Do you have it?
A supernatural view of everyday life?
Find out why Isak Dinesen’s view should be ours by watching our Truth in Two (full text below).
Isak Dinesen’s friend was right.
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Picture Credit: Luke Renoe, Snappy Goat
FULL TEXT
Isak Dinesen’s book Out of Africa describes a supernatural view of everyday life. Awakened by her housekeeper to an on-rushing, all-consuming brush fire, the national explains, “I wanted to wake you up in case it was God coming.” Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Glory be to God for dappled things” is a right Christian view of ordinary order. Who could ever forget, once seen, Rembrandt’s etching in “The Good Samaritan” of a dog defecating in the corner of the picture? All of life is a celebration, a reminder of the natural, God-given, God-ordered creation.
God’s creation is “ordinary” where we begin (the word “origin”), where we go to get our bearings (the word “orient”), or where find direction (the word “ordinance”). We arrange supplies, making lists (the word “ordnance”). We put first things first (the word “ordination”). And we organize and systematize our lives (the word “order”). Ordinary order has come to mean what is regular or usual. We can count on regular occurrences because of God’s regulated creation.
The English poet Alexander Pope stated, “Order is Heaven’s first concern.” The philosopher Duns Scotus referred to the distinctive nature of each individual thing as having “this-ness”—a marker of creation’s order.
Richard Weaver’s Visions of Order claims that the inner order of the soul sustains the outer order of society. Jane Jacob’s magnum opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, argues for “visual order” in every metropolis. All these creation examples reflect the origin, of ordered orientation ordained in Genesis 2:1, which says, “Heaven and earth were finished, down to the last detail.”
God has ordered His creation down to the last detail. So I love Dinesen’s description of her friend’s supernatural view of everyday life in Out of Africa. Every event in creation should cause us to say, “I wanted to wake you in case God was coming.”
For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking Truth wherever it’s found.