WHO ARE WE?
Explorations of Paul’s Letters
Wednesday Evenings 7:00-8:00pm
Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 miles away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life?
This was one of several brilliant questions posed by the novelist Walker Percy already thirty years ago as a subtitle to his book Lost in the Cosmos. It was preceded by this equally compelling promise of what the book offered: it was intended as a guide to “how you can survive in the cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians.”
In the decades since, the dynamics Percy identified have only become more exaggerated. With the rapid expansion of information technologies, we have immediate access to almost anything we need or want to know. Google wasn’t even a dream when Percy wrote his book. Yet time and progress have only shown him to be all the more prescient. We are awash in data, but still largely lost when it comes to truly understanding the mystery of ourselves. As Percy quipped, we are able to send spacecraft out to the satellite moons of Uranus, which arrive within three seconds and one hundred yards of the original planned course, but we can be surprised when we see ourselves in a mirror and often embarrassed by the actual sound of our voice when we hear it in a recording.
Who are we? With any reflection at all, this proves to be a central question, but it has become increasingly displaced and forgotten amid the countless other ready fascinations available to us. We are so plugged in to things external to us -- dazzled by iPads, addicted to smart phones, entertained by iPods -- that our own place in the world seems ephemeral. We skip along atop the continual waves of innovation. Gaining the whole world, we are at risk of losing ourselves.
Sixteen centuries ago, Saint Augustine remarked that God is “deeper in me than I am in me.” It’s a statement that should be taken as literally as possible, for it directs us toward one of the most important recoveries we can make: discovering our selves, which can’t be found by sifting through wiki posts or collecting material facts. There is a dual mystery to our world, more intrinsic than all the details we can enumerate. It’s the intertwining of God and human beings, both in nature and in destiny. If we want to come to know ourselves, we need to seek God. And to the extent that we are open to the revelation of God, it is we ourselves who are also revealed.
No one was as insistent about this as was Saint Paul. It was a constant theme in all his letters to the early church. They are a powerful antidote to the imbalances of our age, providing uncommon insight into the character of God and the enduring shape of our lives.
Beginning Wednesday evenings in October, we will be offering a series of investigations into his shorter letters, beginning with Colossians and Philippians. This will be an opportunity not only to wrestle with the substance of Paul’s thought but also to learn how to read the Biblical texts more skillfully -- which offers great reward. “Bible study” has become a dreadful term, because the implication is often that what you learn about is simply the intrigues of an ancient text, when there is so much else in our world that is much more demanding or deserving of our attention. But reading the Bible, when it is done well, reveals something. It reveals God and it reveals who we are -- who we are more truly than all else that can be so thoroughly listed as fact. Explore Paul and discover.
