Grief Needs Beauty

Reading an excerpt from chapter 9 of my book "Meet Mama Bear." "Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast, hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And, just at the moment when someone says, 'There, she is gone,' there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, 'Here she comes!' And that is dying." (Henry Van Dyke)

Pressing into Pope Benedict the 16th's words at a gathering of artists:

"The world in which we live runs the risk of being altered beyond recognition because of unwise human actions which, instead of cultivating its beauty, unscrupulously exploit its resources for the advantage of a few and not infrequently disfigure the marvels of nature. What is capable of restoring enthusiasm and confidence, what can encourage the human spirit to rediscover its path, to raise its eyes to the horizon, to dream of a life worthy of its vocation – if not beauty?"

Encouragement and hope starting with these words from William Faulkner, especially for those that home has been a place of pain: "I give you this not that you may remember time, but that you may forget about it for a little while. I can only tell you that time is me turning and turning while the world is turning around a star that turns around a center that turns around the all of space. Among all the other things, all the turning animals and all the turning worlds, there is me... turning to you."

Considering Dorothy Sayers words in "Mind of the Maker": "Looking at man, something is essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what is written about the original upon which the 'image' of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, 'God created.' The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things."

Considering the "doing" we are called to via Marilynne Robinson's words: "Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm."

Focusing today on Annie Dillard's lines from "For the Time Being":

"You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants' murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants.

As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days 'affords' us that precise association with God that redeems both us and our speck of world."

On lines from chapter 29 of "The Screwtape Letters" by CS Lewis": "He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful until it became risky."

Considering a paragraph from an article called "Lighten Up, Christians! God Loves A Good Time" by ND Wilson,

"We say we want to be like God, and we feel we mean it. But we don't. Not to be harsh, but if we did really mean it, we would be having a lot more fun than we are. We aim for safety and cultural respectability instead of following our stated first principles: that we are made in God's image and should strive to imitate him. We live as if God were an infinite list of negatives. He is holiness, the rawest and richest of all purity. In our bent way of thinking, that makes him the biggest stress-out of all. But holiness is nothing like a building code. Holiness is 80-year-old hands crafting an apple pie for others, again."

Borrowing and running with a line from "Orthodoxy" by GK Chesterton, let's expound on the theme of this podcast: "And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild."