11/1001

 Story: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

Essay:  Can Christians Write?  by Paul J. Pastor

So good. Some worthy quotes:

The Christian artist, like any Christian, is absolutely free. And the Christian artist, like any Christian, is absolutely bound by that freedom.

Christian art has the effect of telling the truth about people—that we are a sacred, disastrous mix-up of the divine and the debauched; that we are, through overwhelming grace, beloved candidates for unreasonable redemptions; and that all things, everywhere, are fitting objects of deep and sustained attention. Christian art assumes the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness, is able to describe why they are as well as what they are, and is able to partner with them to intentionally connect the soul to the “upward” draw of the divine eros, which seeks eternal satisfaction in the life of God. It humanizes both artist and audience, increases their ability to know and love the good, and becomes a way for us to participate in what St. Paul calls “the divine nature.”

***

Our tradition, and its trustworthy connection to transcendental reality as experienced in real art and beauty, can lift us from our circular logic and despair into that higher experience every writer and every artist yearns to achieve. Without it, all that we have are the oppressive subjectivities of taste and popularity. It is either I like it so it is good, or They like it so it is good. Is that really the limit of what may be said about the beautiful? I hope not. I do not trust myself enough for that, and I certainly do not trust all of you.

***

"Good writing involves technique, and the mastery of the principles of your chosen genre. Good writing requires more than novel arrangements of words. It demands an encounter with truth. 

"Through all of these things, we learn how to enter this life larger than our own, to stretch, to be pulled one more rung up the ladder of creation, into the glorious and rowdy communion of the saints and the surprisingly rough and earthy presence of God."

***

"...whatever else it may be doing, true beauty is also nourishing the very root of the soul. It is calling and drawing us to God. In encountering the great works of beauty, and in participating honestly and directly in the creative process, we may also find ourselves encountering Beauty himself. To gaze on him is life, and light to the whole of our being. What we find in entering a larger tradition than ourselves is ourselves."

Poem:

The Windhover

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

     

   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

I love Hopkins. His poems are a delight to speak aloud. The sounds blending together and into each other give them an internal playfulness that is charming. But it is not play without meaning. His poems sometimes remind me of the Shakespearean fool or Scott's Wamba in Ivanhoe - truth-speaking jesters, gambling and tumbling and saying what no one else can say in a playful, sharply witty way that no one else can manage.

Daniel in the Lions' Den by Briton Rivière.