Ha, nice! And also, if there *were* a Pope with a name like BeardTree, how awesome would that be? (On a related note, I came across a mention of a priest in the Philokalia named "Hyacinth" -- which I'd known about that when I was choosing a baptismal name!)
One of the most subversive things one can do in this post modern machine age is pray. I still believe that this and the eternal search for God in the True, the Good and the Beautiful is a way to reclaim our lost humanity. Throughout the Old Testament God speaks from the wind the, earthquake and fire but “ after the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood in the entrance of his cave “ 1 Kings 19:12-13. Godspeed Graham!!
M! So good to hear from you -- and to hear this, that you think I sound really well. That is encouraging. You know, at the back of my mind in recent days has been Basho, as you depict him, sitting in the simplicity of his tree -- everything already present and at rest, nothing more than that needed. That's my happy place!
RE Godel Theorem as a metaphor for religious boundaries: Yes, of course, if religions are systems. I think that's what Jesus shows us anyway: that the system (religion) doesn't encompass Transcendent Being. It points to it and leads/guides our approach/alignment to God/Love/Source of Being, like an asymptote. "I came not to abolish the law or the prophets but to fulfill them". Religion is the mountain. It will never be the cloud of unknowing/the heavenly unconscious/uninterrupted communion with the Divine, but one must start by climbing it.
Godel helped me understand that even mathematical systems, that I used to regard as sort of absolute truth, are theories that must be built on a series of axioms. And as soon as those systems declare themselves to be all-encompassing, you can write a true "this statement is false" statement using the system's own language. This is the Lucifer/Narcissus phenomenon in which intelligence falls in love with itself, worships its own being, and cuts itself off from the rest for the universe, thereby precipitating its own demise. This stands in opposition to true healthy being which naturally continues to open itself to the world, to take in new things and use them to grow. Pride goes before a fall. (if any mathematicians read this, I hope I represented Godel and the math world at least somewhat accurately).
The image of an asymptote is a strong one -- there's a very clear direction to go in, and you know exactly where you'll end up when you go in that direction, yet you never actually get there until you leave the curve...
In Sunlilies, I think I used the image of flower petals and nectar -- the bees don't drink the petals, they drink the nectar, but they can't see the nectar, they can only see the petals. so they have to be attracted by the petals, but only to go beyond them.
True religion is "antireligious" religion -- religion for pointing beyond religion. but it uses religious language to do so --- which hangs as a gigantic, gigantic ripe dangling fruit that anxious, controlling, dogmatic, black and white, power-hungry people can't resist plucking.
his parables are parabolic -- they take you out of yourself, into the shoes of the unclean Other, so you can come back to yourself truly, and be at rest.
but each time you do that, you're actually going up and up the hyperbolic curve (the local topography of the hyperbola, mythically speaking, is composed of parabolas. back me up on this, Avery.
@Graham, I love your image of the bees and the petals/nectar! Bees can teach us so much. The Divine reveals so much about himself within nature. All creation convincingly and consistently proclaims the eternal patterns (Psalm 19 and so many other references).
RE the misapprehension/misappropriation of religion: Satan quotes the scriptures almost as frequently as Jesus does. And yes, instead of waiting for the proper time to receive the fruit in its full ripeness, we often grasp it and draw it unto ourselves, the fruit appearing so irresistibly juicy and delicious.
@PHI, I guess I was considering Jesus's ministry generally as a whole rather than specific parables. However, I think you're alluding to the etymological similarity between “parable” and “parabola” where a a parable is 'thrown/sent alongside' to provide comparison/relational perspective.
This forum seems a bit strange for me to dive so deep, but here goes: I used to have a bit of an aversion to the seemingly trite and contrived “ask Jesus into your heart” concept propagated in modern evangelical circles, but I've come to realize that this phrase actually captures something really profound. Take the asymptote, make it three dimensional, and orient it vertically. What you get is a spiral moving upward, constantly approaching the pole at the center (a sort of Christmas tree). We must place the Logos/incarnate Divine/True humanity/best self at the core of our essence, the center of our ontology. The embodied Divine image filled with the Divine Spirit must be that which we are constantly spiraling upward toward. “I am the true vine (trunk), you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you shall bear much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing”. Jesus (Logos/embodied God Man) is actually at the center of creation. This connection is what we long for. Anyway, almost all religions have a compelling narrative/explanation about how we (humans) got here, who we once were, how we were once in true harmony/communion with the Divine, and exactly what acts/decisions led/leads humanity away from this peace/completeness. Few, though, have an incarnate example of or physical character demonstrating how we are to reconcile this, what direction to move individually and collectively, and how to conduct ourselves in order to return to the Garden within the Golden City on the far side of the chiasm. Of course, like the asymptote, we can't repair that connection until death. Death is our glory, for death is conquered only by death. It is the leveling of the playing field for all humans, that which completes us, that which returns us to the Source of all Being, that which dissipates/dissolves our unity in a corrupted form and restores our unity with the Divine. Death is the point at which The Source of Being (I AM, who breathed life into all things) calls all His creatures/creation back into unity with himself. So yeah, I guess we're on the asymptote until death. And to think that we'll return to the fullness of communion before death is deception. To declare “I'm Him” before death is Luciferian and in league with Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and the rest of these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_be_Jesus. In contrast, Jesus remains mostly silent to accusations during his trial and responds truthfully “I am” only when asked directly if he is the Son of God (which by the way, we all are according to Luke 3:38, if we trace our lineage back to Adam).
