It is a glorious privilege
to live, to know, to act, to listen, to behold, to love.
To look up at the blue summer sky;
to see the sun sink slowly beyond the line of the horizon;
to watch the worlds come twinkling into view,
first one by one, and the myriads that no man can count,
and lo! the universe is white with them;
and you and I are here.
~Marco Morrow
It is God’s privilege to conceal things and the king’s privilege to discover them. ~Proverbs 25:2 ✝
A Ming vase can be well-designed
and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone.
I don’t think this can be true for photography.
Unless there’s is something a little
incomplete and a little strange,
it will simply look like a copy of something pretty.
~John Loengard
The annual beauty in a garden once spent is gone forever, except in memory, if not captured in some way. A camera is one of the ways we who love nature’s fleeting glory take it captive. Unlike Loengard, I believe photos can be more than just an uninteresting copy of a beautiful thing. For example part of what you see in the photograph above started out as that of a single rose. However, as an experiment with some computer technology, I turned the image into something “a little strange,” as Leongard suggests, and it added another level of interest. If one looks carefully at the altered image, fragmented pieces of what used to be negative spaces in the original photograph now have merged into engaging patterns, and so what can be seen raises questions about how much one really sees. “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see,” claimed documentary photographer and photojournalist, Dorothea Lange. So it is that Hawthorne’s idea could be applied to my rose or his trees or to the reflection of anything, and it would speak a profound truth. We often don’t see what is right under our proverbial noses. The eternal underlies everything mankind sees, tastes, hears, touches, and smells, so much so that all things seem to quiver from the Divine energy emitted from them. But it’s only when the Lord’s demure presence is acknowledged that it becomes more and more keenly perceptible.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. ~2 Corinthians 4:18 ✝
A man should hear a little music,
read a little poetry, and
see a fine picture every day of his life,
in order that worldly cares
may not obliterate the sense of the
beautiful implanted in the human soul.
~Johann Wolfgang Goethe
In her novel, THE COLOR PURPLE, Alice Walker says she thinks God gets angry if a person walks by the color purple and doesn’t notice it. At one point in her story the main character, Celie is told to look at the purple flowers and to embrace their beauty in spite of all the pain and suffering in her world. She is urged to see the good in them because it was God who placed them on earth. As she comes to this realization for herself, she begins to understands the magnitude of God’s grace, and like the purple flowers, blossoms as she gains a respect for God and life.
It’s obvious that God puts a premium on beauty, not only for His own sake but also for ours. Since we are made in His image, our souls cannot help but be implanted by a “sense of the beautiful” as Goethe suggests. As a highway sign points us in the right direction, in the same way loveliness points to God’s heavenly realm and His goodness. If we can find beauty, then we can find God. Beauty is meant to feed us spiritually, and the Lord uses what’s beautiful to speak to our hearts for His divine purposes. For example notice all the richness and beauty involved in the scriptural telling of the birth of the Christ child. It starts with a beautiful star that leads the way to a manger. For Celie her beautiful flowers led her to God’s grace, and the Christ child brings all who follow the star and Him the same gift of redeeming grace.
Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life,
its strength; and so man is rooted to the land
from which he draws his faith together with his life.
~Joseph Conrad
Against the backdrop of autumn’s falling leaves ornamental grasses shift and sigh adding an ethereal element to the landscape. With airy flower panicles, fluffy seed plumes, and striking seed heads ornamental grasses provide charming “fringe accents” in yards and gardens. Even after the onslaughts of freezing temperatures, grasses continue to grace the landscape with beauty. They add subtle colors, assorted textures, and the dimensions of motion and sound. Throughout winter’s “vale of grief,” they capture and play with whatever light is available and in so doing speak of life and give us something “that glimmers in the sleep of things.” The “music” of their swishing and swaying reminds us that what’s happening isn’t an ending but merely a transition for the next beginning.
In a poetic conversation with the Lord, Edna St. Vincent Millay said, “God, I can push the grass apart and lay my finger on Thy heart.” A Quaker and itinerant preacher named Elias Hicks wrote that “the fullness of the godhead dwelt in every blade of grass.” And Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer, asked, “To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.” These writers, like me, realize that man was meant to be “rooted to the land and therefore to God.” But, the “umbilical cord” that connects all humanity to Creation and God seems, for many, to have been severed.
The Lord, however, refuses to remain separated or removed from that which He has made. In an effort to reconnect people to the land and to provide healthier food, many neighborhoods are finding places to build community gardens. More and more people are getting involved in caring for the land in these communal plots. Also many schools across the nation are incorporating habitat gardens into the learning experiences of their students, and we are seeing a rise in “hobby farms” where retired professionals have started a second career as a hobby farmer or others who are still working are spending their spare time on their own small farm.
You care for the land and water it; You enrich it abundantly. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, for so You have ordained it. You drench its furrows and level its ridges; You soften it with showers and bless its crops. You crown the year with Your bounty, and Your carts overflow with abundance. The grasslands of the wilderness overflow; the hills are clothed with gladness. The meadows are covered with flocks and the valleys are mantled with grain; they shout for joy and sing. ~Psalm 65:9-13 ✝
Sacred Touches 