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.
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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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The only thing that can save us from our irascibly self-centered existence is to make sure that our existence is in the service of others. Mark Shrime
Without conscious and concerted effort, our focus will always be on ourselves. What we want. What we need. What we’ll do to get what we want and need.
This focus reveals our purpose – which, if we are honest, is to bend the world and all that is in it in our favor. We desire to be seen and to be valued, and with this focus we devise actions that will garner attention, gain praise, and earn love. When we fail, as we inevitably will, we become increasingly discontent and grow more likely to reduce others to the role of competitor, ally, enemy, or tool.
Such self-centered living is destined to fail, despite our rational thoughts to the contrary and despite seeing those we idolize post their social proof. The human soul is not designed to be selfish – it is designed to serve. It is designed to be a cup that receives divine love from above and pours it out freely here below.
Soul-centered living brings freedom and opens the doorway into the kingdom of heaven. Self-centeredness, in its desperation to justify itself, has a way of pretending to be righteous with magic tricks that may fool the eye at first glance. But all that hocus focus cannot and will not ever serve us or others.
Today, we’ll expose the magic tricks that attempt to make self-centeredness disappear, and we’ll rediscover the true meaning of life.
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Beyond the surface affirmations that come through our achievements and social contacts, we long to be seen and celebrated for that which is deeply good and worthwhile in us, and we long for a love that is strong enough to contain our frailty and sinfulness. Something in us knows such love is a transforming power. Ruth Haley Barton
When Adam and Eve hid from God amidst the trees of the Garden of Eden, clad with fig leaves sewn by trembling fingers, they for the first time in their lives feared being in the presence of God. Before the fall of paradise, they were unashamed to be fully seen and known. But now, they lived with a new reality: to be fully known came coupled with the horrifying dread of rejection.
And as they shuddered in the shadows, God called to them. He came to them. And though their shame was as much their own making as their fig leaf coverings, God gently took away both – covering them with love and the skins of of the first creature to ever die.
God’s love enveloped both their worth and their failure, held in the tension between the curses of Paradise Lost and the promise of paradise regained through a future descendant of Eve.
We live in that fallen state – it infects us today. We long equally to be fully known and fully loved, yet we believe the former inherently negates the latter. This leaves us in a terrible state, for we see the love really want on one horizon and who we really are on the other. Trapped in desperation of a world of our own making, we hopelessly run toward one or the other. To run toward love, we believe, we must cloak and costume our true selves, leading inevitably to a false version of love for a false version of ourselves.
And when we can take no more of this, we turn back toward the other horizon, back to ourselves. But, where is this place from whence we came? The landscape looks different now than when we left. We are lost. We search desperately for who we really are, but in so doing the more we discover leads us farther and farther away from the love of anyone who could ever embrace what we find.
And yet, what we do not see or grasp as we run back and forth like little flatlanders who can fathom only two dimensions, a divine voice cries out from above in love, asking the same question asked of Adam and Eve. Where are you?
God’s love seeks us. It searches us out. God is love, and He is capable of loving us fully and knowing us fully, awakening us to and rescuing us from the torturous, writhing, fallen state of forever believing we must choose between experiencing love and being seen for who we are.
Once rescued, we find paradise regained. All we ever desired returns to us.
And then – we find ourselves with one new desire – the desire to do for others what was done for us.
This is the golden rule of engagement.
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Change the prevailing mode of consciousness and you change the world. Theodore Roszak
The prevailing mode of consciousness today might be captured in the word materialism. Philosophical materialism suggests that all that matters is matter, and everything that occurs does so strictly within the material world.
Practical materialism, which flows from its philosophical wellspring, focuses on the acquisition, manipulation, and removal of material objects based on their usefulness.
A better term for this prevailing mode of consciousness that is rooted in philosophical materialism might be objective consciousness.
In layman’s terms: Where’s my stuff? I want stuff. I need stuff. But not that stuff.
Objective consciousness limits us to see, live, and act only within the physical world of stuff. Of things.
Beyond the stuff of earth, however, is a realm of awe and wonder. The spiritual world. The plane of existence where we experience love, joy, peace, gratitude, hope, and communion with the divine.
The membrane that separates these two worlds can only be permeated by shedding the entirety of the material world, including and especially the center of it all – the self.
To the self, this appears as a mythical fantasy at best or suicidal mission at worst. And so, any invitation to cross the threshold is met with dismissal or attack.
So how does anyone trapped in the prevailing consciousness of the material, objective world ever see the truth of what lies beyond?
There is one – and only one – spiritual substance that can penetrate the physical world and shine light that illuminates the path between these two world
And that substance is the focus of today’s episode.
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People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung
One of the most harmful and yet least examined impulses of human nature is that of judgement. In silent milliseconds, we can observe a fellow human being and decide if he is worthy or unworthy, right or wrong, good or bad.
And with that judgement, just as quietly but more deadly, we condemn. We From our judge’s chair while draped in our robes of black, we pass one of the many sentences available to us in our play book.
