Seeing with Integrity

From our Presiding Bishop's sermon at the closing Eucharist in Camp Allen:

...Our eyes have grown accustomed either to looking at the world over our shoulder, or toward the future, and we've lost some of our Anglican ability to look in both directions, to hold both perspectives in tension.

Our current struggle gives evidence of a competition between perspectives or worldviews. One of them looks at the world through an Enlightenment lens and expects to see predictability, understandability, and definability. Another view of the world comes through a postmodern lens, one that sees constant change and a significant degree of unpredictability as intrinsic to creation. Those two worldviews seem to many people to be incapable of being used together or even held in tension. To many people, they feel fundamentally distinct and irreconcilable. The two worldviews may also lead to different understandings of our lives as Christians, but before we go there let's consider what a Godly worldview might look like.

Recall Rublev's great icon of the Trinity, and the way in which each of the members of the Trinity looks in a different direction. They are not gazing out into space, however, but at another being, at another of those present around the circle. If we are created in the image of that social God, we too are invited to look as God does, toward another image of God, to turn our eyes upon Jesus - and also on the many images of God all around us.

The ability and willingness to focus on those many images of God around us is fundamental to our lives as Christians. God has the ability to hold all of us together in one field of view, affirming each one as child and beloved. Our baptism into the life of God is about seeing as God sees, with integrity...

J.