Well hello there, fellow blogosphere friends! I hope you had a lovely and relaxing summer. I took a wonderful break from the virtual world and have spent the last week getting slowly back into the swing of things. As today is Monday, what better way to kick off my blog again than with Moltmann Monday?! Here’s a quote to ponder, again from his most recent book “Sun of Righteousness, Arise!”:
“There is no way of first perceiving something except through astonishment. Because even in the everyday world of experience, which is so much a matter of course, nothing repeats itself exactly, everything we encounter also has a unique character. The readiness to marvel at the fact opens our senses, so that we can observe the unrepeatable in the recurring, the unlike in the like, and the dissimilar in the similar. It is true that out of judgment we judge ‘everything that is’ according to precedents and general laws, but at the same time we know that every case is different. Events remain contingent. Consequently the origin of all knowing is to be sought not in recognition but astonishment.” -p.175
Last night at Journey we spent some time talking about seeing things from a holistic worldview; that is, not seeing the world by constantly trying to take things apart and siphoning them down into something we can label, but by focusing on how things are connected and how the brokenness of the world can be put back together. This is a subtle art, to devise this way of seeing the world, and I wonder if doesn’t require a way of seeing the ordinary, cyclical nature of things as in some way “astonishing” as Moltmann argues. There is something that feels really fatalistic if we presume that everything is in such a constant state that we can no longer imagine changing it. When we try to focus on the blips that make even our most basic days unique, I’d presume that it helps us cultivate the kind of holistic “seeing” that is required of us as people of God. If our task is to be the people who, with God’s help, are trying to restore wholeness back to the broken parts of the ourselves, our communities and our world, we can only rightly see those potentials by taking the time to notice the remarkably astonishing moments waiting all around us.
Amen :)