In the process of moving and reorganizing some bookshelves in the middle of October, I recovered something long out of place. Carved out of olive wood, a small nativity had been left behind from last year’s Christmas. I held it in my hand and cringed at the thought of digging through boxes in the garage long buried by post-Christmas storage. At this point, it seemed better to be two months early in setting it up than ten months late in packing it away.

Strangely enough, my decision then coincided with a friend’s mentioning of a good Christmas quote. Advent was suddenly all around me. In a Christmas sermon given December 2, 1928, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God in the child in the manger. God comes. The Lord Jesus comes. Christmas comes. Christians rejoice!” To be early with my Nativity scene suddenly seemed a wise, but convicting thought. I had kept it around for the sake of convenience, what about for the sake of waiting? If Advent reminds us that we are waiting in December, what reminds us that we are waiting in October or February?

The story of the Nativity, though beautiful and familiar, and admittedly far-reaching, is as easily put out of our minds as Christmas decorations are put in boxes. On certain sides of the calendar, a nativity scene looks amiss. Sitting on my mantle in the fall or the spring, it seems somehow away from home, far from lights and greenery, longing for Christmas fanfare. But looking at it with thoughts of Advent near, I am struck by the irony that longing is often precisely the sentiment I am holding amidst the burgeoning lights, greens, and fanfare of Christmas.

As Bonhoeffer continues, “When once again Christmas comes and we hear the familiar carols and sing the Christmas hymns, something happens to us… The hardest heart is softened. We recall our own childhood. We feel again how we then felt, especially if we were separated from a mother. A kind of homesickness comes over us for past times, distant places, and yes, a blessed longing for a world without violence or hardness of heart. But there is something more—a longing for the safe lodging of the everlasting Father.”(1)

Unlike any other month, December weighs on my soul the gift and the difficulty of waiting. In the cold and dead of winter, tragedies seem to sting further, healing for the broken parts of my life and for the people I love seems harder to reach. When it comes to things that are deep and important, peace and goodness on the earth, freedom from suffering, waiting is hard, even painful. But in these moments, I am remembering that I am troubled in soul and looking for something greater. In the familiar hymns that play wherever I go, I remember that I am poor and imperfect and waiting for the God who comes down to us, and I hear again the gentle promise of a knock at the door. Like the Nativity scene on my mantle in June or October, I embody a strange hope in this sense of waiting. I see a home with tears and sorrow, but I also see in this home the signs of a day when tears will be wiped dry. Advent is about waiting for the one who embraced sorrow and body to show us the fullness of being home, present, and real. It is not December that reminds us we are longing for God to come nearer, but the Nativity of God, the Incarnation of Christ. For each day is touched by the promise that in this very place Jesus has already done so, and that he will again come breaking through, into our world, into our longing, into our sin and deaths.

Every day, despite its location on the calendar, or the headlines on the news, a still, small voice answers our cry persuasively here and now, “Behold. I stand at the door and knock.”

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

(1) Edwin Robertson, Ed., Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).

“The kingdom of God is for the gullible,” I read recently. “You enter by putting an end to all your questions.”

It is true that Jesus moved all over Judea pronouncing the reign of God and the kingdom of heaven as if it were a notion he wanted the simplest soul to get his mind around. But simplicity never seemed what crowds walked away with. With looming paradox in every statement, he made it clear that this kingdom was approaching, that it was here, that it was among us, that they needed to enter it, that they need to wait for it, that they desperately need the one who reigns within it. He insisted, the kingdom “has come near you” (Luke 10:9). Yet he pled to the Father, “Thy kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10). Even in his metaphors, the contrast of so many different and dynamic realities turned the clarity of any individual picture into a great and ambiguous portrait. He assigned the kingdom imagery such as a mustard seed, a treasure in a field, a great banquet, yeast and pearls, among others.

Contrary to putting an end to one’s questions with a childish simplicity, the kingdom of God incites inquiry all the more. What is the nature of this kingdom? Can it be all of these things? Who is this messenger? And what kind of proclamation requires the herald to pour out his very life to tell it? Whatever this kingdom is, it unmistakably introduces to a world far different from the one around us, one we cannot quite get our minds around, with tensions and dynamisms reminiscent of the promise of God to answer our cries “with great and unsearchable things you do not know.”(1) But one thing it absolutely does not do is ask us to stop thinking or to stop trying to reconcile this curious kingdom Jesus describes with the curious world around us. His is certainly a kingdom that challenges any sort of thoughtless, gullible obedience, that compels not blindness or gullibility but sight. It is a kingdom with a king whose very authority exposes present obsessions as wood and reforms numbed minds with great and surprising reversals of life as a gift.

