The Lost Symbol
Awestruck
A symbol, in its intended state, induces the memory of or call to an experience that transcends words. It can be the smell of clover mixed with carnations that recalls boyhood play in a southern field. Perhaps it is the sound of those specific bells played at the beginning of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life that calls us to meditate on the meaning of Christmas - and life. It might be the symbol of the cross or crucifix, which can evoke a deep reverence for Jesus’ love and the call he placed on us to deny ourselves and carry our own cross - daily. If we are not careful, however, we can lose...
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Lost No More
Awestruck
Garish, your caricature Perish the fair at your Ceaseless libations and Peace-less privations Absent, your poets While present - all-know-its Whose knowing is depth-less Ne'er sensing the breathless All wonders surceasing Misunders e’er fleecing You of your true nature For what? Nomenclature Flatlander, look up. Definitions took up And away founts of splendor Until counts surrender Beyond all reduction A grand introduction To your ground of being To laughter - to seeing Let truth and spirit meld Transcendent joy beheld Reverie, mystery Every bliss for...
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The Sound of Music
Awestruck
You brought music back into the house. I had forgotten. These are the words spoken by Captain Von Trapp in the 1965 musical The Sound of Music. He utters them to Fralein Maria moments after his miraculous transformation from angry and militant to warm and joyous. And it all happened because he heard his children singing in the house - singing he had silenced with insatiable demands for order and obedience. Our deepest desires call us to the transcendent, and yet we too often conflate the fulfillment of those desires with earthly trappings in which the futile search for them exists on a...
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The Age of Exploration
Awestruck
Discovery begets truth. Begets transformation. And discovery begins with exploration. The impulse to explore has largely been stunted in our time by the erroneous assumption nothing remains to explore. We’ve mapped the earth. We have GPS systems to tell us exactly where we are at any given time. We’ve been to the moon. We’ve sent probes to Mars and even beyond the edge of our solar system. Our telescopes now give us glimpses of the furthest shores of the Universe. Microscopes have deconstructed the atom and beyond. We have relinquished real exploration to the experts, and we wait...
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Know Doubt
Awestruck
Doubt is mostly viewed as a negative trait or as even as the opposite of faith. We think this way largely because we imagine doubt and faith in still life, or rigidly defined - devoid of motion. Such attempts at crystallization lose sight of the inner dynamics and play when we struggle with doubt. When we doubt, a number of forces arise within us: curiosity, fear, urgency, to name only a few. These forces compel us to know - to experience - and to do so we act. We move. We seek answers. We position ourselves to see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. Doubt drives the struggle -...
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Welcome Back to Wonder
Awestruck
We have unwittingly exchanged the active experience of being alive in the present for living in a dank library filled with atomized facts that we read not with just our eyes, but with our whole physical bodies. We willingly plug ourselves into a matrix of technology and information that, given the right combination, can summon fleeting fulfillment of our selfish desires: popularity, prosperity, pleasure, and power. These four pillars serve as the supports that bear the table of lifeless and soul-less reductionism where we spend our lives attempting to put together the one-million piece puzzle...
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The Real Ones
Awestruck
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, not light them for themselves; for if our virtues did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike as if we had them not. William Shakespeare Such words capture the essence of a latent power within us, awaiting the spark of purpose to ignite. From our first breath, we are cradled in potential, but our world orbits around primal needs, each cry a beacon of dependence. Yet, as the veil of infancy lifts, the tender choreography of growth and guidance train us to wield the sword of power. And once trained, we are free to choose how to fulfill our potential. ...
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I See You
Awestruck
To see is to discern with clarity what is… C.S. Lewis addressed what he saw as the oncoming blindness to what is in his book The Abolition of Man. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate...
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Axis Mundi
Awestruck
Acceptance - we yearn for it in our inmost being. We long for others to accept us as we are, and yet we are terrified that who we are - which includes our shortcomings, our fears, our secret stories of horror, the terrible things we have thought and done - will repel others and deny us the very acceptance we seek. And so we don costumes, adapting some role that isn't us, hoping to finally earn acceptance. But is it really acceptance if we gain it as someone other than our true self? Maintaining the false self requires exerting so much effort that we then collapse when in solitude and wonder...
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It's Time to Strike Out
Awestruck
Our modern way of thinking has created a false dichotomy between truth and experience. We have become obsessed with the reduction of truth into facts: atomic sentences and numbers and equations that we can use as a periodic table of elements. But this obsession holds no real power. No matter how well you know that two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen combine to form water, this fact will not help you when you are on your knees in the desert and dying of thirst. Water is life, and your experience of consuming it is vital. Spiritual truths exemplify this need for active participation even more...
info_outlineA symbol, in its intended state, induces the memory of or call to an experience that transcends words. It can be the smell of clover mixed with carnations that recalls boyhood play in a southern field. Perhaps it is the sound of those specific bells played at the beginning of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life that calls us to meditate on the meaning of Christmas - and life. It might be the symbol of the cross or crucifix, which can evoke a deep reverence for Jesus’ love and the call he placed on us to deny ourselves and carry our own cross - daily.
If we are not careful, however, we can lose the meaning and experience of the symbol even when it presents itself to us. The smell of clover becomes a nuisance as we dread pushing the mower through it for an hour. Those bells that announce the beginning of a favorite movie now trigger boredom and the search for something new. And the cross becomes nothing more than trinket jewelry dangling from every ear and neck.
In a larger sense, this same thing can happen with us. We ourselves are the image of God, created in His image and intended to be His likeness in the world. When we encounter another human being, what we should see - what we should experience - is the presence of God himself. Even in the least of these as Jesus later says he is in Matthew 25. And focusing just on ourselves, in him we live and move and have our being as Paul says later in the Book of Acts. We are the image of God - the imago dei - and we can be that fully when we find our purpose, meaning, and hope in Him.
But when we forget. When we no longer see ourselves as we truly are - as His image - we are a symbol torn away from the transcendent experience that generated it - and we become a morbid thing. We are dead to things of the spirit. And the longer we remain in this state, the more desperately we labor to disguise our death with the pretense of life.
This is what the Bible calls sin. We are missing the mark. We lose our connection to the transcendent God who created us and lives in us. His light fades and we now live in darkness, crawling around and blindly searching for distractions to our plight.
Today, we will be focusing on this lost state - especially as it pertains to those of us who don’t realize it because we still bear the symbol of His image, but we have yet to realize that the fullness of its meaning - of its transcendent experience with the divine - has been torn away. And the only way back - is metanoia. Repentance.
Source Scripture
Matthew 11:16-19; Luke 7:31-35
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