A symbol torn away from the transcendent experience that generated it is a morbid thing. It has died as surely as the body dies once the heart is torn out. A defunct symbol only grows more ghastlier the more desperately we labor to disguise its death with the pretense of life. Theodore Roszak
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 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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Extras
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 thee
But first you must let go
Of this-that and yes-no
Of dual divisions
That dull mystic visions
Of purpose and meaning
Of rapturous gleaning
Of music forgotten
Of soul-light begotten
Now come to your senses
Not those five - essences
Divine resonation
Oh, numinous station!
Metamorphosis realized
Birthed again, alchemized
Lost no more, I now attune
My soul to One, in bliss, commune
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 spectrum ranging from aggresorial austeria to bedlamic bacchanalia. Yet both of these, and everything in between, still exist on a plane of existence that excludes the divine.
Music, nature, art, sacred texts, poetry – all of these are spiritual languages that call us to transcendence – to fly high above the draconian Baconian single-vision prison we have voluntarily locked ourselves into. Like Captain von Trapp was before he heard the sound of music, we are trapped in a wasteland devoid of spirit, of joy, of wonder, of meaning, of purpose, of love and of mercy.
This reductionist flatland of the scientific reality principle is a disease that affects all of us. It is a way of thinking that we have accepted as the only lenses with which to discern what is real and what is not. And it compounds another disease that has existed from the beginning: selfishness. In selfishness we see people, places, things, and systems of thought as utilitarian – they are for us to cultivate and harvest pleasures and tools that benefit us most.
In many parts of the world, especially the West, theology, so-called, has surprisingly drifted and deflated into the flatlands, and Churches and Christians with it. We have traded the experience of loving God and loving others for the study of God and of the heresy of others that will justify why we do not love them.
It is time to bring music back into the house of God. We have forgotten.
Source Scripture
Matthew 11:16-19; Luke 7:31-35
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X: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot
In the Age of Exploration, Europeans began to venture beyond their long-held geographical and social confines to wander in and observe the territory beyond. They beheld spectacular new and colorful species of flora and fauna. They discovered new lands – including the first recorded sightings of the continent of Australia. And they encountered new cultures whose languages, belief systems and ways of life were nothing like their own.
These revelations toppled deep-rooted paradigms, cultivating the framework for the coming Age of Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.
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 for them to sift through the discoveries and highlight what might be meaningful to us in our morning papers and Sunday sermons. And in so doing, we have lost the experience of discovery, settling for filtered reports from the frontiers’ edges.
This lack of experiential exploration has left us yearning for something more. Something that the information and technology revolutions have failed to give us.
The call to explore whispers still, beckoning you to begin a new age of exploration – one that takes you on a captivating journey that leads beyond everything you think is true and into the truth itself. A journey that leads to discoveries that topple deep-rooted paradigms and cultivate a framework that can lead to total fulfillment that transforms your life into one of meaning, beauty, love, joy, peace – into everything you long for and everything you hope to be.
A journey that leads to the center of you. And what you find there – who you find there – is the greatest discovery of all.
Source Scripture
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Extras
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. Douglas Adams
These humorous words from Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy some of the very few you will read that cast doubt as a positive.
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 – without it we would never see potentiality give birth to actuality. This is precisely why God does not present himself as an irrefutable fact. He wants us to struggle. He wants us to be curious and to move toward Him. He wants us to pursue him until, like the moth whose new wings are strengthened by its endeavor to escape the cocoon, we emerge transformed into a new creation that exchanges the rigidity of an earthbound life for the boundless skies.
Today we will rediscover the nature and purpose of doubt – and how to allow it to serve as a positive force for transformation.
Source Scripture
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Extras
I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested with information than wonder. Fred Rogers
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 from the box of pieces that, even if accomplished, would result only in a flattened and ghoulishly carved representation of the real world that awaits us in plain sight – if only we would just turn around, leave the puzzle behind, and embark on a journey of adventure, purpose, and meaning.
We live in blueprints rather than homes. We exchange the territory for the map and the symphony for the sheet music, both of which can be neatly tucked into our day planners. We have abandoned the rapture of a starry night for a lifeless book where the front cover has faded under the white-washed sky of light pollution, the back cover boasts of the data contained within, and the pages between them offer not stories, but columns and charts, distances and densities, enormity and expansion.
We have stripped sacred symbols of their resonance and reduced them to tokens and trinkets to buy, sell, or appropriate for monetary gain. Two-handed scrolls enchant no longer, now lost to mindless single-handed scrolling. Pythagoras marveled at meaning in mathematics, envisioning the number one as the symbol for unity and ten for perfection. He found astonishing connections between music and ratio. But now hear the name Pythagoras and all we can muster is a-squared plus b-squared = c-squared as a formula to conquer algebra tests and solve occasional problems. Mathematics are now mere means to ends.
We have wandered from wonder, only to wonder why we wander.
