

But you, O Lord – how long?

These words have been a dear companion throughout the year:

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am feeble;
heal me, O Lord, for my bones are troubled.
My soul, too, is very troubled.
But you, O Lord – how long?

Psalm 6:2-3

I love the ungrammatical construction ‘but you, O Lord – how long?’ which perfectly expresses the halting, stumbling kind of speech that is prayer.

Postcards from a Young Man

Having lived with Mumford & Sons’ album Sigh No More for almost a year (and a rather special year at that), their earthy indie folk has finally given way to the Manic Street Preachers’ reckless flirt with joyousness that is Postcards from a Young Man. This is Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s description on Allmusic, and he goes on to say that the Manics have ‘never sounded as ebullient as they do here’. Ebullience and joyousness – that’s exactly what I needed, and the Manics provide it in liberal dosages. And yes, some of the lyrics of the title track appealed to me as well:

This world will not impose its will
I will not give up and I will not give in
And I will not give up and I will not give in

Eternity

‘The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The cry for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. … The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a herenow.’

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), p. 295.

Ἀγάπη and the Biblical Texts

Only the self-giving ἀγάπη (agapē) love that enables us to approach the biblical texts with attentive respect can receive what God desires to give. Ideological approaches that focus too much on the rights of the reader are in danger of trumping the text and finding in it nothing but ‘the reflection of [their] own silly faces’, as C. S. Lewis once put it (Reflections on the Psalms [1961; reprint: London: Fount, 1977], p. 102).

Armageddon

‘One of the unintended and unhappy consequences of St. John’s Armageddon vision is that it has inflamed the imaginations of the biblically illiterate into consuming endtime fantasies, distracting them from the daily valor of dogged obedience, sacrificial love, and alert endurance. […] The Armageddon war sets our daily conflict with evil in the context of the cosmic conflict, or vice versa.’

Eugene H. Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (Pb. ed., New York: HarperOne, 1991), p. 165.