Peering into the unknown in Jónsi’s FLÓÐ, a multi-sensory installation in Seattle’s Nordic Museum.
I have been writings this blog since 2014, and the turning of time at the New Year has always provoked an annual reflection on our temporal existence. If, as 2023 slips away, you’re in the mood for one of those essays, here are some links:
Hope has been my recurring theme at year’s end. On the eve of 2024, it’s a precious commodity. Two years ago, I wrote Tending Hope’s Flame on an Anxious New Year’s Eve. With the flag of hope tattered and torn by endless battles, I drew inspiration from Thoreau, who continued his quiet work of studying the natural world even as the Civil War ravaged the American consciousness. We must, he argued, refuse the hypnotic spell of the chaos which seeks to seduce our gaze. The refusal to take our eye from the transcendent goodness and beauty at the heart of things is “the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil.”
As midnight fast approaches, I don’t have much to add, except a few lines from W. H. Auden’s New Year Letter (January 1940). Written in search of a foundation for living amid amid the chaos of war and the collapse of the known order nearly a century ago, some of it speaks directly to our own present moment:
The situation of our time Surrounds us like a baffling crime …
We find ourselves in Purgatory, Back on the same old mountain side With only guessing for a guide …
The New Year brings an earth afraid …
But then Auden addresses a particular friend who has been for him a shelter from the storm:
We fall down in the dance, we make The old ridiculous mistake, But always there are such as you, Forgiving, helping what we do …
Tonight let’s raise a glass to the ones who forgive, and the ones who help. And that brings me to the photograph I took last summer while immersed in FLÓÐ (Flood), a multi-sensory simulation of oceanic depths by Icelandic artist Jónsi. The two figures gazing into the mist remind me of old illustrations of Dante and Virgil in the Inferno. No matter how unsettling the sights along the way, the companions of the Divine Comedy are usually seen side by side, slightly apart from the next horror, retaining enough detachment from the chaos and pain to analyze and learn from it, without getting sucked into it themselves. And whenever the pilgrim Dante misunderstands what he sees, or succumbs to fear, his guide is there to help.
Virgil leads Dante out of Hell (14c MS).
One of my favorite Divine Comedy illustrations is in a 14th-century manuscript of Dante’s poem. Having traversed the dark way to stand once more beneath the stars, Virgil reaches back to pull Dante out of the pit as well. It’s like that beautiful line in “Auld Lang Syne”:
And here’s a hand, my trusty friend, And gie’s a hand o’ thine.
As we make our own way through the peril and promise of the coming year, may the helpers be there when we need them. And God willing, may we all “take a cup o’ kindness yet.”
Happy New Year, dear Reader. May peace and wisdom abound in the days to come! Thank you for your thoughtful attention in 2023. I’ll see you again on the other side.
“The old year now away is fled …” (New Year’s Carol)
Do you have hope for the future? someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. Yes, and even for the past, he replied, that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was, something we can accept, mistakes made by the selves we had to be—not able to be, perhaps, what we had wished or, what looking back half the time it seems we easily could have been, or ought to have been … The future, yes, and even for the past, that it will be something we can bear.
— David Ray, Sam’s Book (Wesleyan, 1987)
Happy New Year, one and all!! And thank you, dear reader, for all the times you dropped by to read and reflect and respond over the past twelve months. I am grateful for your thoughtful attention, and for your supportive sharing of the posts that move you. Thus does our circle of thought grow wider.
As we prepare for the turning of the year, let me pass on to you two gifts for the occasion from John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2020). The first is a story from Ireland:
One night, around a campfire, a band of Celtic warriors begin to debate what might constitute the finest music in the world. One man says it is ‘The cuckoo calling from the tree that is highest in the hedge,’ while others jump in to suggest ‘the top of music is the ring of a spear on a shield’ … ‘No, it’s the bellowing of a stag across a lake’ … ‘It’s the song of a lark’ … ‘It’s the laugh of a gleeful girl.’ Finally, they turn to their chief, Fionn, and ask him what he would choose, to which he replies: ‘The music of what happens. That is the finest music in the world.’
The second New Year’s gift is Burnside’s translation from the Ninth of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The “once and no more” need not be a denial of resurrection (we are, I believe, more than “earthly”), but it is a candid reminder to savor the gift of every moment and every face.
A time for everything, but only once. Once and no more. And we too, only once. Never again. But to have been here this once, even if only once: to have been earthly, this cannot be revoked.
