Quotes that move me
The following quoted excerpts are all from "The Sacred Romance" by Brent Curtis and John Eldrige (who has written a few other books I am currently finding insightful and meaningful to where I am at in life).
"For centuries prior to our Modern Era, the church viewed the gospel as a Romance, a cosmic drama whose themes permeated our own stories and drew together all the random scenes in a redemptive wholeness.
But our rationalistic approach to life...has stripped us of that, leaving a faith that is barely more that mere fact-telling.
Modern Evangelism reads like an IRS 1040 form: It's true, all the data is there, but it doesn't take your breath away.
"To reduce revelation to principles or concepts
is to supress the element of mystery, holiness and wonder to God's self-disclosure.
'First principles' may enlighten and inform,
but they do not force us to our knees in reverence and awe, as with Moses and the burning bush,
or the disciples in the prescence of the risen Christ"
(Excerpt from A Passion for Truth quoted inside of , and preceded by quote from The Sacred Romance on page 45)
"...the 'tournament of narratives' in our culture, a clash of many small dramas competing for our heart.
Through baseball and politics and music and sex and even church,
we are searching desperately for a larger story in which to live and find our role.
All of these smaller stories offer a taste of meaning, adventure, or connectedness.
But none of them offer the real thing; they aren't large enough.
Our loss of confidence in a larger story is the reason we demand immediate gratification.
We need a sense of being alive now, for now is all we have.
Without a past that was planned for us and a future that waits for us, we are trapped in the present.
There's not enough room for our souls in the present.
Our attempts to construct a story to live in eventually fail because,
as Robert Jenson has said, "Human consciousness is too obscure a mystery to itself for us to script our own lives"
Inevitably, we leave significant parts of our souls out of the story.
If our particular verson fails to take both of life's messages into account, to grant them proper weight, it will destroy us.
Denying the tragedy of life requires such effort that it tears the soul apart.
Believing that in the end there is only tragedy kills the most tender, "alive" part of us.
Trapped in an eternal present, we come to a sickness of heart like that of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the Scottish nobleman who sells his soul to play the role of king in his own small story. At the end of his life, he laments,
I am sick at heart...
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard of no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(Act V, Scene V)
Could it be that our lives actually make sense, every part--- the good and the bad?
Those deep yearnings that catch us by surprise when we hear a certain song on the radio,
or watch our children when they aren't aware of being watched,
are telling us something that is truer about life than the Message of the Arrows.
It seems too good to be true,
which ought to raise even deeper suspicions that it is true.
As Chesterton recounts in Orthodoxy, he "had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician...I had always felt life as a story; and if there is a story there is a storyteller."
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Ask any one who knows me well -- I have always seen life best through music and stories....so these excerpts speak to my perception and framework for sorting and responding to life.