This morning's OT reading from Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (which I highly recommend) was from Genesis 28. 10-22. Jacob is backpacking across Canaan, and like most of us who've been camping, uses a rock as a pillow (okay, so I've got a nice collapsible pillow I throw in my pack, but I'm sure I've used a rock before at some point). During the--I'm sure fitful--night's sleep, Jacob dreams about heaven, earth, and God's moving between the two. When he wakes up, he calls the place "the house of God (Bethel in Hebrew)" saying "Surely the LORD is in this place and I didn't know it!"
That's my prayer for me and you this year, that we have multiple experiences of seeing God in places where we didn't realize he was there. One of my favorite authors, Bob Benson, once wrote about the Beatitude that he didn't know which was the bigger miracle, having a pure heart or seeing God. Which one comes first? Either one is an amazing work that I can't accomplish on my own.
Clearly Jacob was no candidate for "purest heart" awards. Yet he saw God and realized that he was in a place where heaven and earth met. You and I--and we're no purest heart candidates ourselves--can see God in places where heaven and earth come together. Charles Foster in his book The Sacred Journey calls these "thin spaces" and makes this comment:
The sort of new eyes God gives aren't just, or even mainly, designed for seeing the buds you would previously have missed or the nuances of your relationship with a particular pile of rocks. They are designed to let you see Jesus in the world...
May the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob show up in your thin spaces today and this year.
Showing posts with label charles foster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label charles foster. Show all posts
Monday, January 02, 2012
Friday, May 06, 2011
Book Review: "The Sacred Journey" by Charles Foster
I come from a church tradition that doesn't typically see pilgrimage as an organized discipline to pursue. But while I've never been to the Holy Land, I've been on many pilgrimages--and on one Pilgrimage--during my life. Life is most obviously a journey, a hike, and as a backpacker and camper I enjoyed the book. Foster's writing style is wonderful, intermixing his own personal journeys with biblical texts.
I have to admit, when I first started reading this book it biased me against itself early on in the reading. In "The Sacred Journey" Foster lays out that our God is a wandering God, a god of nomads, and in so doing he seems at times to disdain the city. As a country boy, cities were places that I have had to adjust to, but I've come to love the city to a certain degree. I hope to someday live in a totally urban context (although my wife thinks I romanticize the idea somewhat).
But as I read Foster more, I grew to like him. He's irreverant--a trait we share and which I admire. But at the same time he's open to ideas and thoughts and keenly aware of his own prejudices and shortcomings--again a trait that draws me in. In talking about his trip to Rome and seeing pilgrims climbing the Scala Sancta, he later read Spurgeon's rant against such Roman "fetish worship." Foster asks
"Fetish worship"? Because they climb a staircase of dubious historicity? Hardly. We all worship our own synthetic images of God. Growing Christian maturity simply means that the images become incrementally less inadequate. "[God] is the great iconoclast," C. S. Lewis truly wrote. He is constantly smashing up the images we have of him. And anyway, no one is in any danger of confusing God with a staircase or a saint's mummified head. There's a real and malignant danger of confusing God with the things that Scripture says about him.
I could go on, but this will suffice. While there is much in this book that will make evangelical toes curl up (a phrase Foster uses in the book) it is well worth the read, and then worth the figuring out how to practice. I give it 4 out of 5 bellybuttons.
I have to admit, when I first started reading this book it biased me against itself early on in the reading. In "The Sacred Journey" Foster lays out that our God is a wandering God, a god of nomads, and in so doing he seems at times to disdain the city. As a country boy, cities were places that I have had to adjust to, but I've come to love the city to a certain degree. I hope to someday live in a totally urban context (although my wife thinks I romanticize the idea somewhat).
But as I read Foster more, I grew to like him. He's irreverant--a trait we share and which I admire. But at the same time he's open to ideas and thoughts and keenly aware of his own prejudices and shortcomings--again a trait that draws me in. In talking about his trip to Rome and seeing pilgrims climbing the Scala Sancta, he later read Spurgeon's rant against such Roman "fetish worship." Foster asks
"Fetish worship"? Because they climb a staircase of dubious historicity? Hardly. We all worship our own synthetic images of God. Growing Christian maturity simply means that the images become incrementally less inadequate. "[God] is the great iconoclast," C. S. Lewis truly wrote. He is constantly smashing up the images we have of him. And anyway, no one is in any danger of confusing God with a staircase or a saint's mummified head. There's a real and malignant danger of confusing God with the things that Scripture says about him.
I could go on, but this will suffice. While there is much in this book that will make evangelical toes curl up (a phrase Foster uses in the book) it is well worth the read, and then worth the figuring out how to practice. I give it 4 out of 5 bellybuttons.
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