REFLECTIONS
Week of January 4, 2009
… [F]reedom is often burdensome... and while some part of the world is paralyzed by the narrow despair of inescapable poverty, the more developed nations are paralyzed by the very mobility of their populations, by the twenty-first-century nomadism of constantly pulling up roots and resettling to accommodate jobs and relationships. One writer... tells the story of a boy whose family had moved five times in a short period, who hanged himself from an oak in the backyard, leaving a note that said, “This is the only thing around here that has any roots.” There is a feeling of perpetual disruption for the jetting executive who visits 30 countries in an average year, and the middle-class city dweller whose job keeps getting redescribed as his company is bought out time and again and who does not know from year to year who will work for him or for whom he will work, or for the person living alone and encounters different checkout staff every time he goes grocery shopping. In 1957, the average American supermarket had 65 items in the produce section: shoppers knew them all. In 1997, an average American supermarket had over 300 items in the produce section, with many markets pushing a thousand. You are in the realm of uncertainty even when you select your own dinner. This kind of escalation of choices is not convenient; it is dizzying. When similar choices present themselves in every area-where you live, what you do, what you buy, whom you marry—the result is a collective uneasiness that explains much about the rising rates of depression in the industrialized world.
— Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
One of the tragic casualties of our age has been that of the contemplative life – a life that thinks, a life thinks things through, and more particularly, thinks God’s thoughts after Him. A person sitting at his or her desk staring out the window would never be assumed to be working. No! Thinking is not equated with work. Yet, had Newton under his tree, or Archimedes in his bathtub, bought into that prejudice, some natural laws would still be up in the air or buried under an immovable rock. Pascal’s Pensees, or “Thoughts” would have never been penned. What is even more destructive is the assumption that silence is inimical to life. The radio in the car, Muzak in the elevator, and the symphony entertaining callers "on hold" all add up as grave impediments to personal reflection. In effect, the mind is denied the privilege of living with itself even briefly and is crowded with outside impulses to cope with aloneness. The Bible places supreme value on the thought-life as that which shapes all of life. “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he,” Solomon wrote. Jesus asserted that sin’s gravity lay at the level of the idea itself, not just the act. Paul admonished the church to have the mind of Christ, and that [W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things” (Phil. 4:8). Let us serve the God of creation with both hearts and minds. After all, it is not that I think, therefore, I am, but rather, the great I Am has asked us to think [and meditate], and therefore, we must.
— Ravi Zacharias