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| Gamble Mansion - Ellenton, FL |
What
“eagle’s nest” (fortress mentality) have you built to feel
secure your private world? How secure are you, really? How has God
broken through that to bring you to himself? (Serendipity Bible
10th Anniversary Edition, page 1131).
A
central function of religion is that of serving to meet fundamental
security needs in human beings. We seek to attach ourselves to the
Eternal One—someone who can be our Intimate-Other forever. As I
heard it described in my youth, we look for Eternal Security. To get
there we identify eternal values in which we can find security not
only for today, but extending forever. In this way, meaning itself
is born of security. Thus, we find that true security forms the
substantial bedrock upon which reliable creativity and spontaneity flow.
In a sense we arrive at Eternal Security by default. All other
forms of security fail us in the end. My friend Angelo and I visited
Gamble Mansion in Ellenton yesterday. It was constructed prior to
the Civil War and is replete with large white columns invoking a
sense of stability and security. It was ensconced when built upon a
large sugar plantation. Yet some few years after it was built, the
Civil War dismantled the basis of antebellum
security—slavery. Today we have no sympathy for slavery; yet it is
deeply saddening to realize that once a large community of people
believed that security resided in this flawed institution—that they
looked for safety and stability in a doomed and sinking vessel.
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| Angelo Lundy at Gamble Mansion |
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