Illumine Me

 

  Illumine Me

C.S. Lewis once noted that if we had to choose between reading old books and new books, it should be the old books we choose. "Not because they are better," he wrote, "but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful." Lewis was well aware that there were truths spoken through other worldviews that he was blinded from simply because he existed in his own. 

Our worldviews are no exception. Every thought and experience, every book and idea that crosses one's path, has been shaped within a very particular worldview. Life is in fact so oriented by this unconscious zeitgeist that blindness is often a difficult concept to accept. 

But that doesn't make it less real. Blindness is as natural to humankind as the desire to understand. We are often blind to our own faults, blind to truths we don't want to hear. It is the cure to such blindness that is important. Noting the interconnectedness of worldview and spirituality, Eugene Peterson writes, "There is widespread interest in living beyond the roles and functions handed to us by our culture. But much of it ends up as a spirituality that is shaped by terms handed out by the same culture."(1) What do you do to see authentically? What do you do to protect yourself from walking blindly down paths shaped by dangerous ideas, down roads paved with misleading promises? How do you see what is real and not what is just culturally programed?   

The Christian pilgrim powerfully attests that it is worship that opens our eyes and God's Word that illumines our path.  A story is told of a man in a country far from his own. The man walked along, his coat buttoned up tightly on a frigid, windy day. As he walked through the crowded street noticing the somber faces that passed him, he was suddenly taken aback by a stranger who plainly stood out. As if in his own world, a man walked by contentedly whistling a tune. Wondering at first how he could even manage to whistle in the cold, the foreigner then noticed the tune that was hitting his ears. It was a fairly uncommon Christian hymn, yet a hymn that happened to be of great comfort to him personally. The words rushed into his mind as if a message from God personally: The Great Physician now is here, the sympathizing Jesus.  

Catching up with the man, the foreigner joined in the whistling. Immediately, the man's eyes lit up and they finished the hymn together. Each man spoke excitedly in a language unknown to the other, as they pointed to the heavens, touched their hearts with their hands, and embraced. Waving goodbye, the two men went their separate ways whistling, having experienced the transcending hope of the sympathizing Jesus and the illumining presence of God in a dark and lonely world.     

It is a simple and true story that conveys the profound mystery of worship and its ability to present a worldview and kingdom beyond our own. Without a word spoken, two worlds were bridged because a tune resounded of a Spirit both hearts knew deeply. If a whistled hymn and a heart for God can unite strangers, imagine what will be when every tribe and nation cries out for God together. The Christian knows Jesus as the transformational hope, the eternal one who stepped into history to transform all of those in time.  As Ravi Zacharias notes, "Thus, worship brings together the divergent areas of our lives and allows us see the composite whole." The living God is able to bring sight to the blind and meaning to every life's story because God is the author of all things. Like the prophet Isaiah, eyes are opened in worship because we are suddenly before something bigger than any eye can imagine. 

Might we stand accordingly with the hymn writer who asked in the illumining presence of God, "Open my eyes that I may see. Open my eyes—illumine me, Spirit Divine!"