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John Koessler on Holy Emptiness
2007-08-21 13:25:00
John Koessler, chair of pastoral studies at Moody Bible Institute, wrote an incredibly moving essay in Christianity Today about how emptiness is the precondition for blessing. Once again Jesus reverses our worldly values, such that the depth of our neediness becomes the measure of God's opportunity to fill us with good gifts. Some excerpts follow: My mother was hungry most of her life. She cooked daily for us, but rarely sat down to eat. Unable to stomach the food she'd prepared for the rest of us, she ate her own meals at odd hours, nourishing herself on a strange combination of the ordinary and the exotic. One day she might eat a baked bean sandwich smothered in ketchup; the next, broiled lobster.Mother blamed her eating habits on a childhood of poverty. Born six years before the Great Depression, her earliest memories were of hunger. Her family was so poor they often went days without eating. When there was food, it was never enough. Sometimes all they had to share between them...
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Judith & Gershon Goldhaber: "Noah and the Flood" (excerpt)
2007-08-21 13:00:00
Award-winning poet Judith Goldhaber and her husband, the artist and physicist Gerson Goldhaber, have just released a sequel to their well-received collaboration, the illustrated poetry book Sonnets from Aesop. Their new collection, Sarah Laughed: Sonnets from Genesis, embellishes familiar Bible stories with humorous and mystical elements from midrash and folklore. Willis Barnstone writes, "Sarah Laughed is utterly charming, poem and icon...In the best tradition of imitation it illumines the Abrahamic religions." The Goldhabers have kindly permitted me to reproduce the following excerpt from their "Noah and the Flood " sonnet sequence:ii. The Time is ComingGod spoke to Noah when he became a manand said, "The time is coming ? build an Ark;storm clouds are gathering; soon you will embarkupon the seas, as outlined in My plan.Make the Ark as sturdy as you can ?line it with pitch, strip gopher trees of barkto shape the hull, and lest it be too darkcut windows, and a doorway." Noah beganto ...

Church of the Holy Cow
2007-08-20 15:15:00
The artist Steve Emery, who blogs over at Color Sweet Tooth, put up a thoughtful post some months ago about taking some time away from the noise, conflict and complications of the church in order to reconnect with God. Commenting on the impending Episcopal schism, he wrote in March: Why do we leave a church? Because we no longer consider the worship of the others to be true? Because we fear our own faith or the faith of our children may be damaged by hearing what we consider to be wrong ideas? Because we no longer believe the Spirit moves in the presider, and the Eucharist is thus somehow invalidated?For now I find these questions beyond me, and not mine to answer. This may change.In my case I did not leave a church in particular, though it was events in a particular church that precipitated my departure. I left organized church in general. I needed to leave, like a man who needs to clear his head at a concert or a party by going outside and breathing some cold fresh air. I was seei...
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"Talent", Fatalism, and the Artist's Fears
2007-08-18 16:28:00
One of my favorite "books for writers" is Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. Whether you need to sustain your faith in a long-term project or gather the courage to leap into a new one, this little book is an invaluable aid to identifying and overcoming the fear-based myths that prevent you from doing your work. One of those is "talent": Tale nt , in common parlance, is "what comes easily". So sooner or later, inevitably, you reach a point where the work doesn't come easily, and -- Aha!, it's just as you feared!Wrong. By definition, whatever you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. There is probably no clearer waste of psychic energy than worrying about how much talent you have -- and probably no worry more common. This is true even among artists of considerable accomplishment.Talent, if it is anything, is a gift, and nothing of the artist's own making....Were talent a prerequisite, then the better the artwork, the easier it would have been to make. But...
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Divine Impassibility? A Jewish Perspective
2007-08-17 16:35:00
No, not impossibility. For the non-theology-geeks among you, impassibility is the doctrine that God does not suffer or have emotions in the human sense. This assertion is disputed among Christians, and seems to appeal more to Calvinists and others who are anxious to preserve God's absolute sovereignty. (If that sounds absurdly presumptuous, well, I phrased it that way for a reason.) I lean toward believing that it's an unbiblical notion that crept in from Hellenistic culture, which understood perfection as changelessness. By contrast, the Bible tells us that God is faithful and eternal, but this need not mean that God is unaffected by events. Rather, it means that God's loving nature and His promises are completely reliable. Writing in this week's Jewish World Review, Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo connects the de-personalization of God to a loss of moral significance for human emotions and actions: ...[T]he term G-d...often stands for completely o...