Jesus pointed crowds to a God who opens the eyes of the blind and raises the dead, who claims the last will be the first and the servant is the greatest. But lest we are tempted to leave his statements as hopeful moralisms, his proclamations did not cease with mere words. He put these claims into equally curious action, placing this kingdom before the crowds in such a way that would have absolutely stymied contemporary attempts to dismiss his life as mere religion, abstraction, gullibility, or sentimentality. Even his opposition saw him as a certain and credible threat to their own power and authority:

“Then the whole assembly rose and led Jesus off to Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, ‘We have found this man subverting our nation. He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be Christ, a king.’

So Pilate asked Jesus, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’

‘Yes, it is as you say,’ Jesus replied.

Then Pilate announced to the chief priests and the crowd, ‘I find no basis for a charge against this man.’

But they insisted, ‘He stirs up the people all over Judea by his teaching.  He started in Galilee and has come all the way here…’ So with loud shouts they insistently demanded that he be crucified, and their shouts prevailed.”(2)  The way of proclamation led to the way of the passion, the path of commotion to the path of accusation, a road strewn with signs of the authority of another kingdom to a road that demanded death and mocked a king.

It is tempting to lose sight of this revolutionary figure in the sentimentalism of Christmas manger scenes and familiar carols. And yet this is the child born into our world: one who is still subverting nations and threatening our every sense of authority. The kingdom he proclaimed in birth and in death mercifully continues to unravel our own. His is not a kingdom for the gullible, nor for the faint of heart and sight. Yet, both heart and sight he provides for the weary, taking us beyond familiar borders of the world we know to the very threshold of the good and hopeful kingdom of God, where in both our longing to see in fullness and in our relishing here and now, we discover the one who reigns.

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

(1) Jeremiah 33:3.

(2) Luke 23:1-23, emphasis mine.

Those of us who make our home in the Northern Hemisphere must welcome the encroaching darkness of the winter months. At the height of winter in Kotzebue, Alaska, for example, daylight is but a mere two hours. Where I live, the light begins to recede around 4:30 PM. When the winter sun is out it simply rides the southern horizon with a distant, hazy glow.

Perhaps it seems strange to some, but I love the shorter-days and the darkening skies of winter. For me, the darkness of winter invokes nostalgia for the days of huddling around the fireplace, hot coffee, and curling up with a good book. Indeed, there are some gifts that can only be enjoyed in the darkness of winter and in this season of lessening light.

Of course, darkness and night evoke ominous images as well. Pre-Christian inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere—who did not separate natural phenomenon from their religious and spiritual understanding—saw the departing sunlight as the fleeing away of what they believed was the Sun God. Darkness indicated distance from this receding god and what followed was a loss of hope, the presence of absence and the cessation of life.(1) Like these ancient peoples, darkness often creates fear. We fear what we cannot see in the dark, and what is seen inhabits the mysterious realm of shadows. Darkness has always represented chaos, evil, and death, and therefore is rarely thought of in either romantic or nostalgic terms.

For many—even those who live in sun-filled hemispheres—the darkness of life is a daily nightmare. Despair, chronic loneliness, doubt, and isolation conspire to prevent even the dimmest light. The darkness that comes only as a visitor during the night is for many a perpetual reality. Is there any reason to hope that the light might be found even in these dark places?

It is not by accident that the season of Advent for Christians coincides with the earthly season of fading light and increasing darkness. With its focus on waiting, repentance, and longing, Christians view Advent as a season of somber reflection. Yet, even as the light recedes in winter, the season of Advent offers surprising gifts in the shorter days, in the womb of pregnant possibility, and in the often anxious anticipation that accompanies waiting in the darkness. Those pre-Christian peoples who watched their sun-god disappear found that there were gifts that could be had even in this dark season. The wheels of carts used for hauling and carrying goods, were taken off and decorated with greens and garlands. Those ordinary objects now hung on their walls as mementos of beauty and hope. Taking the wheels off of their carts meant the cessation of work and a time to watch and wait. As Gertrud Muller Nelson writes about this ancient ritual, “Slowly, slowly they wooed the sun-god back. And light followed darkness. Morning came earlier. The festivals announced the return of hope after primal darkness.”(2)

While the dark is mysterious and often ominous, it is also a place of unexpected treasures. As one author notes, “[S]pring bulbs and summer seeds come to life in the unlit places underground. Costly jewel stones lie embedded in the dark interiors of ordinary rocks. Oil, gas, and coal reserves lie far beneath the light of the earth’s surface. The dark depths of the ocean teem with life.”(3) Indeed, unique gifts from earth, sky, and sea can only be observed in the dark.

Spiritual gifts, too, often emerge out of the darkness. The writer of Genesis paints a picture of the Spirit of God hovering over the primordial chaos and the darkness that covered the surface of the deep. Out of the darkness of chaos came the light of creation. The covenant promises of God to give children and land to Abram were forged “when the sun was going down…and terror and great darkness fell upon him.” Moses received the Law in the “thick darkness where God was.” God’s abiding presence was the gift from the darkness. Speaking through the prophet Isaiah, the God of Israel promises: “I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name.” Indeed, the long-awaited Messiah would be revealed to those “who walk in darkness” and who “live in a dark land.”(4) Unlike the sun-god of the pre-Christian understanding, the God of the biblical writers did not flee as the sun faded away, but could be found in the darkest and remotest places.

