BLOG 10/18/15. AN ENCHANTED WORLD, LIKE IT OR NOT …

BLOG 10/18/15. AN ENCHANTED WORLD, LIKE IT OR NOT …

I was intrigued by the large number of visitors to my last blog: “It’s been lonely in the world since God died.” Even in a world that becomes increasingly secular, with no intellectual place for stuff like basing one’s life and morality on some notion of God or the afterlife, … there linger all of those unanswered longings for meaning, for acceptance, for hope. There is that meta-conscious sense that we are missing something. Exclusive humanism, or atheism, or agnosticism may be convenient escapes for a season but they don’t eliminate that sense that there is something (how to say it?) haunted about this present scene. One person describes such persons as: “Without hope, and without God in the world.”

I remember quite vividly two graduate students in physics with whom I had significant conversations many years ago. One of them, with an undergraduate degree from an elite Ivy League college, had a ‘bone in his teeth’ about Christians, and when he found out that I was one such, sitting over coffee with several of my companionable friends looking on, he took off on a diatribe against the whole Christian thing. When he stopped for a breath (my friends watching with fascination) I asked him if he had ever read the primary documents of the Christian faith? He was somewhat incredulous, and asked what they were. When I explained that even secular scholars accepted the four gospels of the New Testament as the primary sources if one was to understand what the Christian faith pertained to be (even if one did not believe a word of them). He was not even aware of them, and so certainly had not read them. I then asked him if he would ever make some dogmatic assertion in his doctoral dissertation without confirming footnotes into his sources? He admitted that he would not. So I quietly told him that it was difficult, then, for me to really have an intelligent conversation with him about the viability of the Christian position if he had never bothered to understand it’s own primary documents. He was chagrined, and I quietly proposed that he read up on them, and that I would love to continue the conversation with him. I never heard from him.

But another graduate student in physics (undergraduate from Amherst) at the same prestigious university was also a very aggressive agnostic, who took delight in making life miserable for professing Christians, but was also quite taken with one of his female colleagues in the same department, who was a professing Christian, and in spite of her rejection of his attempt to dissuade her of her Christian faith, had his full attention. Long story short, late one night I got a phone call asking if he could come to my home and talk with me. When he came I asked him the same question about his familiarity with the New Testament documents. He bit. I gave him a copy of the Bible and sent him on his way. Within a few weeks he came to me, thoroughly convinced of Jesus, was baptized and has had a long career as a physicist of profound Christian persuasion.

I relate all of this because there is that state of being, that meta-conscious border between physical reality and spiritual existence, where the border dissolves. There is discovered a spiritual self as the true reality (if that makes sense). It reminds one of the fascinating statement by the New Testament writer, that in Jesus Christ, the mystery hidden for the ages is now revealed. As has been said: “In meta-consciousness you shift effortlessly and spontaneously into a higher plane of being and state of awareness.” I am heralding Jesus as the door into a very healthy and enchanted life where we find our heart’s true home. If you never discovered this, It’s worth pursuing.

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About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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