Greek funerary sculpture, 4th-3rd century B.C. (National Archaeological Museum, Athens)
So long as one hopes, one puts oneself at the mercy of the future.
––Didier Maleuvre
When we say goodbye to the Old Year tonight, it will be with considerable relief. Whatever our private griefs and losses may have been (I lost 5 beloved elders as well as my best friend), the long-term public damage to people and planet is almost beyond measure. Will the New Year be any better? We can only hope, and that leaves us, as Maleuvre says, at the mercy of the future.
Maleuvre’s resonant phrase comes from his analysis of the human face in ancient sculpture:
“The head that tops Egyptian statuary is really a death mask. Expectation, longing, hope… are absent from the Egyptian physiognomy. What they carved in rock is the hard stare of compulsive serenity, of a mind set in foregone conclusions. Longing tends to stretch the boundaries of reality; it opens up prospects, possibilities, contingencies. So long as one hopes, one puts oneself at the mercy of the future… But this expecting mode is absent in Egyptian statuary, the faces and forms of which feature none of the muscular readiness of Greek figures. The latter wade in the stream of time, on the watch for the unforeseen, ready to contend. Whereas the Egyptian statue expects nothing from the world: its blank equanimity is not even the quiescence of stoic wisdom, but of a mind dead set against wonder.”[i]
If any of us were really capable of the “compulsive serenity” or “blank equanimity” of an existence without surprise, possibility or risk, would we really choose it––“a mind dead set against wonder,” expecting nothing, hoping for nothing?
It is not in our nature to do so. We are creatures of longing and hope, and it is our fate to wade into the stream of time, come what may. But as the biblical God tells us at the beginning of every quest, “Do not be afraid. I will go with you.”
So let us go bravely into the New Year, to do the work and be the change.
And twelve months hence, may all our songs be glad.
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Dear reader –– Thank you for honoring this writer with your attentive reading and thoughtful feedback in 2017. I am also very grateful for those times you have shared a post with your own friends and communities. It is encouraging to know that these reflections mean something to you, and that you find them meaningful for others as well. So I thank you for your support of my writing ministry. I will do my best never to waste your time. Happy New Year!
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Some of my favorite posts from 2017:
The arts
And whether art is a mirror of the human condition, a window into beauty both immanent and transcendent, or a hammer to shatter our complacencies, it shares many of the tasks and effects of religion.
To Plough and Harrow the Soul: The Shared Work of Art and Faith
Kieslowski’s Decalogue: A Masterpiece of Religious Cinema
Culture
We may have lost our innocence about the world––and about the traces of darkness in our own hearts––but we are still prisoners of hope. Our formative glimpses of a new heaven and a new earth may have come and gone, but their influence still lingers. However chastened or weary we may be, a sense of expectation remains. What Jesus called the Kingdom of Godis a future of human flourishing and divine blessing that still pulls on us with gravitational force. Its current absence doesn’t dim our faith. It only intensifies our longing.
Everything Changed, Nothing Changed (Summer of Love, Part 3)
Mortality
None of us will be shouting “Hey, look, it’s me!” in heaven.
We won’t even be shouting “Hallelujah!”
We will have become Hallelujah!
“You say goodbye, I say hello”: A Requiem Sermon
In Paradisum: On the Death of a Friend
Falling Leaves and the Fate of Mortals
Wonder
When [the eclipse] was over, what lingered was the overwhelming sense that I had experienced both immanence and transcendence in a single image, its roundness like a sacramental Host lifted above the altar of the world. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem too much to claim that within the visionary interval of totality my deepest longing was met by an answering Presence.
[i] Didier Maleuvre, The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing (, Berkeley: UC Press, 2011), 16.
The religious imagineer 