Christ In Winter:
Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter…
[Repeated intro] I have
been thinking about the “hinge” books in my life, those books that open a door
in a unique way. There are hinge occasions that are not books, of
course—people, events, places, movies. Books have a special niche of hinge
importance, though--especially to people of my generation, who did not have
access to more modern forms of input when we were in our hinge years--because
they take time. If a book has hinge importance, you don’t just glimpse it, you
ingest it. And you may go back to it time and again. The whole list of my hinge
books is at the bottom. That is too long a list to explore at one time, so I’m
going to do only one book per column.
Today’s hinge book is… THE IMMENSE JOURNEY by Loren Eiseley
In my campus ministry
days, I read a lot of books, including things like The Hobbit, by Tolkein, because the students were reading them for
their classes, and I wanted to understand what they were talking about. That
was the only reason I started skimming through a copy of The Immense Journey that some sophomore had left in the lounge.
Wow!
First, I had no idea that
a scientist could write so well and so interestingly. I was scared to death of
science in high school, mostly because you really had to study it, rather than
just get by on writing ability, and also I was bored by it, probably because
our physics text book was written by the aptly but unfortunately named Charles
E. Dull. The edition we used was published in 1922, already 30 years out of
date. Science was just a bunch of facts and theorems—no stories. Eiseley showed
me how wrong I was about that! The
Immense Journey read like a novel.
Second, I got my first
introduction to the theory of story, which would become the center of my own
academic work, from Eiseley, a scientist, and not from theologians. [1] Eiseley
said: We live in story, not in facts and theories. The story is just there. It
doesn’t have to have a point or purpose.
As I began to write
narrative theology I began to say: Let the story tell itself. Leave it open so
that people can find their place in it. Don’t tell them what it means, because
you don’t know. It will mean something different for each person. If they want
to know what it means, God will tell them.
Third, I began to see God
as the great story-teller, the one not so much creating the great story, from
outside, but living the immense journey, creating—telling the story--from
within, living/telling it with us.
I don’t think Eiseley
intended my third point, but that’s okay. By opening my eyes to the wonder and
immenseness of the universe, he helped me better see God, and the job of any
scientist is to help us see farther, deeper, and better. Eisley did that for
me.
JRMcF
1] I did, of course,
profit from the work of many theologians, also, as I worked on narrative
theology, especially folks like Hans Frei in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.
TRAMP, THE SHEEP DOG by Don Lang, pictures by Kurt Wiese. 9-10-18
THE PREACHER AND HIS AUDIENCE, By Webb Garrison 9-11-18
JESUS OF NAZARETH by Gunther Bornkamm. 9-12-18
MAN’S NEED AND GOD’S ACTION by Reuel Howe 9-13-18
IDENTITY & THE LIFE CYCLE by Erik H. Erikson 9-14-18
THE IMMENSE JOURNEY by Loren Eiseley 9-24-18
GUILT, ANGER, AND GOD by C. Fitzsimmons Allison
PROFESSION: MINISTER by James Glasse
LOVE, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES by Bernie Siegel
JESUS, A NEW VISION by Marcus Borg
BIOGRAPHY AS THEOLOGY by Wm. McCutcheon
My novel, VETS, about four handicapped and
homeless Iraqistan veterans, who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will
never be on anybody’s hinge list, but, for a limited time, it’s only 99 cents,
so what have you got to lose? It’s published by Black Opal Books and is
available from the publisher as well as the usual suspects--Barnes and Noble,
Amazon, BOKU, Powell’s, Books on First, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment