Sunday 22 January 2012

Sabbatical Day 7

More devotionally than most of my reading this week, I have been reading Finding the Groove - Robert Gelinas. He explores a 'jazz theology' of Christian faith. Noting that Jesus responds individually in his encounters in the gospels, he explores how we too might 'improvise', to use a jazz term.

Three quotes:

'What words do you use to describe God? Surprisingly, one of the first things that God reveals about himself rarely makes our top five: God is creative - the most creative being in the universe!'

'[W]e can use tension to lead us to places with God we never would have gone if all the tensions of our faith were to be resolved.'

'The apostle Paul describes God's creative process this way: "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared for us to do." Workmanship is the Greek word poiema. This is where we get our English word poem. What an amazing thought to think of oneslef as a poem of God. How humbling to imagine God sitting down with paper and pencil and laboring over each verse of our lives. To the Greeks the word poieme carried with it the connotation of "fabric" or "material." This works well with the next phrase - "created in Christ Jesus." It is as if Jesus was the workshop in which God fabricated us into being."

One chapter draws in John Coltrane, whose music I have never understood. However, Gelinas' route into 'Love Supreme' has opened a door for me into his jazz which I expect to explore further.

Talking of being creative, I took this photograph of Rutland Water in 2007, but hadn't been sure how to 'develop' the rather more bland image so that it properly represented what we saw on a journey back from Loughborough. This captures something of the beautiful scene that spread before our eyes: a masterpiece by He who is Love Supreme.

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