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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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
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
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
I realised that my anger created restlessness, brooding, inner disputes, and made prayer nearly impossible. But the most disturbing anger was the anger at myself for not responding properly, for not knowing how to express my disagreement, for external obedience while remaining rebellious from within, and for letting small and seemingly insignificant events have so much power over my emotional life. In summary: passive aggressive behaviour. – Henri Nouwen
Anger is like fire. Under control, it can bring much-needed warmth to a cold environment or form a backfire to stop the spread of a raging wildfire. But out of control, the smallest of sparks can ignite an inferno that races to consume and destroy.
Controlling anger is not, as we might often assume, merely the exercise of withholding caustic words or violent deeds. Containing the anger within the confines of the body does not bring it under control – it suppresses. Compresses. Distresses.
Left in this state, we smolder. And the resulting pressure requires release. It will either build a backdraft that explodes when someone or something opens the door, or it will seep out at regular intervals in a period – or even a lifetime – of passive aggression.
Some of us, without even knowing, live in a perpetual state of anger – like the coal fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania, that has been burning underground since 1962. And in this state, everyone – and everything – agitates us. Or, more destructively, we find ourselves wondering we explode at the slightest provocation.
Today, we will take a fresh look at unsettled anger – how to determine if we need to extinguish it, or build a good fire that helps others. And, in most cases, we learn how to avoid creating the drought conditions in the soul that allow it to burn uncontrollably in the first place.
Source Scripture
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
Read 1 John 1. How does this passage relate to today’s podcast and help you examine your inward life as it pertains to anger? Where do you see the ministry of reconciliation to God and others? How does hypocrisy sneak into our lives to prevent us from seeing how our refusal to reconcile warps our view of the divine?
Books to Read
Unoffendable by Brant Hansen