Showing posts with label Transcendence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transcendence. Show all posts

Sunday, October 10, 2021

The Distance Between

IC’s post on immanence/transcendence last week got to me for a number of reasons. (If you haven’t read it, what are you reading this for? Go. Now.)

When I was a little boy, our family crossed the ocean on a liner sizable for its day. I don’t remember much of the journey; I suppose most of it was fairly uneventful. What I do remember vividly is coming up on deck with my father one bright day when the sea was slightly turbulent. It wasn’t stormy, but it was far from calm. Great swells repeatedly arose to starboard, higher (I thought at the time) than the ship itself, gradually dipping and moving slowly and methodically under us. The horizon seemed to disappear and I found myself convinced the deck had tilted at some sort of incredible angle (though I suspect that was only my disconcerted, childish impression).

It was my first experience of “big”, and it stuck.

Friday, April 26, 2019

Too Hot to Handle: Bypassing the Intellect

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

[Editor’s note: The following email back-and-forth reproduced here didn’t really bring us to any hard-and-fast conclusions about transcendent experiences and how the Christian ought to process them. Perhaps we talked past each other a bit too much. Certainly, we all used the words “I think” far too often for any of us to hold our respective positions too dogmatically. All the same, it seems to me the exchange serves as a good example of how brothers in Christ tend to work things out in our heads by bouncing ideas off one another, as well as a plausible explanation for why their wives flee the room at such times.]

Bernie: I remember being struck by something Ravi Zacharias said some years ago. I can’t find the original quote but my attempt at a paraphrase is this: “Music has a way of bypassing the intellect and speaking directly to the heart.”

Sunday, June 26, 2016

The Distance Between

The most recent version of this post is available here.