I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
SAR: Epilogue
- In G.K. Chesterton’s Manalive, Innocent Smith turns everyone’s stable world upside-down. To some, it seems exhilarating, and to others, threatening. What comes to free us also blows away our facades, our props and supports, and our illusions.
- Sabbath-keeping seems crazy because it seems impossible (we are way too busy, things are already scheduled on Sundays, no way we could get our work done in six days, nobody we know acts like this, if we gave up weekend fun we’d never get a break). Whatever a person’s notion is of ‘Sabbath-keeping’, he has usually distilled it to a bullet-point and dealt with this tiny conception out of hand. ‘Crazy’, ‘So Yesterday’, ‘legalistic’, ‘Jewish’, ‘Luddite’, ‘sports and bubble-baths’, are some of the unthinking labels by which Sabbath is kept from causing creative tension (either by marginalizing the practice, or by reducing it to fluff).
- A man in full self-possession is ‘simple’ in the sense that he is single-minded, stable, located in one ‘place’, transparent. The world looks at this and sums it up as ‘simple-minded’, which couldn’t be further from the truth. He is the best-possible vehicle for the entrance of Christ’s counter-cultural principles into the world, and so could be called ‘revolutionary’ for helping turn the world upside-down (or ‘counter-reformational’ for standing it back rightside up!)
- When we know all about a Thing, we are in danger of thinking we know it fully, but until we have wondered at it – taken it in and been affected, amazed by it – we know only a mental construct and not the Thing itself.
- If I am ‘flattened’, or operating from within a shallow shell of my own being, I have less interior capacity to receive whatever, whoever I encounter whole/wholly. Until I have a sense of things in their wholeness, I won’t be able to perceive connections between the parts, or between different aspects of Reality. Only God has the capacity for a completely unfragmented apprehension of Reality, but I have capacity for this that is underdeveloped, or unused – and it may be recovered!
- In the embrace of wonder I am most child-like, most whole and simple, most fully present to what is before me and unguarded against taking it in, and letting it affect me. Thus, in this state, I am most receptive to Reality. See Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty for Truth’s Sake if you want to learn more about wholeness, presence, receptivity and beauty in education.
- A poem lets me work in ‘three dimensions’ at once. I have the form of the poem, filled with the literal meanings of words. The words are infused with associative meanings by which I ‘raise up’ another layer, or dimension of meaning that may compliment, or seem to contradict, the literal. My juxtaposition itself creates a paradox, or tension that can only find closure, or resolution within the reader’s mind, where the whole thing is quickened into life in a way that lets him ‘in’ to the form I’ve created, to experience it in a personal way. (If architecture is ‘frozen music’, then is poetry ‘melted architecture’??? Gotta think about this!)
- A poem’s form and symbolism prevent the intellect from quickly ‘getting it’ – reducing its meaning to a bullet-point, or ‘gist’ of meaning. They frustrate the desire to lay-bare-to-view and invite a reader deeper into a mystery, or experience, or encounter. The capacity of metaphor to temper (or tame?) Reality as it mediates it to us helps ‘make a way where there is no way’ between impossibly separate things, like man and God, or then and now, or dying and life. (Hamlet asks, when his pals are trying to pin down whether he’s crazy, or not. “Am I a violin, that you may play me?”)
- True creativity is the resolution of tension by the free act of will that responds by re-presenting that tension, crisis, paradox in a New Thing. The limitations of our materials (Wood? Words?), the demands of a genre or form (Sonnet? Opera? Fugue? Speech?), the constraints imposed by editors, budgets, juries, and small stages, all ratchet up the tension. The result is a higher call upon our creativity, resourcefulness, and skill.
- God has entered history as a person, because person is the form of being. (He didn’t make persons and then decide to take that form just to fit in. We were created as persons because person is the image of, the form of His own being.) He conveyed Himself to us in the truest possible Form, with no violation of the perfect content of His own divine substance. No poem written by man could ever possess such interior perfection of correspondence between content and context, or form and meaning. We can only pray that our works of placing meaning in tiny, communicable vessels of form will not do too much violence to the precious Content we hope to convey, and that the forms we make will, by their beauty, do as much justice as possible to the One they aim to glorify.
You must be logged in to post a comment.