THE DESERT CAN be an empty place where the lost are driven insane by inner demons, or it can be a place of refuge and real where pilgrims escape the insanity of a chaotic world. Our desert experience is determined by how we cope with being alone. Solitude can bring strange illusions and despair or it can strip us of faulty dependence, filling us with a desire for our Creator.
ARISTOTLE REPRIMANDED GREENHORN scientists in his Academy for their immature disgust toward the gross and unappealing in nature. “The consideration of the lower forms of life ought not to excite a childish repugnance. In all natural things there is something to move wonder" (Boorstin 51). He believed that all things looked at impartially are manifestations of the divine. Ralph Ralph Waldo Emerson Waldo Emerson extended Aristotle's estimate of the beauty of nature into the process of death itself: “There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful. Even the corpse has
THERE IS A mind-boggling connection between creation and chaos. This unexpected synergy applies not only to creation's emergence from the primordial chaos but is mysteriously operational when people's spiritual foundations have crumbled. It is revealing that the Genesis creation accounts were woven together, as the poetry of the dispossessed, during a time of the exile and crisis of faith. Disorientation in communities and in individuals has a peculiar way of resulting in an inspired movement toward creativity and re-orientation. When we at Watershed were flailing around, wrestling God, shadowboxing in the post ‘91 period, many of us felt on the
We've been looking at how Christianity is interpreted differently by different groups of people. I find this fascinating because it always seems easy to think that how I define Christianity is simply THE definition that's out there. But there are so many ways. Richard Niebuhr identifies fives ways that Christianity gets expressed in the world: 1) Christ Against Culture - The easiest way to describe this definition is that it's the one that we grew up in. It's the way of the Anabaptists who chose to reject the close relationship that Luther supported between the church and state, and struck