Soil, Sight and Skin—rediscovered!
Just re-discovered this entry in one of my old notebooks. (“I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,” to quote Dylan; and yet, nice insights from when i lived at L’abri, a spiritual community in Switzerland) I was thinking lots then, about where traditional Christianity was lacking or not tuned into the Divine conversation at the time:
“Soil, sight, and skin. Three neglected areas of Christ lordship and our partnership with Him, or open dialogue with the Divine understanding. These are areas, we haven’t entered the deep and practical dialogue yet, and pressing areas of concern and burn.
Areas of understanding our relationship with the earth, the healing of how we see (perception, art, symbolic—there is a poverty of the imagination in the church) therefore, interpret and know (sight is related to knowledge, if we don’t see right, we don’t know well); and our relationship to our physicality, our bodies (what to do with our tents, as one teacher put it).
He is Lord over every dimension of Life, every area. So, He is waiting to be dialogued with in each of these vacuous areas. These are also gap-zones where the vacuum gets filled by many things.
In the area of the earth, new age and paganism enter, in the area of perception, pornography and advertising and commercialism (disguised materialism); in the area of our bodies, “mass supermarket- yoga” and other partial forms of integrating mind and body. Christianity has still not properly dialogued with these three.” I must have been deep back then! Nice to discover, at least I wasn’t asleep spiritually, and was “minding the gaps”! Are we dialoguing actively and articulately with these three areas yet?