For those who dwell in the dark season of despair or discouragement, the promise of treasures of darkness may spark a light of hope. “The recovery of hope,” writes Muller Nelson, “can only be accomplished when we have had the courage to stop and wait and engage fully in the winter of our dark longing.”(5)

The hope of Advent is that God is in the darkness with us even though our experience of God may seem as clear as shifting shadow. The hope of Advent is that God’s coming near to us in the person of Jesus is not hindered by the darkness of this world or of our own lives. We may fear our dark despair hides us from God, but the treasure of God’s presence waits even there—for darkness is as light to God.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Gertrud Muller Nelson, To Dance With God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1986), 63.

(2) Ibid., 63.

(3) Sally Breedlove, Choosing Rest: Cultivating a Sunday Heart in a Monday World (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002), 133.

(4) Genesis 15:12; Exodus 20:21; Deuteronomy 5:22; Isaiah 45:3; Isaiah 9:2.

(5) Gertrud Muller Nelson, 63.

“You can’t stop stories being told,” Dr. Parnassus tells his relentless foe with religious assurance in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The world of belief-systems and worldviews is indeed a complicated playground of stories, storytellers, and allegiances—and this is one film which certainly attests to that complicated dance. What makes the interplay of story most complicated is perhaps what is often our inability to name or even to perceive these interacting powers in the first place. That which permeates our surroundings, subconsciously molds our understanding, and continuously informs our vision of reality, is not always easy to articulate. The dominate culture shapes our world in ways we seldom even realize, and often in ways we cannot realize, until something outside of our culture comes along and introduces us, and the scales fall from our eyes.

Further complicating the great arena of narratives is the fact that we often do not even recognize certain systems for the metanarratives that they are, or else we grossly underestimate the story’s power on our own. Whatever version or versions of the story we utilize to understand human history—atheism, capitalism, pluralism, consumerism—their roots run very deep in the human soul. This is why Bishop Kenneth Carder can refer to the global market economy as a “dominant god,” or consumerism, economism, and nationalism as religions.(1) These deeply rooted ideologies are challenged only when a different ideology or imagination comes knocking, when a different faith-system comes along and upsets the imagination that powerfully orders our world.

This is perhaps one reason that the biblical imagination presented in Scripture calls again and again to remember the story, to tell of the acts of God in history, and to bear in mind and vision the one who is near. For into this world of belief-systems and worldviews, God tells the story of creation and the pursuit of its redemption, and then Christ comes in our own flesh and proclaims a kingdom entirely other. The narrative imagination we discover in Scripture introduces us not only to a new world but a world that jarringly shows us our own.

The signs and scenes leading to the incarnation alone challenge many of our cultural norms, turning upside down ideas of authority, power, and glory, presenting us a kingdom that reverses everything we know. What kind of a king crouches down to his subjects to feed the masses or wash their feet? What kind of a leader tells those under him that the way to the top requires a dedication to the bottom? What kind of God comes as child and leaves on a cross? What kind of meal lifts us to another kingdom where we are brought into the presence of the host and asked to taste him? Yet these are the stories he told and Christians tell; this is the imagination he gives us to see him, the world, our selves and neighbors. “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me’” (Luke 22:19). Not long after their meal, his physical body was broken, too.

The story of the Christian is one that remembers the very first and the very last moments of a rabbi and his disciples—a child born, a teacher present, a meal shared, a lamb revealed, feet washed by one who claimed to be both king and servant. It is a story that invites its hearers into a kingdom entirely different than the many stories before them, connecting them with a God who somehow reigns within a realm that is here and now, and also approaching. In the Lord’s Supper, Christians are literally “taking in” this biblical imagination, which unites followers with Christ in such a way that helps us to live as he lived in a world of stories.

When the apostle Paul called early followers of Christ not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds so that they might discern what is the will of God—”what is good and acceptable and perfect,” he was reminding them that there are overlapping and contradicting stories all around them, but that it is the story of God that earns the role of orienting narrative. In other words, Christ does not leave his followers with the option of living unaware of all the subconscious ways in which we are formed by the world of stories. Living into the kingdom of God means recognizing the power of God’s story beside every competing narrative—not necessarily shutting each one out, but interpreting every other story through the Story. Living further into the biblical imagination presented in Scripture, the Christian’s very life, like that of Christ’s, shows the world the subversive power of an imagination that moves far beyond the systems of “postmodernism,” “consumerism,” and “nationalism.”

