The “doorknob phenomenon” is an occurrence many physicians know well. Doctors can proceed meticulously through complete examinations and medical histories, taking care to hear a patient’s questions and concerns, but it is often in the last thirty seconds of the appointment that the most helpful information is revealed. When a doctor’s hand is on the doorknob, body halfway out the door, vital inquiries are often made; when a patient is nearly outside the office, crucial information is shared almost in passing. Many have speculated as to the reasons behind the doorknob phenomenon (which is perhaps not limited to the field of medicine), though a cure seems unlikely. Until then, words uttered on the threshold remain a valuable entity to the physician.

If I can speak on behalf of patients (perhaps I’ve been a perpetrator of the phenomenon myself), I would note that the doorway marks our last chance to be heard. Whatever the reason for not speaking up until that point—fear, discomfort, shame, denial—we know the criticalness of that moment. In thirty seconds, we will no longer be in the presence of one who might offer healing or hope or change. At the threshold between doctor’s office and daily life, the right words are imperative; time is of the essence.

One of the many names for God used by the writers of the Bible is the Great Physician. It is curious to think of how the doorknob phenomenon might apply. Perhaps there are times in prayer when the prayer feels as if we are moving down sterile lists of conditions and information. Work. Finances. Mom. Jack. Future. Of course, while bringing to God in prayer a laundry list of concerns with repeated perseverance is at times both necessary and helpful, perhaps there are also times when we have silenced the greater diagnosis with the words we have chosen to leave unspoken. Can a physician heal wounds we will not show, symptoms we will not mention?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – In Critical Care →

On December 1, 1955, she was asked with three others to relinquish her seat on a crowded bus for a white man who had just boarded. Though they were already seated in the section reserved for blacks, they were ordered by the bus driver to stand in the aisle to make room. Three complied. Rosa Parks remained seated. Recalling the incident for a television series in 1987, Parks said quietly: “When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’” She was immediately arrested and ordered to pay a fine of fourteen dollars.

Mrs. Parks died at the age of 92, a woman history will remember for her courage and conviction. As she hurriedly left the department store where she worked as a seamstress that day in December, the last thing she was thinking about was becoming a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement. She had errands to run and preparations to make for a workshop that she was organizing for teenagers that weekend.  “So it was not a time for me to be planning to get arrested,” she said in the interview.

No matter who you are or what you believe, there are moments in life that will call you out of your daily life and into something beyond it, denying yourself for the sake of another. Almost always these moments will come with a certain degree of inconvenience. The soft spoken Montgomery seamstress who refused to give up her seat could have given heed to injustice with the rationale of not wanting to get involved just then or the daunting thought of all the things she had to get done that day. Instead, she brought about the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and ignited the Civil Rights Movement.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faithful Inconvenience →

Vincenzo Ricardo. If that name does not mean much to you, you are not alone. It does not seem to have meant much to anyone else except, perhaps, him who bore it. In fact it was not even his name. His real name was Vincenzo Riccardi, and nobody seemed to get it right after the sensational discovery of his mummified body in Southampton, New York. He had been dead for 13 months, but his television was still on, and his body was propped up in a chair in front of it.(1) The television was his only companion, and though it had much to tell him, it did not care whether he lived or died.

Riccardi’s story raises many unsettling questions. How can a human being vanish for over a year and not be missed by anyone? Where was his family? What about his relatives? Why was the power still on in his house? Whatever the answers are to these and other questions, one thing is clear: Riccardi was a lonely individual whose life can be summed up in one word, alienation. You see, Riccardi was blind, so he never really watched television; he needed this virtual reality to feed his need for real companionship. Moreover, his frequent “outbursts and paranoid behavior” may have played a role in driving people away from him.(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Alienation and Embrace →

