Seeing is believing. Or so we are told. But what if there is a truth behind the obvious? How do we get to that? Poets, do your job!
Recent Entries
Theological SteakApril 10, 2012
These words by P. T. Forsythe on the magnificence of Christ's work are to theology what Ruth's Chris is to a good steak.
Describing the Indescribable
February 11, 2012
What we have in Christ will take all eternity to describe. But for one segment of one sermon, a great preacher made a mighty attempt.
Making Sense Of It All
January 30, 2012
Where are things headed? Is there rhyme and reason to the endless cycle of summer, fall, winter and spring? Is there a plan in place, or is randomness the explanation?
Suffering Saints
January 25, 2012
We get nervous thinking about it - suffering for the sake of Christ. How necessary is it, and what does it produce in us?
George Herbert on Prayer Meetings
January 21, 2012
Prayer Meetings are a thing of the past. Or so it seems. What has been lost? Maybe more than we realize.
When Fear Is Good
January 7, 2012
NO FEAR, we are told. And the point is well taken. But fear can be healthy, at least when it comes to eternal matters.
Happy, Happy, Happy
January 4, 2012
The declaration of independence holds up the pursuit of happiness as a right. Did you ever consider the reading the bible might be the one source that will never let you down?
Sleepwalking Through Life
January 4, 2011
When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it." Genesis 28:16
Most of us won't get a "wake up" dream like Jacob got. When he woke up his whole world had changed. Even though this is our Father's world, we can view it flatly, in mono, black and white instead of color, lacking the lacking the heightened wonder that HD brings. This is a gift the Spirit brings.
William Blake the poet/illustrator noted that our tendency is to see only "with" the eye, when the possibility exists to see "through" the eye, beyone to the deeper truth that lays just beneath the surface of a thing. And C. S. Lewis picked up on this theme as well, in a poem he titled A CONFESSION.
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening–any evening–would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker’s nose;
Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I’ve never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops’ brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.
Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d’estaminet.
I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things…peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.
In humbly denigrating his ability as a poet, Lewis begins with the least important things - peacocks strutting, and climaxes with the most important, with Jerusalem and all that lies behind it.
This is calculated by Lewis in order to express his desire to see beyond a mere city of stone, and instead to see through it, comprehending the spiritual and eternal significance hidden there, hoping in so doing, to better come to understand the heart of God.
What better thing could we ask of God in 2011, that he might grant us eyes to not just see with, but through - to the ultimate realities - to God himself, and his plan in history that continuously unfolds.