Whether Christian, atheist, or Hindu, no one can avoid being in the world. We cannot escape the world’s formative stories, nor should we want to escape the particular place where we have been planted.(3) Yet, nor do we want it to become so much our home that we cannot see all the dust on the windows or feel the draft of a roofless shelter. For the Christian, the more we find ourselves living into the imagination of this different kingdom, a world breathed by the Father, proclaimed by Christ, and revealed by the Spirit, the unchallenged, unseen storylines of our worlds come sharply into focus. And the more we taste and see of the goodness of God, the more we taste and see of Christ in the land of the living. Like Paul, at times something like scales fall from our eyes and the Spirit compels us to get up and re-experience our baptisms, going further into the biblical imagination, where our voices regain strength in telling and retelling the unstoppable story.(4)

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

(1) Kenneth Carder, “Market and Mission: Competing Visions for Transforming Ministry,” Lecture, Duke Divinity School, Oct. 16, 2001, 1.

(2) Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1995), 95.

(3) Jesus himself prayed, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but I ask that you protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15).

(4) “And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength” (Acts 9:18-19).

It is tempting to look at the ancients of Israel, as they wandered and grumbled in a desert for forty years, and wonder at their behavior—or else, question the storyline, which leaves a few questions. These people are key participants in mouth-dropping events at the Red Sea, where the God who has chosen them offers a display of all that means. These same people then come to doubt God’s presence among them, God’s power, God’s concern, God’s plan for their lives. Did they really believe they could be as moved and cared for by a golden ornament, molded at their own hands, as they were with the God who split open the Red Sea?

Whether a casual or careful reader of Israel’s story, it is tempting to keep their behavior at a healthy distance, as if in its ancient context, it is wholly un-relatable to our own. But imagining that Israel’s actions are in complete contrast with mine, I repeatedly discover, is a stretch by any imagination. The behavior of the Israelites is still among us; at times, is it frustratingly close to home.

Though the specific events of Egypt could have similarly been held at a distance by the psalmist who was writing years later, the writer nonetheless stood poised to remember the events of Israel’s past so as to see his present situation more clearly. As if forging it in his own memory, the psalmist speaks bluntly of Israel’s experience in the desert: “Then they despised the pleasant land; they did not believe his promise” (106:24).

What does it take to come to despise what once seemed promising? What would it take for you to refuse to believe the one thing you want to believe most? When hopes are dashed in trying places, I don’t believe their reaction to the desert is so far removed from our own. The Israelites were not unusually slow in understanding; they were no more stubborn than you or I am. But they were entirely disappointed; all they longed for seemed altogether unreachable. They could not believe that the wilderness was the way to Canaan. They could not see how their current trouble was consistent with a God who loved them; they could not see how their pain could possibly work for good in the end. Who among us cannot at some point relate?

Whether people of faith or not, we long for someone or something or some place that can make right what is wrong in this world, what is wrong in our lives. And yet, carrying ideas of what that someone or something will look like, and not finding it, we end up doubting the promising thought we once held on to with hope. When the route we see in front of us seems irreconcilable with the place we thought we were going, we come to despise what once seemed hopeful, holding in its place shattered expectations, fear, and anger.

When Jesus healed a man who was called Legion because he was possessed with so many demons, the townspeople had a peculiar response. Mark describes the scene and its aftermath as a crowd began to gather. “When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid” (5:15).

This man was someone they were familiar with; the crowd actually recognized him. He was the one they saw dodging in and out of nearby caves, living as a total recluse, cast out of society, an outcast even of his own mind. Yet, seeing the one they were used to avoiding suddenly dressed and in his right mind evoked within them, not delight or amazement, not thanks or hopefulness, but fear. No one suspected that this was a shadow of all they longed for themselves. Seeing Jesus, the instrument of healing—the one who set right what was wrong—they were simply afraid. And they begged him to leave.

As the Israelites beheld the desert and the townspeople beheld Legion, both missed what God was doing because they were troubled by the failures of their imagination. It brings quiet inquiries to mind. Do we not still oscillate between being too uncomfortable to trust and too comfortable to believe? How do we guard against missing our deepest hope, though we fear? And how do we not come to despise what once seemed promising, though we stand broken or disappointed in the wilderness?

Like the psalmist, we might stand poised to remember, seeing God in history, seeing ourselves, seeing today—with imagination, with thanksgiving. Though I am tempted to keep the behavior of those who have gone before me at a distance, I am comforted by the proximity of God throughout their story, continually drawing them nearer, even in the desert. Though they grumbled and failed and begged God to leave, God continued to lead them, in mercy breaking each idol they would have settled for, prying from their hands the things that blocked their view of the promise God would not forget.

