Last week I received a text from a good friend: "Can you remind me what God is like?" I had to chuckle at my phone's automatic response choices: "Sure"; "Sorry, no"; and "Talk later."
Given circumstances in the world, my friend's request wasn't that unusual. I gave her a longer version (because that's what I typically do) of what children's television host Mr. Rogers said about looking for the helpers. I look for signs of the Imago Dei, the image of God, and I look at His handiwork.
Those familiar with art know that the painting above is a Caravaggio without seeing his name. The Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence bear all the markings and attributes of Caravaggio's work. So, too, with God's handiwork. His creation has marks of His handiwork: beauty, goodness, and incredible skill. Sometimes it bears the marks of astounding mathematically precision, and at other times, it is the irregularities which are amazingly wondrous.
Those irregularities are quite common in people, yet as Dallas Willard writes: "The obviously well kept secret of the 'ordinary' is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows" (14). But, some friend will cry out: "This week we have seen humans where no mark of the divine seemed anywhere close!" The divine in them was given over to tin: tin men and women mechanically carrying out what they had been trained to trust in -- a god of hate.
"...C.S.Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what God said long ago and 'trying to carry it out.' Rather, 'The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to "inject" His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin'" (Lewis, Mere Christianity, qtd. by Willard, The Divine Conspiracy 20).
Still tin. We walk around daily with much tin in our lives. We don't look like we carry the Imago Dei within us. The beauty of a Caravaggio painting is his mark of reality: Mary is weary, no halo or crown above her head. C.S. Lewis's words from "The Weight of Glory" apply: "Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is Monday morning."
What do I do with my Monday mornings (and Tuesdays and all the other mornings)?
"A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point" (Lewis).
Given circumstances in the world, my friend's request wasn't that unusual. I gave her a longer version (because that's what I typically do) of what children's television host Mr. Rogers said about looking for the helpers. I look for signs of the Imago Dei, the image of God, and I look at His handiwork.
Those familiar with art know that the painting above is a Caravaggio without seeing his name. The Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence bear all the markings and attributes of Caravaggio's work. So, too, with God's handiwork. His creation has marks of His handiwork: beauty, goodness, and incredible skill. Sometimes it bears the marks of astounding mathematically precision, and at other times, it is the irregularities which are amazingly wondrous.
Those irregularities are quite common in people, yet as Dallas Willard writes: "The obviously well kept secret of the 'ordinary' is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows" (14). But, some friend will cry out: "This week we have seen humans where no mark of the divine seemed anywhere close!" The divine in them was given over to tin: tin men and women mechanically carrying out what they had been trained to trust in -- a god of hate.
"...C.S.Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what God said long ago and 'trying to carry it out.' Rather, 'The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to "inject" His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin'" (Lewis, Mere Christianity, qtd. by Willard, The Divine Conspiracy 20).
Still tin. We walk around daily with much tin in our lives. We don't look like we carry the Imago Dei within us. The beauty of a Caravaggio painting is his mark of reality: Mary is weary, no halo or crown above her head. C.S. Lewis's words from "The Weight of Glory" apply: "Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is Monday morning."
What do I do with my Monday mornings (and Tuesdays and all the other mornings)?
"A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point" (Lewis).
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