Still not the full response, Avery, but I'm imagining something like y=|x^-1| spun around the z-axis. As z →∞, the curve approaches the central axis -- but by the same token, as z →0, it flattens out to almost horizontal, and x and y go to +/- ∞. What that's illustrating is this simple, basically very childlike "asking Jesus into your heart" notion that you so beautifully raise from the depths here -- it's also a way (as you say) of asking yourself to recognize that Jesus is in fact the heart of Creation itself, as symbolized by the horizon -- the horizontal plane where z = 0. Put another way, anyone and everyone on Earth is already included in him. And also, the closer to the heart of Creation they walk, no matter how waywardly or indirectly, they more they lift "off the ground" as it were, and are carried upward into the Father. There is no way to be outside of Yeshua. And yet the goal is always further inward, further upward--a never ending task, not even with the dissolution of this primate skin-bag.
You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here these is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.
Darius, who doesn't like school, who is sometimes stupid and mostly a fool, said something wise today, though most days he says nothing. Darius, who chases girls with firecrackers or a stick that touched a rat and thinks he's tough, today pointed up because the world was full of clouds, the kind like pillows.
You all see that cloud, that fat one there? Darius said, See that? Where? That one next to the one that look like popcorn. That one there. See that. That's God, Darius said. God? somebody little asked. God, he said, and made it simple.
So beautiful, Matt. And so Matt, Matt, to share the long gem that only dauntless Matt Axvig would have the fortitude to dig long enough for. Thanks, man!
Oh man, awesome Miles -- what a delight to hear. Also: My old flip phone died, with all its contacts, including yours...can you text me sometime, no rush? We should get the crew back to the cabin some day when the weather's fair and people are around, maybe summer or whatever...maybe accidentally time it for a pizza night or something...
I like that description of a shroud of exhausted depression you quoted. I just picked up Byung-Chul Han's "The Burnout Society" and he opened it along very similar lines.
Man, I feel you. Online job hunting is like navigating the nine circles of hell. I think we're at or very close to Babel.
Are you familiar with Godel's theorem of incompleteness? Every system is either incomplete or false. A constant reminder to me that, even in the digital and mathematical realm, systems eat themselves when they try to solidify their border/definition completely. Even a castle needs gates.
"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in" - Leonard Cohen
Avery! Man, yeah -- that's it exactly, the nine circles. But without a Beatrice.
But you dropping Goedel and Cohen into the same paragraph is a sunbeam dropping into the darkness. Definitely down with Goedel's incompleteness theorem & I hear you using it as a metaphor for religious boundaries--yeah?
It's very surreal to listen to your writing, in your voice, as I sit at my desk plodding through fatigue homework (ironic, huh?). I'm glad life is moving along, and glad you're back to writing! Keep it up, Graham.
Ha! The Machine is the Mother now, baby! ;) Awesome to see your name, and your voice, Thomas -- hope you're doing well! And come up to the land with the boys sometime, you'd be floored by the cabin. I lost everyone's phone #s, so just text me or something...
I reposted this from the Charles Eisenstein Substack in response to your “towards a Western reindigeneity, where the Messianic feast and permaculture are one unified and harmonious thing”Funny thing about the future - it can be hard to know what it is because it hasn’t happened yet! I am caught between two opinions about it. Either Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years or so or we will be sliding into the future predicted by John Michael Greer in his books, The Retro Future, The Ecotechnic Future, and The Long Descent. Unfortunately it looks like to me we have passed the point to have a soft landing into what Greer is describing.
Appreciated your confession of not being an OrthoBro. I am not a EvangelBob either. I think the various Christian tribal groupings are jostling overlapping Venn diagrams continuously permutating and hybridizing within the Father, Son, Holy Spirit space. Crisp boundaries to please our Pharisee and Sadducee tendencies are not available.
May the tender witness of the Spirit be with us both.