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"Pocket Full of Violet" and Other New Poems by "Conway"
2007-08-16 11:42:00
  My prison pen pal "Conway" continues to make great strides in his poetry and artwork. As I mentioned in last month's post, conditions have improved at his new location, where he has a job in the library and access to colored pencils and a typewriter. I hope to reproduce some of his drawings here soon. He often picks up themes from the classics he has been reading and reworks them in a voice that's all his own. He sent me these poems after reading T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". I heard some echoes of Eliot's closing section ("What the thunder said") in the first poem below.In his July 17 letter, Conway writes, "...The other day while going through work change (strip search) the lady (if you wanna call her that!) searched my lunch (state issue baloney, apple, bread & mustard) well I had put a scooter pie inside the bag, I had purchased from canteen -- she said I was not allowed to have it, who knows what (security risk) this would present, 'the great marshmallow p...
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Partners in Health: 20th Anniversary Appeal
2007-08-14 21:43:00
For 20 years, Partners in Heal th  has provided free medical services to the poorest communities around the world, while lobbying developed nations for more equitable access to medication and technology. Their website states, "Our mission is to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care." Millions of people are dying of treatable, preventable diseases such as malaria, AIDS and TB because medications are unaffordable or countries lack the infrastructure for traditional means of foreign-aid delivery to be effective. PIH's innovative "community-based care" shows dramatic results where other programs have failed. Their aid workers make a hands-on, intensive personal commitment to their patients, helping them adhere to treatment regimens and addressing other non-medical problems that interfere with their care. For PIH, fighting disease in poor communities involves larger issues of social justice, including access to education, clean w...
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Christian Mood Swings
2007-08-13 16:31:00
When I became a novelist last year, I decided to start having emotions. Bad idea. My characters experience higher highs and lower lows than I've generally allowed myself in "real life". I thought that because it wasn't "really happening to me" I could enjoy the upside without the downside. Wrong again. Something that happened around the same time was that God answered my prayer (chuckling in His size-40 sleeve all the while) to remove my fear of being incinerated by contact with Him. Nowadays, when I read "Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" (Jeremiah 23:29), my response is more "Awesome, dude!" than "Yikes - where do I hide?"Since I opened the doors of my creativity and my prayer life to let the storms sweep through, amazing things have happened. My writing has taken on new degrees of honesty, depth and mission, and my zeal to know God has increased. BUT...a lot of the time I feel like the Holy Spirit's ch...
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Inmates' Access to Religious Books Threatened
2007-08-13 13:09:00
From the government that brought you Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo...Not content with violating the Eighth Amendment, our prison system is taking aim at freedom of religion, too. Chabad.org reports on new federal regulations that would remove thousands of religious books from prison libraries: From behind bars, many prisoners turn to religion to fill the void in their lives. Frequently, prisoners' pursuits dovetail with the prison system's goal of rehabilitating the convicts in its care; at the end of their incarcerations, if prisoners leave with a better understanding of right and wrong, so the thinking goes, they'll be less likely to return in the future.But that logic has come under fire recently by a federal rule change implemented in May limiting prison libraries under the domain of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from carrying no more than 150 titles dealing with any single religion.The new policy, while rooted in a desire to prevent religiously-motivated militancy from taking hold ...
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Suffering for the Wrong Reasons
2007-08-07 22:56:00
The Christian life is not an easy one...but then, what life is? "Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal," wrote Longfellow in "A Psalm of Life". Prophets and preachers can be stung to harshness at the thought of people wasting that one precious life on trivia, when they could be growing in the knowledge and love of God. But I also see a lot of Grape-Nuts religion; woe to you who prefer Frosted Flakes to a bowl of unsweetened gravel, because you are still selfish enough to want God to make you happy. That is not the God I am encountering in the Gospels and the Psalms. God is always making promises to people, very concrete ones involving food, shelter, the birth of children, and livestock, as well as the ones we can reframe as acceptably "spiritual", like justice and salvation. "I came that they might have life, and have it more abundantly." (John 10:10)The issue of homosexuality puts this kind of "No pain, no gain" religiosity on di...
