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Thursday, February 07, 2008

book musings

[i can't stop... reading. i lose more sleep this way. here are some questions/thoughts that emerged from reading pieces of "everything must change."]

can the suicide machine really be stopped? can the earth really be liberated from the destructive framing story that drives it? is Jesus' healing and transforming framing story really powerful enough to save the world?

...[to unleash the needed change requires] doubting, rejecting, and defecting from our old framing stories, and instead, discovering and adopting - in a word, believing - a new framing story. that, once again, is exactly where i believe Jesus steps into human affairs, challenging us simply to believe his good news (mark 1:15), and to believe him as the bearer of that good news (John 6:29, 35; 7:38; 10:37; 14:1).

if the word believing seems too soft a strategy for confronting global crises, i would reply that believing seems like a soft or weak thing only when it is domesticated belief. tame believing for and within the dominant system may be easy, but wild believing against and beyond it turns normal people into heroes and history changers. martin luther, martin luther king, jr, galileo, nelson mandela, gandhi, mother teresa, saint francis... they all showed this heroic courage to believe against and beyond the dominant systems of their day.

so we must realize this: the suicidal framing story that dominates our world today has no power except the power we give it by believing it. similarly, believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do.

mclaren:
A community of people who begin to wake up to the covert curriculum in which they swim each day would want to band together to share their insights about it. They would help one another not be sucked in, not be massaged into passivity... They would remind one another of the alternative framing story they had come to believe was good, beautiful, and true, and they would seek, together, to live by this alternative framing story, the radical good news. They would develop practices of spiritual formation so they and their children for generations to come would be able to learn, live, and grow as part of the solution, not part of the problem; as agents of healing, not as carriers of the disease; as revolutionaries seeking to dismantle and subvert the suicidal system, not as functionaries and drones seeking to serve and preserve it.

1 comment:

steve said...

i can dig it.