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| Photo credit: Lois Keen |
In an interview with Deborah Arca, reprinted with permission in Crux, the magazine of The Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut 2013 issue, Nadia Bolz-Weber said that the story of God and the people of God and redemption and Jesus interprets us. We may think we are interpreting the story, but "ultimately we submit to being interpreted by it".
In a lecture given in the summer of 2003 on the island of Iona off the western coast of Scotland, Philip Newell said that we carry the presence of God in our being. He challenged us to look into our hearts and ask what God has written into us.
What has God written into you? Then look at Christ and compare the two - what you believe God has written into you, your life, your thoughts, your desires, your dreams, and what you read about Christ, AND what you have experienced of Christ through and in your life. If there is discord between the two accounts - what you believe God has written into you, and what the stories and your experiences of Jesus say - then go back and look deeper into yourself, "for you have misread your own heart".
He said, and I quote from my journal of that day, "Christ, the truth, is at the heart of our being, not outside of us. We can misread ourselves, but the text is still there - listen for it." In other words, the text of Jesus and the text of ourselves is written on our hearts. Repentance, Newell said, is to wake up - to wake up to who we really are. "That is our journey, to wake more and more."
Then Philip Newell said this. In the early Christianity of the British Isles the Christians understood there to be two scriptures: The little book, which is the written Bible, and the big book, which is Nature and the World. Notice which is the greater.
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| Photo credit: Lois Keen |
Putting these two together, Bolz-Weber and Newell, I am scripture. You are scripture. That tree is scripture. The relationship between me and you and that tree is scripture. All are as authoritative as the written words we call Holy Writ or Scripture writ large. When we interpret the written word, the Little Book, we do so in the context of the Big Book, which includes our own experiences, the scripture God wrote into our hearts at our birth, which is also constantly interpreting our lives, as is the Little Book and the whole of creation.
Bishop Steven wrote that theology comes naturally to us. It does not require special training or rules. When we wonder about the sacred and our lives, and try to fit the pieces together - God and our thoughts about and experiences of God - we are being theologians. "Rules are for games. Dreams are for religion", he writes.
So imagine. Dream with me. What does it look like to have all of Scripture - Little Book and Big Book - interpreting your life? What does repentance look like if we shift our definition and see repentance as waking up to who we truly are, living, breathing scriptures, the presence of God in the world?
What if our journey, our adventure, is this: being scripture ourselves and being interpreted by the words of scripture and being interpreted by all creation, and repenting - that is, continually waking up - to the consonances and the dissonances and to who we really are in God's dream of us, and waking more and more and more?
What has God written into you?
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| Photo credit: Lois Keen |
the re-definition of terms is intriguing to me. I appreciate the idea that God is as near to us as our very breath and that so many of us spend so much of our time chasing after meaning and the Holy One when all we really need to do is slow down, sit down, and look in the mirror... or at each other... or out over the breathtaking horizon.
ReplyDeleteAnd we want more. We want Something to be bigger and more authoritative and more powerful than We are. Because then it's not so intimate or so hard and we don't need to be so accountable. Reconciliation is easier if its not our work.
This begs the question of the utility of prayer, though, if we embrace only the immanent God. yes?
And maybe the answer is "yes" and "no" and "both". As a contemplative, I understand prayer to be everything I do, see, smell, touch, feel, as well as the words and silences I send toward the Eternal. The exercise of perceiving who or what it is God has written into me is prayer. Especially today when I am very aware of the conflicts between how I experience myself, and what I think God has written in me. And, the Adventure, as I've been calling this, sometimes leads into difficult terrain. Bp. Steven's post today about theology being our dreamings about God, led me to remember Nadia's words about being interpreted by that which we intend to interpret, which led me to dig out my notes from Iona and Phillip Newell, who, by the way, keep in mind, was on a mission to rehabilitate Pelagius. ( ! )
ReplyDeleteIn the words of the immortal Harry Chapin..."all my life's a circle...sunrise and sunset..."
ReplyDeleteLove this blog! It is new to me. Thank you.
Thanks, Audrey. And yes, Harry Chapin is immortally right!
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