More About: Bible , Reasons , Suffering , Wrong , Erin

Book Notes: Feminism Without Illusions
2007-08-07 15:35:00
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions : A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).This book by the late lamented historian would have saved me from becoming a Republican had I discovered it when I was in college (1989-93, so it could have happened). Fox-Genovese rejected the entire way that the "canon wars" were framed at that time, and argued that "potential lies not in the repudiation of [gender] difference but in a new understanding of its equitable social consequences." (p.256) Conservatives in the 1990s defended the universality of Western Civilization, and its democratic-individualist ideal of knowledge that could be approached on equal terms by everyone, regardless of "race, class and gender" (the Holy Trinity of political correctness in my youth). The liberals at that time often sounded like determinists, reading texts only through the lens of the author's, or their own, biological and ...
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Support Mthatha Mission in South Africa
2007-08-05 22:10:00
Jesse Zink, a young man who grew up in our Episcopal parish, preached an amazing sermon today about his upcoming stint as a missionary in South Africa . Jesse will be working at the Itipini medical clinic in a shantytown outside Mthatha, which was the capital of the largest apartheid-era black "homeland" and is still one of the poorest parts of the country with one of the highest rates of HIV and tuberculosis. You can follow his progress (and make donations) at his blog Mthatha Mission. In his sermon, he reflected on the mixed history of Christian missions and how the word "missionary" can be reclaimed for a less colonialist, more service-oriented way of living out the gospel in a foreign culture: I read the Bible as a whole, a complete piece of divinely-inspired literature that ? while contradictory and confusing in many places ? tells a couple consistent messages throughout. The message I hear most frequently is evident in this morning?s Gospel. Jesus says, ?one?s life does not con...
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A Saint of Emotional Intelligence
2007-08-04 11:11:00
Today is the feast day of John-Baptist Vianney, about whom James Kiefer at The Daily Office writes: Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney (better known as the Cure' d'Ars, or curate of Ars -- now Villars-les-Dombes) was the son of a peasant farmer, born in France in 1786, three years before the beginning of the French Revolution. He wished to become a priest, but his studies were hindered, first by the poverty of his family, next by the anti-religious policies of the Revolutionary government, and finally by the wars of Napoleon. He was not a particularly bright student, and struggled hopelessly with Latin. He was 29 when he was finally ordained, his superiors having decided that his zeal and devotion compensated for his "academic underqualification."He was sent as curate to the small and obscure village of Ars-en-Dombes (now called Villars-les-Dombes (46:00 N 4:50 E),about 30 kilometers northeast of Lyon (formerly Lyons, 45:46 N 4:50 E), where he proved an unexpectedly brilliant preach...
More About: Intelligence , Bible , Emotional Intelligence , Saint , Emotion

Desktop Inspirations
2007-08-01 17:12:00
Glimmer Train, a leading magazine of literary fiction, asked in a recent survey for the inspirational quotes that their readers have tacked up on their desk to motivate them to write. The full list is here (PDF file). Some of my favorites: "If you can't piss people off, why write at all." (anonymous)"I write to discover what I know." (Flannery O'Connor)"The hard is what makes it great." (Tom Hanks in the movie "A League of Their Own")"One reason for writing, of course, is that no one's written what you want to read." (Philip Larkin)"Have the courage to follow your talent to the dark place." (anonymous)"A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well." (G.K. Chesterton)"Start writing -- the answer will come to you." (fortune cookie; I have this one taped to my computer too) Quotes from my desktop: "Concentrate not on protection, but on reducing your vulnerabilities." (an...
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God's Honor and the Atonement
2007-07-31 12:47:00
From the April 2007 archives at The Thinking Reed comes this insightful post on how we misread the Atonement as a legal formality demanded by a proud, wrathful God. Actually, one could interpret it as God subverting the human zero-sum model of authority that must be shored up by another's punishment, by collapsing all distinctions among the offender, the judge and the victim into the Person of Christ. Lee writes: Anselm?s account of the atonement is rooted from first to last in his understanding of the divine nature, and he reworks the notions of honor and satisfaction accordingly. [John] McIntyre argues that a, if not the, key to understanding [Anselm's Cur Deus Homo] is the concept of God?s aseity. This is theological jargon referring to the idea that God exists in and through himself, utterly independent of anything else. There is nothing ?external? to God which constrains him to act in certain ways. Thus, there isn?t an order of justice that has to be satisfied by God bef...
