What stands in the way?

(The Role of Scripture in Christian Spiritual Formation….part 3)

The false self is ever and always seeking reinforcement and it will subtly work to confuse, complicate, and destroy anything that poses a threat to its strength. One way it does this is by keeping our hearts and minds imprisoned in our perceptual framework, closed off from any diversity of ideas or variety of interpretations. Whatever makes up our individual frameworks (whether we find ourselves more on the side of relativism or objectivism), our vision is limited to a few colors or brushstrokes within the portrait, and we are not encountered fully by the Word. Transformation is held at bay. The crust is thickened.

I had a conversation last summer with an artist who was being featured in the gallery where I work – she does restorative work on paintings. She told me about a time she’d worked on an original Monet that had been tucked away for years. It was unrecognizable – thickly covered with years of accumulated dust, grime, and cigarette smoke. She removed layer after layer of filth…to reveal the masterpiece hidden beneath.

We need the grime removed – our idolatrous insistence that “truth is connected to unity, opinion to multiplicity” (Living Jesus, 196) – that keeps up from seeing the real thing. Scripture contains layer upon layer of inspired meaning. As long as we insist that our own view is the only right way of seeing, we will be kept from the full transformation God seeks to bring to our garbled word. This is one of the benefits to reading in community, as we have done in this class. By reading and responding with others, we are able to see Scripture through any number of lenses – the metaphors we use to help in our understanding of God are multiplied and we grow in our ability to see the portrait of Scripture in an infinite number of dimensions.

~ by kingdomstrider on March 27, 2009.