A snowman surrenders to what Susan Sontag called “time’s relentless melt” (Jan. 3, 2022).
And if you’d like to revisit some past New Year’s Eve reflections on our dance with time, click the links below. May 2023 be a year of grace for you and those you love. Great joy to the New!
There is an element of carnival this night, as we throw off the tyranny of good order for a bit of wild excess, declaring independence from the way things are in the name of things to come. But the night’s underlying theme is not chaos but renewal.
It seems fitting that the world festival of the turning of time comes in the middle of the Twelve Days of Christmas, since the Incarnation is God’s decisive embrace of the temporal and finite, while extending – simultaneously – an invitation to us humans to embody in ourselves the divine kenosis – the eternal self-emptying that constitutes God’s trinitarian life. In other words, both human and divine are all about giving over and letting go. Never just being, but also becoming.
At year’s end, I sometimes lapse into a retrospective melancholy, thinking of people, moments, experiences and places that have come and gone in my life, some for the last time. My sense of future will revive at midnight, when we will go outside to bang gongs, beat drums and blow kazoos and whistles to welcome the New. But until then, impermanence shall be my partner in the year’s last dance.
With the flag of hope tattered and torn by endless battles, I draw inspiration from Thoreau, who continued his quiet work of studying the natural world even as the Civil War ravaged the American consciousness. We must, he argued, refuse the hypnotic spell of the chaos which seeks to seduce our gaze. The refusal to take our eye from the transcendent goodness and beauty at the heart of things is “the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil.”
Little Nemo dreams about the New Year (Winsor McCay, Dec. 27, 1908).
My times are in your hand; deliver me.
— Psalm 31:15
Time is our choice of how to love and why.
— W. H. Auden
The turning of the year is the only ritual observance shared universally by humankind. Each religion has its own sacred days scattered across the months, but tonight everyone on earth will join in one great procession, time zone by time zone, into the New Year. We pause a moment to look back, with a mixture of gratitude and regret; then we turn our faces toward the unwritten future. We usually do this with gleeful clamor and warm embraces, welcoming the New with our brightest hopes. The arrival of 2022 may strike a more tentative note.
In my seven years of blogging, I have written a reflection every New Year’s Eve. Most of those posts have been about hope. On the eve of 2017, with my country “teetering on the brink of insanity and ruin,” I hoped that we would “not to be mesmerized by the abyss,” but rather be on the watch for the divine ingenuity “already and always at work amid the blind sufferings of history.”
Three years later, with the flag of hope tattered and torn by endless battles, I drew inspiration from Thoreau, who continued his quiet work of studying the natural world even as the Civil War ravaged the American consciousness. We must, he argued, refuse the hypnotic spell of the chaos which seeks to seduce our gaze. The refusal to take our eye from the transcendent goodness and beauty at the heart of things is “the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil.”
At the end of 2021, such spiritual poise feels elusive, if not unimaginable. This was supposed to be the year we returned to normal. With COVID now raging like the fires and storms of climate change, and our body politic critically ill with malice and madness, normal is no longer on the itinerary.
Didier Maleuvre, a specialist in the study of Western culture, describes hope as an inherently perilous task: “So long as one hopes, one puts oneself at the mercy of the future.” Isn’t that where we find ourselves on the eve of 2022—at the mercy of the future? It is an unnerving time for sure, and few of us will be stepping so bravely into the New Year tonight.
Yet we must, now more than ever, light our candles in this dark and declare our fidelity to the dawn, whenever and however it may come. God desires a better world. However our follies may frustrate and obstruct divine hope, God is wiser than despair. “Behold,” says the Holy One, “I make all things new.”[i] May we all heed the summons to embody that great redemptive labor in our own stories, whether it be in small acts of kindness or collective works of social and spiritual transformation.
The world as we know it is passing away. But death is never the final meaning, only the portal to new birth. Can we embrace this moment in time as an invitation to radical transformation? The Indian writer Arundhati Roy expresses such a hope:
“What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus … It has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality,’ trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”[ii]
Imagine a better world and walk toward it.
Dear reader, I believe that our faith and our love, as well as our hope, will be severely tested in the coming year. When the demons of weariness and discouragement do their worst, remember the Paschal Mystery: The way down is the way up.
When Dante’s descent into the abyss of Hell reached its deepest point, his downward trajectory ceased. Once the poet passed through the nadir—the center of the earth—his motion became, without a change in direction, an ascent back toward the surface. His journey taught him that even the “lightless way,” if you take it far enough, is bound for glory.
… we climbed the dark until we reached the point where a round opening brought in sight the blest
and beauteous shining of the Heavenly cars. And we walked out once more beneath the Stars. [iii]
Virgil leads Dante out of Hell (14c MS).
Dear readers, thank you for engaging with my posts over the last year. I am especially grateful when your own thinking is stirred or your soul is fed by what you find here. My work is to pass on whatever comes to me in reading, experience and the occasional inspiration, planting what seeds I can in the community garden. It is a labor of love. To all who take the time to write a comment or share a post with others, thank you for valuing and extending the conversation.
I wish for you both courage and joy in the New Year. Keep tending the fires of hope!
For summaries and links for previous New Year’s Eve posts, click here.
[ii] Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal,” in Freedom. Fascism. Fiction, (New York: Penguin, 2020). This quote has been widely posted on the Internet, and you can see her read the full text on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7hgQFaeaeo0
[iii] Dante Alighieri, Inferno xxxiv.140-143. John Ciardi translation.
Fiona Hall installation, Australian pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent the Son, born of a woman …
— The Letter of Paul to the Galatians (4:4)
In my six years of blogging, I have always posted a reflection on New Year’s Eve. The symbolic border between old and new prompts the big questions: Where have we been? Where are we going? If “Time is our choice of How to love and Why,”[i] are we using it well? Here are links to all my past posts dated December 31, followed by some thoughts at the end of a year like no other.
The Angel of Possibility(2014) Fresh starts nurture fresh hopes, but the turning of the year is of itself not enough to save us. The only sustainable new birth is rooted in the Nativity’s marriage of earth and heaven, finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, human and divine, and I am grateful that our passage into the New Year falls in the middle of the Christmas feast, enriched by faith’s larger hopes. We are not alone. As the Psalmist cries to the Holy One, “My times are in your hand; deliver me.” (Psalm 31:15)
Tick, Tock: Thoughts for New Year’s Eve(2015) On the one night of the year when countless human beings devote collective awareness to the vanishing Now (at least for the last 10 seconds of the 12th month), time is on everyone’s mind. And though there may be little consensus on the theoretical nature of time, we are all immersed in its flow, or what Susan Sontag called “time’s relentless melt.” We feel keenly the effects of beginnings, transitions, losses and endings. At year’s end, we pause on the razor’s edge between old and new, memory and expectation, regret and hope. When we dance our welcome to the New, may that narrow boundary prove wide enough for our joyful steps.
Foolishness and Hope on the Eve of 2017(2016) At the outset of our 4-year political and social nightmare, I beheld my country teetering on the brink of insanity and ruin. The New Year brought more dread than hope. It demanded a sturdier and steadier kind of moral resolve than the customary pledges of self-improvement. It required that we renounce despair. “We would do well,” I wrote, “not to be mesmerized by the abyss, but to focus on the greater power already and always at work amid the blind sufferings of history. God neither causes nor prevents those sufferings, but divine ingenuity always outwits them in the end.”
At the Mercy of the Future(2017) My title came from Didier Maleuvre: So long as one hopes, one puts oneself at the mercy of the future. 2017 was a painful year to be a person of hope, but I found consolation in Maleuvre’s study of ancient sculpture, contrasting the “readiness” of Greek statuary with the blank visages of Egyptian figures, who appear to expect nothing from the world, their minds closed to wonder, risk, or surprise. I myself am partial to the Greeks. “We are creatures of longing and hope,” I wrote, “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 journey, Do not be afraid. I will go with you.”
On New Year’s Eve, My Inner Clown is Full of Hope(2018) Midway through the Trumpian hell, I hear the voices of three poets tending the flame of hope. In “O Esperanza,” Catherine Barnett cites one of her teachers, the philosopher Richard Rorty: “Just before he died, Rory said his sense of the holy was bound up with the hope / that someday our remote descendants will live in a global civilization / in which love is pretty much the only law.”