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Proud Anglicans of the Week
2007-07-30 11:14:00
Here's a roundup of some great Anglican "via media" blogs I've discovered this month. All of these folks are thoughtful Christians determined to hold together the compassionate, progressive, dynamic spirit of the church's liberals and the respect for tradition, truth and theological sophistication of the conservatives. They give me hope that the current fundamentalist-secularist impasse won't last forever. Christopher at Betwixt and Between offers a spirited and GLBT-friendly exposition of the Incarnation in his wonderfully titled post A Shitting God. (Hint: If this offends you, you're exactly the person who needs to read it.) We don't want our God to come to us as flesh and blood, bone and sinew. But he did, not deeming equality with God something to be grasped at as did our first parents, but rather relishing simply to be an earthen one--"a shitting god" as one rabbi put it, became truly one of us in all of our comical glory, with our orifices and pleasurable bits, goin...
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Nannette Croce: "The Box of Cereal"
2007-07-28 11:04:00
  It's turning into The Rose & Thorn appreciation week here at Reiter's Block. R&T editor Nannette Croc e's story about a man facing the brokenness of his relationships is well-paced, heartbreaking, and worth your attention. Here's the beginning: Hi, this is Richard Drake. I?m either not home, or I?m busy creating some ingenious piece of software. So leave a message at the tone, and I?ll get back to you ? honest.?Richard, are you there? Are you there?? I thought it might be my boss, but it?s Gwen. Ever since the suicide, she has this new voice, high-pitched and loud, even more of a teeth-grinder than her old one. ?I need to talk to you. It?s important.? At the word ?important,? I reach for the phone. Then I remember that there is nothing important left to tell me, and I relax back into my chair. ?Richard. If you?re there and you?re not picking up....? There is some dead air. The machine clicks off. Maybe I?ll call her later. It doesn?t r...
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An Anglican Hero: William Reed Huntington
2007-07-27 17:59:00
In the Anglican church calendar, today is the feast day of Episcopal theologian William Reed Huntington (1838-1909), whose achievements include spearheading the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, and formulating what became known as the "Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral," the four-point statement of Anglican/Episcopal identity that is still used today. Huntington cared deeply about Christian unity. His intent was to articulate a few core beliefs that made the church distinctively Christian and Episcopal; beyond those, the church should make room for a wide diversity of views. Those four points were the Holy Scriptures as the word of God; the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds as the rule of faith; the sacraments of baptism and communion, as ordained by Christ; and the historic episcopate (bishops who traced their lineage back to the apostles). Bryan at Creedal Christian provides a nice overview of those principles and their implications in today's post.James Kiefer, who writes the ...
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Anne Caston: "A Man, Returning, Will Not Be The Man Who Left"
2007-07-27 11:26:00
A world view: for months and months before he leftfor war, he'd spoken of it as if to be without onewas to be godless. And then the planes. Four.Forget a world view. What she wants today is a table solid enough to set things on:a lamp, a pitcher, a bowl of lemons.She wants a dress the color of brandy.She wants a black lace shawl.A silk slip. A locket. But Love, that tenderest tyrant of all,fastens its necklace of flame at her throat and she gives herselfover again to the lesser glory of who she iswith him: the glory of a bent spokeand the rut it fell into.She imagines him sometimes now as he must have been thenin that other kingdom of men:his doll-like face in its little uniformof death; his shuttered eyes, opening, closing;and, underneath the ribs,in place of an actual heart, the far-offknocking of the guns that opened him.Reprinted by permission from the website Why Are We In Iraq?  
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Why Not Church?
2007-07-26 12:08:00
  Yesterday I wrote to a friend who heads my women's Bible study group:   It has become quite clear to me that fear of sin is one of the things keeping me from church. The current cultural landscape is such that I will eventually end up offended by something I hear either in the conservative or the liberal church, and I am afraid of being unlikable and conflict-causing when I offer a different viewpoint. Since the whole point of being a Christian is the grace not to be driven by fear of sin any longer, this is obviously a problem. She wrote back:I too feel if I went back to [the evangelical church], I would be screaming You people are crazy don't you see that I am right and you are wrong and if I went back to [the liberal church] I would be screaming You people are crazy don't you see that I am right and you are wrong Once I put that down in writing, it gives [the liberal church] a less compelling pull on me. If I'm likely to be a screeching lunatic wherever I go, migh...
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Caron Andregg: "The Thursday Night Trap Club"
2007-07-26 12:01:00
We're skeet shootingthe potter's seconds.The catapult slingsskewed plates, crackedvases in erratic arcsacross the dry creek canyon.Each Thursday eveningwe obliteratethe week's mistakes.When the pellet-spread connects,explodes a shrapnel starit's an absolution.Lucinda's been castingreproductions of Egyptianbowls with tiny feet.One seems near perfect;but when I set iton the trap-box edgeit lists, daylight gleamingbeneath the toes of one foot.When wet and formingit must have restedon a warp, somethingnot quite level in the firing.It seems somehow unfairthis small, lame thingwound up in the slag-boxdestined for buckshotjust because it totters. And it strikes mehow much easier it isto love a flawed object -the supplicant's posturelike a pair of cupped hands;the sloped bowl tilted in offering;its little feet of clay. Caron Andregg is co-editor of the fine journal Cider Press Review, which is accepting submissions through Aug. 31. They also sponsor a poetry manuscript prize open for ...
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The One-Room Schoolhouse
2007-07-23 19:00:00
My church is beginning the rector search process, and already we're feeling sorry for this person because of the conflicting expectations he or she will have to manage. We want a firm administrator who's also a gentle pastoral caregiver; someone who can address the unique needs of the elderly, singles, young families, Sunday School kids, and college students; someone to balance our budget without disrespecting any of the programs that our strong lay leadership holds so dear. I'm sure this dilemma is common to any church that can boast of a diverse congregation and a large menu of activities. St. Paul addressed it in several epistles with the reminder that we are members of one body, with Christ as the head. The issue preoccupying me right now is how people who are at different stages of religious commitment can worship together. It takes a skilled minister not to direct his entire attention to one of these groups and treat the others as an obstacle to his agen...
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Trinity, Atonement, and the Coherence of Doctrine
2007-07-22 21:38:00
Years before I found Christianity believable (or truly understood what there was to believe), I found its coherence as an intellectual system immensely satisfying. Now too, the more I learn, the more I appreciate how its core concepts are inseparably entwined. Take away the Resurrection, for instance, and the Crucifixion goes from triumph to tragedy. However much disbelievers in miracles try to recast Jesus' death as an inspiring martyrdom, if the story ends there, it really isn't all that inspiring -- just another tale of how good guys finish last. Similarly, Bryan at Creedal Christian points out in a recent post that the doctrine of the Atonement would seem barbaric without the Trinity . The objection is commonly heard, "What kind of father would be so wrathful that he could only be appeased by the death of his son?" Isn't that the essence of human sinfulness, after all -- that there must be a doer and a done-to, a consuming ego and a devoured other? That power struggl...
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Poetry Roundup: Smith, Backer, Roeske
2007-07-19 21:11:00
Some favorite picks from recent browsing of online journals. I've just quoted a few lines of each for copyright reasons; visit the journals' websites for the whole poem.Character Studyby Patricia Smith ...He was scarredby every change I?d made, every strike-through, cut/paste, backspace, delete, all the unleased betrayal that roars through prose. I built himfrom a knowing of adjectives, piled on detail and declaration, and now he is overdone, draggingall that weight and wheezing when he breathes.The boy patiently loads his pockets with stones, bottle caps and jagged pieces of glass, waiting for the moment when the skin of my neck is exposed.Only 11, he scans me with man eyes and says it, claiming my nights, advancing the plot in a way that can?t be undone. He says: Give me a name.   Read the whole poem, plus an interview with acclaimed performance poet Smith, at Torch, a journal of creative writing by African-American women.****The Fourth Nestby Sara BackerIt hurts t...
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Signs of the Apocalypse: Product Placement for the Dead
2007-07-18 22:17:00
This week's Springwise business trends newsletter reports on Eternal Image, a maker of coffins and funerary urns customized with your favorite sports or product logos: In a lively new twist on what you might call a dead industry, Eternal Image is bringing licensing to the afterlife?through branded caskets and cremation urns. Now lifelong supporters of select sports teams and other brands have the option to take their loyalty all the way to their final resting spot.Eternal Image has licensing agreements with 30 Major League Baseball teams (urns and caskets will available late 2007), the Vatican Library, Precious Moments?and there are even special urns licensed by the American Kennel Club and Cat Fanciers Association to preserve the ashes of beloved pets. More than just a gimmick, Eternal Image products are made with high-quality rot-resistant composite materials and are designed to be tasteful representations of a person's interests. The company continues to seek new partners and ...
