A World of difference

A world of difference 

For 144 days people around the world have been captivated by photos taken by a man living in a small metal box.
 
The man was Commander Chris Hadfield, and the metal box was the International Space Station (ISS), in orbit 250 miles above the surface of the earth.
 
Between 21 December 2012 and the beginning of this week, when he began his return to earth, Chris took photos of the incredible sights he saw. He beamed them back to earth via Twitter, and soon became a hit on the social media site, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers. 
 
The irony was that for all the millions of dollars spent to send him to space, his fame was built on the photos he took not gazing into the furthest reaches of the galaxy, but looking back to earth. 
 
And what a sight he had to look back at. Commander Hadfield's pictures were truly stunning. It is impossible to look at them without marvelling at the beauty and complexity of this little blue-green ball of carbon spinning in space. We saw snow-capped mountains and the wind's patterns in the desert sand; every imaginable shade of blue in the oceans and crazy streaks of red in the Australian outback; ranks of cloudsqueuing patiently over Hull and the moon rising above the “only planet we have ever called home”. 
 
When we as Christians see such images, we are quickly moved to praise the God who designed and made it all with such care, such precision and such ease. We cry out with the psalmist: "What is man that you are mindful of him?" Or to put it in more inclusive language: “What are humans that you are mindful of us?”
 
Science fiction writer Douglas Adams once imagined a “Total Perspective Vortex” in which a person would be given a momentary glimpse of the size and complexity of the universe and him- or herself in relation to it: "An invisible dot on an invisible dot, infinitely small." The experience, he surmised, would fry your brain. We have an aching need to feel that we have significance, that in some way we matter to somebody, somewhere. The idea that we can't even be seen from the ISS is humbling, and can be crushingly so.
 
The good news, though, for us and our friends, is that the God who made it all is also the God who sees us. You're not an invisible dot on an invisible dot, you're a precious child, known and beloved. And that makes a world of difference.

Jennie Pollock is a freelance writer and editor who lives in central London. 

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The Moment

Here's an interesting thought by Richard Rohr

Isn’t it strange that a religion that began with a call to change or letting go has become a religion that has been so impervious and resistant to change? Many Catholics think that what it means to be a Christian is to be in love with the 13th century, or the 16th century if you are Protestant, thinking that “this is when Christians were really Christians and God was really God.” There is no evidence that this is true but it allows us to create “religion as nostalgia” instead of religion as actual transformation. Some Catholics hanker for “a true Latin Mass” not realizing that Jesus never spoke Latin—the language of his oppressors! Anything to avoid living right now where God is fully present!

What healthy religion is saying is that the real life is both now and later. You have to taste the Real first of all now. The constant pattern, however, is that most Christians either move both backwards (religion as nostalgia) or into the distant future (religion as carrot on the stick) and consistently avoid where everything really happens and matters—the present moment.  Catholics once beautifully called this “the sacrament of the present moment.” The full now is always a taste of something really real. It therefore entices us to imagine the eternal and live in an eternal now. We are just practicing for heaven. How we do anything is finally how we do everything.

Jesus and Patriotism

“Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9) was proclaimed by the early church, as their most concise creedal statement. No one ever told me this was a political and subversive statement, until I learned a bit of Bible history. To say “Jesus is Lord!” was testing and provoking the Roman pledge of allegiance that every Roman citizen had to proclaim when they raised their hand to the imperial insignia and shouted, “Caesar is Lord!” Early Christians were quite aware that their “citizenship” was in a new universal kingdom, announced by Jesus (Philippians 3:20), and that the kingdoms of this world were not their primary loyalty systems. How did we manage to lose that? And what price have we paid for it?

Jesus showed no undue loyalty either to his Jewish religion nor to his Roman-occupied Jewish country; instead, he radically critiqued both of them, and in that he revealed and warned against the idolatrous relationships that most people have with their country and their religion. It has allowed us to justify violence in almost every form and to ignore much of the central teaching of Jesus.

Richard Rohr