Monday, June 25, 2018
606 - Plain as Day
Spirituality Column #606
June 26, 2018
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Plain as Day
By Bob Walters
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908
The sincere mainline Protestant minister presiding over the huge, recent funeral spoke eloquently of the deep, comforting love of God that sustains us in our grief.
At a beautiful lakeside wedding – unsheltered outdoors at the edge of a pure forest by a pristine beach with ominous, awesome storm clouds rolling along the fog-dotted Great Lake – the hired officiant spoke with surety to the small assembly of the great love that exists and its power to hold us joyously closer to all things around us.
Yet … never at the funeral did the minister assert the truth that the great Godly love of which she spoke is known to humanity only because it is embodied in Jesus Christ. Never at the wedding – rich with love and atmosphere and the magnificence of God’s Creation – was God’s love mentioned or the name of Jesus uttered.
And yet surely, God was in every heart; Jesus not far from anyone’s mind.
Current secular, cultural evidence and polling suggest the “nones” – those with no religious affiliation – are ascendant. Christianity is fading and secularism is the new normal. Plainly, all popular roads these days seem to lead away from the heart of Jesus and into the great maw of worldly humanism. Jesus Christ says “I am the way and the truth and the life; No one comes to the father except through me” (John 14:6). Modern society, instead, says either, “I decide my own truth,” or “There is no truth.”
And yet, God and Jesus – and the Holy Spirit – absolutely illuminate in our hearts the sense of occasion, warmth, relationship, and cosmic yearning for a glimpse at that mysterious “greater thing” – God in all His glory – so plainly right in front of us. Our hearts know it, but our minds refuse to name it and even preachers refuse to say it.
I think of those among us whose souls in their moments of greatest grief and greatest joy are left with a pain they cannot assuage or a hope they cannot explain. Christ is plainly that comfort and that truth, available to all, but we are unwilling to believe. Chesterton (above) grasps the difficulty of grasping the obvious: our perfect companion in this imperfect, fallen world is the perfect person of Jesus. Our challenge, “our mission if we choose to accept it,” is to put in the work necessary to connect that famous “God shaped hole in our hearts” to an assured reality of Christ in our minds.
What’s hard about it? Faith is what’s hard about it. Lots of theology and religion professors have put in years of work understanding church and scripture with no faith in the truth of any of it. It’s merely an academic exercise in anthropology and psychology.
When everyone around you is convinced “God wouldn’t allow this” and every cultural institution and cause defines a god – actually an idol – to fit their worldly needs, of course these great moments of faith are going to fall short of the Glory of God.
Jesus is what makes those moments happen, and to me it is as plain as day.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes the irony that after the unexpectedly dry outdoor wedding, many folks shared the sentiment, “Thank God the rains held off.”
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