More About: Product , Signs , Dead , Apocalypse , Lace

"This New Armada" by Conway
2007-07-18 01:04:00
My correspondent "Conway," a prisoner at a supermax facility in central California who's serving 25-to-life under the state's three-strikes law for receiving stolen goods, reports in his July 13 letter that conditions have improved since his transfer to a new facility. He now has a job as education clerk, grading GED's, and access to a typewriter and a library of donated books. (Unfortunately, I have no way for readers of this site to send him books without revealing his name and location, which he's asked me not to do; instead, if you are so moved by this post, donate some quality reading materials to a prison in your area.) Here's one of his latest poems, written on the back of a news story from several years ago about brutality at Corcoran prison:This New Arma da I never understood this loss   till cuffs were locked behind my hands;I should've seen it comin along   slidin past my hourglass' sands.Inside heaped stones, heavy of time  &n...

Why Church?
2007-07-17 16:53:00
I've always managed my personal life on the theory that a bad relationship is worse than none at all. Ever since I was a very little girl, my fantasies revolved around falling in love and getting married. (Well, that and saving the world from evil.) Because I cared so much about being in relationship, I actually didn't date a whole lot, and never got serious with anyone till I met the man I eventually married. I just didn't have the time to waste. At least when you're alone, you know you still need something. Like those annoying people who leave a shopping cart in a parking spot at the supermarket, filling that void with a lesser form of intimacy blocks the space where the real thing could enter your life.As a Christian, it's part of the deal that I have to be in fellowship with other believers. The church is the body of Christ. The Bible is very clear on this. Like marriage, this is my ideal. But also like marriage, there are worse things than being alone. I won't s...
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Support Soulforce Campaign for Gay Marriage in NY State
2007-07-14 02:28:00
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has introduced a bill to extend equal marriage rights to same-gender couples. Over the next two weeks, interfaith gay activist group Soulforce will be sponsoring GLBT youth to travel to the districts of key "swing vote" state senators and assembly members to tell their personal stories. Soulforce will hold townhall meetings, attend community events and church services, and speak with state legislators and their constituents about same-gender marriage. You can volunteer to participate or support them with your donations here.
More About: Site News , Marriage , Gay Marriage , Campaign , Support

35 Books for my 35th Birthday
2007-07-14 01:59:00
The list below is something of a self-portrait in books. Most of them reflect, and in many cases helped shape, my current worldview. I recommend them for their beauty and wisdom, and the originality of their vision. They're the books I reread while hundreds of their newer siblings languish on the shelf.Poetry and FictionT.S. Eliot, Four QuartetsElegance and coherence of Christian ideas revealed in poetryKatie Ford, DepositionContemporary poet chronicles via negativa in thorny yet beautiful languageJack Gilbert, Refusing HeavenPoems shine with hard-won affirmation of lifeGerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur and Other PoemsMystical joy explodes normal patterns of meter and syntaxMark Levine, Enola Gay20th-century poetic ApocalypseC.S. Lewis, Perelandra trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength)Christian science fiction; CSL shares his beatific visionWalter Wangerin Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow and The Book of SorrowsBarnyard allegory of the gospelWal...
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Beauty in Absence
2007-07-11 21:37:00
Why do encounters with beauty often make us sad? Along with euphoria, I experience pain as I become more aware that my limited senses and attention span cannot fully comprehend or exhaust the possibilities of the sublime reality before me. As Edna St. Vincent Millay exclaimed, "World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!" Yet that pain is, in its own way, sweet. Brett McCracken reflects on this fact in "The Aesthetics of Absence" from Relevant Magazine: The climax of watching the sun set is knowing that in a scant few minutes, it will be gone, consumed in the revolving horizon. And we feel this tension of impending loss?as joy, as tragedy, but above all as beauty.And the more I think about beauty?and art?the more I realize how central absence is. What hits us the most?what goes beyond our senses and touches our souls?is not what is present, but what is absent. For good or ill, the state of being hungry and seeing some delicious food is undoubtedly more thrilling than con...
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