[NEW: Audio section on LovingLikeGod.com blog]
In a recent weekly conversation focused on the book of Revelation, we enjoyed a number of interesting and diverse perspectives on this rather timely Book. One way or another the world as we have known it seems to be coming to an end.
Our little conversation included believers from a diversity of backgrounds, and that always guarantees a number of popular positions on the meaning of this fascinating Letter. Included in this diversity was a very nice range of ages. And it is this diversity of age that I want to share about here.
By the time we reached Chapter 21, we had quite a struggle between a literal interpretation, (there are a number of those even among the older saints) and a more symbolic interpretation.
Being in many respects a symbolic, even parabolic kind of a guy, I probed to see why it was so difficult for a young woman to get the symbolism in the Letter, and this chapter in particular. Finally it occurred to me to ask her if she had ever been in love. As I did, the Title song of the subject of this post came immediately to mind, though I hadn’t heard it for many years. At 74, I had to go look up the lyrics:
“How little we know
How much to discover
What chemical forces flow
From lover to lover
How little we understand – what touches of that tingle
That sudden explosion – when two tingles intermingle
Who cares to define
What chemistry this is
Who cares with your lips on mine
How ignorant bliss is
So long as you kiss me – (and) the world around us shatters
How little it matters – how little we know
(How little we know, how little we know,…)”
The song was even a better elaboration on the problem we were having than I had remembered. She admitted that she had never been in love.
If you have never been in love there are some things that are very hard, really impossible to understand.
The problem gets even more difficult when we have been exposed to a lot of religion. But when we peel back all the teachings of men, and look full on into the Bible with our spiritual eyes and ears open, (it helps to have our hearts open as well) we find that there is a lot of Bible that is very difficult to understand if we have never been in love, even in the old creation sense.
There are no chemical forces in the old creation, for instance that can hold a candle to the chemical forces of the Spirit of God. There is no kiss in the old creation that can compare to the kiss that begins Song of Solomon. An accurate translation of the original would be “Kiss me.”
And where “the world around us shatters” is concerned, it would be difficult to surpass the message of the Book of Revelation. The eschaton certainly is the shattering of the world, as we know it.
Perhaps this is enough to say that for many years the very rocks have been crying out in secular music and lyrics, and all we need is to tune our ears and hearts to the Spirit to hear the love of God, in God, from God, to God, even in the songs of this world.
In the past couple of days this blog has been upgraded to include media of various kinds, adding audio messages and songs, in addition to the video that has been here for some time now. You can find the songs in the blog’s top menu tab. Most of the songs I sang during the month of September while in Connecticut, enjoying a month or so off from my chemo-therapy. One of the things I have found doing karaoke is that I don’t feel any pain when I sing. As for the audience, You will have to be the judge of that. :-)
Love!
Loving Like God 