Reflections on Ch. 1 -- Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now

Close your eyes, and whirl yourself around for a few minutes. Or if you have a small child, hold them in your outstretched arms as you spin on your heels. Your child will love the ride, but the second you stop your head will keep circling. If you’ve done it well your eyes won’t focus for a second, and your stomach will feel a bit queasy. It will take a few moments for your head to settle and the room to stop moving, and to regain your bearings.

Take note of this feeling. This disorientation is a mild form of what Dallas Willard claims plagues our world and our Church. We’re flying upside down, in danger of crashing as we think we’re going higher, he says.

• When have you felt disoriented and out of control? What caused it? What resolved this feeling?

What is it that we’re disoriented about? Certainly the post-Enlightenment period – the so-called “modern” era – made us certain that we could learn and master everything about our world. And the more we know, the more we can ensure “progress.” But this certainly turned to illusion in the 20th Century. Unlocking the secrets of the atom nearly destroyed everything. An increasingly enlightened and civilized world unleashed holocaust and genocides, one after the hour.

Some of the academic certainty Willard complains about started unraveling years ago. Postmodern philosophers chipped away at the modern notion that there was one story of reality, and we knew what it was. In physics, models moved from describing how things worked (if one allowed convenient “fudge” factors) to opening new layers of uncertainty like nested Russian dolls. The movie “Contact,” based on a book by cosmologist Carl Sagan, makes the point that ultimately faith, not science, is the final answer. Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” explains the developments of quantum physics in a way that acknowledges the mysteries of creation. As a result, according to David Lose of Luther Seminary, there is a greater openness to mystery and the divine now than there has been since the Enlightement.

But even as we have lost faith in promises of progress from government, education, science and even religion, we are confused about what the mystery is that takes their place. Cute slogans point to the void but offer no way to fill it. Even as religion and spirituality become more viable as a solution, the way of Jesus is rare and being marginalized. Why? Willard argues that its very ubiquity in history and in modern American culture leads people to dismiss it. Either they think they have accepted the watered down “civil religion” in the US – the one that thinks “God helps those that help themselves” is a quote from Scripture, not Ben Franklin – or they think they have rejected it. But in Willard’s view many have actually accepted or rejected a substitute, either a social gospel that transforms systems but not ordinary life, or a piety more concerned with “getting my butt into heaven” that the imitation of Christ. Willard sums it up this way:

Our usual “gospels” are, in their effects – dare we say it – nothing less than a standing invitation to omit God from the course of our daily existence.

• Do you agree or disagree with his assessment? Why?

What we really need is to stop spinning in the busyness, anxiety and fear of our world long enough to get our bearings and to see two essential realities. First, that ours is a world blessed by God and a “community of boundless and totally competent love” – just like the Trinity. And second, he says, that ordinary life is the receptacle of the divine, and thus holy.

I admit that, listening to the news, I am not the first to view ours as a world with love as its deepest meaning – though I am heartened by glimpses of self-sacrifice and charity that break through my cynical shell. And as a product of our culture, I often demand more, so much more, than the ordinary of life. As a result I often find myself settling for a slightly new and improved version of this upside-down, disoriented life, rather than the totally rightside-up (yet very different) life that Jesus demonstrated – the one that drew Samaritans and soldiers to him, that drew huge crowds to try to touch the hem of his garment.

• Why is the message of Jesus not causing such excitement and commitment today? Is it something about the message? Or something about the way we have lived it?

Willard says that God is inviting us – as he has invited people throughout time – to straighten up and fly right, as my mother used to say to us. God offers us life in his kingdom now, life grounded in the uncommon reality that its purpose is love and can be experienced at work, in the family, even at church. But we have to give up our idea that we can continue to simply be who we are, believing a set of propositions that will, if we don’t lose “faith,” get us into that kingdom when we die.

• Where in your life do you see the kingdom at hand?

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