Caught Up

 To be caught up with Christ, in Christ, is to be filled with a love not only powerful enough to move the sun and stars but powerful enough to love that person we would otherwise despise. It is to love the kingdom of God more than the kingdoms of this world. It is to count all human empires as dirt, all our petty platforms and performances as dung.

To be caught up in Christ is to be enraptured by him, to be beholden to him, to be taken by him, to be---as seventeenth-century poet John Donne puts it---ravished by him.

Not just in the sky and on some future day.

But here.

And now. 

Just imagine it. 

The Evangelical Imagination

by Karen Swallow Prior 

London Weather

"On a day in late December when storm clouds made Alpine landscapes in the sky above London, when the wind played such havoc in the heavens that the city was one moment plunged in gloom and the next illuminated by sunlight, when rain rattled upon the windowpane, Mr Norrell was seated comfortably in his library before a cheerful fire. The tea table spread with a quantity of good things stood before him and in his hand was Thomas Lanchester's The Language of Birds."

~Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke 

More Vigorous Measures

They must retrench; that did not admit of a doubt. But she was very anxious to have it done with the least possible pain to him and Elizabeth. She drew up plans of economy, she made exact calculations, and she did what nobody else thought of doing: she consulted Anne, who never seemed considered by the others as having any interest in the question. She consulted, and in a degree was influenced by her, in marking out the scheme of retrenchment which was at last submitted to Sir Walter. Every emendation of Anne's had been on the side of honesty against importance. She wanted more vigorous measures, a more complete reformation, a quicker release from debt, a much higher tone of indifference for every thing but justice and equity.

from chapter two of Persuasion

~Jane Austen

Living Agency

 PERHAPS one reason why music is made so prominent among the revelations vouchsafed us of heaven, is because it imperatively requires living agency for its production.

 For I think that from this connection music produced by mere clockwork is fairly excluded: ingenious it may be, but inferior it cannot but be. 

Music, then, demands the living voice for its utterance, or, at the least, the living breath or the living finger to awaken a lifeless instrument. Written notes are not music until they find a voice. 

Written words are words even while unuttered, for, they convey through the eye an intellectual meaning.  But musical notes express sound, and nought beside sound. 

 A silent note, then, is a silent sound: and what can a silent sound be? 

The music of heaven, to become music, must have trumpeters and harpers as well as harps and trumpets, must have singers as well as songs. 

“Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. 

. . . As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there.”

~Christina Rossetti

Time Flies

February 10

The End of Advent

I’ve noticed in recent years, however, that the feeling comes over me more rarely than it used to, and for shorter bits of time. I have to pursue the sense of wonder, the taste in the air, and cling to it self-consciously. Even for me, the endless roar of untethered Christmas anticipation is close to drowning out the disciplined anticipation of Advent. And when Christmas itself arrives, it has begun to seem a day not all that different from any other. Oh, yes, church and home to a big dinner. Presents for the children. A set of decorations. But nothing special, really.

from "The End of Advent"

by Joseph Bottom

 

Complexity of Art: Imagery and Types

Sometimes I tear the front of a card apart from the handwritten greeting, if the picture is interesting and the text not so much. 

The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt (1854-55) is one such picture I found filed away.

Although the composition includes an animal, colorful rainbow, and majestic mountain scape, I knew that I couldn't recycle the image to send to just anyone. 

Maybe I'll just keep it for mental exercise. 

What questions would you ask?

Here is a link to a more extended discussion about the piece and the artist:

 The Scapegoat