It's a Wonder-Full Life
Birth: wonder … astonishment … adoration. There can't be very many of us for whom the sheer fact of existence hasn't rocked us back on our heels. We take off our sandals before the burning bush. We catch our breath at the sight of a plummeting hawk. "Thank you, God." We find ourselves in a lavish existence in which we feel a deep sense of kinship—we belong here; we say thanks with our lives to Life. And not just "Thanks" or "Thank It," but "Thank You."
Most of the people who have lived on this planet Earth have identified this You with God or gods. This is not just a matter of learning our manners, the way children are taught to say thank you as a social grace. It is the cultivation of adequateness within ourselves to the nature of reality, developing the capacity to sustain an adequate response to the overwhelming gift and goodness of life.
Wonder is the only adequate launching pad for exploring this fullness, this wholeness, of human life. Once a year, each Christmas, for a few days at least, we and millions of our neighbors turn aside from our preoccupations with life reduced to biology or economics or psychology and join together in a community of wonder. The wonder keeps us open-eyed, expectant, alive to life that is always more than we can account for, that always exceeds our calculations, that is always beyond anything we can make.
If in the general festive round of singing and decorating, giving and receiving, cooking meals and family gatherings, we ask what is behind all this and what keeps it going all over the world, among all classes of people quite regardless of whether they believe or not, the answer is simply "a birth." Not just "birth" in general, but a particular birth in a small Middle Eastern ...
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A Fractured and Beautiful Faith
Streaming This Weekend, May 24, 2013
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t
the hypocrit who named himself "the prophet" who supports eugene peterson is no prophet but is an astrologer: A stargazer who is starstruck by the shining-bright peterson. Moosekatt needs a lesson in English, Creative Writing and spirituality, because if he thinks peterson can lump the natural wonder we have for creatures next to Moses' experience of God and then expect us to treat the two as equally profound, then he is a little strange. Peterson is sincere but sincerely wrong when he tries to spiritualize the trivial and treat as trivial the deeply spiritual. Peterson in his attempt at winning audiences has put on a mask that attracts people's attention but he feeds them nothing but Greek tragedy or belly laughs for food. He has no depth. That lack of depth is shown how he writes trivia as if it is marvelous and then treats marvelous things like Moses and his burning bush experience as if Moses was seeing a hawk fly by.No sir, you do not understand the importance of writing for depth
Moosekatt
Mr. Peterson is no fool. And when he says things like, "We take off our sandals before the burning bush." He is speaking illustratively. I doubt very seriously he means such things in a strict literal sense. Maybe we need some basic English and Creative Writing classes in our Sunday school rooms nowadays...
a prophet
boy o boy i am so glad i am not drinking from the poison that those critics of Eugene Petterson are drinking from. Please examine yourself now the flesh is running rampant, how can anyone live with you?