Daily Reading for July 23
Theology ponders the deep meaning of everyday life by seeing our lives as taking place within God’s life. There are certain moments when we just sense, almost intuitively, that what is happening is terribly significant or somehow holy—moments, in other words, when the mystery of things seems to well up before us and, like Abraham or Jacob, we know that we are in the presence of God. If you have ever watched the sun set over a silent purple northern lake with the sky so richly purple and red you could hardly breathe; or if you have ever walked quietly into a tiny child’s bedroom at night and watched her rustle gently under her blanket, so that for a moment you ache with the memory of your own distant past; or if you have ever watched and prayed as a young medical intern, gray with fatigue and lack of sleep, worked desperately through the night to save a patient in distress: if you have known any of these things, or a hundred others like them, then you have already begun to theologize.
You have begun to theologize, I think, because moments like these seem to put us at the edge of mystery. Whether we know it or not, we are standing all the time at the edge of mystery, in the presence of God. For Christians, the context of the world’s life is provided by the story of God’s life with the world. The story that opens in paradise and ends in the coming of God’s kingdom is the context we need. The story of God’s life with us is the deep landscape against which we begin to notice and recognize the mystery of love at work in everything.
From Mysteries of Faith by Mark McIntosh, Volume 8 of The New Church’s Teaching Series (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2000).