PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: WE ARE ALL TURTLES ON A FENCEPOST!
(By: Ron Woodrum)
His name was Alexander Murray Palmer Haley. He was an American writer. He was born in 1921 and died in 1992. He became a household name when his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family was adapted by ABC into a TV mini-series and was seen by over 130 million viewers in 1977. It was a great influence on awareness in the United States of African-American history and inspired a broad interest in geneology and family history, not just of African Americans, but of all races! What you may not know is that Alex Haley had a favorite painting. It was on the wall of his office. It caught your attention as soon as you entered the door. It was a picture of “a turtle on a fence-post”. Haley always remarked about the picture-“If you ever see a turtle on a fence-post you can be certain he didn’t climb to that height by himself!” Haley said that picture was a reminder to him to remember that anything he might pat himself on the back for accomplishing in life should also include the recognition of all the others who had helped him reach those heights. Somehow I think there is a spiritual message in there for you and I. We are, spiritually speaking, “turtles on a fence-post”. Any heights that we have scaled in our Christian lives is due to “the supernatural power of God, by the workings of the Holy Spirit in us” and the “mentoring of other Christians who told us to follow them as they followed Jesus Christ”! The Christian life is not lived by “picking one’s self up by your own boot-straps!” As we conclude the Winter Bible Study of 2016-The Book of 2 Corinthians, Paul encourages believers at Corinth to Embrace The Faith, and by the Power of the Holy Spirit in their lives, go on to maturity. Those words and truths are still very relevant for us today. Dorothy Sayers, in her book The Mind of the Maker, talks about how God is creative and powerful. That is His nature. Since He created us in His image we share in this creativity and power. She says, “we are most like our God when we exhibit His love and our work in a finite yet glorious way while we create something–whether it is a story, a song, a painting, a sculpture, a photo,or dance”. She sees the power of the writer expressed in a three-fold manner. First, as thought in the mind of the author. Then written and produced in the writen product of the book. Thirdly, the power is demonstrated and incarnated as the book is read. There the power of the author is unleashed and the transforming power soon becomes manifest for good or evil, depending on the motive of the author. This illustrates the way the Christian is transformed. As Paul said in II Corinthians 3:18, “But we all, with unveiled faces, beholding in the mirror the glory of the LORD, are being transformed into the same image, from glory to glory, just as from the LORD, by the Spirit”. When we as Christians, behold the glory of Jesus, as revealed in His word, by reading it, it has power, and the Holy Spirit uses that image to focus our minds upon, and then by His presence and power, thought by thought, action by action, by His power, moment by moment, in an unseen way, transforms us to be more like Jesus. Then Sayers says this power is not easily seen, nor analysed.
She writes, ” the Power of its effect upon the responsive mind… is a very difficult thing to examine and analyse, because our own perception of the thing is precisely what we are trying to perceive. We can, as it were, note various detached aspects of it: what we cannot pin down and look at is the movement of our own mind. In the same way, we cannot follow the movement of our own eyes in a mirror. We can, by turning our head, observe them in this position and in that position with respect to our body, but never in the act of moving themselves from one position to the other, and never in the act of gazing at anything but the mirror. Thus our idea of ourself is bound to be falsified, since what to others appears the most lively and mobile part of ourself, appears to us unnaturally fixed. The eye is the instrument by which we see everything, and for that reason it is the one thing we cannot see with truth. The same thing is true of our Power of response to a book, or to anything else; incidentally, this is why books about the Holy Ghost are apt to be curiously difficult and unsatisfactory-we cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.” When I read what she wrote about not being able to see our own eye movements I had to check that out. Sure enough that is true.
Read the following: “First, grab a mirror. Second, grab a family member, friend or colleague. Now you are ready to begin. Stand in front of the mirror about 6 inches away. Look from eye to eye. Observe that as you do this, you will not be able to see your eyes move nor will you feel your eyes moving. Now have someone watch your eyes as you do this experiment again. They will however, see your eyes moving back and forth. The truth is that we cannot see our eyes in motion. We can see other’s eyes in motion and other people can see ours, but we cannot see our own eyes move. This phenomenon is called Saccadic Masking. A saccade is a movement of the eye when it makes a sudden change of fixation, ie looking from one eye to the other. As our eyes move, there is a blurring of the image on the retina. To counteract this so that the image stays clear and sharp, a part of the brain, believed to be the cortex, cuts off the processing of images. What happens is that we go momentarily blind as the visual information is no longer going to the brain, therefore stopping the blur. We can’t see this happening as it is done automatically and quickly thousands of times a day”. Sayers’ words,” The same thing is true of our Power of response to a book, or to anything else; incidentally, this is why books about the Holy Ghost are apt to be curiously difficult and unsatisfactory-we cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.”-She reminded me of C.S. Lewis’ quote-“I believe in the Sun, not just because I see it, but also because by it I see everything else!”
The transformation by the Spirit, in our lives, is something really happening, though we may not be able to see it while it is occuring. Another of my favorite writers, as you know, is the Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner. I do not always agree with his theology, and everything he says, but I do love the way he says things. They illustrate some truths in a magnificient way. In his book Telling the Truth, Buechner writes, “In the Happy Hypocrite Max Beerbohm tells about a regency rake name Lord George Hell, debauched and profligate, who falls in love with a saintly girl, and, in order to win her love, covers his bloated features with the mask of a saint. The girl is deceived and becomes his bride, and they live together happily until a wicked lady from Lord George Hell’s wicked past turns up to expose him for the scoundrel she knows him to be and challenges him to take off the mask. So sadly, having no choice, he takes it off, and lo beneath the saint’s mask is the face of the saint he has become by wearing it in love!” What a parable of the Christian life! We happy hypocrites experience His transforming touch, without being aware of it, until the time comes we are completely transformed into the image we have been unsuccessfully beholding continuously in a mirror darkly! In that way we are all turtles…see you at the top of the fence-post!
