“Works of art die as a result of being looked upon by dull eyes, and even the radiance of holiness can, in a way, become blunted when it encounters nothing but hollow indifference.” (Glory of the Lord, volume 1, 23)

Great description of our the reaction against modernism in our age – “There have been ages of representation in which it was natural to experience the kalokagathon (the beautiful and the true), so much so that the temptation was always at hand to slide back from the primal form into the derived forms–so rich was the abundance of forms offered. When these secondary forms come to decay and are regarded with suspicion as belonging to an ideology, then it is both easier and more difficult to find one’s way back to the origin of form. It is more difficult because our eyes lost their acumen for form and we become accustomed to read things by starting  from the bottom and working our way up, rather by working from the whole to the parts. Our multi-faceted glance is, indeed, suited to the fragmentary and the quantitative: we are the world’s and the soul’s analysts and no longer have a vision for wholeness.” (Glory of the Lord, volume 1, 25)

Photo uploaded to Flickr by Snap Man

I am looking through my poetry books for poems of Incarnation (as I think about Advent’s soon appearance). Tonight I was reading through Mary Oliver’s poems, when I landed on this little treasure and wanted to share it with someone. Hope you enjoy.

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

On cold evenings
my grandmother,
with ownership of half her mind–
the other half having flown back to Bohemia–

spread newspapers over the porch floor
so, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath,
as under a blanket, and keep warm,

and what shall I wish for, for myself,
but, being so struck by the lightning of years,
to be like her with what is left, that loving.

by Mary Oliver (from New and Selected Poems, Volume 2)