Lightning

I recently dreamt that I stood under a bolt of lightning. A searing stream of energy poured forth out of a white globe in the clouds. Amazingly, I was not hurt. Rather than feeling afraid, I felt safe. As I watched it move across the landscape and over me, somehow I knew that it would protect me even as it charged everything else in its path. It felt like God’s powerful presence surrounding me.

As the dream faded into the reality of the day, the vivid memory of it remained. Then several unique things happened that brought great alteration, significant change, and God’s hand upon my life. I kept going back to the imagery of the dream. 

The voice of the Lord strikes with flashes of lightning. (Psalm 29:7) In the forces of nature, we find God. Too often we only hear of how this indicates punishment—as in, “If you’ve been bad, you’ll get struck by lightning!” Even worse is to place blame: “The earthquake was God’s retribution on those wicked ones.”

The whole creation groans.(Rom 8:22) It bucks and heaves just as we do inside of our souls, yearning for peace. My dream reminded me that God’s lightning-strong power is for the world, and uniquely, for me.

Unleash your creative power in our world, God, and in my life. Amen.

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Read Bono, A.S. Byatt, and the Dalai Lama's personal repsonse to books of the Bible.

The why and the how of lightning.

How do I capture something like this on film?

Guidance

Around the narrow turn, my bicycle sails through a damp but warm October morning. Downhill over wet leaves, trees in a canopy above, I think, “What a perfect ride.” Just then I see a parked construction vehicle blocking the road. Too close to avoid, I brake, spin out over the leaves, and take a bad fall. My left shoulder takes the brunt of the impact.

Three months later, thinking things are back to normal, I go to the gym. After a couple workouts in a week, my shoulder is worse than before. Another three months, and here I sit, with a physical therapist, still in pain. “You thought it was healed,” he says, showing me a mechanical diagram of the muscles and tendons. “It will heal. But nobody told you, it needs to be guided to heal the right way.” 

The body is a delicate thing, but also strong and able to heal when guided to do so. How much more so is the soul delicate, strong, and able to heal, when guided to move toward healing. Such guidance comes from mentors who understand the why and the how of things better than I do.

The wise listen and find guidance. (Proverbs 1:5) Who are my mentors? What wounds—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual—are not healing well for lack of proper guidance? 

In my wounds, God, help me not to ignore the guidance available to me. Amen.

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Albrecht Durer remains one of the world's most influential and creative artists. He wanted to understand not only the how of drawing but the why. He combined a scientific understanding of the body with artistic observation, depth of feeling, and spirituality. Some of his images have become icons the world over, such as "Praying Hands."

Creators by Paul Johnson is an energetic and very readable account of people like Dürer who have left a lasting mark on the world through their art. Bach, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, T.S. Eliott, Picasso, and Walt Disney are among the lives depicted. 

Johnson argues that the kind of creativity they pursued, often under great duress, was of a different degree than most other forms of creativity, but that the creative spirit lies within everyone. Johnson examines whether there is such a thing as a "typical artist," comparing and contrasting their lives, and finding great inspiration in their efforts.

Durer was also a writer and philosopher who wanted to pass along his knowledge to future artists.

Johnson says of Dürer's On Human Proportion, "The conclusion to the third book deals with aesthetics and the relationship between man, art, and God."

Heroes' Feet: One Day Without Shoes

Chapel Address, Concordia College—New York 

April 5, 2011

As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. Luke 7:38

Look at your feet. Look closely. What do you see there? What adjective would you use? Large? Small? Calloused? Lumpy? Sore? Painted? Cute?

How about this one—beautiful. I’m not sure we usually think of feet as beautiful. I remember trying to draw feet in drawing class, having to focus on the shapes and contours. I realized that the more you look at them, the more beautiful they are. Like a lot of things, actually, the more you look at them.

How beautiful your sandaled feet, O prince’s daughter! Your graceful legs are like jewels, the work of an artist’s hands! (Song of Solomon 7:1)

Another adjective—heroic. Depictions of Greek heroes going into battle are always barefoot. I wonder why? It is a sign of strength, surely. By connecting to the earth we draw on its power. But we also draw on the connective power of shared humanity, as we walk the same ground today as those who have no shoes. Maybe they are heroes. Maybe you are heroes. When you see your feet, do you think, these are a hero’s feet?

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, says Isaiah.

You are a hero because of the good news you bring today, the solidarity you proclaim by going without shoes. 

But you will also go places with these feet. Places that you never thought possible. You will be a hero in those places, because you will bring shoes to children, you will bring good tidings and love to forgotten places. You won’t bring God, he’s already in those places. But you’ll discover Him there. As you sit at others’ feet.

Jesus washed his disciples’ feet to signify that he was their servant. And to remind them of baptism, that their sin was washed away. But it was also to send them, to say to them, you have beautiful and heroic feet. You will go places with these feet.

