T.S. Eliot - on a relationship of religion and the state

I have been reading through "To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings" by T.S. Eliot, and in an essay addressing the Aims of Education on the Issue of Religion, he writes:

"Thus, when religion comes to be more and more an individual matter, and is no longer a family tie; when it becomes a matter of voluntary association on one day a week when the weather is neither too good nor too bad, and of a traditional and ore and more meaningless verbiage in the pulpit and at times upon the political platform; when it ceases to inform the whole of life; then a vacuum is discovered, and the beliefs in religion will be gradually supplanted by a belief in the State. That part of the social life which is independent of the State will be diminished to the more trivial. The necessity will appear for a common belief in something to fill the place of religion in the community; and the liberals will find themselves surrendering more and more of the individual freedom which was the basis of their doctrine."

Is this where the church is today - not applying to all of life, and forcing a belief in the security of the State?

DEW

Living Between the Trees

I just gave probably one of my best talks and most passionate talks ever last Monday with the help of the Nooma #3, Trees. The guy in the video talks about the idea of living between the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden and the tree of life in Revelation. Students were silenced by the video, but also seized with thoughts of relevance. All semester long they had been asking the questions, how does this apply? How do we live this out? Through my talk I hoped to help them think through life, and get some visions of beauty to direct them.

I was trying to frame how we understand the world we live through the eyes of a brainstorming session, and 3 basic steps that are used. First, you figure out where you want to go. If you could have anything you want, what would it be? In the context of the discussion/teaching, what we want to see is the perfection of the garden and the city of Revelation. So to get our visions, we interpretively read through quite a few passages. We looked at bits of Genesis 1 and 2 and bits of Revelation 20 and 21 to get some ideas of what could be.

After you figure out where you want to go, the questions must be asked, "Where are we now?" The basic text we looked at was Genesis 3, or the Fall, but it was moved to the context of the world around us. I asked the questions, " Do we look around us and see things as broken, bent, good, or do we even care? Do we know where we live? Do we see the struggles of our neighbors and our communites? Do we plead ignorance or to we just remove ourselves from our culture?"

The questions then moved to, "How do we live in a broken world with these visions of perfection?", which is the third step of the brainstorming session (how do we get to where we want to be?) My answer was that we look at the life of Christ. He brought visions from Revelation directly to where he was. He fed the hungry, healed the sick, cast out evil from his presence, and forgave repeatedly. We simply looked at the basics of his miracles and realized that if we looked around us in our communities, it would not be so hard to find people to feed, and help relieve their pains. Jesus knew what perfection was, he looked around himself and saw what was wrong, and he made Revelation small realities in a world longing for restoration. As we study Christ and his interactions in the world, our hearts should start breaking as we open our eyes to the people around us, and as our hearts break, we should start moving out to bring our visions of perfection to the hurting around us. We will effectually take the Gospel of the Kingdom to our friends and neigbors, and be living relevantly between the trees.

Peace,
DEW