Malcolm Muggeridge is remembered as one of the most notable figures of the twentieth century.  The wit and style of the self-dubbed “fatally fluent”” journalist made him as endearing as he was controversial.  His presence was a decipherable entity in print, over the radio, and on television. With over fifty years in the public eye, Muggeridge knew well the effect of publicity on the human ego.  In the words of one biographer, Muggeridge knew well “the strange metamorphosis that turns an individual into an image.”(1) He once confessed, “There is something very terrible in becoming an image… You see yourself on a screen, walking, talking, moving about, posturing, and it is not you. Or is it you, and the you looking at you, someone else? […] Once, sleeping before a television screen, I woke up to find myself on it.  The experience was quite terrifying—like some awful nightmare to which only someone like Edgar Allan Poe or Dostoevsky could do justice.”(2)

In our media-saturated, celebrity-producing, me-obsessed culture, the warning may well be appropriate.  Though I do not think it is only the televised that find themselves in danger of becoming an image.

Of course, some of the images we may have of ourselves obviously come with the territories. A student embraces the image of student; a new mom learns to see herself as a mom; a journalist sees himself as a journalist. Muggeridge was speaking of images beyond this—namely, a journalist who starts to see himself as an icon, or perhaps, a mom who starts to see herself as an image of success, or grief, helpfulness, or humility. This is perhaps where many of us can relate.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Images We Think We Are →

I travel the same route every day as I head into school. It takes me through one of the nicest parts of town where million-dollar houses line the cliffs overlooking Bellingham Bay. Manicured lawns and pristine exteriors beckon all passersby to admire their beauty. But this same route also traverses one of the poorest sections of town where the skeletal remains of warehouses and manufacturing plants sit like open tombs. Among these abandoned ruins, solitary figures hover. The shelter of our local rescue mission is here. It is often the place where these otherwise solitary figures gather. Often, I have to steer my bike around a person jaywalking. Ambling with a slow gate or running with hands thrown in the air screaming at some unseen foe, they are quite often figures for whom reality seems as blurred as the transition from sidewalk to street.

When I am stopped at the traffic light just beyond the day shelter, it is difficult for me to avert my gaze from the macabre spectacle in front of me. Yet, I often feel afraid and hope that the light changes quickly so that I can be on my way. As I pedal hurriedly, trying to avoid road debris and traffic, I seek to escape their haunting presence. But I cannot escape wondering about whether or not there are families who love them and still worry about them. What were the legion of forces that contributed to their plight? As I wonder, I cannot help but ask what glimmer of hope there might be for these who are dependent on the mercy of a handout or who suffer the indifference of others like me?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – To Fear or to Follow →

The line between real and imagined is sometimes a little blurry. At least this is the conclusion of one report on the business of cyberspace, where thousands of people have imaginary lives and some are actually making a living at it. The creators of several popular online role-playing games completed a year-long study of the very real transactions that are taking place in their imaginary worlds. The results portray a flourishing economy that is rapidly grabbing advertisers’ attention. The sellers are role players who have taken the time to find marketable goods in their virtual worlds—and they are clearly putting in the time. In one popular game, a gnome is sold with a basic skill set for $214; in another, a virtual cherry dining set for a virtual home runs about 250 actual dollars. Between June 2005 and June 2006, 9,042 role players spent $1.87 million dollars on virtual goods from swords to special powers. According to analyst estimates this year, U.S. virtual goods revenue alone will top $1 billion and could even rake in over $2 billion.

It is entertainment I don’t claim to fully understand. But it is fascinating (and maybe frightening) to see how integrated the real and the virtual can become. Of course, this idea applies to far more than online games. What we imagine can become so enmeshed with what is real that we scarcely notice a difference. That is, until something real reminds us otherwise—like an outsider’s perspective or a credit card receipt.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Losing Consciousness →

In the hug felt ‘round the world in 1989, First Lady Barbara Bush began the slow process of de-stigmatizing the simple action of touching someone with HIV.(1) It was an unexpected act offered by an uninhibited grandmother who wanted to bring attention to a community in isolation. Such a move would hardly surprise anyone today, but thirty years ago, intentionally reaching out via physical touch to a member of an ostracized community was noteworthy.

