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Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Almost finished

I am like a rag, dunked ceaselessly in a barrel of water and rung out, cycle never ending. I long to be laid in the Sun, allowing my weary body dry and revitalize. My lungs have no time to expel the water that was injected before more invades. My desire for the Sun deepens and intensifies, yet no time is allotted for recuperation. Back into the bucket, back to twisting and pulling til all has been squeezed out and yet still a ragged dampness will not leave. Back to a carmivourous devouring of a thanksgiving feast, placed in honor and reverance but attacked by a searching consumer. I am forced to consume in this way, discriminately, savagely, with no respect or regard. Knowledge is a consequence, perhaps, but so is exhaustion and irreverence. Yet that desire, unrealized and unquenchable, still rages, fueled and given motivation by the stained, holey, mildewed rag that I am

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Essay 8; on Beauty


{An essay for my christian poetry class that concisely articulated some concerned pondering I'd been doing; thought I would share.}

     Is it possible to idolize beauty? Artists are seekers of beauty, in its many forms. In the current culture it is so easy to witness massive amounts of beauty. You can simply google ‘flowers’, or ‘Sistine Chapel’, or ‘babies’, and witness varying angles of the beauty that streams through the world. Artists are creating beautiful digital art and mass distributing it with the help of websites like Pinterest or Tumblr, which are partially designed to be gathering places for beautiful images. We strive to be surrounded by the beautiful, the decorative, and the transcendent. Amidst this abundance of splendor, we still yearn for more. The thirst for beauty is never quenched; a beautiful object is just as thrilling as all the rest you have seen. Yet if we are striving to be the most beautiful, even in deed more than in physical appearance, might we neglect our sanctification yearning? Though we guard ourselves against idolization of beauty, the sanctification journey is one of beauty as well; Christ transforming us from ugly corpses in sin to beautiful children of God. Thus the two are wrapped into one, and our desire for beauty is a natural part of our struggling towards sanctification. Jacques Maritain says that “He [God] is beauty itself” and later quotes Baudelaire as explaining that this intense emotion felt while witnessing beauty is not a joy, but rather an extreme melancholy caused by the realization that paradise exists, yet the soul is in an imperfect land. This definition of beauty’s impact in Maritain and Baudelaire is the clearest I have found. It provides hope that beauty is essentially God or God-breathed and thus will not distract, but direct the spirit to Him.