The Fellowship of Runners

20 02 2012

When Rolling Stones magazine interviewed U2 singer Bono, and asked which kind of music turns him on, Bono answered in a surprising and self-revealing way. “The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt.”[1]

Music that runs toward or away from God. I would imagine Bono would choose songs by their rhythm, by their catchy chorus, by their ability to move a stadium with its melody. Maybe he would be attracted to romantic lyrics, peppered with sensuality and longing, or maybe to music that resounds in people’s hearts and influences a generation. Yet Bono goes for our existential core: our gut reaction before ultimate reality, our instinctive surrender to God’s presence or haunted flight from his face.

I, for one, am more of a surrender type of guy, but I’m fascinated by the fellowship of runners. You know, by that anguished avoidance of God, stubborn and defiant, which tries to outrun infinity and outsmart omniscience. I admire this kind of persistence – it feels almost like a little dwarf’s rebellion – and, if I may confess some sadistic impulses, I enjoy seeing people avoid the inevitable and fight until the last breadth against God. It is entertaining. It is like children kicking and struggling against a spoonful of chocolate, only to enjoy it the minute it enters their mouth. I’m not quite sure why I enjoy this final struggle, maybe because I see it s the final tantrum of sin before the flood of grace, but when I see someone running away from God, I smile, and try to stay around long enough to see God catching up.

Can I share some scenes of my sadistic voyeurism? Let’s start with red meat, you know, a good sinner of old, a mighty oak falling down. Augustine narrates in his Confessions how he tried to run from God, and revels in the foolishness of it: “I would only hide thee from myself, not myself from thee.”[2] Augustine’s is a fascinating journey, elaborated by a great soul-physician in the Confessions, until he comes to the decisive moment: “Thou didst call and cry aloud, and didst force open by deafness. Thou didst gleam and shine, and didst chase away my blindness. Thou didst breathe fragrant odors and I drew in my breath; and now I pant for thee. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me, and I burned for thy peace.”[3]

Good stuff, eh? I like C. S. Lewis’ final struggles too, and the silent resistance he tried to muster to the last, even against a palpable sense of God’s presence. Lewis narrates in his autobiography:

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him who I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps the most defected and reluctant convert in all England.”[4]

But let me acknowledge it too. Maybe I enjoy seeing these moments in others not much for the agony’s sake – though that is fun, I admit – but maybe, if I may face my own resistance, because I enjoy the moments when God finally wins me over, and overflows my opposition, and reluctantly I let myself kneel and pray. I like seeing it in others because I see that this reluctance is not only my own, and even a stubborn like myself is within the reach of grace. I see David trying to make his bed in the depths, and feel I’m not down there by myself – there’s God, and there’s David hiding too, who tells me to shush and go hide somewhere else. If these dwarves dared to resist God, my own short arms and legs don’t seem to so foolish either. I can rest, and open myself, and let God arrive, and thank him for seeking such a small-minded fool as I.

René Breuel

[2]     Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2002), X.II.2.

[3]     Ibid., X.XXVII.38.

[4] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (Orlando: Harcourt, 1955), 228-229.


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

The Grand, Multi-Color Story

30 01 2012

“Why is mythology everywhere the same?”  This may sound like a simplistic judgment – there are so many myths across history, from the Hindu Vedas to the Nordic tales and the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. But the person who raises the question is Joseph Campbell, a Columbia University expert in comparative mythology and, according to Campbell, no matter which folk traditions are surveyed, from the peoples of Congo to the legends of the Eskimos, “it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story that we find…” [1]

Campbell’s major book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, plots these common themes in the universal figure of the hero, whose adventures follows similar steps even in the most varied cultural settings: he receives a call to adventure, and after initial reluctance, he crosses the threshold to his journey. Here he faces numerous trials and meets forms of gods or goddesses, who mentor him and help he understand his mission, until he returns to reality with a message to proclaim or a mission to fulfill, and saves the community from its perils. (When George Lucas crafted the story for Star Wars and its hero Luke Skywalker, he leaned heavily on Campbell’s reconstructed hero’s journey).