“To hug or not to hug?” however, is a question not yet mainstream. To the contrary, ours is an increasingly remote, touchless society reaping its own gloomy consequences. A 2014 study at the University of Arizona examined those suffering from “affection deprivation” and found that people who did not have meaningful physical contact from others suffered from loneliness, depression, and anxiety disorders.(2) Clearly, a patient’s physical condition might very well be his most public problem, but it likely won’t be his deepest.

How could such a simple act of a hug merit so much attention? Why would the giver care enough? Why would the onlookers be required to reassess their opinion of such an event? The reason lies behind both the physical and the spiritual effects of such an act: that hug, though unable to bring physical healing, brought comfort while simultaneously erasing a border between the skeptical and the suffering.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Transformative Power of Empathy →

Public radio program This American Life ran a special report on a certain sub-culture of people whose prize possessions are their car stereos. They are called “decibel drag racers” and people flock across international borders to join them in competition. Like actual drag racing, cars line up across the track, except in this competition they will not be going anywhere. The winner is the owner of the car stereo that can play at the loudest possible decibel. Oddly enough (that is, more odd than the fact that these systems are too powerful to play music), most of the cars that win this competition are not even drivable. The world record holder at the time of this interview had 900 pounds of concrete poured into the floor of his van. Wind shields usually only make it through three competitions before cracking (and these are not normal windshields). Yet one competitor still seems to entirely miss the irony that there is no longer any room for himself in his car. “We need more batteries,” he laments. “But that’s all the room we have.”(1)

To anyone outside of this extreme audio sport world, “irony” is perhaps a generous word to describe the phenomenon. The TAL reporter was far more articulate: “Everybody wants to be the king of a hill,” he concluded. “But the number of aspiring kings always dwarfs the number of available hills, so in this country we build more hills.”(2)

I’m not sure there is a better way to describe it.

There is a word in Greek that captures my imagination as much as undrivable cars and manmade hills. Cheiropoietos is a combination of two other Greek words, the first meaning “hand” and the second “to make”—thus, the rough translation, “made with hands.” The word makes one of its first appearances in the Septuagint, the early Greek version of the Old Testament. In something like a satire, the prophet Isaiah questions the effectiveness of Bel and Nebo, the god of the Babylonians and the god of the Chaldeons. Isaiah describes a procession out of the city and into exile where Bel and Nebo only burden down donkeys. They “stoop and bow down together,” Isaiah writes “unable to rescue the burden, they themselves go off into captivity” (Isaiah 46:2). In calamity, the people who serve these gods are not bowing before them. Idols made with hands must be carried out of the city gates by the very hands that made them. Isaiah is perplexed by the irony they fail to notice:

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – King of the Hill →

I wish it had been an unusual conversation. A group of close friends had gathered for dinner to catch up on life’s happenings and events. In the course of conversation, and it happens more often than I’d like to admit, the typical meanderings through each other’s lives shifted to calling out the particular character flaws of individuals we all knew, but who were not present with us. “She’s so judgmental,” one friend observed. “Well, she’s a perfectionist and hyper-critical” another added, and on and on it continued as the evening progressed. Never one to remain silent, I added my perspective that dissected personality peccadillos, all without a defense or a counter-narrative. How easy it was to evaluate another with surgical precision without stopping for a minute to think about how it might feel to be on the other side of the scalpel.

As I replayed the conversation in my mind, I was struck by the fact that the very nature of our conversation displayed the very same tendencies we had called out in these others. More than that, hadn’t we just demonstrated the very judgmental and critical spirits we had leveled against others? Psychologists have long understood this all too common tendency of identifying in others what we tend to struggle with in our own lives. We had all demonstrated the process of psychological projection by which individuals defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities by attributing them to others.(1) How easy it had been to deny the existence of these ugly qualities in ourselves by placing them (and blame) on others.

