Sometimes beautiful forms emerge from collections of harsh things, like this set of prickly weeds. Individually they look thorny, but together they evoke graceful movement.
As I’ve pondered my Christian faith and the reasons that it seems like the best answer to life’s deepest questions, a similar pattern has emerged.
It’s easy to get lost in troubling details when thinking about the faith, where some things seem thorny, difficult to deal with. Apparent contradictions, senseless violence, archaic social values, and historical events like the Crusades, can make the history uncomfortable.
And yet, like the weeds in the picture, these individually uncomfortable things seem to be part of something larger that is beautiful, even graceful.
Many of the difficulties result from the fact that the faith is lived out by imperfect humans – Christianity is cut from the same cloth as the rest of humanity, stains and all. Yet this cloth contains a continuous golden thread.
Throughout the tumultuous 2000 year history, there is a continuous growth of loving, caring values based on the self-giving ethos modeled and taught by Jesus. These values have become entrenched into the fundamental moral systems of Western society, and are so pervasive that we don’t even recognize how different we are from much of the rest of the world, and from virtually all of human history.
This paradigm-shifting history has also largely driven things like the establishments of hospitals and organized medicine, pervasive education, the foundation of modern science, the elimination of slavery, and many other examples.*
In other words, the tumultuous and often sketchy history of Christianity has nevertheless produced a beautiful dance that has changed the world, despite the often raw humanity of the dancers.
*Holland, T. (2019). Dominion: The making of the western mind. Hachette UK. The non-Christian author and historian Tom Holland has documented how much Western history has been molded by Christian principles, without whitewashing the process of the last 2000 years.
Kelvin's Clouds 