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

A New York Times column recently posed the question “Do moralists make bad novelists?” Two novelists, Alison Gregory and Pankaj Mishra respectively, provided brief responses. Though both writers grapple with the question in a distinctive manner, they are unified on one thought: Morality in the context of a story should be inherent, not explicit. The concrete circumstances of the story ought to allow the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. And, both writers agree, ambiguity is usually a more suitable vehicle for such a task than certainty. Gregory sums up this conclusion well: “It’s not that fiction should be written by amoral authors — in fact, I would argue that novels actively unconcerned with which thoughts and behaviors are worth having are themselves not worth reading — but that their methods ought to be suggestive rather than forthright. Fiction should expose us to a conscience, not a conviction.”(1)

Allowing the circumstances of a story to speak for themselves can lead authors, their characters, and their readers in surprising directions, directions that don’t necessarily fit the assumptions of all three. This is when books get really interesting. When an author’s, a character’s, a reader’s assumptions smack against the hard surfaces of reality this can be a means to an enlarged perspective, an invitation to an outlook that is more subtle, generous, and humane. But this kind of undertaking requires courage. We seldom speak of great writers as brave. We should. Telling the truth flies in the face of fashion, ideology, vanity, and self-interest.

Asked if he is religious, author Jeffrey Eugenides responded, “I don’t think you should be interested in searching for the truth if you don’t think maybe you’ll find the truth.” One of the characters from his latest book, The Marriage Plot, discovers this first-hand. With a last name that is every bit as dramatic as his author’s, Mitchell Grammaticus sets his sights on Calcutta, India, where he plans to volunteer at the Sisters of Charity, Mother Teresa’s home for the sick and the dying. The year is 1982 and Mitchell has just graduated from Brown University. Mitchell boards the Calcutta-bound plane clutching a tattered copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Something Beautiful for God, his heart inflated by lofty ideals of charity and sainthood. The trip is a fascinating failure.

“Mitchell had never so much as changed a baby’s diaper before. He’d never nursed a sick person, or seen anyone die, and now here he was, surrounded by a mass of dying people, and it was his job to help them die at peace, knowing they were loved.”(2) Crowded by this unremitting destitution, Mitchell is pushed well beyond his limits. What is especially confounding to him is his seeming inability to marshal the kind of regard that Mother Teresa and her sisters have for their dying guests. His inner resources simply aren’t up to the task.

The breaking point arrives when Mitchell and another volunteer are trying to bathe a man’s cancer-ravaged body. “Not for a moment did Mitchell believe that the cancerous body on the slab was the body of Christ. He bathed the man as gently as possible, scrubbing around the base of the tumor, which was venomously reddened and seeping blood. He was trying to make the man feel less ashamed, to let him know, in his last days, that he wasn’t alone, not entirely, and that the two strange figures bathing him, however clumsy and inexpert, were nevertheless trying to do their best for him.”(3) But Mitchell’s resolve is fatally weakened. The hard surface of reality is unyielding and simply won’t crack open to reveal some liberating spiritual principle. There is only the slab, the failing body with its failing organs— the whole recalcitrant body of facts that register Mitchell’s impending failure. The ordeal concludes with these stunning sentences: “And Mitchell began to move. Already knowing he would regret this moment for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life, and yet unable to resist the sweet impulse that ran through his every nerve, Mitchell headed to the front of the home, right past Matthew 25:40, and up the steps to the bright, fallen world above.”(4)

Is this a disparagement of the Christian ideal of love? Has this incident simply woken Mitchell up to the sad fact that a human being is nothing more than a sophisticated animal bound to the same fate as whales, mice, and amoebas? Is that all there is to us?

Mitchell shares more than an exotic last name with his author. Following his graduation from Brown University, Jeffrey Eugenides made the same trip to Mother Teresa’s home for the sick and dying as Mitchell. Eugenides’ own experiment in sainthood also ended in failure. What drew both Mitchell and his maker to this humble little nun and her perch in the squalor of India’s poorest slums is the same thing that inspired Malcolm Muggeridge’s unforgettable words as he bade her farewell at the Calcutta railway station: “When the train began to move, and I walked away, I felt as though I were leaving behind me all the beauty and all the joy in the universe. Something of God’s universal love has rubbed off on Mother Teresa, giving her homely features a noticeable luminosity; a shining quality. She has lived so closely with her Lord that the same enchantment clings about her that sent the crowds chasing after him in Jerusalem and Galilee, and made his mere presence seem a harbinger of healing.”(5) Is this “shining quality,” this “noticeable luminosity” real? Or does the “bright, fallen world above” expose Mother Teresa as a fraud?

Eugenides doesn’t answers these questions for the reader. What he does do is offer a concrete demonstration of the fact that it is manifestly impossible to muster this kind of love on our own strength. Mother Teresa and her Sisters of Charity are seeing things in these decrepit bodies that Mitchell just can’t see. Something that doesn’t seem to fit into the “bright, fallen world above” is guiding their hands and feet.

Flannery O’Connor says that the “chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.”(6) Confronting the limits of this world, Mitchell appears to be on the threshold of another world. True, he flees, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t brushed shoulders with a deeper reality. And besides, not everyone flees… Mother Teresa is proof of that. Jeffrey Eugenides is portraying a larger universe in this scene. It would have to be a larger universe in order to accommodate Mother Teresa and others like her. And there are many others like her if we would only have eyes to see.

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

(1) Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra, “Do Moralists Make Bad Novelists?” The New York Times (July 7, 2015), Italics mine.

