Abstract to Concrete
Whenever I teach the poetry section of my class in Abilene, I always end up thinking about the fundamental move of the poet: to bring the abstract into the realm of the concrete. Having these comparative minds of ours, it is the only way we can understand things. I confess I have lived far too much of my life in the abstractions, thinking lofty thoughts about love and art and faith and what-have-you, knowing all along that it is one thing to talk about love and art, and quite another to actually practice them in daily action and in the process of making works of perceived beauty.
I came across a quote somewhere that said something like: "Jesus is form to God's content." It rang in my head like a bell. This is the meaning and importance of the whole notion of incarnation. God knowing that we are concrete people needing form to understand a thing, and that He is, almost by default in terms of how our minds work, an abstraction. So Jesus comes to give him flesh, imaging what humans had, at that point, only known in abstraction. (Except in "shekinah glory" manifestations of God in the OT.)
These days I'm seeing the "abstract to concrete" move everywhere. We say "I love you," and the person we're saying it to wonders what we mean. They will only discover it by our action. Abstract to concrete. We say we have faith, but it only has meaning when it informs and forms our action. When we take a concrete action that is based in faith, it enfleshes what we have tried to understand in our heads. Abstract to concrete. Faith (abstract) without works (concrete) is dead.
I suppose I'm thinking about this because I'm always considering how fundamental art and poetry is to life, and it seems to me that art making is embedded in our most fundamental moves of mind. A good life well lived is much like a great poem--dominated by the creative use of concrete nouns and verbs and images. So to live poetically is not a romantic notion, it is a notion of action that knowingly points toward an idea. And for we followers of Christ, realizing that for most of the world he is nothing more than an abstracted idea, it is our action that will put flesh on him (or not), thus gaining plausibility for his whole teaching for life.
...to live poetically...hmmmm...
5:38:39 AM 