The psychoanalytic tradition defined projection as a defense mechanism which is understood as a largely unconscious strategy to avoid conscious conflict or anxiety. And what could cause more anxiety than having to face the truth about ourselves? As author Richard Rohr notes, “I am convinced that there is nothing on which people are so fixated as their self-image. We are literally prepared to go through hell just so we don’t have to give it up. We’re all affected by it.”(2) The people who irritate and frustrate, the ones with qualities we dislike so much, are in fact a mirror that reflects our own image. Yet, we find every conceivable way not to see that kind of ugly reflection staring back at us.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Reflection →

My wife, Ono, is someone who has been through quite a bit of physical distress and lives with some measure of disability. In one of her old Bibles is a fading scrawl that she made during one of her bouts of illness. It is a quote by Joni Eareckson Tada: “When we learn to lean back in God’s sovereignty, fixing and settling our thoughts on that unshakable, unmovable reality, we can experience inner peace. Our trouble may not change, our pain may not diminish, our loss may not be restored, our problems may not fade with the new dawn. But, the power of those things to harm us is broken as we rest in the fact that God is in control.”(1)

As is well known, Joni Eareckson has lived with unimaginable handicap for the most part of her remarkable life. In the book Indelible Ink, where 22 prominent Christian leaders discuss the one book (apart from the Bible) that has most influenced each of their lives, Joni Eareckson’s pick was Loraine Boettner’s The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination.(2)

The epigraph that Joni Eareckson used for her chapter in Indelible Ink is also from Boettner’s book: “History,” Boettner says, “in all its details, even the most minute, is but the unfolding of the eternal purposes of God. His decrees are not successively formed as the emergency arises, but are all parts of one all-comprehending plan, and we should never think of Him suddenly evolving a plan or doing something which He had not thought of before.”(3)

For Boettner, God is in ultimate control of, and has decreed, everything—not just the larger scheme of things, but also the minutest details and the apparent happenchance of our lives, including the mad, the bad, and the sad. It is in knowing and believing this that lies the secret of rest and strength in the midst of life’s vicissitudes. This is the existential implication and practical application that Eareckson draws from Boettner’s work—and, presumably, Ono from Eareckson’s words. Stumbling upon Ono’s scribble of Eareckson’s words has, however, given me a different (not necessarily contrary) perspective on handling pain and suffering—a perspective that Eareckson or Boettner’s words do not exactly state or bear out.(4)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – If God, Then Why? →

“April is the cruellest month…” begins the first line of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The poem is thought to be a portrayal of universal despair, where we lie in wait between the unrelenting force of spring and the dead contrast of winter, and the casualty of the warring seasons is eventually hope. In the bold display of life’s unending, futile circles, one can be left to wonder at the point of it all. Does everything simply fade into a waste land? Is death the last, desperate word? Perhaps it was somewhere between the war of winter and spring when the prophet reeled over life’s abrupt and senseless end. “In the prime of my life must I go through the gates of death and be robbed of the rest of my years? For the grave cannot praise you, death cannot sing your praise. The living, the living—they praise you as I am doing today.”(1)

Though differing in degree and conclusions, literature is unapologetically full of a sense of this deep irony, at times expressing itself in futility. Euripides, writing in the fifth century, remarks:

“…and so we are sick for life, and cling

On earth to this nameless and shining thing.

For other life is a fountain sealed,

And the deeps below us are unrevealed

And we drift on legends for ever.”(2)

Shakespeare, on the lips of Macbeth, is struck by the monotonous beat of time and the futile story it adds up to tell:

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Into the Waste Land →

Within the dark and heavy world of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, the coinciding stories of each character shift around themes of grace and legalism. The stories are immensely honest, such that we find ourselves somewhere in the novel, or perhaps all through it. The darkness is overwhelming because it is all too close to home, maybe as close as our own hearts. But the light is also real, and it stings our eyes and seeps into our hearts.

In this dark and honest world, life is not fair, it is not easy and the stories don’t always go where you want them to go. Yet, the words of Victor Hugo himself push further: “Will the future ever arrive?” he asks, “Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it; nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.” The lives of Jean Valjean, Javert, and Cosette force us to perceive things we have maybe only half perceived, such that whatever we knew of shame and mercy and forgiveness are never the same. Their lives seemingly ask us to be aware of the brilliance of even the smallest of lights in the midst of a devastating darkness.

It is said of Christ in the Gospel of John, “In him was life and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”(1) Literally, John says that the light shines and the darkness could not “lay hold of it”; the darkness could not master it. Undoubtedly, as John penned the words that testified to the events which had unfolded before his eyes, his mind hastened back to the Cross, the darkness of that day—the unfairness, the ugliness, the confusion and regret of that overwhelming scene. And then he says boldly: Even in the jaws of darkness on the cross, the light of the world did not go out. The Light was not mastered by even the darkest moment in time.

His illustration is weighted with the reality of the waves and particles of light. Darkness cannot overpower it. It cannot catch it. It cannot comprehend it. And so John begins his testimony: Darkness could not grasp the one who is the light and life of men. In Christ is the life that death cannot understand, the light that cannot be overcome.(2)

James Stewart, the great Scottish theologian, challenged readers to ponder this: Jesus Christ is light incomprehensible by darkness. Writes Stewart, “The very triumphs of his foes Jesus used for their defeat. He compelled their dark achievements to serve his ends, not theirs. They nailed him to the tree, not knowing that by that very act they were bringing the world to his feet. They gave him a cross, not guessing that Jesus would make it a throne.”(3)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Comprehending Darkness →

Most scholars agree that the Enlightenment or “Age of Reason,” which began in the early seventeenth century, set up a great dichotomy that persists in modern time.(1) The great “dichotomy” of the Enlightenment entailed the separation of the public and private realms. The public realm was the world of ascertained by reason alone. Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains, “The thinkers of the Enlightenment spoke of their age as the age of reason…by which human beings could attain (at least in principle) to a complete understanding of, and thus a full mastery of, nature—of reality in all its forms. Reason, so understood, is sovereign in this enterprise.”(2) In the realm of reason, therefore, revelation from a divine realm was not needed. Human reason could search out and know all the facts about reality, and “no alleged divine revelation, no tradition however ancient, and no dogma however hallowed has the right to veto its exercise.”(3)

The realm of religious belief was now relegated to the realm of private value and private purpose. It wasn’t that the Enlightenment dichotomy cut out God. Rather, it created a distinction between “natural” religion—God’s existence and the moral laws known by all and demonstrable by reason—and “revealed” religion—doctrines as taught by the Bible and the church. The latter realm, dominant in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, came under increasing attack and was eventually relegated to private expression and personal feelings.

Fueled by scientific and philosophical discoveries, the view of the world as the venue of God’s providence and rule, shifted to the view that sovereign reason could discover all that was necessary to advance humanity toward its highest destiny. All of Christianity’s supernatural claims and all of its revelatory content were unnecessary in a world where the Creator had endowed human beings with enough reason to discern what was important simply through the study of the natural world. As such, the autonomous, rational human became the center of truth and knowledge.

What emerged from this dichotomy was the belief that the real world was a world of cause and effect, of material bodies guided solely by mathematically stable laws. Discovering the cause of something was to have explained it in its totality. There was no need to invoke any supernatural “purpose” or “design” as an explanation any longer.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Great Dichotomy →

Whether compelling the visions of a child or inspiring music or architecture, the power of the imagination is often clear:

O hark, O hear! How thin and clear,

And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing.(1)

But what of the mere presence of the imagination? “I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental,” wrote Lewis. “I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.”(2) Certainly, this taste of a richer fare was sensed in the formative imaginations at which Lewis supped long before he knew he was starving for their Host. Writes Lewis:

“Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete—Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire—all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called ‘tinny.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.”(3)

