wandering in a starbucks

‘Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything.’ - St. Gregory of Nyssa

'My idea of God is not a divine Idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence….all reality is iconoclastic.' C.S.Lewis A Grief Observed (an iconoclast is a breaker or destroyer of images)

My whole life I have been fascinated with ideas. The fresh. The exciting. The invigorating encounters with things as I have not seen them before. Maybe that is part of why I love airports so much. Sitting on a hard chair staring into space, watching people come and go, planes take off and land, things change and happen with speed and in every direction at once. Wondering where every one is hurrying too, and where they are coming from. The random, new, fresh, busy environment is wonder-full.

Today I sit in a Starbucks in Calgary wondering if I am an introspective person at all...because i am always looking for the next thing...as if in a hurry to get away from the past and the present. I always have thought that I have been good at understanding who I am and what I believe and where I am going...and maybe, because of this, great at using my life experience to express truth. But I am more aware today that I can see other people's lives much more clearly than my own. I can read a story in their eyes. But read my own story...sigh. Not so good.

Why do I yearn for the adrenalin rush...from a great touchdown strike, a roar from a crowd, a moving piece of music, a scene from a movie that totally captures me...?

This fascination with ideas, which for most of my life has been the energy of searching for the fragmented soul of a generation and finding hope in community encounters with the divine...is this all bad? I have been told many times that i dream too much. That i oversell. That I manipulate environments. That i need to be realistic and stop saying things that will never happen...

SO...having said that...let me share a couple of my reflections on ideas and wonder.

Ideas are simply that…ideas.
There is only one real danger in loving ideas. And I have discovered it in my own heart: I understand that in lots of caverns and spaces in my heart I have substituted Jesus for an idea of Jesus. My quest for creating atmosphere and environments that allow people to encounter Him has really been my personal quest for wonder. I want to be awed. To be overcome. To be startled by the divine. To meet with Jesus in such a way that I am shaken by His wildness. His truth. His fixed gaze. As Brennan Manning puts it, His 'relentless tenderness'. I want to be gripped by this maniacal love...that pursues me into my own hidden retreats of darkness.

Could the idea of Jesus that I have wanted to follow since I was a toddler be more than I think He is?

***break time...needed to get a refill of coffee. Am truly NOT learning to appreciate Cafe Verona...

You want to know what I think the battle that we, as the church of Jesus Christ are in right now? A war between dullness and wonder.
Not abortion. Not pornography. Not the disintegration of the family. Not moral absolutes. Not MTV. Not traditional or emergent church strategies. Not drugs, racism, sexuality or whether we drink or not. These are simply symptoms of something bigger.

Dullness.

We have lost our astonishment.

The Good News is no longer good news. It is okay news. This journey of faith that has been blurred with the title of Christianity is no longer life changing. It is life enhancing.
Jesus doesn’t change people into wide-eyed lovers of life, of people and of Him. He changes them into ‘nice people' who have a new group of friends.

Think about this for a minute. When we try to capture the Kingdom of God and the story of Christ, we don't often hear(or use) the words: Wonder. Awe. Astonishment. It is usually GOD = laws, commands, rules, sin, wrath, repent, hell, and then salvation, etc.

Sometimes it feels like the story of Jesus is some subversive way of tricking us into a trap. To get us under control. To conform us. To make us clones.

If this story of Jesus is simply about the Son of God coming in human form to be crucified, raised from the dead, descend into hell, ascend to the right hand of the Father, etc...SO that we could stop doing bad stuff, it seems like an incredible waste of energy.

There has to be more to it.

Think of the incredibleness of the story. From the last supper to Peter and John doing the 100m dash to the tomb. Its extraordinary.

I think what I have missed too often, and maybe my whole life, is the extraordinary story that is written when I/you/someone fully engages this awe-some story of Jesus.

Think of the implications of this story:
If God, the creator of the universe, stepped into human history and took the initiative to take on flesh and blood and walk among us in actual time and space...and if God would be so intent on bringing us into intimate relationship with Him...that His passion play, performed on the stage of human reality, would culminate in Jesus allowing Himself to be brutally tortured and crucified on my behalf and in a moment consciously bear the darkness of who I am and what I have done and will do...its says allot about who He is...

But here is the more overwhelming truth. One that moves me deeply in wonder...

Consider, just for a moment, what it says about me. And what it says about you.

When I look wide-eyed at this, suddenly my disappointment with who I am and who the church is not...fades. Something of a larger and more brilliant story springs to life.

Could the ideas, the dreams, the hopes, the insane yearnings, the lust for life, the hunger for adrenalin that we all have at some level be the pieces of His dream that are woven into our soul?

My mom told me years ago that she had read that for most of us our physical thirst mechanism is so weak we mistake our thirst for hunger. So instead of drinking a glass of water, we eat and numb the desire.

Could this be where many of us are at in terms of our faith journey? Could this be where I am? So many of us live frustrated and we misinterpret our own inner callings. Instead of being drawn deeper, or ala The Lion, The Witch and Wardrobe going 'farther up and further in', we shut off and lash out.

This grand idea, this dream called the Church will always be an unsolved mystery. Yes, a mystery. Something that we cannot fully define. Its a journey filled with cut knees and bruised elbows. William Newton Clarke said that 'Faith is daring the soul to go farther than it can see!'

We must learn to live in the questions, to love the questions. Because they call us farther up and further in. Bono said, 'The soul will be described, but God may not use the people you expect.' Followers of Jesus are meant to be translators of the deepest longing and desires of men's hearts. Too often we opt for critiquing as a way of insulating ourselves from our own longings and desires. We cannot translate what we will not take time to hear in our own hearts. So I am left asking the questions: in my passionate commitment to self preservation and a natural healthy avoidance of pain have I mistaken the instinctive yearnings of my soul for a lack of faith or a youthful arrogance?

Maybe, just maybe, His great idea is made up a a whole bunch of wandering wonder-ings. And maybe just maybe the fully alive-ness, the creativity, the imagination, the joy, the interdependence and commitment to journey with others by these wandering wonder-ings create collective wonder in a world searching for meaning. And maybe, just maybe they will want to wander with wonder too...because that inevitably leads us to the one who is wonder-full.

I believe that Jesus actually knows that we can change the world. But He also knows that the world begins in my heart.

awakening
Jonathan