My distress is great and unknown to men. They are cruel to me, for they wish to dissuade me From all that the forces of Love urge me to. They do not understand it, and I cannot explain it to them. I must then live out what I am; What Love counsels my spirit, In…
Category
Poetry
Wallace Stevens: Reality is The Product of Imagination
“To Wallace Stevens, reality is the product of the imagination, as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an…
Fortune by Dobby Gibson
Fortune We think we are little gods yet the one thing we fear most is to be left alone So we carve one another’s names into the desktops, drop rocks from the trestle. We invent and overuse the long vowel. To be loved, speak with your hands. To learn how, open a magazine and try…
Why Poetry Matters
Poets write in the line of prophecy, and their work teaches us how to live. The language of poetry, when properly absorbed, becomes part of our private vocabulary, our way of moving through the world. —Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters Photo by Céline Clanet.
How Beauty Will Save the World
Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn proclaimed that beauty will save the world and this essay explores how Blake’s prophetic writings (especially “Jerusalem”) reveal how beauty transforms individuals and societies. Beauty need not be a commodity, a thing to be craved. Beauty can be about perceiving the divine in every thing, and such spiritual materialism can engender social justice. …
On Earth Day: Song in a Year of Catastrophe
Landscape 18 Acrylic Painting by Miki, Queen of Planet Goodaboom I began to be followed by a voice saying: “It can’t last. It can’t last. Harden yourself. Harden yourself. Be ready. Be ready.” “Go look under the leaves,” it said, “for what is living there is long dead in your tongue.” And it said, “Put…
The nightmare of His sepulcher
Max Beckmann, “Descent from the Cross” oil on canvas, 1917 What hard travail God does in death! He strives in sleep, in our despair, And all flesh shudders underneath The nightmare of His sepulcher. The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone; All night the cold wind heaves and pries; Creation strains sinew and bone Against…
Lewis Carroll, Orthodox/Quaker Thought, The Audobon Society, and the Willingness to Squint
An extraordinary presentation by Callid Keefe-Perry at Theology After Google. The part that really stuck with me was when he quoted Rufus Jones’ Introduction to George Fox’s journal. “…real spiritual life begins when the individual becomes aware of [God].” This really makes me think of the example Peter Rollins uses when speaking about the God…
To Spring by William Blake
O THOU with dewy locks, who lookest down Through the clear windows of the morning, turn Thine angel eyes upon our western isle, Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring! The hills tell one another, and the listening Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turn’d Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth…
The Meaning of Spiritual Love
When you regarded me Your eyes imprinted your grace in me, In this, you loved me again, And thus my eyes merited To also love what you see in me… Let us go forth together to see ourselves in Your beauty. ~St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 32, 33 Our book group is currently…