Friday, June 10, 2016

organizing into error

Lewis teaches us something important about the relationship of faith and science today in A Year with C.S. Lewis.

He points out how we have all of our different meanings of the word "heaven". We are tempted to think that the people during Jesus's time mistook one for the other, and that assumption is flawed because of the way we think today.

See, we have learned in our time to categorize, organize, and separate. This is useful when it comes to science. It helps when you're doing chemistry experiments, studying the movement of the stars, or discovering a cure for polio, to keep things organized.

But it only works in certain types of thought. It works beautifully in the physical - what we can see and hear and taste and feel. But there is much more to life than that, isn't there? There are the "why questions". Why do we study these things? What's it all for? Why are we here?

There is the deeper meaning behind the facts. Facts are important, sure. But they are all points which make up a bigger story, like the bits of ink on paper make up Hamlet, or the bits of sound comprise The Nutcracker Suite.

We have to let the truth maintain its organic reality, all four of Lewis's meanings coming together to form the word "heaven", just like all of our organs come together to form a living body. We can take it apart to study it... but only all together does it form a living, breathing person.

This is true in our personal lives, not just in our fields of study, right? We try to compartmentalize and organize our lives. We put our spiritual life over here, our work life over there, our family right here. But it doesn't work that way. We are holistic beings, and all of our areas affect our other areas. This can be frustrating, as long as we're trying to control our lives.

But when we surrender that control to the great composer, He orchestrates our lives into the beautiful symphony that He created before there were such things as time or space.

God - help my compartmentalized parts become whole again.

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