Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

Israel affirmed that the world of Spirit was known. It intersected with “this world” at many points: historically, especially in the exodus and the return from exile, though also in other central events of its history; culticly, in the Temple in Jerusalem, which was seen as the navel of the earth connecting this world to the other world, which was its source; and personally, in the devotional and spiritual experiences of ordinary people and especially in Spirit-filled mediators such as Moses and the prophets.

To put it mildly, the “other world” is no longer taken for granted as an objectively real “other reality.” Indeed, within the modern framework, frequent and vivid experiences of another reality mark a person as clinically psychotic.

Jesus’s vivid experience of the reality of Spirit radically challenges our culture’s way of seeing reality.

the Christian life as a journey and the role of faith in that life. Today,

The modern distortion of faith is the one I learned growing up around the middle of this century: faith as believing. Faith as believing the doctrines of the Christian tradition, faith as believing that there is a God, faith as believing that Jesus is divine, faith as believing that Jesus died for your sins—in short, faith as believing certain statements to be true.

in the Christian culture of the Reformation, the Middle Ages, and earlier, nobody had any trouble believing that the Bible came from God, that the Genesis stories of creation were true, that Jesus walked on water, and so forth. It didn’t take faith to believe any of that; that was simply part of the taken-for-granted understanding of people living in Western Christendom. It’s only when those things started to be questioned that suddenly faith came to mean believing what otherwise doesn’t make a lot of sense to you.

The opposite of faith as trust is anxiety. You can measure the amount of faith as trust in your life by the amount of anxiety you have in your life.

The journey of faith that leads to greater trust can cast anxiety out and free us from that self-preoccupying force.

Indeed, if this is not what life is about, namely, growth and wonder and compassion, then I don’t know what it is about.

“What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?” Are we going to remain in the world of the dull, the repetitive, the same ole, same ole, or are we, like Abraham, going to respond to that voice that invites us to leave our old way of being and enter a life beyond convention and our domestications of reality? The voice speaks of promise to us. “I will show you a better way, a better country.”