Aesthetic Logic

My son just began piano lessons. He is learning about rhythm, melody, harmony, and plain old practice. He stops at the base of the stairs where the piano sits and plays simple lines, like Mary Had a Little Lamb. A beautiful thing that punctuates the day.

He is also learning—at a very subliminal level—to read and interpret signs. Musical notation is another language, full of signs, symbols, patterns. To translate it and play it is to employ what I call aesthetic logic, or the ability to receive and communicate the language of beauty.

As a culture, do we cultivate this aesthetic faculty of discerning patterns? The language of patterns lends purpose, meaning, and structure to life. I can’t state it better than Richard Rohr: “We have difficulty reading the meaningful patterns of our existence, and we remain unconvinced or even uninterested in our divine origins. This is a major crisis of meaning that results in a loss of hope and a lack of vision.”*

The Bible is full of patterns. Its logic is aesthetic. It wants you to read it for the signs, symbols, and the deeper reality to which those symbols point. There was a bird, hovering over the water of creation. There was a bird released over the water of the flood. There was a bird that landed on Jesus’ shoulder in the river. Do you see the arc, the rhyme, the pattern?

May the signs around me be illuminated by the signs You give. Amen.

*On the Threshold of Transformation: Daily Meditations for Men (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2010), p. 5.

A New Earth

What is heaven like?

Sometimes Christians are accused of failing to describe heaven with any sort of compelling vision. It’s true: if heaven is just a place with fuzzy white light and fat cherubs playing boring music on harps, who wants to go there? 

What is heaven like? Answer: Earth! It will be a lot like here, just without sin. From the perspective of the Bible, sin causes all else evil: earthquakes, floods, disasters, wars, famines, poverty, disease, murder, loneliness, broken homes, mental disorders, global warming, crime, bankruptcy, corruption, tyranny, emotional pain, meaninglessness, grueling labor, grief, death. The list goes on. The reason heaven is hard to describe is that it is hard for us to imagine life on earth without sin.

Behold, I am about to create a new heaven and a new earth. (Isaiah 65:17) The earthy-ness of the Bible and its imagery starts on page one with water and touches every other elemental image—fire, wind, bread, wine, body, blood, stones, mud, earth—to help us understand that God is here on earth and aims to make it a beautiful place. 

The best part? Human beings will have such elemental unity with God and each other, that their new physical bodies will show forth the glory of God as if they were “clothed with righteousness.” Can you imagine?  

O God, draw me to the vision of a new earth. Amen.

Allowing the Motion

“That wasn’t so bad after all!” says Soren, my four-year-old son, after I hoist him onto the low moving chair. We settle in for the quiet ride above the snow. His first time riding the lift. 

I can tell he is scared of the height, but he keeps saying, “It isn’t so bad.” At the top, I yell, “tips up!” I grab him around the middle, and we dismount together. Down the hill again, he skis between my legs, chastises me for going too slow.

One cannot learn to ski by standing still. Its peculiar movement requires movement, in order to master it. Perhaps children are better at this than adults. They can more easily commit to movement, accept it as a reality.

Do not be afraid to go down...for I will make you great. (Genesis 46:3) Where am I not allowing movement, out of fear? Where am I trying to move by standing on top of the hill, analyzing how it might feel to go down? Where have I yet to learn the peace and unity and aliveness of motion? Am I preventing myself, my children, from facing the darkness and danger of going down?

Help me confront my fear, and to allow the motion, knowing You are there. Amen.

Symphony

In the symphony, all the instruments and all the players have their place. They can be classified according to their unique properties: the cellos, low and rich, sit opposite the rather more perky violins. The percussionists hide behind their contraptions, the woodwinds sit in an orderly row in front of the brass. (They try to shield their ears.)

What proceeds from this order? “The whole is larger than the sum of its parts.” Certainly. But talking of parts is mechanistic. It is no machine produced by this assemblage of minds and souls freely interacting with that most ineffable of languages, music.

I believe in the communion of saints. (Apostles Creed) A communion is a body, organic, not a machine. Like a symphony, it has an inner spirit governing, pulling at the players, drawing them forward, as they apply their best selves to the expression of what they hear. The purpose, destiny, and order of that inner spirit exists alongside the liberty of will to choose it.

Be united in the same mind. (1 Corinthians 1:10) The “mind” of a symphony unites the players. Its sublime, beautiful (and metaphysical) reality is apprehended when we are opened together to its inner spirit. 

Open us to your Spirit, as we hear and play the music together. Amen.

View/Listen to a fun and unusual symphony

A Silver Vessel

The steam has to go somewhere. Are you storing it up, hoping it will dissipate on its own? Does it come out anyway, in unfortunate ways?

