Looking Upward: Recovering Ancient Vision in a Modern World
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There's a moment in the Gospel of Luke that I think really captures something essential about our tendency as humans to miss the sacred even when it's right in front of us. It occurs on the road to Emmas. This is right after the resurrection. Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem. Their hearts are heavy. They're grieving Jesus' death. They're confused.
This is not what they expected to happen. And they're talking to each other. Well, Jesus joins them on the road, but they don't recognize that it's him. Now, the Bible is not clear about why they don't recognize him, but they don't. And for miles, they walk right alongside the resurrected Christ, but all they see is a stranger. Luke gives us a hint without giving us a lot of details. In Luke, it says, "But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.
They recount to this supposed stranger everything that's happened about the crucifixion, about Jesus not being in the tomb, the bewildering reports that came from the women who went there, the angels, all of it. And Jesus concealing a divine patience that we can hardly begin to fathom finally finally has enough. And he responds, "Foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken. Didn't the Christ have to suffer these things and to enter into glory?" Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interprets to those two all the scriptures that concerned himself. But they still don't see that it's him. They invite him to stay with him because they're very impressed with him.
And he decides to do so. He does stay with them. And at the table, something shifts. When he had sat down at the table with them, he took the bread and gave thanks. breaking it. He gave it to them. Their eyes were opened and they recognized him and he vanished out of their sight.
They had that instant of recognition and the breaking of the bread, familiar gesture of blessing and sharing. Maybe it was the way he prayed. Whatever it was, or maybe it was a divine removal of the block that prevented them from seeing who he was. whatever it was, they finally see who had been walking beside them the whole time. And then in a moment of understanding, an epiphany, they turn to each other and ask, "Weren't our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us along the way and while he opened the scriptures to us?" Their hearts had been burning. The presence was there, but their eyes were closed.
They were looking but they weren't seeing. They were walking but they weren't awakening. This is the condition of our present age.
We live in what I call the blindness of abundance. It's an unprecedented time of material blessing. Our technologies connect us instantaneously across the world. Our medicine extends life. It reduces suffering in ways that our ancestors could not even have imagined. I mean, the smallest injury, a broken limb, anything like that could lead to their death in the past. And today, it's an ER visit.
We've defeated many of the diseases that once ravaged humanity. We have clean water. We have sanitation. We know how to grow crops in abundance. We have far more freedoms. We have freedom of speech, freedom of movement, of ownership, of belief that would astound previous generations. This world is by no means perfect and there's a long way to go.
But if you compare it to the past, well, there's really no comparison at all, is there? Our grocery stores overflow with abundance from all over the world. We're warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer. We're safer from violence than we ever have been, despite what you read in the news, and wealthier than the vast majority of humans who have ever lived.
Think about it. A king a thousand years ago did not have indoor plumbing, hot and cold running water, HVAC, a cell phone, a television, access to boundless amounts of information on the internet. None of that. even though he was the wealthiest, most powerful person in the country at the time. And yet, despite all the prosperity that much of the modern world has, there's a spiritual poverty that haunts people today. We are the disciples on the road to Emmas. We walk alongside sacred things, but all we see is the ordinary.
We have the eyes, but we still don't see. We have ears, but we don't hear. Sound familiar? Didn't Jesus say something about that? We move through a world that saturated with the divine presence, but we don't notice anything. Go to a park, a lovely city park that has a walking trail.
Go into the woods. You're in the middle of the city, but when you step into the woods, you can't hear any cars. there's no buildings. If it's a nice solitary day and there's no one else there, pay attention to what you feel. I noticed years and years and years ago, even in my former religion, I I made the connection that I was never closer to God than I when I was going on a hike or when I was sitting on a kayak alone on the water of a lake. There's a presence in nature. When you step away from the electronics, away from the television, you get outside of the house.
It's there. You cannot miss the divine touch that's all over the world. Unless, of course, you're always looking down at a device or looking inward instead of outward.
Now, there are times when that's a good thing. That's not always bad. Our devices can be very useful. Inward reflection is very important. But sometimes you have to stop and look around the world and see how not just you but everything out there is fear inspiringly and wonderfully made. The psalmist wrote in Psalm 19, "The heavens declare the glory of God. The expanse shows his handiwork.
