on missing pieces

Read this today and wanted to share it. I tried to put together some thoughts on why it reached me so tenderly, but I want you to receive it without all that setup.

In my mind, NT Wright is the sort of visionary man of God you have to grow into. If you like this, I highly recommend reading some of this other thoughts.

The Bible and Christian Imagination - N.T. Wright (excerpt)

How do we give an analysis, then, of the world as it is, the present, and of our task within it, within the biblical vision of what it means to be made in God's image. I have an illustration which helps me to understand this. And it may help if you're musical, but you may be able to understand it even if you're not musical. And I want you to imagine that some people in an old house in Vienna, in Austria, in Europe, are grubbing around in an attic, and they come upon a musical score, a piece of music, a manuscript, written by hand, and they look at it and they wonder what it is. And it turns out it's a piece for the piano, and somebody takes it to the piano and says, "This is strange,” playing it, “this is great music, what is it?"

And they phone the museum or the culture center somewhere, and somebody comes and says, "Actually, this handwriting, this is Mozart’s handwriting, but it's very strange, because we don't have this piece of music. We've never seen it before. What is it?"

And then they get a professional pianist, who plays it, and it makes a lot of sense, but it's incomplete. There are bits where there are gaps, where the piano stops and there's a few bars' rest. And it's awesomely beautiful, but it's pointing toward a larger whole. And they realize that what they've got is the piano part of a string quintet. And we haven't got the violins, the viola, and the cello. We've got something which is a signpost pointing us to something further which has yet to be discovered.

That is what the beauty of this earth is like. It is a true signpost. God has put us in a beautiful world, and wants us to celebrate it, but he wants us then to use our imaginations to write those other parts. We'll get it wrong, we will imagine it wrong, but then we'll get glimmers which are getting it right, and the music will grow, and swell, and we will teach one another, and enlarge one another's horizons so that we can actually glimpse and see that there is to be a yet fuller beauty, a beauty in which the ugliness of this world is redeemed, in which the violence is rebuked, in which the possibilities of this world are finally fulfilled. Our culture is not good at imagining that, and it takes the arts to help us to do it — music, poetry, literature, dance, drama, all of that.