I'm not sugesting it is easy, this maintaining of an observant Genesis conection between the animals and trees in the garden and the people in the garden, honoring the continuities in the God-formed man or woman right before us with the God-formed trees and birds around us. I'm only inisting that is is necessary.Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. I'm rereading this book before going on to Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, the second of a planed serries of five.
...
Deseceration of the one is of a kind with desecration of the others. If we are going to enjoy and celebrate and live this gift of place in wich the Lord God has placed us, we going to have to embrace the people around us with the same deligth as we do the hawks soaring above us and the violets blooming at our feet. Men and women, children and the elderly, the beautiful and the plain, the blind and the deaf, amputees and paralytics, the mentally impaired and the emotionally distraught -- each a significant and sacred detail of nature, of God's creation.
- Peace
1 comment:
In defining necessity Peterson references Annie Dillard's essay "Expedition to the Pole" (found in Teaching a Stone to Talk) and how we must pay attention to 'conditions' and where she talks about conditions he will name them necessities.
When I talk of duty its in the sense of law/rules/regulation. You can keep a rule while ignoring the conditions, like the woman who rear ended me insiting that she was only going the speed limit. She was following the rule but not paying attention to conditions.
Consider when Jesus said:
If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
I don't think Jesus was giving law or setting a regulation but he was showing us something very necessary to the abundent life.
I see them as very different words.
- Peace
Post a Comment