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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – We Demand Windows

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“We demand windows,” said C.S. Lewis speaking of the role of literature in our lives. Why occupy our time and hearts with accounts of characters and events that are not real? Why enter vicariously into the fictional life of one who behaves in ways we wouldn’t or shouldn’t? Lewis explains, “We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own…. We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors….”(1)

The literature I have loved most has taken me to windows of other worlds and other countries. Whether a Hobbit in the Shire or a rationalist in 19th century Russia, I have been a thousand characters in a thousand places and know more about myself and my world because of it. Crossing the bridge into Terabithia, I was introduced to another world and my own at once. The characters that came bounding out of Katherine Paterson’s pages pulled me through their window and voiced my very first questions about life, death, and my own mortality. When I first followed Charles Wallace and Meg through a wrinkle in time and a window to Camazotz, I saw that darkness can overwhelm, and wondered at the idea that there is yet a light that cannot be overcome. Likewise, Lewis’s own wardrobe provided the door that carried me to Narnia, a world that introduced the suggestion of signs and possibilities of another Kingdom within my own.

The windows we find in our literature teach us to see windows in our own worlds. The stories and places that pull us in and spit us out again show us our own lives as stories, our own place in a bigger story, our role in a better country. Perhaps we demand windows into other worlds simply because we are looking for another world, a world without suffering, or injustice, or our own pettiness.

The ancient psalmist voiced something similar about the world he was a part of and the world he imagined, “Hear my prayer, O LORD, listen to my cry for help; be not deaf to my weeping. For I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger, as all my fathers were” (39:12). Years later, the author of Hebrews wrote of Abraham, “By faith he made his home in the Promised Land like a stranger in a foreign country… For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (11:8-10). God made humanity, Elie Wiesel once said, because God loves stories.

As we wake to life, whether in our own story or vicariously in other, we wake with questions. “How did we get here?” the Pevensie children asked with good reason. “And why are we here?” Of course, they got to Narnia through a wardrobe, but how they didn’t know. And what did it all mean? Who among us has at times not been floored with the same questions of our own world: How did we get here? Why are we here? And what is the point of it all?

Our questions of this world are as valid as our questions of any other. Had the Pevensies’ settled into Narnia without asking questions such as these, a great deal of the story would have been incomplete. Likewise, Annie Dillard writes of life in this place where we find ourselves, “Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, even if we can’t learn why.”(1) We are citizens in a world that would be easy to settle into and go about our lives. But what crucial part of the story do we miss by doing so?

The Christian story imagines a world where there are windows and doors that open to the Kingdom of God all around us—here and now and coming. There are places where heaven and earth meet at great crossroads, moments when we are given opportunities to see things beyond us, to see things as they really are. God is always leading us toward the many-roomed house Christ left us to imagine. The question is whether or not we will take the time to thoroughly explore and enjoy the neighborhood.

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

(1) “We Demand Windows,” Leland Ryken, ed. The Christian Imagination, (Colorado Springs: Shaw, 2002), 51.

(2) Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, (Bantam, 1977), 12.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Commanding Mystery

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Ravi Z

Today the Queen of England will host the Royal Maundy Service at Blackburn Cathedral. She will be carrying out the annual tradition held each year on the Thursday before Easter, handing out 88 coins, to mark her age, to men and women in recognition of their service to their community and church.

For those who first experienced the events that would become the stuff of tradition, the day was indeed eventful.The word Maundy, derived from the Latin word “mandatum,” meaning commandment, hastens the words of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper:

“And now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”(1)

It was the day the disciples received the command to love and had their feet washed by Jesus. Though perhaps in hindsight, it was the day they first saw the connection between the Passover sacrifice, their beloved teacher, and the Lamb of God. It was a day their eyes were particularly roused by the uniqueness of the humanity before them, their minds filled with history, prophecy, tradition—and mystery.

As author Annie Dillard once observed, “We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery.”(2)

In fact, Jesus is a mystery that has unarguably shaped all of history. A 1936 Life magazine article on the life of Jesus noted, “Jesus gave history a new beginning. In every land he is at home: everywhere people think his face is like their best face—and like God’s face. His birthday is kept across the world. His death-day has set a gallows across every city skyline. Who is he?”(3) The mystery of Christ, his life, death, and influence is both unmatched and unsearchable. Even Napoleon, in a conversation while imprisoned at St. Helena, acknowledged in Jesus “a mystery which subsists”: “He exhibited in himself the perfect example of his precepts… Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires, but upon what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded his empire upon love and at this hour millions of men would die for him.”(4)

But who is this vicariously human, divine mystery behind these concentrated words? I can think of no better question to ask on Maundy Thursday. And yet, as Ravi Zacharias states, the precursor to the answer is the intent of the questioner. Magazine articles and television programming and new books by popular antagonists may reflect curiosity in the man the world remembers this week, but do we want to know who Jesus was, who he is, beyond the philosophical exercise?

