Humans Being

Humans Being

I often find myself doing.  Doing homework, doing life, and if I am in the process of not doing much I sure as hell am thinking about doing much.  It's exhausting and distracting where is the life in always striving to do things?  When can rest ever come if I am always conforming to the pressure to do?  Some say, "there isn't rest, not until your dead, so do all you can now."  Do so much that when you get to that point you can do more.  I've been wrestling with this idea of doing and being learning the difference between laziness and being, and learning the difference between working hard using your body and mind the way it was designed and doing in a striving/vain manner.  I am learning to recognize the difference between working hard in a place of being and doing from a place of striving, and one of those indicators is my encounter with beauty!  I find it most difficult, near impossible, to admire, let alone encounter, beauty when I am distracted by doing things in a striving manner.  It's as if I am totally zoned out just moving through life without any recognition of everything happening around me I am so driven by pride and vain efforts towards some thing that I think is worth it.  This reminds me of Martin Buber's discussion on the relationships between people and people/things "I and Thou vs. I and It" "I, It" is a perfect demonstration of the effect of someone who is doing in a striving manner, never present always seeing the relationship as a means to the striving persons end.  However, when being, there is a total and complete presence which opens an individuals eyes to beauty and encounters with beauty.  This next thought however, is somewhat contradictory to what I was saying, but Beauty calls us into being it demands all in that moment whatever we had fixed on our mind, whatever we were doing it ceases for the overcoming power of Beauty.  It is an interesting paradox how there is a need for one to reside in a place of being in order to be opened to beauty or Beauty, and yet the idea that it does not matter if a person is in a place of being or doing, that one can get derailed from their vain efforts of doing by Beauty.  Both equally call us to back to our nature the place we were designed to live from, Humans Being not Humans doing.

Beauty in Changing Seasons

Beauty in Changing Seasons 

Topic of Choice 

November 30, 2015

One of my favorite parts of growing up in Virginia is the mild climate that allows me to experience all of the different seasons. There is something beautiful about the change that occurs naturally ever few months. After a long summer of sweltering heat and thick humidity my whole being welcomes the crisp, clear air and new colors that fall provides. I even love the raw cold that winter brings. The same lake in my neighborhood that I used to go fishing at as a kid, I used to throw rocks on when it was frozen over in the dead of January. By the end of February, my soul is eager for the new birth that Spring brings. The beauty of the seasons is found not only in their weather patterns but also in the power and influence they hold over my thoughts and emotions. I find myself to favor contemplation in the winter and action in the summer. Spring abounds with hope while fall resounds with peace. Nearly everything, from musical to culinary to literature preference, changes with the seasons. As the seasons change, so I change with them. This is one of the most profoundly beautiful mysteries of life. Maybe one day I will know what it is like to live in a tropical environment all year long. But if not I am okay with that. Every few months I feel the need for a change so significant that I have no power over it. This, I find in the changing of the seasons. 

Beauty of Symmetry

Beauty of Symmetry 

Topic of Choice

November 30, 2015

I remember the first time I walked the campus of CNU. I was a junior in high school, driving back from a trip to Virginia Beach with some friends. We decided to take a bathroom break on the same exit that CNU was off of and walk on the campus for a few minutes. I had only vaguely heard of CNU before and had not a clue what to expect of the campus. What I saw astonished me. The campus, though small and contained, was beautifully constructed. As I walked the great lawn for the first time, I stood in awe of the regal brick buildings. The beauty of the campus remained etched in my mind for the rest of the ride home that night. After having walked the same path I did that night, going through the heart of campus never gets old for me. I especially love walking across the great lawn on a late fall afternoon, admiring how the pastel sky complements the same stately buildings that first stunned me. Upon further reflection of my first encounter with the campus, I believe it was the symmetry of everything that led me to exclaim of it’s beauty. It seems to me that equality in proportion is an aesthetic principle of great value. When things balance out and fit together we marvel. Symmetry makes things belong by putting them into a predetermined order. 

Redemption in the Rise and Fall

In general colloquialism, people talk about going uphill as a good thing and going downhill as a bad thing. When encouraging another, some will say, "It's all uphill from here!" In recounting a personal tragedy, "everything went downhill from there"; if anything went up, it went up in flames.

