From the 23rd Sept – 27th, I will be hosting a five-days Imaginative Mission intensive at Burrabadine, Dubbo NSW. If you can’t afford to come for even a day, you’re very welcome to come for just one session. Below is an outline of session #2 Taming the Terror and Eliminating The Darkness.
This session is a reflective look at the wilting of the proud secular dream, which Walter Brueggemann speaks to when he says, ‘It is worth considering a “sociology of wonder,” and asking who is open to abiding astonishment,” and who might be compelled to overcome, banish, or deny such astonishment? I submit that “abiding astonishment,” the celebration of enduring miracle, tends not to occur among those who manage writing, who control the state, who create and transmit proper “facts,” who monopolise control, and who explain by cause and effect … ‘
The author suggests that our society (and even at times our ‘Christianity’) has a vested interest in this elimination of wonder and “abiding astonishment,” because ‘In our modern experience but probably also in every affluent culture it is believed that enough power and knowledge can tame the terror and eliminate the darkness *… The remarkable thing about Israel is that it did not banish or deny the darkness from its religious enterprise. It embraces the darkness as the very stuff of new life. Indeed, Israel seems to know that new life is rooted nowhere else.’
Rob Bell has a perceptive insight on this when he says, ‘A Christian should get very nervous when the flag and the Bible start holding hands. This is not a romance we want to encourage.’
We will also be looking at Vishal Mangalwadi’s perspective in ‘The Book That Made Your World.’
