n e w c h u r c h l i f e : m ay / j u n e 2 0 1 5
In a chapter about another of his mentors – renowned preacher and writer
Frederick Buechner – Philip Yancey says: “People of faith stumble across God
everywhere: in nature, in the Bible, in daily acts of Providence. God seems
amply evident. But the secular mind sees no such evidence, and wonders
how it is even possible to find God in the maze of competing claims. Unless
we truly understand that viewpoint, and speak in terms a faithless person
can understand, our words will have the quaint and useless ring of a foreign
language.”
It is always easy – perhaps too easy – to preach to the choir. The challenge
is to “speak in terms a faithless person can understand,” and to stir a longing
within them.
Yancey frames the challenge in this quote from one of Buechner’s books:
“In the front pews the old ladies turn up their hearing aids, and a young
lady slips her six-year-old a Lifesaver and a Magic Marker. A college sophomore
home for vacation, who is there because he was dragged there, slumps forward
with his chin in his hand. The vice president of a bank who twice that week had
seriously contemplated suicide places his hymnal in the rack. The pregnant
girl feels the life stir inside her. A high school math teacher, who for 20 years
has managed to keep his homosexuality a secret for the most part even from
himself, creases his order of service down the center with his thumbnail and
tucks it under his knee. The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the
lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes
have never been higher.”
(BMH)
marriage in a cosmic context
The wonderful thing about the view of marriage we have in the Heavenly
Doctrine is how all-inclusive it is. It extends from its purest Divine and
heavenly origins to its representations throughout the world of nature, and
even its infernal distortions. “There is a universal sphere of marriage which
proceeds from the Lord, pervading the universe from first to last, and so from
angels all the way down to worms.” (Conjugial Love 92; 222)
Needless to say (or is it, in this age in which humans are assumed by many
to be just a species of animal?), the form in which this universal sphere of
marriage is embodied in angels and worms is not the same, not equal, but
of a very different quality. The inclination to marriage affects everyone and
everything, but it takes on many different forms.
The conjugial atmosphere that flows into the universe is, in its origin, Divine. As
it descends, it becomes, with angels in heaven, celestial and spiritual; with people,
natural; with beasts and birds, animal; with worms, merely carnal; and in the case
of plant forms, mechanical. In addition, in individual recipients it is also modified
according to their particular forms. (Conjugial Love 225)
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