Thursday, October 1, 2009

Delightenment

Over the next few days I'll be writing more about truth, reality, and God, because it has been a focus of discussion with my BP re. his work on the Christian imagination.

I was thinking about how the evil one loves to steal words and distort them for his own purposes ("choice" being a fine example), and how inaccurate a phrase "The Enlightenment" truly is.

We are riding the edge of the wave of reclamation, a restoration of wonder which will bring us to greater understanding of creation, and there will be a word to capture the essence of this era. I'm not sure how early in a cultural shift the name for it becomes apparent, but I want a word for it, as I write about it. I've been playing with a few, but my current favorite is "Delightenment".

I like that it begins with "delight" because a restoration of wonder and love to reason is key to deeper truth. I also like that it conveys an undoing of the distorted aspects of the enlightenment without doing away with it completely.

More as it unfolds...

3 comments:

Pranayama mama said...

Delightenment. It works. Interesting how enlightenment is anything but.

Ike said...

How about "Perfected Experience"?

". . . so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Romans 5:21


In Romans 5:12-21, Paul "is not saying merely that we have life for a time, after which life ends in death; nor is he aiming to explain the fact of such death. . . . What he is saying is rather that all that we call life . . . lies under the dominion of death. . . . Death rules supreme in this world. . . ." But since the resurrection of Christ "the new aeon has become actual fact in our world. Christ stands at the frontier between the two ages, outdating the old and blazing the way for the new. . . . In the new aeon, which burst upon man with the resurrection of Christ, life has come to dominion still more mightily."

Anders Nygren, Commentary on Romans, pages 22-23.

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.

We don't "apply this to our lives." It's too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace

Suzanne Marie DeWitt said...

Hello Ike, and thank you for your thought provocation.

It is interesting indeed to ponder what this life, here and now, means. I have trouble thinking that it is simply a living death, given that the Holy Trinity created it and inhabit it, right down to the Son who still maintains a physical body, albeit resurrected. And given that His plan for ultimate restoration, when heaven and this world become one, is to retain so much of our physicality.

I think He created it, and us, as He did so that we can bring life to life. Not to simply wait for the redemption to come, but to enter it, to embrace it, now.

(In re-reading your post, I'm wondering if we are, perhaps, saying the same thing?)