Today, we delve deeply into the hope that this wretched wasteland in which we wander is not our home – the hope that we may yet wake up and rise up and return to reverence, recapturing rapture and seizing the sublime.
Welcome back to wonder.
Source Scripture
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Extras
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.
The easiest path, perhaps, is to mold power to the whims of desire, where the ego eschonces itself as the unyielding center, its gravitational force gripping all it covets.
As we grow older, the spectrum of power broadens—intellectual, political, social, occupational, extending its tendrils into the vast garden of human endeavor. And with every strand of authority entwined around it, there emerges a dichotomy of choice—will we use our power be a vessel of selfish craving or a conduit of collective good?
The news often paints a grim tapestry of power misused—a teacher betraying trust, a politician trading integrity for gold, a city council weaving webs of defamation, a police badge morphing into a shroud of fear, a shepherd fleecing his flock.
Yet, amidst this gloom, rays of hope pierce through— a policewoman’s badge shining as a shield of protection and service, a school principal crafting a haven of learning and respect, a city council sowing seeds of prosperity, a politician being the voice of the voiceless, a pastor trading earthly gold for the treasure of service.
In this grand theatre, the power of choice orchestrates every act. It’s the silent custodian of all other powers, holding the potential to either plunge us into an abyss of self-indulgence or elevate us to beacons of hope amid the encroaching shadows. The path we tread in wielding this primal power echoes the essence of today’s passage—the reverence of recognizing a power beyond ourselves, an authority rooted in the heart of divine love.
Source Scripture
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Extras
What I am trying to describe here is the sacred gift of seeing, the ability to peer beyond the veil and gaze with astonished wonder upon the beauties and mysteries of things holy and eternal. A. W. Tozer
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 the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.
Reason, both C.S. Lewis and Plato insist, follows a natural conformity to the existing harmony of the Universe – to what is. To see is to recognize this, much like a beginning piano player must strain to learn the existing workings of the piano and how dancing her fingers across the keys can create something beautiful.
To see and know what is, then, precedes reason. Reason flows into us once we take in the wonder – the splendor – of the true nature of being.
Today’s episode is a review of the previous six episodes, where Jesus concludes his Sermon on the Mount as a revelation of the true nature of being and then proceeds to immediately fulfill the deepest desires of a man gripped by suffering to be restored to his true nature.
And in all of these episodes, all the while as Jesus is opening our eyes to us what is, he is also peering directly into the depths of our souls to reveal our longings, our needs, and our blindness to the truth and whispers to us, “I see you – and I want to heal you.”
Source Scripture
Matthew 7:13-14
Matthew 7:15-20; Luke 6:43-45
Matthew 7:21-23; Luke 6:46
Matthew 7:24-27; Luke 6:47-49
Matthew 7:28-29
Matthew 8:1-4; Mark 1:40-45; Luke 5:12-16
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
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Extras
The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man’s life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul. Thomas Merton
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 why we feel so empty, lonely, and starved for the very thing we created the false self in the first place – acceptance.
Your deepest desires for acceptance cannot and will not be met until your true self can safely and wholly emerge in full view of another that has an enthusiastic willingness to approach, to touch, to wipe away tears, to gently clean away all impurities to reveal the beauty that lies beneath – you.
When your desire for acceptance, free of costume, meets and grasps the divine desire to accept you for who you really are – you have reached the most sacred space on all earth – the axis mundi – where heaven meets earth. Where the divine meets – and embraces – you.
Source Scripture
Matthew 8:1-4; Mark 1:40-45; Luke 5:12-16
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
Recommended Reading
The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus
Woe to him who cannot tell the difference between the fear of objective truth—a truth which exposes us to our lies in order to show us the fundamental love at the heart of reality—and the fear of the false universe which our world injects into us. Jacob Needleman
Gravity is an objective reality – it exists whether we are conscious of it or not. And gravity not only exists. It exerts. Its force acts upon us at all times. And as such, we construct our world in order to accommodate it – even when we aren’t conscious of it. At crucial times, to not have a keen awareness of the presence and power of gravity is to risk harm or death.
It is one thing to read in a book that the gravitational force exerted on a free-falling body results in an acceleration of that body of 9.8 m/s/s. It is quite another to thing to lose your footing on the precipice of a steep cliff and realize that if you don’t regain your balance immediately, you will be that free-falling body.
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 deeply. A sacred text is not sacred because it reveals truth in written form. It is sacred when and only when the truth in the text connects the spirits of both reader and writer and the experience of sacred communion takes place.
Facts stripped of truth and immersive experience are lifeless at best and oppressive at worst. But when spirit meets truth – yours and the divine – you lose your mind and find your soul.
So if you’re stuck in your head and dying of thirst in a land of facts, it’s time to strike out on a new adventure.
Source Scripture
Connect
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Extras
For Meditation
“The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.” Psalms 65:8 NIV