Several years ago, I experienced a crisis of faith, or what I now realize was a typical deconstructionist moment so common these days for those raised in religious communities. I decided to intellectually dissect my beliefs to understand (1) the seeming feud between faith and reason, (2) the troublesome, even violent parts of scripture and Christian history, and (3) the simplistic answers and spiritual flatness endemic in many church communities. 

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The Inklings (a twentieth-century literary group in Oxford) and their influences talked me off this cliff and have been removing the contemporary Western straight jacket I strapped around Christianity ever since, helping me to see it afresh as the vibrant, peculiar, and joyful force that it is, robustly and positively shaping history. Writers like George MacDonald and poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins have opened my eyes to the necessity of clothing Truth in beauty, narrative, and myth if we hope for it to truly take root. Ray Vanderlaan, Marty Solomon, and other teachers dedicated to studying Judaism have given me permission to ask difficult questions when reading biblical texts. Only when we do this can we lay aside cold and systematized interactions with the bible and behold it with the same awe and imagination the Israelites would have exercised in the Old Testament. ​

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​These authors, poets, and thinkers have become like friends to me, spiritual guides gently and slowly prodding me towards what is good, virtuous, and filled with wonder. They have thoroughly convinced me of the need for ancient answers to solve our contemporary problems and the spirit of apocalyptic negativity at large. How can we rethink our modern cynicism and revitalize the spirit of the ancients and medievals, who were aware of the "secret festivity" of the cosmos around us, as G.K. Chesterton would say?

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To feast with family and friends according to a sacred calendar

To tell and listen to captivating and vivid stories of goodness

To regularly experience the magic of nature

To create a warm and welcoming haven of hospitality

To order one’s habits and rituals around adoring God together

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These are a few of the ingredients that just might make us healthy, sane, and alive again to the reality of Divine Presence.

 

I hope these authors can convince you of the same, and we can say, like Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.”

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Cheers,
Carolyn