Aesthetic Thanks
Do we ever thank God for Beauty, and the beautiful?
Thank you, God...
...for Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, for his book The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics...for Pied Beauty, by Gerard Manley Hopkins...for the human capacity to receive Your Glory "fathered-forth" on creation, calling to us, calling for us to return the favor with praise.
...for tonight's rain, and fresh air, and my kid's joy at being out of school for two days...for my kitchen full of flour, apple and pumpkin pies baking, making ready for the feast day...for the words of poets, who see the world through original eyes...for the songwriters, for the singers and bands, for the classical musicians, for the harmonies that move us...for U2, David Wilcox, and all the musical theatre...for the novelists and essayists, the philosophers and theologians...for the wisdom of Barbara Nicolosi, Nancy Beach, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Annie Dillard...for my friends who are writing and acting, singing and painting, trying to make art for the world, for the church, perhaps for their own broken hearts...for the pastors in my life, men and women seeking to live like you, coaxing we artistic sheep along...
...for my friends from years past, the ones missing from what should have been our shared history, lost because of my self-absorption...for the ones who are still with me, graciously bearing up...for the very notion of friendship, that long binding of spirit that turns one into two or three, rope-strong, fibred most by forgiveness...
...for songs sung under-breath to keep warriors on this side of mad terror...for words, or paintings, or symphonies that lift the estranged - even for a moment - back toward each other, images of possible futures catching their breath...for hands delivering sacks of food where hunger tempts good hearts toward dark...for the communities of the beautiful, where "the form of Your content" is lived, the beauty of human touch ballet-elegant, summer-warm...
...for the notion of nation - for people must live together, deciding "the good", making law - but more for the kingdom, Your kingdom mostly unknown, stretching across boundaries, obliterating them, claiming primary allegiance...for all the nations, birthing and dying, and for each morsel of wisdom we find, anything that helps us lean against the rebel in our collective nature...for the moments of respite from public bitterness and rancor...
...for my family: Anjie, Amy, and Daniel...Mom...Jody...and long gone Dad...Dick and Esther, Steve and Karen, Ryan, Anna, and Meghan...Ronnie, Sharon, and Logan...Anita, Dara and Michael, Tina and Chuck and Lindsay and Delaney, Lee, Teresa...all part of the pied beauty, the dappled glory You "fathered-forth" in my life, rising again in me as simple praise...
...and for Beauty pouring down into Bethlehem, the Incarnation of You - the essential "fathering-forth" - creating life again, new and whole, as in the beginning, offering us the chance to come home...for the home that is, and is to come...
...for Beauty, and the beautiful...for the ability to gape in awe...
...thank you
9:37:44 PM
