Sunday, November 11, 2007

interpreting mystery

The past series of image related posts have plumbed deeply from the depths of the mystery of God’s intimate and personal presence as well as his intensely beautiful connective character in the posited, ever being renewed creation. His word is pervasive in reality just as the word of an image sketched. Personal, communal and divine are but x to the third in a math of infinite dimensions. The power of the mystery entices and entrances.

Yet this may all be too mysterious to appreciate. My sister got a bit of a commentary and told me she would have missed most of it without the commentary. I struggle to express the mystery clearly enough to entice but allowing it its own character. In the hopes to not destroy the mystery, I make a tentative attempt toward description.

The parable of the adult in an infant seat is a personal message. It is an individual. It is also the church. It is also the Christ. All have wounds. All have scars. All have been self-inflicted. All have been rejected and unesteemed. All have put on the vestiges of infants. All are called by the same name. All exist in the tension between already-not yet.

Revelation. What is the meaning of Revelation. The images from John on Patmos, who can find the end of it? One attempts a historical contextual interpretation. One a futurist prophesy. Others stand in line. Who is right? Who has the epistemological sense of the times? Who can plumb the depths of this mystery? Perhaps there is no mystery and we must strip it down to its bare boned science. We could survey our congregations like "It matters not how it is revealed." This is perhaps security of control. Or perhaps we should bask in the rays of its eternal sustainance. We could be drawn to the banquet. Commune with the cook. Perhaps this is security of another sort.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The picture of the adult in the infant chair stayed with me for a week or something.

I find it extremely dynamic, it keep yielding new questions, but above all it yields a tension.

What happened when we insisted on being fed semolina and on being cajoled like babies? What did we not see? The church hurting itself, our own hurts that can't surface and just get deeper, or both?

Kindergarten games cannot nurture adults, it should be grotesque to think that they could. But friendly Kindergarten games will actively poison adults.

So thanks for sharing this one. I've been chewing on it for quite some time.

Dany