These phrases make me wonder: if these people using these phrases went on a hike, would the terms switch? Do they say uphill is easy because they have never experienced the abject, gritty misery of an unrelenting climb? Do they view the word "downhill" as a descent into ruin because they haven't ever sprinted down a mountainside, allowing their weight to throw them into momentum, wind gloriously pelting them in the face?

Metaphorically, these descriptors make sense. It's fairly well-recognized that mountaintops are better than their corresponding valleys. However, the respective aesthetic experiences on the journeys don't match up to their destinations.

Perhaps this provides some insight into the nature of spiritual journey - while the trail of a Christ follower is steep and treacherous, all of its strain and exhaustion pales in comparison to the glory of the peak. And likewise, the downhill run of one succumbing to temptation is easier and feels much more natural, but eventually slows to a halt at the very bottom of the valley.

“Son,'he said,' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why...the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.”

- C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Holy Words

Holy Words

Class Reading: Gerardus van Der Leeuw/Sacred and Profane Beauty

November 22, 2015

Words have power. This is evident to everyone. We have all had our minds changed on a matter because of words. Word influences belief. The power contained in words is derived from both the sound a word makes and the meaning behind a word. For primitive man, however, the power of words was found not in the meaning but in the rhythm. As Van Der Leeuw says, “under rhythmic constraint, words exert a force.”(115) Without this rhythm, words of content were considered profane. The formula behind poetry and song is what brought things alive and made things sacred. What is sung is not as important as how it is being sung. The primitive understanding of words emphasized formula. Thus, for primitive man, word is inextricably connected to dance. Music for the sake of music is a modern invention. The primitive man used music to achieve rhythm, symmetry, and harmony. We moderns should appreciate the primitive wonder of formula and rhythm, while also focusing on content. Often times, rhythm is the stage on which content is made great and beautiful. 

Art as Truth

Art as Truth

Class Readings: Thomas Wartenberg/Nature of Art

November 22, 2015

Martin Heidegger said that “beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness.”(157) The truth is made present and manifest through that which is beautiful. A key theme in ancient thought was that the good, true, and beautiful all coalesced. The good, true, and beautiful were all essential Forms in Plato’s thought. The Danish Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, recognized that is not enough for something to be true if it is cold and indifferent. For the existentialist gadfly, it was not enough to know the true way to live. An equally important question the philosophers struggle with is how to live beautifully. What good would it do to act in truth if it meant forsaking that which is beautiful. Heidegger held that the origin of art is not the artist nor the equipment but the art itself. The creation of art is different from the creation of other useful objects, of equipment, since art is created in and of itself, for itself. Equipment is made with a preconceived purpose in mind. For example, an ax is made to chop down a tree. In a work of art, createdness is exposed and experienced. The nature of art is the “setting-into-work of truth.”(159) In art, truth is in the process of becoming and happening. Art opens itself up to the world, showing us the Being of particular beings; the essence behind objects.

Spiritual Aesthetic Capacity

Spiritual Aesthetic Capacity

Outside Reading: Belden Lane/Ravished By Beauty

November 21, 2015

Jonathan Edward’s greatest contribution to the canon of historical theology is his idea of a new “spiritual sense,” graciously received in salvation. Edward’s theology of aesthetics was birthed by the beauty he beheld in the Connecticut River Valley. In his Religious Affections, the theologian of beauty states that “God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above them, chiefly by his divine beauty.” According to Edwards, the essence of salvation is being awakened to a new aesthetic capacity. Just as man has physical senses - taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing - so there exists a sixth sense; a spiritual sense that has been dulled by sin. If Christ Himself is the sun, creation is the ray of light that emanates from it. God chooses to communicate and express himself through longing. Moreover, it is the nature of beauty to share, bind, and celebrate itself. God reaches out to share himself, through creation, not because he is deficient in himself. Rather the fact of God’s completion is the grounds for his reaching out. God chooses to communicated through creation. The reason God chooses to extend himself through creation, Lane says, is because “a perfection that elicits rejoicing is always superior to a perfection left to itself alone.”(175) Praise, adoration, rejoicing, pleasure, and delight seem to add to the Being of it’s object. God is intensely dedicated to the celebration of his own glory. However, this strong love of self does not make God a selfish deity. Instead, he shares his glory with creation.