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I’m a little reluctant to write this post because it’s theological, and a lot of you only just recently stopped diving into the bushes when you saw me approach (BTW thanks for that). Plus I’m supposed to have my products lined out so you can just shop shop shop, but I honestly don’t care as much about that as you can see.

Yes, it’s theological, but THERE IS NO CONDEMNATION HERE, just calling out the elephant in the living room, you know, the Emperor is buck naked right now and trotting into our lives with impunity. During this time of pandemic catastrophe, under which not one single human being on the planet is exempt, I was truly relieved and encouraged to re-read this work by Eugene Peterson. He’s the guy who got into a lot of theological hot water for re-writing the bible into the conversational tone in which it was originally written, The Message, knowing that the bible as written was understood immediately by those who heard it, they didn’t have to run off to a library to figure it out. Peterson wrote a LOT, and in his book, Reversed Thunder, the Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination, he deconstructs (what reads like an acid trip, sorry) +Armageddon/Rapture stuff in the last book of the bible, making sense of it for those of us who love Jesus but can’t get past the CRAZY show at the end.

In Reversed Thunder, Peterson writes to the praying imagination of all people, and it’s truly relevant to our current ‘sitch. This blog post is mostly a quote from his book, about salvation and the Catastrophe. Again, please trust me, THERE IS NO CONDEMNATION HERE. But we’ve been forced to open our minds a lot lately. Let’s do that and heed what angels always say when they show up on scene unannounced: DO. NOT. BE. AFRAID. They’re funny that way… My husband thinks they say that every time because it’s unbelievably amazing on the other side so why are we all so afraid? Truly, we mustn’t worry, God is good and his steadfast love endures forever (even without a “correct” pronoun).

Here ya go…a taste. Keep an open mind! And if you want to read the whole book, well, get your helmet on it’s a doozy (and free download on archives.org). I’ll unpack my own Catastrophe in Part 2, and more stuff in Part 3. Let’s get started:

From Reversed Thunder:

“….The dimensions of catastrophe are understood biblically to exceed human capacity for recovery. All parts of creation – Arcturus and the Mississippi, Lebanon cedars and English turnips, rainbow trout and parula warblers, (Inuit, Yupit)  and aborigines – have been jarred out of the harmonious original and are in discord.”

ME: Can we please agree that the catastrophe is now, with global warming and world pandemics, starvation, human sex trafficking, war? Evil exists. How much evidence do we need in order to agree that it’s a CATASTROPHE outside and in?! 

“The catastrophe is beyond calculation. Still, there is so much beauty in the wreckage, such deep goodness, so much moral zest, such blessing, so much active intelligence, that it is possible to live for stretches of time, sometimes quite long stretches, honestly unaware of the extent of the disaster. But then, either by a slow accumulation of evidence carefully observed, or by a sudden crisis-invoked recognition (…!…), it is inescapably before us, and we are inescapably in it: we are separated from our origins, separated from our God, our parents and cousins and siblings, from bears and hawks and coyotes. We are, in Walker Percy’s blunt report, “lost in the cosmos”. We don’t know where we are. We don’t know who we are… 

…The catastrophe was caused, Christians believe, by a primeval act of rebellious disobedience that attempted to circumvent or displace God. But that is not the popular belief. The popular belief is that however bad things seem from time to time, there is no catastrophe. To face the fact of catastrophe would involve, at some point or other, dealing with God. Anything seems preferable to that. So the devil doctors the report, the world edits the evidence. People reduce their perception of catastrophe to the level that is manageable without getting God into the picture in any substantial way. And so the same act that caused the catastrophe perpetuates it…

….The world’s alternative to salvation is optimism. Optimism is a way of staying useful and being hopeful without having recourse to God. It requires, of course, a much reduced perception of catastrophe if it is to maintain credibility. Optimism comes in two forms, moral and technological. The moral optimist thinks that generous applications of well-intentioned goodwill to the slag heaps of injustice, wickedness, and the world’s corruption will put the world gradually, but surely, in the right. The technological optimists think that by vigorously applying scientific intelligence to the problems of poverty, pollution and neurosis, the world will gradually, but surely, be put right. Neither form of optimism worships God, although the moral optimist sometimes provides a ceremonial space for him. Optimists see that there are few things left to do to get the world in good shape, and think that they are just the ones to do it.

It seems ungracious to be unenthusiastic over such an enormous expenditure of intelligence and goodwill. These people, after all, are at least doing something. But the biblical discernment is that a spiritual evil motivates their good actions. It is the evil of ignoring or circumventing or denying God. Their efforts to live well, to help others and improve the world are fueled by a determination, conscious or unconscious, to keep God out of who they are and what they are doing. As long as they can rationalize, fantasize, or interpret the catastrophe as something considerably less than a catastrophe, they can deny their need of God for salvation, either for themselves or others or the world. Optimism is so pervasive, addresses itself so attractively, and chalks up so many awards, honors and achievements, that it is difficult not to be impressed, and then, in the general euphoria, to go along with it. It is certainly a lot easier, for then we do not have to deal with God.

Unused to living beyond ourselves, out of control, by faith, the great danger is that we timidly retreat to the kind of religion that we can manage. The commonest reductions that we make as we attempt to get God’s salvation down to a size that we are comfortable with is to reduce it to the subjective devotion, or reduce it to ethical decorum, or work some combination of the two. Salvation is the action of God. It is always far more than we think it is, far more than we are experiencing at any one time. We are forever stopping short and defining it in terms that we understand right now. But such understandings are always premature, and therefore reduce this large action that we have so much more to learn in, so much more, by God’s grace, to get in on. “Having begun in the spirit are you now ending in the flesh?” was St Paul’s slightly acidic comment on our reductionism. St John’s pastoral approach is through visions: he opposes the reduction of salvation to the spiritually subjective by showing us a meal; he opposes the reduction of salvation to good manners by showing us a war.”

Petersen goes on to describe salvation in the context of the meal and the war, the beauty of shared sustenance and the battle against evil. I hope you’ll be intrigued enough to read the rest of the book, it really helped me understand the context of Covid-19.

Next time: MY CATASTROPHE – It’s a Doozy.

OH AND HERE’S WHAT’s HAPPENING IN FH TOWN RE: ART – I’m doing a FH Live show on the Facebook page by the same name on April 15th, an intro to perfumery and tour of my lab. PLUS: We are having a Virtual Art Tour on April 16th, I’ll put a bunch of paintings up and am selling off some fragrance samples, how about THAT!?

Love ya,

Win