Rather than turn the other cheek, we turn our back. Rather than go the extra mile, we force them to. We hurl insults. We raise our hands in obscene gestures. We steal back what is supposedly ours. We open the floodgates of rage into our hearts and with our minds we justify the mental, verbal, emotional, and physical abuse that we heap on our accused.
And as we pass judgement and condemnation on the other, we silently and often unknowingly hold up our get-out-of-jail-free card – the one we earned by being right, righteous, good, better. We choose to be our own judge, and we always find ourselves innocent.
At stake here is not who is right and who is wrong. What is at stake is you – your state of being. The desire to set the world right is a God-given desire implanted in us. It is etched in the imago dei of our souls.
But the fulfillment of that holy desire does not and cannot come from judgement. Judgement arises from egoistic pride, arrogance, entitlement, and a withering connection to the sacred.
It is time to bring the oft-overlooked act of judgement into the light and let it be judged for what it is. It is time to acknowledge and take the beam out of our own eye. The good news is that we have a Judge who is willing to both forgive us and to teach us his way of forgiveness – freeing us to walk this earth in peace and love.
To err is human, to forgive divine.
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The old debate between reason and revelation, reason and belief, continues up to the present day without either side suspecting that what is at issue is the activation within the being of man of an entirely new faculty of attention. Jacob Needleman
As the science vs. faith battle wages to determine who is right and what is real, what each can miss in this philosophical tournament is the opportunity to lift up their eyes and see beyond the coliseum that hosts it – and walk outside, leaving the weapons and armor of the game behind and embracing the search for being.
Science creates rules that govern and limit how we see. Faith, a term which once meant something much more, finds itself reduced by modern Western thought to nothing more than another set of rules, creeds, and systematic theology – a flattened version of what it really is.
Faith, in its essence, is not a set of rules. Faith is the confidence in what we hope for and the assurance of what we do not see. Hebrews 11:1
Faith is knowing that the deepest, truest desires within us are real. This means that our longing for love, transcendence, meaning, purpose, acceptance, and connection to the divine is not an unrealistic outlook. Faith gives us confidence that these desires are the most genuine thing about us.
And faith is the assurance that these longings, which cannot be seen with the eyes of objective consciousness, can be trusted to lead us to their fulfillment. And they can be trusted precisely because the divine, transcendent God who created us planted these inherent desires within us. He designed us with these invisible desires to seek Him so that he can fulfill them all in communion with him.
And all we have to do is to see this truth in our spirit, accepting it by faith.
Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. Hebrews 11:6
Source Scripture
Matthew 6:19-21; Luke 12:33-34
Matthew 6:22-23; Luke 11:33-36
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Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace. St. Augustine
Created things pull us outside ourselves. We fix our attention on objects, and so our mode of consciousness becomes objective. We assume that the pursuit of the external will, in return, bring us reward as the objects of our attention come to us.
And yet, no matter how hard we try, the external cannot cross the threshold into our inner being and satisfy our real need. Possessions can go no further than an ephemeral caress of the ego. And this maddening tease drives us to toss aside one failed object for the next, leading us on an endless and fruitless pursuit.
Saint Augustine awakened from objective consciousness, from his madding pursuit of created things, to discover that looking outside himself for meaning only drew him away from himself. And the way back to himself was to yield to the divine call that comes only from within.
Today, we turn our attention away from created things out there– letting go of objective consciousness – and look toward the treasure that lie within, where the Creator of all things calls to us.
Source Scripture
Matthew 6:19-21; Luke 12:33-34
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Paradise Now – Tim Mackie of The Bible Project
Narcissists are consumed with maintaining a shallow false self to others. They’re emotionally crippled souls that are addicted to attention. Because of this they use a multitude of games, in order to receive adoration. Shannon L. Alder
The ego longs to be seen and admired, and all those who fall under its narcissistic spell see the world as their stage. Abandoning their true selves for the sake of thunderous applause, they live their lives in performance.
But, as with all performances, the script has an ending. The actors take their bows. The audience goes home. The stage falls silent, and the performers go back to the dressing rooms, remove their costumes, masks, and makeup, and go home as themselves.
The Greek word for such a stage actor is hypokrites. In English, we transliterate that word as hypocrite, and we use it to refer to a person who acts as if he is one thing on the public stage, but lives as if he is another thing entirely in private.
None of us wants to be known as a hypocrite. None of us wants to be seen as a narcissist. We just want to be seen. Noticed. Accepted. Loved.
The problem is that we are afraid that people will not accept us for who we really are, and so we fashion costumes that hide our true selves in hopes that we will be seen as the performer‘s persona and receive the requisite rounds of applause that go with it.
And the longer we play a role, regardless of how much recognition we receive, our true selves will continue to grow restless until we are seen and known for who we really are.
Today, we will wrestle together with the natural tendencies to fall into narcissism and hypocrisy and discover the rewards of being true to ourselves.
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