(2) Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (New York: Picadore, 2011), 297.

(3) Ibid., 319.

(4) Ibid., 321.

(5) Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1971), 17-18.

(6) Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Sraus and Giroux, 1957), 175.

The recognition of one’s humanity can be an uncomfortable pill to swallow. Life’s fragility, life’s impermanence, life’s intertwinement with imperfection and disappointment—bitter medicines are easier to accept. The Romantic poets called it “the burden of full consciousness.” To look closely at humanity can indeed be a realization of dread and despair.

For the poet Philip Larkin, to look closely at humanity was to peer into the absurdity of the human existence. Whatever frenetic, cosmic accident that brought about a species so endowed with consciousness, the sting of mortality, incessant fears of failure, and sieges of shame, doubt, and selfishness was, for Larkin, a bitter irony. In a poem titled “The Building,” he describes the human condition as it is revealed in the rooms of a hospital, where one finds “Humans, caught/On ground curiously neutral, homes and names/Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,/ Some old, but most at that vague age that claims/The end of choice, the last of hope; and all/ Here to confess that something has gone wrong./ It must be error of a serious sort,/ For see how many floors it needs, how tall…”(1)

With or without Larkin’s sense of dread, the confession that “something has gone wrong” is often synonymous with the acknowledgment of humanity. “I’m only human,” is a plea for leniency with regards shortcoming; in Webster’s dictionary, “human” itself is an adjective for imperfection, weakness, and fragility. Nevertheless, there are some outlooks and religions that stand diametrically opposed to this idea, seeing humanity with limitless potential, humans as pure, the human spirit as divine. In a vein not unlike the agnostic Larkin, the new atheists see the cruel realities of time and chance as reason in and of itself to dismiss the rose-colored lenses of God and religion. Yet quite unlike Larkin’s concluding outlook of meaninglessness and despair, they often (inexplicably) suggest a rose-colored view of humanity.(2) Still other belief-systems emphasize the depravity of humanity to such a leveling degree that no person can stand up under the burden of guilt and disgust.

In deep contrast to such severe or optimistic readings, Jesus of Nazareth adds an entirely different dimension to the conversation. The Jesus admits in his own flesh that while there is indeed an error of a serious sort, the error is not in “humanness” itself. He provides a way for the great paradox of humanity to be rightly acknowledged: both the deep and sacred honor of being human and yet the profound disgrace of all that is broken. So the Christian’s advantage is not that they find themselves less fallen or closer to perfection than others, nor that they find in their religion a means of simply escaping this world of fragility, brokenness, guilt, suffering, and error. The Christian’s advantage is Christ himself. The human Son of God mediates on our behalf, bringing us back to a full and forgiven humanity. In his life, death, and resurrection, the Christian is able to see their own broken humanity and a world that has gone awry in light of God’s severe and merciful pursuit. In his vicarious humanity, we encounter our own.

“[H]umanity’s mystery,” as one writer expounds, “can be explained only in the mystery of the God who became human. If people want to look into their own mystery—the meaning of their pain, of their work, of their suffering, of their hope—let them put themselves next to Christ… If I find, on comparing myself with Christ, that my life is a contrast, the opposite of his, then my life is a disaster. I cannot explain that mystery except by returning to Christ, who gives authentic features to a person who wants to be genuinely human.”(3)

The author of these words was well acquainted with the paradox of human nature and the God who became human to bring the world to authentic humanity. Oscar Romero was a Salvadoran priest who saw the very worst and the weakest of humanity in the corruption, violence, and suffering of a country at war within itself. A witness to ongoing violations of human rights, Romero spoke out on behalf of the poor and the victimized. In both the abused and the abusers, he saw the image of God, glimpses of Christ, and the dire need for Christ’s true humanity. For his outcries, Romero was assassinated in the middle of a church service. He was holding up the broken bread of communion, the very sign of Christ’s human body on earth, given for a broken and hungry world.

Surrounded by reasons to be despairing of humanity, there is yet this startling image of a human who gives us cause to reconsider our despair, one whose only brokenness was at our own hands. Christ is more than someone who came to fix what was wrong. He is the image of all that is right, the bread of life for those who seek to be genuinely human.

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

(1) Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 191.

(2) Various Atheist bus campaigns offer well-known examples of this, one a few years ago declaring, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” See Ariane Sherine, “The Atheist Bus Journey,” The Guardian, January 6, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/.

(3) Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 112.

I lost my glasses and my keys all in one afternoon. Having stacked back to back appointments, I suppose it was bound to happen. Racing around as I was that day increased the likelihood of error. Other than my keys, I had left everything else in my car—including, I thought—my glasses. After a three hour search of the areas most likely to have my keys, I returned to my car and couldn’t find my glasses either. Desperate calls to the places I had been yielded no results. My glasses and my keys were lost.

