Dispatch from Kopua, Sunday, April 24

I thought I might share some of my reading with you (besides the novels we’ve been reading and shedding along the way). My main "spiritual" reading has been a new book by Eugene Petersen, "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places," a title taken from a famous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book is subtitled "a conversation in spiritual theology," and is intended as the first in a trilogy of books by this wise and prolific writer. (Petersen is also the one who translated "The Message," a paraphrase of the Bible that has enriched many.)
Petersen begins where any good Christian (or Jew) should, with the doctrine of creation. Here are a few gems I’ve culled so far:
+++Spirituality" is a net that when thrown into the sea of contemporary culture pulls in a vast variety of spiritual fish, rivaling the resurrection catch of 153 ‘large fish’ that John reports (John 21: 11). In our times "spirituality" has become a major business for entrepreneurs, a recreational sport for the bored, and for others, whether many or few (it is difficult to discern), a serious and disciplined commitment to love deeply and fully in relation to God." (p. 27)
[I liked that last sentence’s definition of spirituality, and would expand it thus: Spirituality is a serious and disciplined commitment to live deeply and fully in relation to God by his Holy Spirit, in the place God has put us, the world of creation and human relationships made holy by Christ’s incarnation.]
+++You would think that believing that Jesus is God among us would be the hardest thing. It is not. It turns out that the hardest thing is to believe that God’s work—this dazzling creation, this astonishing salvation, this cascade of blessings—is all being worked out in and under the conditions of our humanity: at picnics and around dinner tables, in conversations and while walking along roads, in puzzled questions and homely stories, with blind beggars and suppurated lepers, at weddings and funerals. Everything that Jesus does and says takes place within the limits and conditions of our humanity. No fireworks. No special effects. Yes, there are miracles, plenty of them. But for the most part the miraculousness of miracle is obscured by the familiarity of the setting, the ordinariness of the people involved. (p. 34)
+++Setting the two words [self and soul] side by side triggers a realization that a fundamental aspect of our identity is under assault every day. We live in a culture that has replaced soul with self. This reduction turns people into either problems or consumers. Insofar as we acquiesce in that replacement we gradually but surely regress in our identity, for we end up thinking of ourselves and dealing with others in marketplace terms: everyone we meet is either a potential recruit to join our enterprise or a potential consumer for what we are selling; or we ourselves are the potential recruits or consumers, Neither we nor our friends have any dignity just as we are, only in terms of how we or they can be used.
[Petersen goes on to identify two more words that are symptomatic of this reduction of soul to self: "resource" and "dysfunctional"]
+++"resource" is commonly used of people who can help us in our work. I can still remember how jarring that word sounded to me when I first heard it used 40 years ago by a man who was giving me direction in my work of developing a new congregation. He kept on pushing me to identify the resource-people that I could use in my work. And then I noticed that he was using the word as a verb…offering to resource our church board….
And "dysfunctional." It is alarming how frequently people are referred to as dysfunctional: dysfunctional families, dysfunctional committees and congregations….But dysfunctional is not a personal word, it is mechanical. Machines are dysfunctional but not souls; bicycles are dysfunctional but not children; water pumps are dysfunctional but not spouses. The constant, unthinking use of the word erodes our sense of worth an d dignity inherent in the people we meet and work with no matter how messed up they are.
We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start using them, and they end up using us. (p. 38-39)
+++[Finally some words on the doctrine of creation.] Wendell Berry dislikes the term "environment" as a synonym for creation because it puts too much distance between us and where we live. He thinks it sounds as though we think of the earth as simply a place where we happen to be camping. But creation, he insists, is not something apart from us and we are part of it. When the land is violated, when animals are exploited and abused, when streams are polluted, that is the stuff of our personal creation that is desecrated.
The gospel of Jesus Christ has no patience with a spirituality that is general or abstract, that is all feelings and ideas, and that takes as its theme song, "This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through." Theology divorced from geography gets us into nothing but trouble.
(p. 76-77