Thursday, July 14, 2011

RE Slater - The Lost Sight of Transcendence


Narcissus in the Garden of Malcontent
Too often we get caught up in the machinery of living, of working, of studying, and a thousand other big and small things that would keep us from seeing the beauty of life that God has given us each day we are alive. Each moment we experience. Each breath that we take. There are so many seeming constraints and obstacles, so many problems to solve, so much ugliness that is seen, read, or heard each and every day. Each callously sucking the very breath of God out of the beauty he has placed all around us. Causing us to simply stop looking, or feeling, or even wishing to find, a spiritual transcendency or dimension to the days that blur by, one-after-another, in dizzying finality and array.

 
Narcissus in the Garden of Malcontent
http://www.artprize.org/artists/public-profile/18923
I am reminded of all the things that we have been given and must see again with renewed eyes and hearts and senses that would deeply intoxicate us if we were but to focus on God again. And in so many ways this has become true when discovering God through the Scriptures, through his Son Jesus, even the people and events that God has placed upon our paths that would perhaps cause us to stop and look and feel again.

For when this happens we slowly begin to understand just how much of our world God has renewed for us - as if we are seeing it for the very first time all over again! Whether through prayer and devotions, fellowship with friends, communion with fellow believers. A simple walk down the street or through a park. A small discussion with a stranger. Or an activity we play or work at. In many ways this very web blog is trying to recapture the essence of God through the lives of others who at one time or another had felt that they too had been robbed of the spirituality of life. The essence and provocation of life.

God will do that with us when we let him. He'll give us new eyes to see, new ears to hear, new hearts to feel the things he feels. New senses to more fully participate within his creation so that we are no longer hardened to all the hatreds and harms and cries that we endure each day in a world spinning from morning to evening, day after empty day, like a mad carousel refusing to give up its whirling dervish.

For the Spirit of the Lord has come to anoint us with God's holy oils of redemption, of transformation, of enlightenment and revelation, before the holy days of the divine. Receive these deeply, with thanksgiving. Breath in their elixirs and let them stir our hearts but for a moment or two, so that we may look around again and learn to see God's world as he sees it - with hope and love and faith. And then pass it on in as many ways as it can be passed on to all those around us!

RE Slater
July 14, 2011

More on Corey Van Duinen:
The Lost Sight of Transcendence



"Art does not reproduce the visible,
but makes visible the invisible"




Meadowlands

I had been happy in my ignorance and in my service
But am grown old and no longer happy as I once was
birthed so long ago upon those careless days of froth and wonder.

The burdens of the day have spent me
and have caused my steps to seek again the favor of the sun
that once shone so warm, so brightly, across springtime meadows fair.

Flashing day's dews of a wiser, more carefree youth
amid dreamscapes held fast glistening solitary marvels
nestled snugly within the craggy wildernesses of heaven’s grand peace.

For it was there in the frothy streams of discovery and conscience I wandered
considering man and beast, wind and muse, upon day's hand
knowing not whither purpose or end each was sent by the warming rays.

Then whilst tending to many gardens did the waning day grow long and cold
leaving its earlier peace but a foundling memory warm and alive
somberly promising all paths forever blessed, whither they led, each fulsome soul.

R.E. Slater
December 21, 2011


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