The older I get, the more these episodes of forgetfulness seem to increase. Many of my friends who are ever-so-slightly older than me tell me this is the way it is and that I’d better get used to it (or figure out a way to padlock my keys and glasses to me)! The subtle slipping of memory and recall, the fading energy, and the inability to find culturally relevant connections with those younger than me all serve to show me—as the mirror reveals the increasing lines on my face and the graying of my hair—that I am no longer a young woman.

In times like these, I am tempted towards despair. How quickly my youth has gone! Or I can be tempted towards envy of those whose youth and vitality are in their prime. Their exuberance runs circles around my increasingly feeble efforts. In my efforts to keep up, I am drawn to fads and notions for reclaiming youthful energy. Lotions and potions, diets and exercise regimes which promise the fountain of youth lead only to an empty checking account and a bankrupt soul. None of these strategies can erase mid-life regrets or restlessness. Rather than animating creative ideas about living in my life now, I allow it to be tethered to worldly dreams of more, or better, or younger or simply other.

Moses was not a young man when he penned Psalm 90. Yet this psalm was his prayer to the everlasting God as he contemplated his own transient days on earth.

“Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were born, or you gave birth to the earth and the world. Even from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You turn human beings back into dust, and you say, ‘Return, O children of the earth.’ For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it passes by.”

We are not told what prompted this song of Moses. Perhaps it was written after an endless day of complaint from wilderness-weary Israelites. Perhaps it was written with regret after his violent outburst against the rock would bar him from entry into the Promised Land. Perhaps, it was simply his own lament as he saw his body age and his youth as a distant memory. Whatever event prompted its writing, it is a song sung in a minor key, with great regret. Our days have declined in your fury; we have finished our years with a sigh.

Whether prompted by deep regret, disillusionment, or a simple admitting of reality, Moses reflects on the brevity of life. He compares it to the grass “which sprouts anew. In the morning, it flourishes; toward evening it fades, and withers away.” Before we know it, our lives are past; we finish our years with sighing. In light of human transience, Moses makes a request: “So, teach us to number our days, that we may present to you a heart of wisdom….that we may sing for joy and be glad all of our days….and confirm the work of our hands.”(1) He doesn’t ask for a longer life, or a youthful potion. Instead, he asks the eternal God to remind finite human beings of their limited lifespans in order that wisdom might reign and gratitude would mark even the briefest of stays on this earth.

It was the inevitability of death that motivated this prayer for wisdom. This was a wisdom that didn’t try to hide from aging but rather sought to keep finitude ever before it. Indeed the cry for God to “confirm the work of our hands” demonstrates that numbering life’s days can lead to meaningful engagement in the world and in human work—and this was the mark of wisdom. Perhaps it is a wisdom that can only come from age.

Sadly, the reminders of our own mortality can tempt many towards distraction. Yet it can also lead to wise engagement. In his own brief life, Jesus faced his own death with intention and purpose. “I am the Good Shepherd…and I lay down my life for the sheep… No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative.”(2) The way of wisdom demonstrated in the life of Jesus gives flesh to the ancient psalmist’s exhortation. As he numbered his days, he calls those who would follow to engage mortality as a catalyst for purposeful living.

While following Jesus insists on the laying down of life in his service, it can be done in the hope that abundant life is truly possible even as one ages and death becomes a more poignant reality. For the one who laid his life down is the one who was raised. He is the everlasting God and a dwelling place for all generations. “I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in me will live even though he dies.”

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Psalm 90:12, 14b, 15a, 17.

(2) John 10:14a-18.

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 peoplehave imaginary lives and quite a few 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 for 2015, 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 worrisome) to see how seamless the real and the virtual can become. Of course, this is a reality that runs through far more than worlds of online gaming. The imagination is always at work in the way we see the world itself; this is both instinctive and instructive. Moreover, to note that something is imaginary is not to dismiss it as void of truth or reality. Fans of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes cartoon remember significant lines of truth coming from a stuffed tiger. Yet, there are also times that what is not real can become so intertwined with what is real that we scarcely notice a difference. That is, until something real reminds us otherwise—like a jolt of consciousness, an outsider’s perspective, or a credit card receipt.

The Hebrew prophet Jonah was a prophet by profession. He knew the liturgy and worship of the people of Israel by heart. So it is not unreasonable that as his life was ebbing away in the depths of the sea, Jonah would cry out with the words of a psalm he had heard countless times before. And yet, the words no doubt had a depth of meaning for him unlike anything he had known before. As he was losing consciousness—literally in Hebrew, “in the feebleness of his person,”—Jonah not only remembered God by name, but in some ways was seeing God for the first time. Like one awakened to enmeshed worlds both real and unreal, Jonah quickly clung to what was real.

Up until this point Jonah’s behavior suggests a mentality that God was not entirely omnipresent, but present only in Israel, in the temple, and in the places of his own interest. As Jonah ran to Tarshish to avoid the call of God to go to Nineveh, he ran believing there was a place he could go where God could not find him. But as he sunk further into the depths of the sea, the prophet realized that he was mercifully mistaken. His language evokes a play on words—As I was losing consciousness, I remembered the LORD. Or else, it was a sudden recognition of the Really Real in the imaginary world he had occupied. Losing consciousness, Jonah was actually gaining it.

