Accepting the Longing, Entering the Quiet...
Self-portrait, 2004. by Edward Wilcox
When I first encountered this painting in LA artist Edward Wilcox's studio, this past summer, I was stunned by his capture of the essence of wonder. "Self-portrait, 2004" is a canvas approximately 4 ft. x 4 ft., and was leaning close to a companion piece that has Edward looking in the other direction, toward distant windmills instead of crosses. Seeing these penetrating pieces in the context of Edward's working studio was truly a thrill, and while the near-closing night party among Act One: Writing for Hollywood students went on, I found myself continually wandering out back to the studio, to stare at this man's apprehension of the rich, terrifying, magnificent wonder of things.
As usual this morning, the world is coming apart, as it has always been. A bleak way to think of things, perhaps, but the brokenness of the world is the bed of miraculous beauty, and why various world religions conclude that reality is a duality, an equal dance between good and evil is apparant enough. We all have friends who see suffering and shake their fists at the skies, crying, "Not fair, not fair." And perhaps we've been fortunate enough to see people crushed by life who somehow rise above it in near saint-like fashion, opening their busted arms to that same sky, crying, "Thanks be...thanks be..."
I'm an artist (trying to become one) because there have been moments of wonder in my life, when I stood as the man in the painting, gaping at the dense experience engulfing me, not judging the good or evil of it, but simply reeling in the glory of presence, in the pleasure of God's (yep, I'm going to call it that) passing by. These moments have suggested themselves in multiple settings, in morally diverse events, in both celebration and tragedy. The phrase I often use to describe such moments are those times "when the curtain is pulled back." But notice that the phrase suggests the pulling back of the curtain is being done by someone, and that someone is not me.
C.S. Lewis said these moments create longing, a deep call inside us, that sets us to pursuing what we can barely speak of. A country, I think is how he puts it, to which we hope to return, though we have never been there.
How troublesome that is. To long for what has been placed inside us--eternity, the Ecclesiastes writer says--but in the longing, to recognize that it is not in us to find, the key residing elsewhere, in an unfathomable unknown. How brutal, how unfair, how alone in the universe we must be, to have this joke played out on us, with wonder pressing down on us, with no way to grasp it, or enter in.
And if there is no God, and He has not revealed anything of himself, as the atheist would have us believe, then fair enough--we are alone, and the wonder is an amazing bit of cosmic sleight of hand, a happy chance (or unhappy, as the case may be) in our small journey from nowhere to nowhere, stopping only in the little town of Ruin, or some equivalent.
But standing in the painting with Edward, I can't imagine--literally cannot imagine--that we stand in a nothing, with nothing but accident as origin and destiny. And in the crush of contradiction (the duality that is no duality, but the one broken world under the sovereignty of a God whose love I have not yet begun to comprehend), it seems that this is the way to make sense of things, and somehow rise each day to face the glory and horror of the days.
I see in this face the man stunned at the lamb of God crucified. But I also see the man stunned at all the innocent murdered over long years, cultures, and generations. And he is stands stunned at the corrupt man of evil's turning around, at the shower of grace raining down on a planet madly dancing away from it's Maker, at the lunacy of those who sense God in every moment, but that somehow reject him, the weight of glory just too heavy, too heavy.
Esoteric? Disconnected from the real world? Musings so that reality might be avoided?
I don't think so. Breakfast calls, kids head to school, wife limps off to work (she broke her toe), and stories to touch the hem of His garment have to be plotted, pounded out one key at a time. Friends moving to and from God, marriages knitting and unraveling--heck, votes to be cast, votes that will change lives everywhere on the planet.
So the contradictions in the human condition can't be avoided. But contradiction need not be chaos, for the grace raining down is from one sovereign hand.
So Job says, "Though you slay me, yet will I trust you."
So the Hebrew writer says, "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus..."
"Stunning, stunning..."
6:54:56 AM 
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