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Southborough L'Abri News /Prayer Letter, Autumn 2007
I have sometimes read a chapter from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity to our students and it has always provoked good discussion. I thought I would start the new year by letting you into a piece of the discussion. Lewis started with the predictably negative response that many people have to Jesus’ teaching, “Be perfect…”. They think Jesus was saying that we must achieve perfection for him to be willing to help us. Since perfection is such a ridiculous impossibility, he must be mocking us. Lewis disagreed. He thought Jesus meant, “The only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less: but I will give you nothing less.” Read the full Newsletter  Southborough L'Abri News /Prayer Letter, Autumn 2007 We end up thinking and talking quite a lot around here about what it means to know God. Clichés and quick answers abound, along with “how to” advice books. God clearly describes himself in the Bible as a Person with whom we can and ought to have a “personal relationship”. But “personal relationship” can be misleading in that our other personal relationships are with people from whom we can get “real time” responses with our senses. God is invisible. So how can we not only know things about God, but how can we actually know God? This presents a problem to many if not most Christians. Mother Teresa’s recently published letters show that she struggled with this question much more than most had imagined. Read the full Newsletter Southborough L'Abri News /Prayer Letter, Spring 2007 For some months I have been thinking and lecturing about sentimentality, stimulated by a course at Regent College last summer from Jeremy Begbie. Oscar Wilde quipped that sentimentality is what happens when cynicism goes on vacation. Having spent so much time on cynicism, I thought it would be worth looking at the other side. There are three parts to a sentimental way of understanding and living in the world: sentimentality denies or trivializes evil, it centers on self-referential emotion and it resists any costly but appropriate action into the world. These three form a certain coherence Read the Full Newsletter Southborough L'Abri News /Prayer Letter, Winter 2007 January, 2007 As I think about the news now, between Christmas and the new year of 2007, I find it heavy to listen to, watch or read about, almost oppressive. There are so many areas of serious trouble in the international news that they seem to dwarf domestic problems, which are serious enough in themselves. Our country is in a critical place, with few good options in Iraq. Things are difficult in Afghanistan. There are crises also in Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe, not to mention Palestine and Lebanon. And then there is Iran and North Korea. You could keep listing more places of political instability, unpredictability and vast human suffering before going on to issues like climate change and its implications. Read the Full Newsletter Southborough L'Abri News /Prayer Letter, Autumn 2006 I doubt that I was the only one discouraged by the news this last month that from now on we will not be able to carry liquids on airplanes. It is not as if this will be a great sacrifice any more than going through metal detectors, taking off my shoes to have them checked for explosives, or remembering to put my jack knife in checked baggage. Read the Full Newsletter Southborough L'Abri News /Prayer Letter, Spring 2006 In a world where image, spin and hype are at high levels of sophistication, suspicion is not a bad idea. Without suspicion about advertising, we would all be bankrupt before the end of the summer. But suspicion alone may not be a reliable guide. Suspicion that is overconfident sees through everything and everyone and turns into cynicism. We face the question daily -- what do we do with our suspicion? Read the Full Newsletter Southborough L'Abri News /Prayer Letter, Winter 2006 Despite regular evidence to the contrary and consistent warnings from the Bible, most of us (myself included) seem to expect the events surrounding our lives to go forward in straight-line, predictable ways. God, whose plans turn out to not be rubber stamps of our own, has his own purposes. This means that our lives do not usually move from stasis to smooth transition to stasis to another smooth transition. For many of us it has more the sense of moving from one crisis to another, each one made more disruptive by our expectations of predictability and tranquility. Read the Full Newsletter
Southborough L'Abri News /Prayer Letter, Autumn 2005 Southborough L'Abri News / Prayer Letter,Fall 2004 We often speak at L’Abri about all people as “religious by nature”. This claim seems ridiculous to many today who have a sense of the modern secular triumph over superstition, mythology and all that is primitive and backward, epitomized by religion. But the religious predisposition of human nature is far deeper than what can be understood by polls about the percentage of people who claim to believe this or that or about their attendance at religious meetings.
In Easter week this year it was hard for many of us to avoid the talk about Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”. The publicity had begun to accumulate over a year ago in the form of outrage and indignation. It was “anti-Semitic”. He had “ignored modern scholarship”. He was “out of his field”. What the film does, of course, is to put the physical suffering of Jesus front and center – in your face. Other films of Jesus’ life have drawn together many different themes of his life and teaching, with varying levels of faithfulness to the Biblical account. With this film, his suffering is almost all that there is for the whole length of the film -- proportionally much more than the New Testament accounts of those same hours. Some have criticized it because it does not explain why he suffered so. They have a point. It could leave you with the perverse hatred of the Jewish leaders and the ghoulish cruelty of the Roman soldiers as the only explanation. But many people have been hated and treated with cruelty. Why has Jesus’ death been so important?
I am finding that the new presence and awareness of Islam in the United States stimulates my sense of irony. There has been an enormous rush of interest in Islam since Sept. 11, 2001. As you can imagine, this might be for all sorts of reasons. Let me suggest a few: |
We have all seen a new wave of moral crises in the last few months. Most of the time (with certain large exceptions) Neil Postman has been right that "nothing puts people to sleep like a crisis". A crisis may keep us tuned to the media with interest because news is good entertainment, yet not necessarily with any sense of a personal stake in the crisis. But the recent corporate scandals are different. They are not just moral absurdities with far off consequences. These crises are hitting many people in their wallets today and in their hopes for retirement in the future. |
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On Good Friday I was asked to do a short talk on Jesus' cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" This brought back distant memories of reading the whole Bible in three days in a hotel room in France after my first visit to Swiss L'Abri in 1964. I had never read it before, didn¹t believe it and was shocked to have found intelligent people who did. As I wrote down my reasons why I couldn¹t believe it, these words of Jesus from the cross were high on the list. They seemed to point to complete failure at the heart of the religion of the Bible. |
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