Perhaps not wanting to consider the discomfort it would take to uproot our own embedded fallacies, tellers of Jonah’s story often minimize the distress that broke his silence with God. But the popular notion that Jonah went straight from the side of the ship and into the mouth of the fish is not supported by either the narrative as a whole or Jonah’s cry for help. H. L. Ellison suggests that “[Jonah] was half drowned before he was swallowed. If he was still conscious, sheer dread would have caused him to faint—notice that there is no mention of the fish in his prayer. He can hardly have known what caused the change from wet darkness to an even greater dry darkness. When he did regain consciousness, it would have taken some time to realize that the all-enveloping darkness was not that of Sheol but of a mysterious safety.”(1)

In that mysterious safety, Jonah shows us the strange world that unwound his imaginary one, and in it, the God who hears in both. Though the deep surrounded him and reeds were bound to his head, Jonah was heard—and his awareness of this was an essential turning point in his story. In prayer and darkness, Jonah admitted that the role of salvation cannot be in his hands. If only momentarily, the drowning prophet clung to a truth more hopeful than escapism and far more able than idols: “Salvation belongs to the LORD.”

It is hard to believe that Jonah could have considered being swallowed alive a rescue, and yet it is precisely Jonah’s considerations from which he needed to be rescued. In truth, at times, the deliverance we need most is that of deliverance from ourselves. Though our thoughts toward God be wound in self and seaweed, and the depths of our imagined autonomy threaten to drown us, rescue is indeed a valid hope. What if God is far more real than we often imagine?

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

(1) H.L. Ellison, “Jonah,” The Expositors Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1985), 374.

I must confess to a certain curiosity with why things turn out as they do. I read a lot of history, biographies, and stories of human successes and failures. Being a child of a particular age, I was raised with a certain degree of optimism. The bad times—World War II, the Korean War—were behind us, and once again we could get back to the normal business of pursuing happiness and success, which I was led to believe were easily within my reach.

Optimism is not hope, yet it is a recurring feature of life in good times. It is also a feature that all too quickly vanishes and reveals itself for what it is when bad times return. As a European, I lived through one of history’s great turning points, a turning point powerfully demonstrated in the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The wall was not simply a physical reality, which had divided families, a nation, and a continent for decades; it was a symbol of the clash of visions and worldviews that battled for a season, not only for Europe, but for global dominance.

I can well remember the astonished newscasters as Germans embraced each other on top of the despised symbol of separation. Europe and the world seethed with the euphoria of change. The brave new world was being born, and optimism was the mood of the day (1989-1991). I heard breathless gurus of the age proclaim the dawn of unfettered freedom, and one even wrote shortly thereafter about “the end of history and the last man” in the sincere belief of the triumph of free market capitalism and liberal democracy.

Yet wisdom bids us to stop, look, and listen. In the first decade of the twenty-first century we have witnessed 9/11, bombings in Spain, Bali, and London. We have seen the debacles of Enron, WorldCom, and the fiascos of “Bear Stearns” (USA) and “Northern Rock” (UK). Optimism has met its match. Perhaps for some, they are seeing the collapse of hopes and the fulfillment of fears. The movie scene is reflectively filled with apocalyptic and nihilistic visions.

When hope fades, cynicism is often waiting in the wings. And this is indeed one of the great challenges of our time. Skepticism (there is nothing good and I know it) and cynicism (I can’t trust anybody or anything and I know this) seem reasonable choices. But is this a necessary outcome or orientation for us? I think not. Yet, if we have bought into a rationalist vision, if we have embraced the vision and values of our age uncritically, if faith is merely a part-time investment in an over cluttered life, then perhaps we don’t have the necessary orientation or resolve to face the issues and challenges of our time.

The Christian scriptures open up for us a view of the world that is very different: There is a God. This God is the creator, and God is personal, loving, willful, and particular. We see that despite being a good creation, a disruption and disorder has occurred and the drama of redemption unfolds. But the central character here is God! It is what God does, whom God appoints, and what God decides that makes the difference.

This is not to say that life according to Christian theology is pre-determined. I have seen too much, experienced too much, and read too much to believe that my choices are illusory. I believe they are real. I have also seen too much, experienced too much, read too much to believe that our choices are, as Lewis would say, “the whole show.” History is not a fatalist’s game. Humans do act, and often with serious and sad outcomes. The good news, I believe, is that we are not alone!

Writing to the Romans, the apostle Paul reminded them that hope is real because it is anchored in one who is able to carry it, sustain it, and fulfill it.(1) History is moving to an end, and Christ offers a good end. Thus, the difference between optimism, which is short term and easily overcome, and hope, which is eternal and anchored, is where they are rooted. One leans on human effort; the other rests in God and God’s promises.

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Romans 8:24-25, 28-30.