Perhaps that first Maundy Thursday, just before the Passover Feast, just a day before Jesus was betrayed, is a revealing scene for the honest inquirer of his identity. The story is recounted in the Gospel of John.(5) Jesus looks at his disciples, his friends, those who would soon deny even knowing him, those who even so, he would love to the end. And standing with those men, knowing the weight of the darkness before him, he took a towel and a basin and began to wash their feet.

It was a lowly job—and an oft-recurring job due to sandals and dusty streets. It was a job for a servant. But here, the menial task was instead performed by the master, their teacher, the Messiah they hoped would save them with force but instead would die on a Roman cross.

The mysterious truth of Christ’s identity is this jarring humanity of an Incarnate Son who still does what is analogous to washing soiled feet: with our deepest sorrows, our sorriest actions, our small attempts at being human.  Might we wake again and again to the enormity of Christ, human and divine—royalty stooping down to serve.

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

(1) John 13:34.

(2) Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, (New York:  HarperPerennial, 1998), 4.

(3) George Buttrick, “The Life of Jesus Christ,” Life, December 28, 1936, 49.

(4) Napoleon I, “Napoleon’s Argument for the Divinity of Christ,” Evans & Cogswell, No. 3, Charleston, 1861.

(5) John 13:1-17.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Awakenings

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Ravi Z

Few of us would be able to recollect from our childhoods the moment when self-consciousness first came into being and the process of waking to self began. For most of us, awareness broke through in pieces. We found ourselves then as we continue to find ourselves now: at times stirringly wakeful to what it means to be human, aware of self and lifetime, and startled by the abruptness of its end.  Essayist Annie Dillard articulates the progression of consciousness with stirring lucidity:

“I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.”(1)

Dillard describes the rousing of self as strangely recognizable—”like people brought back from cardiac arrest or drowning.” There is a familiarity in the midst of the foreignness. We wake to mystery, but so somehow we wake to something known.

We find ourselves jarred awake in a different way to the idea of death, this unsettling notion of forever falling asleep to the life we have known. But even here there is a curious sense of vigilance we carry with us into death. Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno once observed that human beings are distinguished from other creatures in that we have the unique practice of burying our dead. In our funeral preparations, we make the dead ready for another stage; we make ourselves ready to continue on, our eyes further open to the weight of life. We stand ceremoniously present; we speak words over the dead body. Professor James Loder points out the rebellion inherent in these preparations: “We will not let death have the last word. This is a mark of the human spirit that something in us knows we can overcome this thing.”(2)

Into this mysterious world of life and death, the Christian voice calls the world to the wakeful awareness of this spirit, to the story reaching beyond self, beyond our lifetimes and our deaths, speaking words where death stings and tears flow: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken… They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call… when you see all these things, you know that itis near, right at the door” (Matthew 24:29-33).

When Jesus appeared on the scene of a people who had lived with God’s silence for hundreds of years, there were some who were ready and alert and others who had fallen asleep to the possibility of a God who speaks. The story of Christ’s coming, the Incarnation of hope and light, is a reminder that wakefulness is a worthy posture. The one who invites us to “come and see” has come near enough to show us for himself. Like children waking to consciousness, what if something in us knows that Christ is near, right at the door, longing to show us even now. It is worth being found awake, ready for something new and something we have known all along. For the Christian, this mystery is our consciousness. Christ has come. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

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

(1) Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 11.

(2) James E. Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 4.

 

 

Max Lucado

Max Lucado – Follow God’s Impulses

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Max Lucado

What Annie Dillard says about writing in her book, “The Writing Life,” is true about all of life:  “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”

There is a wonder to life. Pursue it. Hunt for it. Don’t listen to the whines of those who’ve settled for a second-rate life and want you to do the same so they won’t feel guilty. Your goal is not to live long…it’s to live!

You can’t be criticized for what you don’t try, right?  You can’t lose your balance if you never climb, right?  So, take the safe route.  Or. . . you can follow God’s impulses. He says, “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it.”  Time slips.  Days pass. Years fade. Life ends. And what we came to do must be done while there is time!