And while Lewis would come to see that this “lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit,” he is equally certain that God in God’s mercy can profoundly make it such a beginning.(4) My own encounter of the great imagination of C.S. Lewis is similar to a testimony given at his funeral, namely, that “his real power was not proof; it was depiction. There lived in his writings a Christian universe that could be both thought and felt, in which he was at home and in which he made his reader at home.”(5) I believe I probably first loved God as an untame Lion, not because the God I wished for was kinder than the God who is, but because I did not yet see that my deficient vision of God was the vision that needed a better imagination. As Lewis later wrote of his intense love of all Norse mythology, “[A]t the time, Asgard and the Valkyries seemed to me incomparably more important than anything else in my experience…More shockingly, they seemed much more important than my steadily growing doubts about Christianity. This may have been—in part, no doubt was—penal blindness; yet that might not be the whole story. If the Northernness seemed then a bigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because my attitude toward it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not.”(6)

Even so, in moments of moral crisis, we do not pause to ask what Jane Erye would do, I once heard a writer say. She had referenced the Brian Nichol’s story—the gunman who went on a shooting spree in Atlanta and ended up holding a woman hostage in her apartment where she read to him from The Purpose Driven Life and eventually convinced him to turn himself in. She then asked if this story would have turned out the same if the young girl had read to him from Moby Dick or War and Peace or any of the great classics of history. Her point was clear: the influence of art and imagination is usually not in the thick of things, but on the margins of culture; nor it is always clear and obvious, but often dense and unsettling. And yet there are quite arguably characters and stories that indeed become of moral significance, pulling us into worlds that call for attention, compassion, and consideration. Long before I had any idea about the word “allegory” or the concept of good or bad literature, Narnian kings, talking beavers, and the Queen of Glome began appearing in my dreams, beckoning me to another place. In the aftermath of death and subsequent disappointment over the miracle we did not get, it was Aslan’s empathetic tear for the grieving Digory that came to mind when all seemed lost. For Lewis, it was the bright shadow coming out of a George MacDonald book that found him mercifully in the margins. “In the depth of my disgraces, in the then invincible ignorance of my intellect, all this was given me without asking, even without consent. That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.”(6) But the Spirit no doubt mercifully did.

It is quite true that a young materialist or pessimist, atheist or agnostic who wishes to stay this way cannot be too careful in choosing what to read. God is unscrupulous, as Lewis attests, willing to use our own imaginations against us, our own pens to probe the wounds. If imagination is not the property of materialism, but the playground of heaven, it is nonetheless not the thing itself. But the hopeful signs of God’s own compelling imagination are everywhere—beautiful and terrible, inviting and transforming. It is the encounter with the Gate, not the signs along the way, that transforms the entire journey. It is said that Lewis became more like himself when he finally kneeled and admitted that God was God—”as though the key to his own hidden and locked-away personality was given to him.”(7) Everything is intensified—his loves, his responses, Jack himself—as the one brought in kicking and screaming discovered in Christ and his kingdom the world of Joy he had only before heard feebly. The faint horns of Elfland give way to the resounding glory of the creator and wonders beyond our imagining.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1955), 167.

(2) Lewis, 213-214.

(3) Lewis, 167.

(4) Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), 312.

(5) Lewis, 76.

(6) Lewis, 181.

(7) Jacobs, 131.

http://www.rzim.org/

In a poem titled “Moments of Joy,” Denise Levertov tells the story of an old scholar who takes a room on the next street down from his grown children—”the better to concentrate on his unending work, his word, his world.” And though he comes and goes while they sleep, his children feel bereft. They want him nearer. But at times it happens that a son or daughter wakes in the dark and finds him sitting at the foot of the bed, or in the old rocker—”sleepless in his old coat, gazing into invisible distance, but clearly there to protect as he had always done.” The child springs up and flings her arms about him, pressing a cheek to his temple and taking him by surprise: “Abba!” the child exclaims, and Levertov concludes:

“And the old scholar, the father,

is deeply glad to be found.