So why is mythology everywhere the same? To explain our common stories, Campbell uses the theories of psychoanalysis, especially the views of Carl Jung, to explain the common source of our kaleidoscopic but similar myths and stories. Myths are reflections of our social mind, of archetypal urges deep beneath our psyches. In Campbell’s words, “They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.”[2]

Ok, these stories originate in our minds… but the question still begs itself: why? Why does the human mind keep producing these stories? Why are myths everywhere, and why are they so similar? What do these archetypes point to?

I believe a person’s journey will illuminate us here. C. S. Lewis was another expert in comparative mythology, and as he started to read the New Testament as an atheist, he was at once startled at how different and yet how similar the Gospels were to ancient myths. At first he was struck by how unlike they were to the metaphysical and fantastic shapes of myths: they smelled like real events, taking place in a specific place and a specific time, not like the pre-time, allegorical epochs of myths. “I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that none of them is like this [the New Testament record].”[3]

Yet even as Lewis noted that the Gospels smelled like real history, he could not miss the common themes it shared with the great myths. Especially, he could not miss the central plot of “the Dying and Reviving God” common to so many folk traditions. Lewis’ initial reaction was dismiss the story of Jesus as another myth, but as the historicity of the Gospels bogged him, he was further disturbed by a comment he once heard. “The real clue had been put in my hand by that hard-boiled Atheist when he said, ‘Rum thing, all that about the Dying God. Seems to have really happened once’.”[4]

I agree. That hard-boiled atheist is just right. How else would you explain variations of same stories cropping up again and again everywhere? They must be reflections, fragments of the Great Story the human psyche captures and different peoples emphasize differently. They are echoes, daydreams that emerge in fantastic forms from the unconscious, but which articulate the central themes of the human drama – our ideals, perils and longings for our Savior –, packaged with the infinite creativity of the human genius and its multiform cultural riches.

For an expert in mythology like Lewis, the multitude of human myths were not contradictions, but preparations for the true story. They were early echoes of God’s thunderous arrival on the planet in the person of Jesus Christ. “In my mind,” wrote Lewis, “the perplexing multiplicity of ‘religions’ began to sort itself out… The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, ‘Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?’” And as Lewis surveyed the ages, and found a historical event that culminated all the best of human aspirations and longings, his conclusion could not have been different. “If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this… Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.” [5]

So why are myths so similar? Because they resemble the history of the universe, the drama of our creation, fall, and God coming to rescue us. They sprout little curious buds, small insinuations in delicate poetry, that came to full bloom when eternity entered time, when God became man, and the grandiosity of the myths met the ordinariness of history, and the Dying and Reviving God really did die on a cross in a Friday afternoon in Jerusalem in the first century, and revived on the early hours of the following Sunday. The grand plot of myth took place in history, and our stories cannot help but echo the universe’s defining moment.

René Breuel

[1] Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2008), 1-2.

[2] Ibid., 330, 2.

[3]  C. S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism”, in Christian Reflections (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967), 155.

[4]  C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (New York: Hancourt, 1955), 235.

[5]  Ibid.


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Categories : The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

A tale of murder and woe…or something

26 12 2011

I’d like to take this time to draw all of your attention to a tragedy that happens every day right before our eyes: verbicide, “the murder of a word.”[1] Each day, thousands of words are cut down thoughtlessly in a number of ways.

Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very’, tremendous for ‘great’, sadism for ‘cruelty’, and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides.… But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them.”[2]

To Lewis’ list of verbicides, today we could add the whole i.m.-dialect (brb, lol, wtf), which is in my opinion the death of the English language. However, the most poignant point is, I think, the one about approval and disapproval.

My wife recently heard a man tell a story in which he got into a discussion with someone over what a family is. Our protagonist remarked, “It quickly became clear that we did not see eye to eye on the matter.” He went on to claim that he supported what he saw as the bible’s definition of a “family” as “a husband and wife and their children.” I think it is good that my wife didn’t have any heavy objects to hand or his story might have ended more abruptly.