Day after day they pour out speech, and night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their voice has gone out through all the earth. Their words to the end of the world. Creation speaks day and night. It testifies. The structure of a tree, the way a bird flies, the way light refracts through the water, the mathematical precision of a snowflake, all of it should tell us something.
It does tell us something. The horizon that stretches into eternity, the perspective that shifts as we turn, the colors that paint the summer sky. These aren't accidents. It's speech. It's the vocabulary of creation, the vocabulary of the divine. But we've trained ourselves to ignore it, not to listen to the words that the world speaks to us. And by the world, I mean the natural world.
We become experts, afficionados at distracting ourselves. Our devices glow with tempting notifications. Our mind just it never shuts down because of our anxiety. Our attention fragments into a thousand pieces that we can never collect and put the puzzle together. We walk through cathedrals of natural beauty and we miss all of it. We encounter neighbors made in the image of God, but all we see are obstacles or opportunities. We eat food that has traveled across the world, thousands of miles, grown in soil we will never see, harvested by hands we will never shake.
And we eat it without even thinking about the marvel that it was able to arrive on our doorstep. We have severed ourselves from the sources of our life. And by doing that, we've severed ourselves from the source of all life. This is not always how it was. There was a time, though we have to be careful not to romanticize it because it definitely had its own darkness and oppressions. But there was a time when religion wasn't something you attended, but it was the atmosphere you breathed. The sacred wasn't confined to Sunday morning.
It permeated every act of every person's day. You planted a seed. And when you did that, you acknowledged the one who gives growth. When you drew up water out of a well, you remembered the one who was the fountain of living waters. When you lit a lamp, you thought about the light of the world. When you broke bread, you echoed the breaking of the body given for you.
The rhythm of life, it followed the rhythm of liturgy. Bells marked the hours of prayer. Seasons turned with feast days and fasts. Time itself was completely theological in the way people viewed it. You didn't simply live through the days. You lived through Advent, through Epiphany, through Lent, through Pentecost. Your personal story was woven into the great story of redemption.
Again, this was not perfect. The world was not perfect. Far, far from it. Those societies had so many failures, injustice, their own ways of missing the point. But there was something that they understood that we have largely forgotten as a society. That the mundane and the sacred, they're not separate realms. God isn't confined to a building or a day or an emotional experience.
Every moment, everything bears divine weight. And Jesus talked about this constantly. He pointed to the liies of the field, the birds of the air, the fig tree budding, a shepherd searching for lost sheep, the woman needing levan to dough. The kingdom of God, he told us, is not far off. It's not locked away in a distant heaven waiting for some future arrival. No, it's here now among you. And as Jesus also said, within you.
Luke 17. When asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, because they were obsessed with that, Jesus answered, "The kingdom of God doesn't come with observation. Neither will they say, "Look here, or look there, for behold, the kingdom of God is within you." It's not something that you observe from a distance like a spectacle or a natural phenomena. It's not it's not something that you have to go find. It's something you inhabit. It's in the water we swim in or should swim in.
If only we would open our eyes to the fact that it's there. Instead, we're walking on the road to Emmas. Our hearts are heavy with anxiety and trouble with things we thought were going to happen that didn't. with our misunderstanding of the world and Jesus is walking right next to us and we like what he has to say but we just don't recognize who he is.
One of the greatest losses of our time is the loss of ritual. Now I know you might think of ritual as just empty repetition, religious formalism, something like that. And Jesus criticized that kind of empty ritual uh with the Pharisees. Certainly ritual can become hollow and we need to be very careful about that. The prophet prophets thundered against ritual that was divorced from justice, from mercy, from the knowledge of God.
But authentic ritual just like authentic spirituality, religion, whatever word you want to give it, it's not empty repetition. It's a sacred remembering. It's the communal act of stopping, of shifting our attention, of acknowledging what's real and what's true. Ritual creates a pause and our relentless forward motion of life, our neverending cease uh our neverending striving and toiling and working. And it says, "Wait, stop. Consider remember when the Israelites crossed the Jordan into the promised land, God gave them a really interesting command. He commanded them to take 12 stones from the riverbed that they had just walked through and to set them up as a memorial.
Joshua 4 6 and 7 records the reason that this may be a sign among you that when your children ask in time to come, saying, "What do you mean by these stones?" Then you shall tell them because the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of Yahweh's covenant. When it crossed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones shall be for memorial to the children of Israel forever.
Those stones, those stones were a ritual, a reminder. They interrupted the flow of ordinary life that made you stop and think, why were those put there? They pointed back to that time when God made a way through the Jordan when there was no way. Naturally speaking, they were physical objects, but they carried a strong, a powerful spiritual weight. They taught future generations to ask questions. That's why they were there. They were to prompt people asking, "Why are those stones there?"
To seek meaning. To connect the present to that sacred moment in the past. Our ancestors, they lived with those kinds of reminders everywhere. The rhythm of planting, of harvesting, that reminded them of dependence on divine provision. The slaughter of an animal reminded them that life feeds on life, that death provides sustenance, that gratitude is the right response to sacrifice. We are so disconnected from those things. And I've talked about this before in my uh discussion on the animal sacrifice of the ancient Hebrews and why we shouldn't look down on that or think of it as barbaric.
All the same things happen for you to go to the grocery store and get that ground chuck or that steak or whatever. You just don't have to do it. You don't have to see it. you are disconnected from the actions it takes to give you the food that gives you life. And in a way that's wonderfully convenient for sure, but it also disconnects us from the need to be grateful to look an animal in its eyes and know that that is going to give us life and it's necessary for life to be grateful to God for the provision. To be thankful and express gratitude. We might pray over our food and that's a good thing.
Thank God for it. Not a bad thing. But we don't have to do what it takes to put it on the table anywhere close to the same way as the people in the past. And we are not our lives are not dependent on good weather, on a productive crop, on the animals not getting sick from some disease and dying off. We're not dependent on those things in nearly the same way. The price of the beef might go up a little bit, but we can still get to the grocery store and find it. It's a different world.
The lighting of the Sabbath candles back then, it reminded them that rest is holy, that productivity is not the ultimate end, and that there's one who holds the world together while we rest and sleep. These weren't interruptions to practical life. They were integrations of the spiritual life into the practical life. They kept people oriented towards spiritual things. They prevented the kind of amnesia that afflicts much of the world. We've engineered ourselves into a position where we can almost forget about our dependence completely. You flip a switch and there's the light.
But we don't think about the power plant. We don't think about the line worker or the fuel source or the intricate grid, the technology, all the work and maintenance that makes that light possible. You turn a faucet, water comes out the pipe. We don't think about aquafer. We don't think about the treatment facility. We don't think about all the infrastructure. Again, all the people, the maintenance, the miracle of having clean, healthy water.
Like I said, we buy that meat wrapped in plastic. We don't have to see the animal. We don't have to honor its life. If we don't acknowledge the cost of our nourishment, that disconnection from the source, it has a real spiritual consequence. We start to believe that we're self-sufficient, that we don't owe anything, we don't need anything, we don't depend on anything. We lose the posture of gratitude. We lose the awareness of the gift, the sense of being held within something larger than ourselves that if the crop fails this year, we might die.
And so when it doesn't, our gratitude just overflows. We trust, they trusted that they lived the way they were supposed to live, that if they did the things that God told them to do, he would provide for them. And he did. But you always knew when that harvest came in, life for another year. When the animals lived and you slaughtered them to eat, life for another season. And you were grateful.
Paul writes in Acts 17, speaking to the philosophers of Athens at the time. The God who made the world and all things in it. He being Lord of heaven and earth doesn't dwell in temples made with hands. He hasn't served by men's hands as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath and all things. He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons and the boundaries of their dwellings. They should seek the Lord if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far off from each one of us. For in him we live, move, and have our being.
In him we live, move, and have our being. That's not metaphor. That's the fundamental reality of our existence on this earth. Every breath, heartbeat, thought, it all happens within the life of God. We're not independent operators in a neutral universe. We are creatures held in our being moment by moment by the one who spoke the worlds into being who spoke light and life into existence. But we've forgotten about that.
We've trained ourselves to look down at our devices instead of up at the divine. We've lost the ritual reminders that ordinarily would interrupt that amnesia and wake us up to the reality of life, the real life as Paul calls it. So, how do we recover that? How do we recover what's been lost? I don't want to just be negative through this whole discussion. There's a positive to this. We can bring this back.
But how do we bring forward the best of the past? That integrated, that attentive, reverent relationship with reality without also dragging along all the baggage and the oppression and the limitations that rightly should stay back there in the past. Well, the answer begins with our attention, with our presence, with the deliberate practice of seeing. Remember Jesus said that they have eyes but they don't see. They have ears but they don't hear. They have mouths but they don't speak. We we want to fix that if we find ourselves in that situation right now.
The disciples on the road to Emmas, they had Jesus himself right next to them walking beside him and they didn't see him because their eyes were closed by grief, disappointment, their wrong expectations of what they thought the Messiah should have been and what he should have done. They were so locked into their own narrative of defeat that they couldn't recognize victory walking right next to them on the road. Their eyes were finally open when Jesus broke the bread in that ritual act, that ordinary daily necessary thing of sharing a meal. Suddenly the veil lifted. They saw they recognized him in that small act. Again, maybe it was the way he broke the bread. Maybe it was the blessing that he spoke.
Maybe it was the gesture. Like, we don't know. But whatever it was, they saw and they knew because it was a ritual. Jesus did that many times when he fed the crowds, whenever they uh had Passover, at the last supper. They would know and understand what it looked like and what Jesus sounded like when he did those things. That's the mystic's path to see the extraordinary.
that's only hidden in the ordinary if we're distracted away from it. To recognize that there's no such thing as merely physical or merely mundane. Everything is saturated with the divine presence if our eyes are open to it. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, what did he start with? Our father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. Some versions say sanctified. Before he asks for anything, before he started making any petitions or requests, there's recognition, acknowledgment.
He looks upward and sees the one who sees us. That's where this recovery begins with the simple radical act of looking up and paying attention. Walk by a lake. Instead of mentally rehearsing tomorrow's tasks while you do so, look down at the water. Look at how it moves. Notice how the light plays across its surface. Consider what it means that this stuff, this substance, hydrogen and oxygen in precise proportion.
It's the medium of life on this planet. Marvel that you your body is mostly water. Feel the connection between your selves and that lake. Recognize that you're not separate from the world. You're woven into it. When you drive down the highway, instead of getting anxious or distracted, look at the trees. Look at their structure.
The way they reach both down into the earth and upward into the sky. The way the leaves move with the wind. They draw nourishment from the ground and from the air. Think about the fact that they're exhaling oxygen that you breathe in and gives you life. Feel that exchange, the symbiosis there. Recognize the gift.
Watch a sunset. And instead of just taking a quick photo that you can post on Instagram, stand still. Pay attention. Watch how the colors shift. Notice how the light transforms everything. I love a summer sunset when the whole world is bathed in a golden hue. And remember that that same light had to travel an enormous distance in order to paint the sky.
Consider that the God who set that star burning in the heavens is the same God who numbered the hairs on your head. He knows when you sit down. He knows when you get up. He knows how you're knitted together in your mother's womb because he did it. It's not sentimentality. It's not just an emotional experience. It's the reality of how it all works.
The divine connection in everything you see. That's what it means to have eyes that see and ears that hear. Psalmist wrote in Psalm 139, "Yahweh, you have searched me and you know me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. For there's not a word on my tongue, but behold, Yahweh, you know it altogether.
You hm me in behind and before. You laid your hand on me. The knowledge is beyond me. It is lofty. I can't detain it. Where could I go from your spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in sh, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the dawn and settle in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right hand will hold me.
That is the truth that so many have forgotten. There's nowhere you can go where God is not. There's no moment so mundane that it falls outside of his awareness. He holds all things together. All things. We're never not in the presence of the divine. The question is whether or not we're paying attention and notice that we are or whether we're distracted away from it.
If we're to recover and get that integrated vision back that the ancients had while not carrying along the baggage and the negative things, we need to create new rituals for our time. Not just a slavish imitation of the past, but something authentic, an expression of our own need to remember, to take pause to reorient ourselves toward the divine. Well, what might that look like? Maybe maybe it means that we establish a practice at the start of every day with a moment of acknowledgement.
This is what I do as soon as I wake up and I turn and my feet touch the ground. This is what I say. Sometimes out loud, sometimes just to myself, but always to God.
My feet are on the ground. The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit dwell within my heart. I am a partaker of the divine nature. It is another beautiful day. Aba be praised.
Before I reach for the phone, before I dive into the demands of the day, that's what I do. With my hands over my heart and my eyes upward, not downward. Whatever you do, whatever you say, however you start the day, start it with an acknowledgment of the divine. Don't just get up and immediately get to work. And I heard it said once and this this is so true.
We spend so much time in the morning on our bodies. We wake up, we take a shower, we get dressed, we eat breakfast, we have our coffee. We are taking care of the physical before we go off to work or do the things we have to do. But do you stop and nourish yourself spiritually in the same way every morning? Even just for a short period of time, do you have something you say every day? Do you read a passage of scripture, maybe a chapter? Do you do something that reorients and aligns you toward the divine so that everything you do that day does not distract you because you're starting off pointed in the right direction.
Maybe it means reclaiming meal time as sacred. Turn off the screen. Sit down together.
Pause before eating, before each bite. Acknowledge all the hands and the soil and the sun and the rain that brought the food to the table. If you pray before you eat, thank God for all those things. Speak a genuine prayer of thanks, not something ro that you say all the time. I remember when I was in kindergarten, we would all line up for lunch at the door and my kindergarten teacher, Miss Childs, would always say the same little prayer because this was in Texas in the early 80s. So, they still prayed before lunch. God is great.
God is good. Now, we thank him for the food. Amen. All the kids said, "Amen." Well, not me cuz I grew up in a cult where I was told that any prayer not given by someone that was a member of the cult was not acceptable. You didn't say amen to it because they were praying to a god that you did not know. But anyway, that aside, that little prayer repeated is fine when you're a five-year-old, but when you're an adult and you're praying to God before your food, don't just say the same things over and over again.
Again, sound familiar? Jesus said something about that. Speak out of your heart.
Maybe it means observing the Sabbath, even if you're not doing it formally. setting aside just one day in the seven where productivity is not your goal, where busyiness is not your virtue, where just being is enough. Resting not because you've earned it, but because God rested and we're made in God's image. I mean, there was a reason he commanded that, right? Whether or not formally we're required to observe the Sabbath today, that was wisdom that God gave humans because he knew they needed rest. animals too needed rest. The ground needed rest.
And you also needed time to focus on spiritual things. Maybe it means marking the seasons of the church year if that's something you do. Advent's waiting, Epiphany's revelation, Lent examination, Easter's resurrection, Pentecost fire. Again, that's not required. Everyone's approach these things is different. I personally do not follow a formal calendar like that. But those rituals breaking up the year are good reminders.
That's a good way to do it. If that's how you do it, you allow your personal rhythm to align with that ancient rhythm, moving through time in a way that tells the story of redemption over and over every year until it becomes a part of your bones. Maybe it means learning to bless ordinary things. Water, bread, work, sleep, your house, your loved ones, your enemies. Jesus said that blessing is the act of seeing the sacred or at least the sacred potential in something and speaking it into fuller existence. It's the opposite of cursing, which that speaks death and diminishment into something. When we bless, we're participating in God's own creative work.
Jesus said blessings constantly. He blessed the bread. He blessed the children. He blessed his disciples on the cross. He even blessed those who crucified him. If you can imagine that. Father, forgive them for they don't know what they are doing.
Even in his agony, Jesus was pronouncing blessing. And we're called to do the same. to move through the world as an agent of that blessing. To see the sacred and the ordinary and to name it, to pause in the midst of rushing and remember, to look upward at the divine instead of downward at our devices.
That is such a radical shift, but it's the shift that occurred in the New Testament. And we miss that a lot if we're not familiar with it. You know, you go to church, you hear the same things, whatever. But in the old covenant, God's presence was localized, right? First, it was in the tabernacle, that portable tent that the Israelites carried through the wilderness with them. And then when the temple was built, it was the magnificent structure that Solomon put in Jerusalem. God's presence dwelt in the Holy of Holies, the inmost compartment, and the space above what was called the mercy seat, right between the cherubam, between the angels.
Once a year, the high priests entered that space with blood to make atonement for all the people of Israel. The temple was the center of their religious life. It's where heaven touched earth. To be cut off from that was to be cut off from God's presence, which is why it was such a terrible thing to be a leper or ritually unclean like the woman with the flow of blood for 12 years. because they were not allowed to enter the temple because they were ritually and ceremonially unclean. But Jesus came and he changed all of that. When the religious leaders asked him to produce a sign, what did he say?
Destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it up. Now they thought he was talking about the building. But John tells us but he spoke of the temple of his body. Jesus is the temple, the place where heaven and earth meet, the location of God's presence. And when he rose from the dead and ascended, he sent the spirit to dwell where? In his followers. Paul makes this explicit in 1 Corinthians 6:1 19 and 20.
Or don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you whom you have from God? You're not your own, for you were bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.
You are the temple. Your body, this physical, material, earthly thing, is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. The presence that once filled the tabernacle, think about that. that once descended on the temple in Jerusalem and you had to go there to experience it. Now it dwells in you. That is a staggering thought because it means that wherever you go, you carry the sacred. There is sacred space within you.
You walk by the lake. The temple's walking by the lake. You drive down the highway. The temple is driving down the highway. You stand and watch that incredible sunset. The temple is standing before the sunset. You're not visiting sacred space.
You are the sacred space. This is the Christian mystic's great discovery. That that divine presence is not somewhere else waiting to be accessed through some special technique or dogma or experience. It's here now within. Jesus said it. The kingdom of God is within you. Paul said it, Christ in you, the hope of glory.
But that inddwelling presence, it doesn't remove the need for you to pay attention. I mean, if anything, it increases the need to do that. We have to learn to tend the temple, to keep it holy, to create space within it for awareness, for listening, for encounter. In ancient Israel, they went to the temple every year. It was a physical thing. They could see, they could touch it. It was there.
That made it pretty easy because, you know, well, it's right there. I'm looking at it. But it was more limiting because they could only experience that while they were there for short periods of time during the year. Now, it's with you all the time, but you have to pay attention to it because it's easy to miss. It's not a giant building standing in front of you.
The mystics speak of cultivating what they call interior silence. That doesn't mean an absence of sound. It just means an absence of inner noise. You know, stop and try to sit in stillness and silence. What's your brain do? It's constantly chattering, chattering, chattering. And it's almost always anxious.
It's anxiously rehearsing the future. It's obsessively reviewing the past. It's worried about the present.
Your mind is the way I describe it. It's a fear-based probability engine. It is constantly trying to discover what could potentially harm you and to try to stop you from being harmed or devise ways to not be harmed. And that's great if you're, you know, planning a trip or doing your taxes or, you know, setting up plans for a vacation or something like that. But it's awful if you leave it on all the time. If you have a power tool that didn't have a safety and it's plugged in and it's sitting in your living room and it's on all the time, let's say a skill saw, that is an incredibly dangerous thing to be running constantly when not being used for the purpose uh for which it was made. Well, your mind's not different.
Don't let it run constantly because it will cause all kinds of damage just like that saw. We need to be present to the present. It's the only moment we ever truly have. I mean, think about it. The future's an illusion because it hasn't happened yet. The past in a sense is an illusion because the only recollection we have of it is in our memory, right? In the mind.
It's not here now. It's over. All we have is this moment right here.
Brother Lawrence, the 17th century Carmelite lay brother, he called this practicing the presence of God. He worked in the monastery kitchen. He would wash dishes, prepare meals, and he found that these ordinary tasks could become acts of worship if done with an awareness of God's presence in the moment. He wrote, quote, "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament." End quote.
That's the integration I'm asking you to look for, not the elimination of the ordinary life in favor of spiritual experience. You don't have to go off to a monastery to do this. But the sanctification of ordinary life through spiritual awareness, looking upward.
Our age has trained us to look down. We're looking down at our screens, down in shame, down in anxiety, preoccupation with our problems, our failures, our inac inadequacies. We walk through life with our heads bowed, our attention fractured, our awareness dimmed. But the invitation of the gospel is to look upward, to lift our eyes, to see. And this is one of the problems I have with institutional Christianity right now. It's so focused on telling us how broken we are that it misses that we are fear inspiringly and wonderfully made.
Fearfully and wonderfully made, as the World English Bible puts it. Okay. So why are we always being told that we're just broken and in need of saving? We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. We are partakers of the divine nature. So why are we constantly looking down?
That's my problem with institutional Christianity. In Luke chapter 21, Jesus is talking about the signs that are going to precede his return. And he tells his disciples, "But when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads because your redemption, your redemption is near." Look up. Lift up your heads. The redemption isn't far off. It's near.
It's approaching. It's coming. It's at hand.
This is always the word for us. It's always the thing we should be thinking. Look up. Stop staring at the ground. Stop being hypnotized by your screen. Stop being imprisoned by your anxiety. Just look up.
Because when you look up, what do you see? You see the heavens declaring the glory of God. You see the expanse showing his handiwork. You see that you're not alone. You haven't been abandoned. You haven't been forgotten. All the hairs on your head are numbered.
You see that you're held within a love that predates creation. And it's going to outlast time. We see that every breath is grace. Every heartbeat is a gift. Every moment we experience, it's saturated with a presence that we've been seeking. It's right there. It's within you.
It's in your midst. Just listen to Jesus. Read the Gospels. I cannot emphasize that enough. Pay attention to the words on the page, the things he actually says instead of what you have been taught or in many cases like in my upbringing indoctrinated to filter all of those words through.
The disciples on the road to Emmas, they spent hours walking with Jesus before their eyes were finally open. Hours of presence with zero recognition. But when the recognition finally came, when they finally saw, they did not stay in their house. They immediately got up and went to Jerusalem to tell everybody else. They could not keep the revelation to themselves. The seeing led to movement, to community, and to proclamation. What did Jesus say?
They have a mouth, but they don't speak. Don't do that. Speak. That's the work that's been set in front of us. We need to recover our integrated vision that sees God in all things and all things in God. We create our own personal authentic rituals that remind us, reorient us, and keep us attentive. We don't just repeat what someone else did, even if that was admirable and worked wonderfully for them in the past.
Our goal is to move through the world as temples of the living God, carrying our presence into every space that we enter. That sacredness comes with us everywhere. How how could it be any other way to look upward instead of downward to see instead of just look to be awake instead of sleepwalking through life?
The best part of the past wasn't its technology or political systems or its comforts because obviously it was in short supply of those things. The best of the past was its awareness of its own dependency. That sense of being woven into the fabric of something larger. Recognition that the sacred and the mundane weren't separate realms. All it took was Jesus saying a prayer and breaking that bread for those disciples to recognize him at last. We can carry that forward. We can do that.
We can bring that ancient vision into the modern world. We should be we can be people who know God isn't confined to Sunday morning. He's not confined to the church. But every moment carries divine weight. that the kingdom of God is within us and among us. We can be people whose hearts burn within us as we walk the roads of our ordinary lives, recognizing at last that we are never walking alone. That the presence we seek has been beside us the whole time, just waiting for us to open our eyes.
So look up, lift up your heads. Your redemption is nearer than when you first believed. The kingdom of God is at hand. The sacred is here right now in the very moment you're experiencing. And the turning of the earth and the beating of your heart and the breath that you draw right now. Open your eyes and see. Let this be our prayer.
Aba Father, forgive us for the moments we've walked past you without seeing. Forgive us for the times we've been so consumed by distraction or anxiety, the noise of our time that we've missed your presence in the ordinary moments of our daily lives. Open our eyes to see you in the water and in the trees and the changing of the seasons and the faces of the people that we meet every day. Teach us to pause, to reflect and remember, to look upward instead of downward. Help us to recover the integrated vision of those who knew that they depended on you for every breath, for every bite, for every day.
Give us the courage to create our own rituals, something authentic, new ways of remembering, practices of our own presence. Make us into living temples who carry your presence into every space we enter because you are forever with us. May we be people whose hearts burn within us as we walk the roads of our lives, recognizing at last that you have been beside us all the time. In the name of Jesus, who opened blind eyes and continues to open ours, we pray. Amen. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my book, The Broken Mirror: Rediscovering Our True Nature in Christ. Readers call it a fantastic book where you will feel yourself discovering your identity in Christ.
One reviewer praised it as five-star material for the spiritual mystic or group Bible study. It's time to escape legalism and shame. Discover you're already God's beloved child with divine nature flowing through you with what reviewers describe as excellent writing style and elegant pros like a campfire discussion with a knowledgeable and gifted wreck contour. Journey from Genesis to Revelation, uncovering your true identity. This book shows how to access God's peace, wisdom, and strength from within. Your struggles become opportunities for divine light to shine through. Available in hard coverver, paperback, Kindle, and audio book.
The link to the book is in the video description. May God bless your journey along his path for you. [Music]