That’s how it is, Lord, sometimes;

You seek, and I find.”(1)

Though many would like to say that the majority of our lives have been spent searching for God, perhaps it is more accurate to say that we have been sought. Even so, like the children in Levertov’s poem, time and again I know I find myself bereft of God’s presence. Sometimes it just feels like I am sitting in the dark.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sitting in the Dark →

Why is it that God does not seem to approach in a much more obvious way? One answer has been that God’s existence is not a matter of reality and facts. Isn’t it more of a faith position, anyway? Isn’t it more about a leap in the dark than an embrace of evidence?

I would agree that God isn’t “forcefully obvious,” but I don’t think that this confines God to being a “take-it-or-leave-it” matter of faith. I think it makes more sense to see God as clearly visible, whilst not being forcefully obvious.

Did you know that the Bible actually recognizes the validity of this question? First, we see passages that affirm the human perception that God seems hidden. In Job 23:8-9 we read, “But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.”

Interestingly, there are also many examples of God appearing as if veiled in darkness, whilst still simultaneously offering his presence.(1) For instance we read that, “The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” Jesus, too, invites people to trust in him and then leaves and hides himself. In John we find the story of a paralytic man who is healed, but then Jesus slips away into the crowd. Luke records that as news about Jesus spread, “he often withdrew to lonely places.” Later, Jesus tells the disciples that, “Before long, the world will not see me any more, but you will see me.” Interestingly in many of these cases, God provides a clear sense of presence, while at the same time veiling the fullness of that presence.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Isn’t God More Obvious? →

The poet Emily Dickinson loved her garden. Though famously reclusive, she spent countless hours admiring and caring for her garden of flowers. Many of her poems reflect on her love of the outdoor world even if it only consisted of the wonders of her own yard. She writes whimsically of bees, clover, honey, and the summer grasses that grew green and lush around her Amherst, Massachusetts home. One of Dickinson’s most well-known poems speaks of her garden as the location of worship—with church, preaching, and heaven all represented by creatures in the natural world:

Some keep the Sabbath going to church

I keep it staying at home,

With a bobolink for a chorister,

And an orchard for a dome….

So instead of getting to heaven at last

I’m going all along!(1)

For Dickinson, the kingdom of God was as close as the bird’s song in her yard. The experience of heaven was not something awaiting her after death, but an experience available to her as she worshipped God in her orchard sanctuary. Her poems often affirmed God’s presence and grace communicated through the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – To Love a Flower →

Long before Horatio Caine or Gil Grissom made crime scene investigating a primetime enterprise, the Bloodhound Gang was “there on the double” “wherever there’s trouble,” a doughty group of junior detectives who used science to solve crimes. Written by Newbery Medal-winning children’s author Sid Fleischman, the Bloodhound Gang was a beloved segment on the PBS television program 3-2-1 Contact, and my first encounter with the almost unbearable suspension, “To be continued.” Thankfully, with the help of their knowledge of science, no mystery remained unsolved for long.

What I did not realize at the time, or through years of absorbing Unsolved Mysteries, CSI, and my own scientific pursuits, was the hold that simple word “solve” would have on my understanding of mystery. For the Bloodhound Gang, as much as for the philosophers of science who have given rise to the notion, science is the invasion and defeat of mystery. That is to say, for many scientists (though certainly not for all historically), mysteries are there to be solved and put finally beyond us.

One can see how such a notion fuels the perception that science and faith are at odds with one another; science being the conquest of mystery and faith the act of making room for it. For Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor and cognitive scientist, certain aspects of religious belief can be thought of as “desperate measure[s] that people resort to when the stakes are high and they’ve exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success.”(1) In other words, religion, like the story of the stork for parents not ready for their kids to know where babies come from, is simply a desperate attempt to explain away mystery, even if only by making space for it. And faith is thus seen as the grossly inferior CSI agent.