Why the ire, you ask? Perhaps it’s partially hormones…she is eight months pregnant, after all. But I think the dominant cause for her anger is the fact that such a definition is deliberately exclusive, and as such, potentially harmful to those who do not fit this man’s “family mold.”

In the first place, that simply is not the definition of a family anywhere in the Bible. In fact, if someone can find a definition of “family” in the Bible, they’ll win a prize. (Not really. I’m not giving out prizes.) Furthermore, such a definition of family is patently inaccurate. If that man were (God forbid) to die in a car wreck, leaving his wife as a single mother, surely he would not hesitate to call them a family. Or, what if he and his wife both passed away and his children went to live with their grandparents or an aunt or uncle? What would they be if not a family? How does such a narrow definition relate his wife to his parents or him to his in-laws? Are they not family? How do adopted children fit into this scenario? What if a single parent adopts a child? His definition is certainly not the operable definition with which most people work on a daily basis. At least, I don’t think so. All this and we haven’t even considered this from the angle of non-western cultures without the myopic focus on the nuclear family.

To explain such an obviously deficient definition, we would do well to turn to Lewis again.

“The phenomenon ceases to be puzzling only when we realize that it is a tactical definition. The pretty word [in our case, family] has to be narrowed ad hoc so as to exclude something he dislikes.” [3]

When a person bothers to define a common word,

“The fact that they define it at all is itself a ground for scepticism. Unless we are writing a dictionary, or a text-book of some technical subject, we define our words only because we are in some measure departing from their real current sense, otherwise there would be no purpose in doing so.”[4]

Interestingly, although he considered himself a defender of ‘the Bible’s definition of family’, this man’s definition also excludes Jesus and his “family.” According to the New Testament Gospels, Jesus was born to an unwed, teenage girl and entrusted to the care of a man with no blood relation at all. I think that’s a bit ironic.

In close, I simply want to say that we, from whatever walk of life we may come, need to be very careful in the way that we define our words. Defining words to show approval and disapproval does not aid in effective communication (in any sense of the word) and, further, can have consequences far beyond what we intend. As Lewis, again, said, “We cannot stop the verbicides. The most we can do is not to imitate them.” [5]

Ben Edsall
________________
[1] C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 7.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, 19.
[4] Ibid, 18.
[5] Ibid, 132.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Hopeful Dissatisfaction

14 10 2011

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has recently been elected the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Stockholm in 1931 and published his first collection of poems at age 23. In 1990 he suffered a stroke and ever since he has been unable to speak. His prolific work has been translated to over 50 languages and was described by the Nobel committee as able to craft “condensed, translucent images” which “gives us fresh access to reality.” [1]

On the day that Tranströmer was announced as winner, the book I happened to be reading was Confessions, by Augustine. I mention this for a reason: if the Nobel Prize for Literature was already being given in the 5th century, I believe Augustine would possibly have received it for his writing.

More than a hundred titles are accredited to Augustine. The most well known, Confessions, was written between 397 and 398. It has been described as the first Western autobiography and has been widely acclaimed across the centuries by its innovative style and depth of content.

The Confessions’ most popular lines are probably “(…) you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” [2] I wonder what you think about these words that Augustine utters to God.

In my view, he speaks of what I’d portray as a hopeful dissatisfaction. He refers to the human condition in which our beings seek what they naturally do not have: true rest. For this reason it’s a dissatisfaction. But Augustine also affirms that the existential rest we long for can be found in God. So it’s hopeful.

Augustine’s words echo a common biblical theme. In the Old Testament we read: “For He has satisfied the thirsty soul, and the hungry soul He has filled with what is good.” [3] In the New Testament, we find Jesus himself affirming this reality in numerous occasions. A couple of examples are: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” [4] And “if anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” [5]

The Christian view, therefore, recognizes that we’re not entirely ourselves until we’re reconnected to our creator. We’re not totally rested, until we rest in him. We’ll never be fully satisfied, until we’re fully joined with him. There’s hope to the human dissatisfaction, the Bible insists.

