Post 153.
In The Journey of the Mind to God, written in 1259, Bonaventure reasons that the triune deity’s perfect light is imperfectly reflected in creation. The process operates in the same way that a person might be presented with an unfamiliar Mozart symphony or Georgia O’Keefe painting and infer who the artist is, considering elements such as form, texture, color and the like. By examining the natural world, our minds can ascend, as climbing a ladder, to a fundamental consciousness of God. Bonaventure suggests that created things contain vestiges of their creator, and while the creator is eternal, sovereign, and faultless, created things are temporal, contingent, and flawed. I have come to believe these flaws, like cracks in Bonaventure’s mirror, offer unexpected beauty: sunlight, upon entering a prism, diverges into the colors of a rainbow. From one, many. With this in mind, I write this poem:
Father’s light, alight divine
Creator, Word, and Spirit, love
In these fissures, spectral signs
Mirror broken, image appealing
A beauty less-than Beauty above
Word and living Breath and feeling
Through these fractures, shine, shine, shine!
In a short essay, Chance, Simone Weil writes: “The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.” This suggests that the faults in the mirror are part of the plan of creation. The Father’s creation, ex nihilo, was of existing things. Existing things are vulnerable. This vulnerability is beauty. We seem most vulnerable the cracks in the mirror of ourselves through which we attend to God’s light. Weakness, if we attend to it, can become beautiful sites of understanding.
When we look at our world today, we cannot avoid noticing its wounds. Standing in a park, the water in this creek must be purified if I would drink it; the trees in this park have been planted in the decades since they were cleared for logging; this soil has remnants of lead, arsenic, and PCBs from the land’s coal and farming history; and my skin must be guarded from the sunshine itself using sunscreen. Yet it is this light through these leaves glowing on this soil by this water where I glimpse residues of my Creator. We aren’t afforded the opportunity to be born in the Garden of Eden, but we remember it in these faults, here.
Daniel Shevock
Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_Canna_(1923)_by_Georgia_O%27Keeffe.png
In The Journey of the Mind to God, written in 1259, Bonaventure reasons that the triune deity’s perfect light is imperfectly reflected in creation. The process operates in the same way that a person might be presented with an unfamiliar Mozart symphony or Georgia O’Keefe painting and infer who the artist is, considering elements such as form, texture, color and the like. By examining the natural world, our minds can ascend, as climbing a ladder, to a fundamental consciousness of God. Bonaventure suggests that created things contain vestiges of their creator, and while the creator is eternal, sovereign, and faultless, created things are temporal, contingent, and flawed. I have come to believe these flaws, like cracks in Bonaventure’s mirror, offer unexpected beauty: sunlight, upon entering a prism, diverges into the colors of a rainbow. From one, many. With this in mind, I write this poem:
Father’s light, alight divine
Creator, Word, and Spirit, love
In these fissures, spectral signs
Mirror broken, image appealing
A beauty less-than Beauty above
Word and living Breath and feeling
Through these fractures, shine, shine, shine!
In a short essay, Chance, Simone Weil writes: “The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.” This suggests that the faults in the mirror are part of the plan of creation. The Father’s creation, ex nihilo, was of existing things. Existing things are vulnerable. This vulnerability is beauty. We seem most vulnerable the cracks in the mirror of ourselves through which we attend to God’s light. Weakness, if we attend to it, can become beautiful sites of understanding.
When we look at our world today, we cannot avoid noticing its wounds. Standing in a park, the water in this creek must be purified if I would drink it; the trees in this park have been planted in the decades since they were cleared for logging; this soil has remnants of lead, arsenic, and PCBs from the land’s coal and farming history; and my skin must be guarded from the sunshine itself using sunscreen. Yet it is this light through these leaves glowing on this soil by this water where I glimpse residues of my Creator. We aren’t afforded the opportunity to be born in the Garden of Eden, but we remember it in these faults, here.
Daniel Shevock
Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_Canna_(1923)_by_Georgia_O%27Keeffe.png
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