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The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus—a group in the “sacred music” category—released an album in 2015 to widespread critical acclaim. Entitled Beauty Will Save the World, the album features, among other things, monastic chants, snatches of hymns, and surging choral arrangements. Most significantly, it concludes with St. Ambrose’s prayer, “Before the Ending of the Day.”

When asked about the inclusion of all these conspicuously Christian elements, the group replied, “We have always been concerned with the sacred or — perhaps more accurately — the loss of the sacred. We are searching for its echoes and traces which are scattered and hidden in surprising and forgotten places.”(1)

In many ways, this is an apt description of those canvassing the cultural landscape for signs of life. In the case of this particular track, the church is the “hidden and forgotten” place. Like many of today’s musicians, this group is drawing on sacred traditions to reach contemporary audiences. What distinguishes The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus is that they are doing so by honoring the original intent of those traditions, preserving their deep spiritual roots. In their own words, “Sometimes it feels as though our work is less about creation and more about investigation and excavation. We borrow, gather and unearth material from different sources — not all of them obviously sacred or spiritual — but we are looking for the connecting thread and evidence of what Thomas Merton called ‘the hidden wholeness.’ Beauty is there. It is not created, it is discovered and restored.”

Demurring from a pervasive assumption about the arts, the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff says, “A hymn is a good hymn if it serves its purpose effectively and then in addition proves good and satisfying to use for this purpose, that purpose being to enable a congregation to offer praise to God—not, be it noted, to give delight upon aesthetic contemplation.”(2) Wolterstorff approvingly notes the famed hymnist Isaac Watts’s scrupulous commitment “to sink every line to the level of a whole congregation and yet to keep it above contempt.”(3) In a very real sense, these sacred traditions cannot be understood apart from sincere participation. A hymn is fully realized only when you add your voice to the worshipping congregation. St. Ambrose’s prayer becomes a real prayer only when it is uttered with honest conviction. These practices are not made for patrons in a museum; they are made for pilgrims in search of paradise.

There is a growing recognition that the current cultural malaise cannot be undone until people learn to see past the present moment, to remember where they came from, and thus attempt to chart a more holistic course. Perhaps the way forward involves listening for the “echoes and traces” of the sacred in order to discover what they actually say, rather than what we can say with them.

The way is not always clear. The group puts it well: “It’s probably more accurate to describe our music as the pursuit of meaning rather than having a meaning. Truth is always elusive and we are still searching.” Though truth ought to be the proper destination, there is a world of difference between searching and scavenging. The scavenger wants loot. The seeker is looking for an answer.

Cameron McAllister is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) http://www.npr.org/2015/12/07/458485196/songs-we-love-the-revolutionary-army-of-the-infant-jesus”>http://www.npr.org/2015/12/07/458485196/songs-we-love-the-revolutionary-army-of-the-infant-jesus (Accessed April 9, 2016)

(2) Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Grand Rapids, MI: WM.B.Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), 169.

(3) Ibid., 190.

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For the past decade, doctors and psychologists have been taking notice of the health benefits of reflective writing. They note that wrestling with words to put your deepest thoughts into writing can lift your mind from depression, uncover wisdom within your experiences, provide insight and foster self-awareness. From autobiography to blogging to the increasingly popular genre of memoir, writers similarly laud the benefits of writing. Whether publically, anonymously, or privately, confessional writing can free the writer “to explore the depths of the emotional junkyard,” as one describes. In my own experience, writing has no doubt been a helpful way to sift through the junkyard, though perhaps most effectively when exploring in good faith and not merely reveling in the messes.

Writing is helpful because the eye of a writer seeks the transcendent—a moment where the extraordinary is beheld in the ordinary, a glimpse of clarity within the chaos, beauty in a world of contrasts. When Jesus stooped over the crumbled girl at his feet and wrote something in the sand, the written word spoke more powerfully than the anger of the Pharisees and well beyond any shame of the young woman. For those of us looking on through story, his words remain unknown but no less powerful. Writing is a tool with which we learn to see ourselves more clearly, a catalyst for which we can learn to see thankfully beyond ourselves.

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