Michael Frost has a growing reputation as a writer and teacher who can invigorate our faith by urging us to see God from new and quirky angles. In his previous book, Jesus the Fool, he argued that Jesus was hardly the pious and bloodless Hollywood hero we often see, but was instead more like a court jester, poking fun and deflating pomposity.
In Eyes Wide Open, Frost has put together a passionate plea for us to open our eyes, to see God at work in our everyday circumstances, often in wildly unexpected ways. The result is a timely and thought-provoking argument, which the Australian Christian Literature Society saw fit to award this year’s title of ‘Christian Book of the Year’.
Frost has been largely successful in making a case for “embracing astonishment as a spiritual discipline”, and I finished the book with a deeper appreciation of God’s creative work in my life, and in the world at large. But first a few quibbles (c’mon, it’s my job).
My question is this - why can’t Christian publishers have the same production standards as any other? The book is sprinkled with typos (not Frost’s fault), as are many Christian books, and it’s VERY ANNOYING.
Back to the real issues. Frost seems to be fighting his battle on two fronts, which is fine except that he never makes this explicit and it can become confusing.
Firstly, he is attacking those who are hanging around waiting for God to do “something extraordinary” in their lives, thus limiting him to the spectacular and dramatic, and completely ignoring the (pretty spectacular) way he acted through Jesus and the quiet, ordinary way he acts every day.
Secondly, he is attacking our “prose-flattened” attitude to Christianity that desperately wants to rationalise and formularise everything, thereby squeezing all the life and poetry out of it. By making our faith so eminently manageable we have made it, perhaps, a little boring.
His central thesis is that God speaks to us in every facet of our lives, from the rose growing beneath our window, to a Seinfeld program, to the actions of Ghandi in India. Frost shows us this without letting the truth of the gospel lose its central position - indeed, his whole argument springs from the pre-eminence of the gospel to our faith.
Frost concludes with an illustration about how one of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ paintings reawakened in him a capacity for wonder, which should be an essential part of our relationship with God. I can relate - ‘Sunflowers’ has played it own part in my understanding. I had been wandering around London’s National Gallery, thrilled to see pictures from all eras, when I walked into the room full of Post-Impressionist paintings, Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ among them. I inexplicably began to weep. All through my school years, the Post-Impressionists, particularly Van Gogh, had been my favourites. I’d studied them, analysed them, stuck them on my bedroom wall, and here they were, in front of me. It was overwhelming - something I’d loved so much from a distance was before me. It struck me then, as it does now, that it was a little bit like what coming near to God is like. We study him, analyze him, admire him from afar maybe, but it is only when we drop our defenses and come into his presence through accepting Christ’s forgiveness that we are touched by him.
As Michael Frost says finally, “If you dare to open wide your eyes of faith, you’ll be surprised by what you see, by what it costs and how it’s worth it.”
