Responses
emily: cool! (5/30/08)
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Responses (sorted by date)
emily: cool! (5/30/08)
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This past weekend I was hanging out with my mom.
One of the things I love about my mom is her constant curiosity about the world and how things work.
So a Saturday night where do we find ourselves? In an observatory of all places, sitting in crowded lecture room, listening to a older gentleman talk about the stars. Afterwards, we went outside into the cool air and looked into bright eyepieces. Starlight was then caught and channeled by the surface of our eyes, further focused onto retinas and then pushed along to our waiting, wondering brains.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm still sitting back in the lecture hall, listening to this guy talk about Greek Myths and the stories behind things like The Big Dipper and Orion. Some of these I'd heard before, while other were completely new, but all were strange and wonderful.
Along with the stories he'd show famous works of art, mostly paintings, that depicted the events of the myths. One particular picture of Zeus got me thinking. Zues, who's more or less the Big Cheese of the gods, was sitting up there on his cloud, chillin. He was apparently debating whether he should in fact get involved with the rather messy lives of those down below. There he was, with his grey beard and his lightning bolt and his bear chest. There I was, looking face to face with the dominant image of God that our Western society still holds to today. This makes me sad because I think God is so much more interesting and vital than this caricature of Him. Yet it is still is very hard for me to move past this 'Old Man in the Sky' view and onto the robust alive God that actually inhabits this crazy universe.
Zues (according this old lecturing man) was the God of the air or sky. This is interesting to me because when the Bible uses the word often translated 'heaven' it's also is the very same word that in other places is translated 'air or atmosphere; the place where the birds fly.' So then when the Jewish Bible talks about God speaking out of heaven, it can more accurately be understood that God is speaking out the surrounding atmosphere. So instead of a distant God, sitting somewhere he up on a cloud, disinterested in human affairs, we have a God who literally fills every nook and cranny of this vast and elaborate planet (but a very, very tiny planet in God's world). This God is as close to us as the air that fills our lungs. We literally swim through the presence of God as we go about our day.
Years later a Jewish man Paul who'd become a disciple of Jesus went into a Greek city and started trying to explain this Jewish God-Man to them. And what did he do? He actually quoted one of their Greek poets that said "In Him we live and move and have our being." This is so interesting to me and makes a bunch more sense now that I know that they saw Zeus as the god of the air. If the Greeks already had this image of God in their minds, then Paul's explanation was a further expansion of this thought, a fleshing out of it.
In Him we live our lives.
Surrounded by God we all are moving around.
It's in God that we have what is essential to being us.
But Paul didn't stop there, he went on to explain that their view of this God was too small. They were trying to locate God within specific temples and other statues. But Paul essentially said this God who made EVERYTHING can't fit inside these things, so for goodness sakes, stop trying to put him there. It wont work.
Staring up at the stars I was thinking about the prevaling Zeus-like image of God and how God actually is all around us from my face and hands all the way to distances beyond comprehension. And everywhere I looked I saw only beauty. Exquisite, incomparable, incomprehensible beauty wrought by the mind of this phenomenal being we try to capture in the word God.
A sliver of silver moon hangs over the deep blue horizon
Saturn stands there looking so clear and constructed as to be a painting.
A cluster of stars billions of light years away is known fully by this God
I claim to know
But will never comprehend. | 