C. S. Lewis, the renowned Oxford professor and author of the “Chronicles of Narnia”, resonated with the biblical idea and Augustine’s words when writing: “if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” [6]

No success, wealth, relationship, intellectualism or even Nobel Prizes will eradicate our discontent, for “you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” [7]

Hélder Favarin

[1] “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 – Press Release”. Nobelprize.org. 10 Oct 2011. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2011/press.html

[2]  Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1

[3] Psalm 107:9

[4] Matthew 11:28

[5] John 7:37

[6]  C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

[7]  Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Anticipating Delights

25 07 2011

The taste of a fresh orange. The smell of coffee in the morning. The calm hush of snowfall. A long-awaited trip arriving in a day or two. For each one of us it is different, but there are certain things which seem to open suddenly a new dimension to us: a brief moment of eternity, almost separated from space, where we revel a pleasure and let it drip down to our guts, filling us with serenity and joy, and igniting our imaginations, until we come back to reality. For me, there are a few songs which transmit this sense of transcendence, and one of them is called Sailing. A hit in 1980 by Christopher Cross, it portrays the experience of sailing – the vast horizon, the smell of the deep sea, the clap-clap of the water against the boat – as an example of this kind of window to timelessness.

Well, it’s not far down to paradise
At least it’s not for me
And if the wind is right you can sail away
And find tranquility

For Cross, experiences such as sailing transmit innocence and serenity; they make “all the world in a reverie, every word is a symphony.” He uses grand words to describe such moments, like freedom and miracles, and names the arrival of a flash of paradise, of “Never Never Land.”

Curiously, C. S. Lewis has seen a similar connection between moments of delight and our longing for eternity. In his book about pain, after dealing with all the emotional and philosophical ramifications of suffering and evil, Lewis reserves his last chapter to talk about heaven. But it is actually a chapter about pleasure, about that undefined longing which consumes us, that craving we try to satisfy but which is meant only to leave us aching for the more splendorous reality which one day will engulf our senses and bathe us anew. “You have never had it,” writes Lewis. “All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear.” [1]

This longing is, as Lewis puts it, a delicious dissatisfaction, a tasty hunger, a longing to hear in song what arrives now only in indefinite echoes. It is similar to the paradoxical, unsatisfied  manner with which a sixteenth-century poet (Luís de Camões, the Portuguese equivalent of Shakespeare) once described love:

Love is fire which burns without being seen;
It is a wound which hurts without being felt;
It is a discontented contentment;
It is pain which maddens without hurting [2]

What I find interesting in Lewis’ understanding of our longings, hinted somewhat also by Cross, is how he connects them to our desire for heaven. “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.” In an address called The Weight of Glory, Lewis points out that the books or songs which mediate beauty to us do not contain beauty, but only transmit a brief glimpse of it, only a longing for it. “For they are not the thing in itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” [3] The full satisfaction of our longings, the definitive sailing across the eternal ocean, our final immersion in endless bliss will arrive only when God creates everything anew, and we can’t even imagine how it will be like.

I find it funny that Lewis identifies heaven as a country we have never yet visited. Today Sarah and I leave for a country we haven’t yet visited, and we are almost shaking with excitement. After an exhaustive year, and before a second baby and a season of even more work arrive, we can’t wait for a week of rest. I’m really looking forward to it. But no matter how tasty the food is there, how colorful the beaches, how fascinating the culture, I know this week will only be a glimpse, only an appetizer of the rest we will one day enjoy. We will relish this trip to the full, yet knowing that our final delight is yet to come, and boy, am I excited for that one.

René Breuel

[1]   C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 150-151.

[3]   C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 31.


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

And then, what?

15 06 2011

“Eat your vegetables”, parents will often advise their children at the table. In the last few days, however, the common advice in Europe has been very different: “Be careful with raw vegetables.” An outbreak of the bacteria E. coli in Germany has killed several people and left hundreds fighting the infection across the continent. The source of the deadly E. coli is still unknown, but is thought to be present in some raw vegetables.

To be seen by the naked eye, an E. coli bacteria needs to be magnified around 10.000 times. Yet, a group of them is capable of killing a human being within a few days. It’s sad to think that some people in Germany were enjoying a meal not knowing it’d actually take their lives away. Who in the world would imagine such a thing?

Let’s admit it: life is fragile. As sang by the pop star Sting:

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are [1]

James, author of a book in the Bible, tells his readers: “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” [2]

Please let me invite you to consider a short but profound question: “and then, what?” Life is fragile and we might lose it when we least expect. And then, what?

I’m certainly not suggesting we should be obsessed with death; however, I think it’d be unwise not to seriously reflect on something that I know will take place. Don’t you consider it curious that we often worry about and ‘pre-occupy’ ourselves with possibilities (most of which never occur as we foresaw them) and we simply ignore certain situations that will surely become real at some point? In my opinion, the fragility of life and therefore the reality of death is an example.

Jesus mentioned the existence of an eternal life several times. To give an example: “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” [3] Although we don’t like to hear it, Jesus actually made several references to only two places people will spend their eternity.

And then, what? Your answer, and I respect it, could be: “there’s nothing”. But have you considered a different possibility? Have you sincerely considered that Jesus might be telling the truth? Wouldn’t now, while we haven’t yet fully tasted life’s fragility, be a good moment to seriously ponder our view?

As a Christian I take Jesus’ words to be true. Despite the fact that my life is more fragile than I want to admit, I believe that because of him I can hope for an  infinitely better and eternal life.

C. S. Lewis beautifully expressed this assurance at the end of his final novel in “The Chronicles of Narnia” series. Making reference to the main characters of the book and their time in Narnia, his metaphor paints a picture of the Christian hope:

“But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.” [4]

Hélder Favarin

[1] ‘Fragile’, by Sting.

[2] James 4:14

[3] John 14:2-3

[4] C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, p. 228


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Categories : Making a Difference

Mud Machine

30 05 2011

In a just-released book, Italian author Roberto Saviano points out a phenomenon which takes place in many of our contemporary societies: the mud machine.[1] Whenever someone dares to criticize those in power – not only political power, but also those who control social discourse, the media, and base institutions – or provides a significant obstacle to their interests, dirty facts about that person are dug up and rendered public. A photo of someone sitting on the toilet is enough to demoralize the critic’s credibility, even if we all sit on it every day. (I confess I am writing these words from this very throne, though, I hasten to add, it’s just because I don’t want to awaken my wife and child late at night, and the bathroom is the only quiet place…) When the critic seeks to make serious pronouncements, his image will be damaged and everybody will giggle inside, remembering the unfortunate picture and its tasteful combination of white ceramic, pants under the knee, and newspaper.

Saviano argues that the mud machine is not only prejudicial to democracy, by intimidating possible criticism and opposition, but it has also a more subtle effect; it disfigures the psychology of the society. Its message is: “you are no better than us, you are also dirty. There are no better people. So don’t you dare criticize us.” It is a message that brings people to the same level, by throwing everybody to the floor, face in the mud. We are encouraged not to fly high, for someday someone may release a fact that will pop the balloon and throw its remains on the mud, and show that we are not better than anybody else. It is a communion of mediocrity, a shadow on the pursuit of excellence, a disincentive toward virtue.

As I read Saviano’s analysis, I could not help but think of its parallel in the spiritual path. We all know the personal equivalent of this social mechanism, our own personalized mud machine. “You will yield to temptation eventually, so don’t even try resisting. Actually, don’t even try being better than you are. You belong to the mud, and like a good worm, enjoy it well. Make it your home. You will never transcend it.” Some people try to psychologize this voice and call it negative self-image. Self-help gurus call it lack of positive thinking. The Christian faith, however, uses a stronger term – strong as an unbearable medicine – and names the person behind the voice, as the devil.

