Читать книгу Salvation in My Pocket - Benjamin Myers - Страница 5

The teaching of Christianity is that God is interested in ordinary human lives. God created human beings—these lovely, tragic creatures, so prone to delirious happiness and extravagant misfortune—and was very charmed by them. And so God became a creature like us, in order to get a better look at us and to see things from our point of view. And, if possible, to mend our broken ways. Because of this—because of the incarnation—we are able to confess that God is interested in us and that everything in our world is somehow related to God.

To believe all this is to see at the bottom of things not human struggles or agendas, not human power and agency, but a simple act of divine giving. It is to see all things against a backdrop of inexhaustible divine generosity, and even the most ordinary daily circumstances as occasions for joy.

The short pieces assembled in this book are miniature experiments in joy. They are attempts to express some of the difference God makes to ordinary experience, and to discover glimpses of God’s generosity in everyday life. Most of these pieces were written originally for the blog Faith & Theology (faith-theology.com). Others have appeared here and there in various magazines and websites, and I have added several new pieces that have not appeared before. “Showing” was first published in I Believe in God, edited by William W. Emilsen (North Parramatta, NSW: UTC, 2011). I would like to record my thanks to the online community at Faith & Theology, a community that has given rise to much writing and many friendships over the past several years. My thanks are due especially to Kim Fabricius, who has been a constant encouragement, as well as an influence—thank him or blame him—on the aphoristic style adopted in many of these reflections. I also thank Steve Wright, who provided invaluable assistance in preparing the manuscript.

If there is any thread that holds these haphazard reflections together, it is just the conviction that beneath the surface of things there lurks an invitation, gentle and alluring; that even in sadness and misfortune there is always rising up, as if from hidden wells, the promise of peace; and that the final word spoken over this world, and over each human life, will be a word of joy.

Sydney

Feast of All Saints, 2012