“If we calculate the nature of the world by what we can manage or explain, we end up living in a very small world.”
Eugene Peterson
“Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you.
Show me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.”
Ps 143:8
“… The ideology of our time is that we can live ‘an uncalled life’, one not referred to any purpose beyond one’s self.”
Walter Brueggeman
I continue to read Eugene Peterson’s The Jesus Way . This morning I was challenged by his comments on zealotry.
Zealotry continues. It continues to be admired by many. It is hard to eradicate it from the human spirit, especially the religious human spirit. When we believe that God is on our Side, that we have a mission to perform sanctioned by God, it is easy to do anything that we think will he effective using force, pushing, bullying, manipulating, and, YE’S, killing – to bring victory to God. It is virtually irresistible when the opposition is identified as evil.
Thomas Merton is blunt and uncompromising in his warning:
We must be on our guard against a kind of blind and immature zeal-the zeal of the enthusiast or the zealot which represents precisely a frantic compensation for the deeply personal qualities which are lacking to us. The zealot is man who “loses himself” in his cause in such a way that he can no longer “find himself” at all. Yet paradoxically this “loss” of himself is not the salutary selfforgetfulness commanded by Christ. It is rather an immersion in his own willfulness conceived of as the will of an abstract, nonpersonal force: the force of a project or program.
Ann and I celebrated our 48th wedding anniversary yesterday. I am blessed beyond any thing I deserve by our relationship. And the best part is that it just gets better.
We spent the afternoon and evening in Cincinnati. A visit to Ikea was followed by a great dinner at Mitchell’s Fish Market. We then took in a Reds baseball game. It was a great game. Unfortunately, the Reds lost. It was indeed … a fine day.