The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, Ph.D., is dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary.
In fact, trusting the Bible may be a lot like trusting another person. The person you trust most is not the one you’re willing to bring only your best self and your unquestioning loyalty, but the one you’ll entrust with all of your complicated self. To trust someone deeply is to trust her not just with your hopes and joys, but with your doubts and your fears, your anxieties and vexations. So it is with the Bible.
Our real lives are intertwined with the kingdom and the saints. We don’t leave one world and enter another when we walk into or out of church or the woods or our homes or our offices or our classrooms. It’s not separate, none of it. The boundaries are not fixed – in fact, there might not be any boundaries at all. Because it’s all real. Nothing is separate. The home of God is among mortals. This is real.
So maybe there’s a way of remembering, even a form of nostalgia, that is not a wishing we were back in another time and place, but the opening of a present experience of love for the world as it is, in all its beauty and brokenness. And maybe there’s a love for the things of the world, even by way of memory or nostalgia or that sacred homesickness, that can actually be, not a distraction from, but the way into an expanded love in us for God. Put another way, what if learning to actually feel a form of love for my neighbor, with all his quirks and sins, is how I actually learn to feel a transforming love for God?
“Take heart. Get up. He is calling you.” Take heart. Take another look at the one standing in front of us, offering us eyesight and insight. “My teacher, let me see again.” Can you and I see where Christ might heal each of us, and can we see the way that God might lead you and me, and how beautiful the way might be if we just opened our eyes?