Farewell to a Decade. And then?(2019) The strain of these evil times was taking its toll on everyone as the decade ended. I recalled how Thoreau ignored the outbreak of the Civil War in his voluminous journal while continuing to register the doings of nature in extensive detail. When asked how he could remain silent on such a momentous national subject, Thoreau said that refusing to let our attention be consumed by the hypnotic gaze of chaos “is just the most fatal, and indeed the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil.” In that same spirit, I wrote: “2020 promises an immense struggle requiring the best of us, and I am grateful for those who plan to welcome the New Year with their most prayerful attention, keeping their eye on the Light rather than being transfixed by the dark abyss of malevolence.”
Harold Lloyd, Safety Last (1923).
As for 2020, does anyone expect it to go quietly, to cease at midnight from doing further harm? Though we may find catharsis in shouting our “good riddances!” tonight, this year’s manifold ills will linger a while longer, and fresh starts will take time. Tomorrow morning the world will look much the same. “A change is gonna come,”[ii] but not in an instant.
Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long; Beneath the heavenly hymn have rolled two thousand years of wrong. [iii]
Lancelot Andrewes, a 17th-century English bishop, preached seventeen Christmas Day sermons before King James in the Chapel Royal. Preachers who struggle to come up with fresh Nativity sermons year after year must stand in awe of Andrewes’ inexhaustible richness of expression and range of thought. “He cuts and polishes a text, like a jeweler a diamond,” wrote a later editor of those sermons, “and the rays of truth from its heart of light flash from every facet.” [iv]
The bishop’s Christmas sermon of 1609 explored St. Paul’s verse (Galatians 4:4) about the “fullness of time.” For Andrewes, St. Paul’s phrase itself is full, generating a surplus of meanings and implications. It suggests a condition of completeness, where nothing essential is lacking. More specifically, it designates the pivotal moment of history’s ripening, producing the Incarnate Word, the crown of creation. But the fullness is not just a property of time. It is an attribute of God: the overflowing fullness of Divine Love pouring itself endlessly into the world. The birth of Christ, said Andrewes, entails “the full measure of [God’s] sending.”
At the same time, there is a receptive dimension to the term, which Andrewes called “the fullness of the benefit we receive” from the Incarnation—not just redemption from sin but the means of union with God—and the joy which fills us in consequence. Fullness is not just divine gift; it is something that happens within us, a grace in which we participate.
“And after our joyfulness or fullness of joy, our fullness of thanks or thankfulness is to ensue; for with that fullness we are to celebrate it likewise. Our minds first, and then our mouths, to be filled with blessing, and praise, and thanks to Him, that hath made our times not to fall into those empty ages of the world, but to fall within this “fullness of time,” which “so many Kings and Prophets desired to have lived in …”
Adoration of the Christ Child, follower of Jan Joest of Kalkar, c. 1515.
But the fullness comes and goes, ebbs and flows. What do we do in its absence? At the end of W. H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being, the poet laments the relative emptiness of time once the Vision fades:
To those who have seen The Child, however dimly, however incredulously, The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
Once we have experienced “the stable where for once in our lives / Everything was a You and nothing was an It,” how can we go back to the way we were? How can we settle for anything less than “the fullness of time?”[v] We don’t. Instead, we make our longing an instrument of change, energizing us—by the grace of the Spirit—to manifest and embody the fullness in our own stories, whenever and however we can.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rimes, But ring the fuller minstrel in.[vi]
When we beat our gongs, bang our drums, and blow our whistles on the porch at midnight, I will recite these lines of Tennyson. But when we go back inside, I’ll put on Rachel Platten’s “Soldiers”—a rousing response to 2020’s time of trial—and we will dance to the fullness of time.
We’re at the end of the road We’re all soldiers on our own Trying to find our way back home And at the end of the day Nothing matters anyway Just the love that we have made
So let’s let go of our mistakes We’ve all got hearts that easily break
No matter how the light may fade We’ll carry on, it’s how we’re raised We might fall But we won’t break Yeah, we won’t break …
And now our hearts will beat, now they’ll beat as one We made it through, and after all, came the sun And now our hearts will beat, now our hearts will beat as one
Happy New Year, dear Reader! Thank you for reading and sharing through this challenging year. “We made it through!” I am grateful for your thoughtful attention to things that matter. I wish you much joy, health, love and peace in the days to come. Great joy to the New!
[i] W. H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, ed. Alan Jacobs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 46.
[ii] Sam Cooke wrote his great song, “A Change is Gonna Come” (1964), in support of the Civil Rights movement.
[iii] Edmund H. Sears (1810-1876), “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.”