There’s one more adjective—loving. Are your feet loving? Can you love someone’s feet? There was a woman who was so overcome with love for Jesus that she washed his feet with her tears and caressed them with her hair. Guys and gals take note: if you love someone, say it to their feet. A little washing, caressing, and perfume will go a long way. Maybe at the end of today especially.

Jesus washes our feet so that we may go out to the farthest corners of the earth, to give of ourselves and become who we really are: beautiful, heroic, and loving. Amen.

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Join the Day Without Shoes, Tuesday April 5, 2011:

More at One Day Without Shoes | www.onedaywithoutshoes.com

Snowdrop

“Why does Mother Nature have to do this?” said my son, waking to another cold March morning. 

The winter has been cold, and the cold seems to linger into spring, causing the snowdrops—and the people—to wilt. The word “motivation” seems a long way off in this sort of vague, prolonged, ill-defined weather. 

Another thing that causes people to wilt: an ideal God. An ideal God is a cold God, detached from flesh and blood, from the world and humanity. A God of abstract “truth” does not know the daily cross of fledgeling snowdrops trying to push through layers of old ice-encrusted ways, struggling in order to grow and become. 

And the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he lived in the wilderness. (Luke 1:80) Jesus, very far from abstract “good,” must be the earthbound snowdrop, growing while hidden away in the cold wilderness, until the right time comes.

Can I look at my time in hidden struggle and see the child of God growing in Spirit? Can I see my life infused with beauty, grace, love, and abundance—even in the cold?

When I wilt, Lord, may my Spirit grow and still push upward. Amen.

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Something Good This Way Comes! A good thing to remember in March.

A little medicine for the soul: some good Baroque.

Masterpiece

Michelangelo saw it: the human being as a sign of the divine. Here is David, no groveling religious penitent, no poor grubby shepherd, but a confident man surveying his horizons. He is absolutely and serenely part of nature, unclothed with only a sling at his shoulder, and yet an image of that which transcends nature: beauty itself, grace itself, harmony itself. 

I have found David a man after my own heart. (Acts 13:22) David’s humility is his confident acceptance of his place, as standing between the natural and the divine. His pose is a repose, a trust in knowing who he is. His nakedness is both an embrace of wild nature, even its sexuality, as well as a return to pureness, a primal unity of soul and body, spirit and flesh.

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his Being. (Hebrews 1:3) As with David, so with Jesus. “The soul is the form of the body,” says Aristotle. Put differently, the ideal is right there in front of you, bodily, if you will just look at it, not through it or above it or away from it. 

Whom do I tend to look through rather than at? Do I see myself, as a human being, where I truly stand before God?  

Teach me to stand confidently, seeing who I really am in Your order. Amen.

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"There's a light making its way

On up the mountain, night and day

You'll get tired, you may weep

But you won't abandon your masterpiece."

Titan's Goblet

With aesthetic logic, everything is a sign, even the fantastical. Thomas Cole, 19th-century American landscape painter, seems to be evoking this logic with his unusual and imaginative painting, Titan’s Goblet. 

Get inside the image for a moment. Feel the romance and the reality of it. Enjoy its sunset repose over the lake, floating far above the world, surrounded by lush greenery, inside a giant chalice. Wonder with the image: Who made this? Is this a scene of memory, about lost age of giants? Or is it about something to come, an evocation of an abundant, heavenly place? Who lives at the base of the cliff, who sails on the water? Could this exist, and if so, how do I get there?

Call to me, and I will answer you; I will tell you of great things, things beyond the reach of your knowledge. (Jeremiah 33:3) The reason Cole’s painting is so powerful is that it is both simple and natural. It convinces us of a solid reality, yet one that is beyond the reach of our current experience. In this sense it is a “cosmological proof”: an example of how the mind can take something within the known, natural universe (in this case a cup), and rearrange it to conceive the divine. Can I allow myself to meditate on such possibilities?

Take me beyond the reach of my knowledge, to your titanic font. Amen.

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Broken

Search the word “beauty” and I find only glossy advertisements for makeup. No wonder we associate aesthetic terms like image with shallowness, as in, “He only does that to maintain his image.” If beauty is only skin deep, it has no purpose other than sales and marketing.
If image is only a tool for our momentary politics, how can it provide any depth of meaning? 

The question about beauty is: can we see it even in what is broken?  The artist Marcel Duchamp loved to let randomness appear in his work. Meticulously crafting a sculpture in glass, he would let the glass fall to the floor and break. He wanted to preserve the broken pattern, to insist on our looking at it, rather than past it.

My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit. (Psalm 51:17) Broken glass, broken bones are one thing, but the worst and very deepest place to experience brokenness is in one’s soul. And yet, God sees brokenness there and affirms it as that most holy of acts: sacrifice in worship. 

“Grace makes beauty out of ugly things,” goes a U2 song. Can we look at the broken Son of God and realize what God saw there?  

God, help me not to deny what is broken, but to see it as You do. Amen.

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Just because I'm losing, doesn't mean I'm Lost!

"Put your brokenness under the blessing." Henri Nouwen

Rising From Ashes

What can be done with ash? As it turns out, a whole lot: it can be used to polish silver, fertilize tomatoes, hide paint stains on the driveway, and make soap. “You can also use it to make your bowling shoes stick better,” a friend of mine said. 

What can be done with the ash inside of me? This is the real question. That which is dead, burnt, sinful in me—can I place even these things under the aesthetic? Is everything really a sign? Even pain, suffering, brutality, betrayal, death? Are these part of a good universe made by a good God?

I will die in my own house, my days as numerous as the Pheonix. (Job 29:18) The beautiful, ancient and artistic vision of the Pheonix, rising again from its own ashes after 500 years, conveys a different and unconventional way of interpreting our ashes. Job was a phoenix-like character who had faith in rebirth, even while he was sick, homeless, penniless, and without his family. According to the cause-and-effect thinking of Job’s friends, these were all signs of Job’s own failure as a person.  

The mythological bird spoken of by Job is a sign of something else, something very real and necessary: death and resurrection. If the first man came from dust, the reborn man must come from ash. 

Teach me about my suffering, my evil, and my sin, that I may rise again. Amen.

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Voltaire on the Phoenix:

It was the size of an eagle, but its eyes were as mild and tender as those of the eagle are fierce and threatening. Its beak was the color of rose...its neck resembled all the colors of the rainbow, but more brilliant and lively. A thousand shades of gold glistened on its plumage. Its feet seemed a mixture of purple and silver; and the tail of those [other] beautiful birds...did not come near to the beauty of its tail.

The Egyptian Phoenix: A White Heron

Aberdeen Bestiary

Persian mythology: the Simurgh

Himeji Castle, "Oshiru" (White Heron),

(Himeji is a sister city to Pheonix, Arizona!)

An honest prayer for resurrection.

One of Springsteen's best efforts, on rising from the ashes of 9-11.

Rhubarb Pie

+Cordelia Marie Obermueller+

February 16, 1919 – October 12, 2010

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like a piece of fresh rhubarb pie. If you haven’t had it, try some. (I like it best without the strawberries; they mask the unique tartness of the rhubarb.) 

Rhubarb pie will forever remind me of my grandmother, who died this past week. Grandma “Obie” was a fabulous cook, and loved to bake—cinnamon rolls! raisin cream cookies! and, oh the pies!—for her grandkids.

She was a woman of great faith. For her, baking and cooking was for fun and family and fellowship, and it had to do with serving God. She understood that God shines forth through love given in family, friends, community, and church. Especially around meals.

In October, the Festival of Booths (Tabernacles), celebrates a God who is present with people. When? At a meal! Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing. Do not grieve, for the joy of Yahweh is your strength. (Nehemiah 8:10)

God comes to people wherever they are, in whatever poor temporary tent-structures they have, whatever the condition of their life. It is in the sharing of bread—or rhubarb—that the Word truly becomes flesh and lives among us. (John 1:14) 

Help me not to grieve, but to see your presence in the people I love. Amen. 

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Babette's Feast is a priceless film about how a meal can be truly spiritual and transform lives.

On my reading list: Women, Food and God. It is a look at how one's relationship to food is a sign of something much deeper and spiritual. Sounds like what I call aesthetic logic!

The Main Sign

One of the most important reasons to develop aesthetic logic is so that we can read signs. If we can’t read, we can’t know, and therefore we can’t act. 

Imagine getting turned around driving because you can’t read the street sign (this happens to me often). “Where am I?” you ask. Out comes the GPS and the map. You look at secondary signs because the main sign was obscured. 

The problem is that we tend not to know which sign is the main one, or even that it is a sign. Which is the main sign? “Know thyself,” Socrates said. A faulty reading of ourselves as human persons is perhaps the worst sort of getting lost. Misreading ourselves, we then also misinterpret the secondary signs (science, nature, law, politics).

Jesus corrects this misreading of ourselves. We look to him as a human sign, a sign of what God stamped on us all: we have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge, in the image of its Creator. (Colossians 3:10) 

Have I read myself as a sign lately? Through the lens of Jesus, the main sign? How might that change my direction?

Renew my knowledge of myself, and guide me to the right road. Amen.

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ON SIGNS and secondary signs, see St. John of Damascus, "On the Divine Images."

SLOW DOWN and read the signs of self and identity, humor and redemption of brothers, as you travel the road by tractor with the intriguing and unusual main character of "The Straight Story."