A favorite song of mine is Under Pressure (David Bowie/Queen): It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about, watching some good friends scream “let me out!” You can see the pressure in people’s eyes, if you look closely. 

What pressures are acting upon your life? Are they environmental or self-constructed? I find something insidious lying in wait for me, underneath the specific pressures of time, task, and duty. Guilt. A far greater pressure, much more powerful in its hiddenness.

The law that promised life proved instead to be the death of me. (Romans 7:10) You have a natural desire to do good, to accomplish things, to provide for your family, and so on. (The “law” in its widest sense.) But when you realize you simply cannot do it, the guilt produces a lethal steam. 

How to let it off? Consider the artful way of the biblical songwriters. Send your complaint to the right address: to God. His forgiveness will give life where the law cannot. He can then channel the pressure and direct the steam to make a beautiful vessel out of you. 

Lord, remove the dross from my silver, so that I may be a vessel for the Silversmith. (Prayer based on Proverbs 25:4.)

Beauty Overcomes

My back hurts. Where is the sunlight? The kids are noisy. I’m tired. Eyes feel heavy. My, I am full of complaints today!

I step out my door and see a fall collage of deep orange and russet and scarlet, cast onto a paving stone as if arranged by an artist. The beauty of it penetrates the dark blanket of my mood. If just for a moment, I am captured and brought higher. 

If you have ever been captured by a symphony, a painting, a film, an autumn scene, or the shape of a person’s face, you know that beauty has power. It can take us out of ourselves, save us from our petty grievances, put our souls at rest, inspire us to become something great.

From Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth. (Psalm 50:2) The reason that beauty has such power is that it is spiritual in nature. It reflects God. The reason we crave it is that we are also spiritual in nature. The soul perceives itself in beauty. Can we verify the existence of the spiritual by means of beauty? 

Call my soul forth with your beauty, O God. Amen. 

Tears in a Wineskin

“In art there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.” —Louis Kronenberger.

I read a fine article in yesterday’s New York Times about a new Monet exhibit in Paris. The author (Michael Kimmelman) rightly praised Monet for being more than a “meteorologist” with paints, but someone who could describe states of mind.

What is your state of mind today? What image would you use to capture it? I recently found this verse incredibly descriptive of my state of mind: Oh, that I had wings of a dove! I could fly away and be at rest. Psalm 55:6

The image was powerful enough to make me cry. It hit me just at the right moment. Reading on, with tears dropping onto the page, I read another verse, another powerful image: Record my lament, put my tears in your wineskin. Psalm 56:8.

Could it be that every tear you have shed has been captured by God? Could it be that He will make such new and beautiful wine out of your tears that the old wineskin will simply burst? 

Record my tears on your scroll and put them in your wineskin, O God. Amen.

Ocean

Ahh, the ocean. Daydreaming about it is a favorite pastime of mine, especially this time of year after shoveling my driveway of snow. 

The ocean itself, however, is no daydream. It is there, always. It goes on and on. It can be touched, and yet not kept. It whispers or shouts, heaves, swells and makes its presence known. Its rhythms are reassuring, sounding a primal chord in us, recalling us to our source in the being of all things.

The ocean, like love, is steadfast. It is not there one minute and gone the next. It fills its designated space totally, yet yields to the slightest touch. 

His steadfast love endures forever. (Psalm 136:1) Have you experienced the kind of love that endures forever? The kind that starts with the exhilaration of cool sugar sand, water coming up to kiss the feet, leading you out through a breathtaking aqua, ever beckoning to an always deeper, wider, greater, unfathomable, and therefore sacred place?

How wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. (Ephesians 3:18) Draw me into your ocean, Jesus. Amen.

Suspended

The photographer sits still, suspended. He observes.

What is the difference between observation and activism?  Tolstoy the activist, for example, gave the world much less than Tolstoy the observer. As David Brooks recently put it, the best thing about Tolstoy was “his ability to see.” War and Peace magnificently observes the human condition, and makes Tolstoy’s later spiritual proselytizing seem mean and cheap.*

Observation goes against our grain. It is less about doing than about being. It is aesthetic and receptive, rather than logical and programmatic. How to practice this observation?

Behold, the glory of Yahweh appeared in the cloud. (Exodus 16:10) Go where there is cloud—the area where you hang suspended—and what do you see? A transition from one year to the next is a chance to stop, observe, journal, draw, behold. 

Can you receive it like an artist? Enjoy the suspension, do not fight, and the forward motion you seek will flow forth.

Help me to suspend judgment and behold, that I may find You. Amen.

*See Brook’s fine discussion of this point at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/opinion/26brooks.html