[iv] The Editor is uncredited and the date, probably early 20th century, is not given in my reprinted volume of Lancelot Andrewes Seventeen Sermons on the Nativity (Collingwood, Victoria, Australia: Trieste Publishing, 2017). All the Andrewes citations are from Sermon IV (Dec. 25, 1609), pp. 44-62.
[vi] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam.” Emphasis mine. The “fuller minstrel” is the Christ, embodying the fullness of our humanity united with divinity, singing Possibility into being.
[vii] Rachel Platten, “Soldiers” (2020). Platten recently explained her commitment to speaking out through her songs: “We need to use our art right now, because I truly believe beauty can save the world.”
12th-century saint effaced by time, Cloister of Saint-Trophime, Arles, Provence.
In “Last Song,” the opening cut of her album Impermanence, Meredith Monk chants a list of finalities over a series of wistful piano chords: Last chance, last dance, last minute, last laugh, last round, last inning, last exit, last ditch, last rites, last supper, last days, last judgment, last words, the last word, last rose of summer, last goodbye, last ditch, last time, last breath . . .
Some of these are repeated quickly, over and over, as if to hold on to them just a little longer. Sometimes Monk’s voice erupts into a staccato of syllabic non-sense, as if language is breaking under the strain of mortality, dissolving into the chaos from which new meaning may be born. Then her final words: last breath, last breath, last breath. . . The voice surrenders to silence. The piano continues on briefly, then it too makes its last sound, fading to nothing.
At year’s end, I sometimes lapse into a retrospective melancholy, thinking of people, moments, experiences and places that have come and gone in my life, some for the last time. My sense of future will revive at midnight, when we will go outside to bang gongs, beat drums and blow kazoos and whistles to welcome the New. But until then, impermanence shall be my partner in the year’s last dance.
Pont du Gard, Provence (40-60 A.D.). Some things last, most things don’t. At least these stones from a vanished empire made it to the future.
I have written about temporality every New Year’s Eve since I began this blog 4 years ago. Thinking about time, memory and hope seems a ritual proper to the turning of the year. Here are links to a couple of those reflections:
But this year, anxious to get outside to enjoy the last sunny day of a rainy year, and not wanting to detain you too long from your own last things, I will simply share a bit of poetry which I discovered this week in Edward Hirsch’s marvelous survey, Poet’s Choice (2006).
In “I Take Back Everything I’ve Said,” Chilean poet Nicanor Parra offers a renunciation well suited to the New Year’s spirit of tossing out the old to make room for the new. Its brave act of repentance (more than mere regret) isn’t just for writers!
Before I go
I’m supposed to get a last wish:
Generous reader
burn this book
It’s not at all what I wanted to say
Though it was written in blood
It’s not what I wanted to say.
No lot could be sadder than mine
I was defeated by my own shadow:
My words took vengeance on me.
Forgive me, reader, good reader
If I cannot leave you
With a warm embrace. I leave you
With a forced and sad smile.
Maybe that’s all I am
But listen to my last word:
I take back everything I’ve said.
With the greatest bitterness in the world
I take back everything I’ve said.
Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Two Cousins (detail), 1716. Is she gazing at memory, or a gathering future?
Catherine Barnett’s “O Esperanza” lifts my spirit after a very rough year in the history of our country and our world:
Turns out my inner clown is full of hope.
She wants a gavel.
She wants to stencil her name on a wooden gavel:
Esperanza’s Gavel.
Clowns are clichés and they aren’t afraid of clichés.
Mine just sleeps when she’s tired.
But she can’t shake the hopes.
She’s got a bad case of it, something congenital perhaps. . .
Look at these books: hope.
Look at this face: hope.
When I was young I studied with Richard Rorty, that was lucky,
I stared out the window and couldn’t understand a word he said,
he drew a long flat line after the C he gave me,
the class was called metaphysics and epistemology,
that’s eleven syllables, that’s
hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope.
Just before he died, Rorty said his sense of the holy was bound up with the hope
that some day our remote descendants will live in a global civilization
in which love is pretty much the only law.
The Creator bestows a blessing above the baptismal font in Eglise Saint-Michel, Roussillon, Provence.
And finally, in “A Flame,” Adam Zagajewski provides a fine New Year’s blessing, which I share with you, dear reader, on this last day before whatever comes next:
God, give us a long winter
and quiet music, and patient mouths,
and a little pride––before
our age ends.
Give us astonishment
and a flame, high, bright.
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.
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.
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.
The religious imagineer 