A Tree that Marks
The sun came out for a few minutes this afternoon. Life just clicked for me today. My bother-in-law had called this morning with a coupon for a time-share condo that my family could use sometime in a beautiful part of the world. A couple of hours later I breathed a sigh of relief after finishing marking the 61st and last essay of a course that I TA for. The wind just filled my sails and I sat back in my swivel chair with my second latte of the day.
Circumstances. So often they dictate our happiness. Even our spiritual experience. I am in good health. They say that middle-age for males can be the most satisfying years. But I think of another bookseller who has just suffered a coronary. I had lunch today with a friend who is slowly adjusting to the hard, cold reality of separation from his wife. Still another friend that I had lunch with on Tuesday experienced the “til death do us part” of his wedding vows as his wife succumbed to cancer in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Sitting at my computer I read regular updates on another friend’s “bloody” experience with chemo. And all the time that I go about my daily routines another friend’s father lies across the street in a diaper, suffering from the painful sores that accompany the experience of lying for years in that hospital bed. I glance at my watch and have a momentary wince of regret that another week has gone without my taking those few steps that stand in the way of a brief visit.
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Alister McGrath debated Christopher Hitchens in DC this past week. I look forward to listening to the debate on the web sometime soon. I read that Hitchens quipped something to Alister about not believing that Jesus healed the blind man since God hasn’t healed blindness. Why not?
The Why not? remains a mystery to me. You come to something approaching terms with it as you make your way through life. I am not referring to stoic terms. Again and again I fall upon the distinctively evangelical understanding of the death of Christ. I have not read through The Cross of Christ by John Stott, but a number of times I have read the passage from it on Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel, and the Cross of Christ. Stott writes in response to Wiesel:
A few weeks ago I visited a little bookstore in Stanwood, WA, birthplace of Eugene Peterson. It was the 60th anniversary of the publication of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, (September 21, 1937) and we wanted to pick up a copy for a friend who was an MA in English Literature but had never read it. I’ve asked before if they carried anything by Stanwood’s most published author and on this visit I was pleased to see a copy of The Message in the New Age/Religion section. At the front of the store in the “New Releases” section I noticed a copy of Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great, strategically placed alongside Mother Teresa’s posthumous Come Be My Light. Some years ago Hitchens pilloried Mother Teresa in a book entitled The Missionary Position. Now here was that little woman standing up to Hitchens simultaneously on the main street of Stanwood, WA and on the NY Times bestseller list, where it remains ahead of Hitchens.
Mother Teresa is an embodiment of the biblical paradox of deep strength in weakness. Her book gives the reader a glimpse of her often deep, inward despair, a despair that Hitchens interprets as manifest proof of the absence of God. But surely God has rather manifested great power by taking a small Albanian woman, born in Skope, Macadonia, and giving her the agency to transform the lives of the dying in Calcutta and to rebuke the powerful in the halls of places such as Harvard.
Over the centuries Word, theology and music have been able to combine in ways that speak to us and for us.
Bill Reimer, October 19, 2007
Circumstances. So often they dictate our happiness. Even our spiritual experience. I am in good health. They say that middle-age for males can be the most satisfying years. But I think of another bookseller who has just suffered a coronary. I had lunch today with a friend who is slowly adjusting to the hard, cold reality of separation from his wife. Still another friend that I had lunch with on Tuesday experienced the “til death do us part” of his wedding vows as his wife succumbed to cancer in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Sitting at my computer I read regular updates on another friend’s “bloody” experience with chemo. And all the time that I go about my daily routines another friend’s father lies across the street in a diaper, suffering from the painful sores that accompany the experience of lying for years in that hospital bed. I glance at my watch and have a momentary wince of regret that another week has gone without my taking those few steps that stand in the way of a brief visit.
---------------------------------
Alister McGrath debated Christopher Hitchens in DC this past week. I look forward to listening to the debate on the web sometime soon. I read that Hitchens quipped something to Alister about not believing that Jesus healed the blind man since God hasn’t healed blindness. Why not?
The Why not? remains a mystery to me. You come to something approaching terms with it as you make your way through life. I am not referring to stoic terms. Again and again I fall upon the distinctively evangelical understanding of the death of Christ. I have not read through The Cross of Christ by John Stott, but a number of times I have read the passage from it on Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel, and the Cross of Christ. Stott writes in response to Wiesel:
I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God whowas immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have to turn away. And in imagination I have turned to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wretched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. “The cross of Christ . . . is God’s only self-justification in such a world” as ours.
John Stott, The Cross of Christ, InterVarsity Press, 1986.
A few weeks ago I visited a little bookstore in Stanwood, WA, birthplace of Eugene Peterson. It was the 60th anniversary of the publication of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, (September 21, 1937) and we wanted to pick up a copy for a friend who was an MA in English Literature but had never read it. I’ve asked before if they carried anything by Stanwood’s most published author and on this visit I was pleased to see a copy of The Message in the New Age/Religion section. At the front of the store in the “New Releases” section I noticed a copy of Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great, strategically placed alongside Mother Teresa’s posthumous Come Be My Light. Some years ago Hitchens pilloried Mother Teresa in a book entitled The Missionary Position. Now here was that little woman standing up to Hitchens simultaneously on the main street of Stanwood, WA and on the NY Times bestseller list, where it remains ahead of Hitchens.
Mother Teresa is an embodiment of the biblical paradox of deep strength in weakness. Her book gives the reader a glimpse of her often deep, inward despair, a despair that Hitchens interprets as manifest proof of the absence of God. But surely God has rather manifested great power by taking a small Albanian woman, born in Skope, Macadonia, and giving her the agency to transform the lives of the dying in Calcutta and to rebuke the powerful in the halls of places such as Harvard.
Over the centuries Word, theology and music have been able to combine in ways that speak to us and for us.
There is a river that washes you clean
There is a tree that marks the places you've been
Blood that was spilled, although not your own,
For all of your tears, are the wages for things you have done
And all of those nights
Spent alone in the darkness of your mind
Give it up, Let go
These are things you were never meant to shoulder
So, give up the right
To control the waves that empty out your life
Above wild skies
Are the rays that break the shadows we design
I know the world can turn in different ways
Most of the time, we're simply hanging on
And under the signs of how we all behave
We might find the place that we belong
There is a river that washes you clean
There is a tree that marks the places you've been
Blood that was spilled, although not your own
For all of these things, love will atone
-Jars of Clay, from “Good Monsters”
Bill Reimer, October 19, 2007
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