Further to the previous post’s musings on living in the age of memoir —

In the midst of this week’s celebration of the passion and resurrection of Christ — what the Christian faith knows as its Holy Week — it’s worth noting that what we most clearly know about God also comes via biography. It came in the lived life of Jesus, but we know that life because it was written down. The Gospels carry the voices, research, concerns, and passion of their authors. They tell a life using the thematic approach of memoir.

So we listen to and read and use the Gospels as the life-writing they are, not to make the texts themselves the focus of our veneration, but to enter into and explore in order to know a person. 

Life-writing, though, it’s important to remember. Not public relations, as Philip Yancey notes in The Jesus I Never Knew, quoting Scott Peck: “I was absolutely thunderstruck by the extraordinary reality of the man I found in the Gospels…”

Reality. For the age of memoir.   

A blessed Easter!

photo by C. Dueck