The devil may sound like superstition, a Medieval stereotype too cartoonish to be real. And yet, we hear him. Don’t we? And one of his very strategies is to hide his presence and to get us to disbelieve his existence, because, if we don’t see where the mud comes from, it arrives as hard as rock, and we believe that mud is all there is to life.

C. S. Lewis illustrated the devil’s strategy in his brilliant The Screwtape Letters, where a senior demon provides advice to a young novice on the art of tempting humans. In one of the letters, Screwtape writes, “I do not think you will have much difficulty to keep the patient in the dark. The fact that ‘devils’ are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.”[2] I don’t think I would believe in anyone in red tights either, not even Tina Turner, let alone the devil.

Maybe one of the crucial steps to spiritual sanity is the realization that the devil exists, just like one of the steps to social consciousness is awareness of mechanisms like the mud machine. We know we are seeing better if the light illuminates the darkness; we know the light is reaching us if the darkness is exposed and we can see beyond it. Noticing the devil may be one of the healthiest, and strangest, things to do – he will be full of subterfuges, and will throw the Medieval cartoon at us and “don’t you listen to that crap” kind of argument – but we won’t see beyond him until we face him, and see that muddy face melt when the light shines bright.

René Breuel

[1] Roberto Saviano, Vieni Via con Me [Flee with Me] (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2011), 39-42.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 32.


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Youtube and all of life’s voices

2 05 2011

When was the last time you watched a video on internet? My guess would be not long ago. Online videos have ignited a new worldwide communication revolution. Through giant platforms, such as YouTube or Facebook, anyone can freely show anything to millions and millions of people. It’s impressive to consider that 35 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute and the website now has over 2 billion views a day.[1] As an example, we can think of Asmaa Mahfouz, a young Egyptian activist who posted a homemade video on Facebook and YouTube. The video became viral across Egypt and has been described as a key factor to spark the protests that led to Egypt’s national revolt.

I recently heard Chris Anderson, curator of the renowned TED Conferences, speaking about this revolution (well, I actually watched his talk through an online video). He confidently asserted that “It’s not too much to say that what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication [...] One person speaking can be seen by millions, shedding bright light on potent ideas, creating intense desire for learning and to respond.”[2]

I wonder whether our constant quest for more evolved means of communication reflects a facet of our Imago Dei (to be made in the image of God). Based on the biblical narrative I believe that a divine communication revolution has taken place in the world since its origin. From the very beginning of creation, God takes the initiative to speak to humanity.  According to the first chapter of the Bible, God created Adam and Eve, blessed them and immediately after spoke to them.[3]

Throughout history God continued to communicate with humanity in various ways, until he spoke most plainly and powerfully through Jesus, the God-Son. Jesus was even described in the opening of John’s Gospel as the Word (in the original Greek, as the logos). From my reading of the Bible, and by experience, I’ve come to realize that God’s words create, heal, connect, teach, call, inspire, change, liberate and give hope. Mysteriously, God seems to speak with enough loudness to be heard and enough gentleness to be avoided. In doing so, he shows his infinite love and at the same time respects the freedom that he gave to each of us.

C.S. Lewis, the renowned Oxford and Cambridge professor and author of The Chronicles of Narnia, did not resist the attraction of God’s voice. He describes his personal experience from atheist to Christian in Surprised by Joy: “You must picture me alone in that room [...] night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me [...] I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed.”

Online videos are undoubtedly giving us an unprecedented access to the message of millions of people from all over the world. In the midst of the increasing number of voices we hear and the revolution this is causing, I believe the most important questions have not changed: can we hear the incomparable voice of the one speaking from the beginning of our existence? Can we, or perhaps, are we willing to listen to the voice of God?


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Categories : On Anything and Everything, Spirituality for the Rest of Us


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