Also, I was looking through some subscriber stuff on some other issue, and saw your email address, and was like "Ohhhh, THERE he is!!" Was wondering if you had peaced out or what, but you just changed your name -- awesome. And very glad you're still here. And "May the tender witness of the Spirit be with us both" -- amen, brother, amen. Amen, amen.
Ha, awesome, BeardTree -- just like your name. Sliding, leaping, or careening--we're gonna get there, but "soft" it probably won't be. More and more it sounds like it might get pretty dang incandescent!! Still, I trust in Yeshua that--regardless--his kingdom's gonna keep slowly and secretly growing, like a tiny flower morphing one day into a tree.
Think I’m a fellow scavenger ! Lovely words and look forward to reading more. Yes the search for Order and Beauty has brought me to look at Orthodoxy but I feel already it’s not resonating deeply enough and I am reluctantly brought back to the Anglican tradition in which I was grounded as a child . Rowan Williams and others like CSLewis remind me of the essential goodness and I see I’m too much of a Protestant to fully embrace orthodoxy or Catholicism
Very glad to have you here, Jane. Order and beauty, we cannot do without--that's for sure. I don't know, I'm kind of wired different, but I get massive waves of healing from the order and beauty of living trees, standing in their serene, sunlit silence -- whereas wall to wall iconography in orthodox churches really stresses me out; it's overwhelming, and I don't find them beautiful -- that's just me. I love Anglican aesthetics myself, and have fond memories of an Anglican church I went to for about a year in Chicago--a lot of austere, elegant stone beauty, like a cave, plus four part harmonies resounding from the balcony.
Graham, have you seen the work of the architect/designer Andrew Gould? I think that the orthodox churches he has designed for parishes around America are getting towards that 'western reindigeneity' you speak of, by embracing local, vernacular building traditions, not just being cheap copies of some idealized version of what orthodox churches are. That being said I'm sure there's a lot of expense involved and what's also important is getting back to that in our own homes, fields and gardens. I really appreciate your perspective.
Hey, Brennan -- thanks for this. Yeah, I have seen Gould's work -- in Road to Emmaus, I think? And yes, his structures are massively expensive -- but very beautiful, I think. Way better than some of the faux onion dome stuff you see in these parts...but ultimately, yes, I think my gaze is more on the home, the field, the garden -- making these our first temple. Gorgeous buildings are nice, but sort of empty if we don't ourselves know how to relate to the living Earth itself (beyond just using the local vernacular in architecture and building structures that blend with the landscape, though this is certainly nice and important and obviously better than the "default autocad" aesthetic so popular in america...)
Graham! Yes! Good to see you here brother. I too am swamped in pixel dust. Let’s swamp together… and resurrect together too.
John, hey brother! Amen to that, amen amen.
Some fun, me dressed up as Saint Patrick in 2015 in our town’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade. Scroll down to see the photo. Over the years I have dressed up as the Saint and told his story first person. My current outfit is toned down, more “natural”, not full on Roman Catholic bishop. I was told I looked like a pope, not a message I want to present. https://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/picture-gallery/news/2015/03/14/green-wearing-revelers-take-over-downtown-visalia-in-st-pats-parade/24764497/
Ha, nice! And also, if there *were* a Pope with a name like BeardTree, how awesome would that be? (On a related note, I came across a mention of a priest in the Philokalia named "Hyacinth" -- which I'd known about that when I was choosing a baptismal name!)
Not really a live lead, but these guys are doing some elegant data viz. Despite the name of their publication. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/careers/
Thanks for sharing, Meg -- yeah, they got a pile of sweet charts over there!
One of the most subversive things one can do in this post modern machine age is pray. I still believe that this and the eternal search for God in the True, the Good and the Beautiful is a way to reclaim our lost humanity. Throughout the Old Testament God speaks from the wind the, earthquake and fire but “ after the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood in the entrance of his cave “ 1 Kings 19:12-13. Godspeed Graham!!
Amen, Leonore!!
Graham, I'm glad you're back! You sound really well, and your writing is inspiring. Good luck with the job hunt. Please don't let it drain your joy.
M! So good to hear from you -- and to hear this, that you think I sound really well. That is encouraging. You know, at the back of my mind in recent days has been Basho, as you depict him, sitting in the simplicity of his tree -- everything already present and at rest, nothing more than that needed. That's my happy place!
Yeah, hell without a guide to lead you out.
RE Godel Theorem as a metaphor for religious boundaries: Yes, of course, if religions are systems. I think that's what Jesus shows us anyway: that the system (religion) doesn't encompass Transcendent Being. It points to it and leads/guides our approach/alignment to God/Love/Source of Being, like an asymptote. "I came not to abolish the law or the prophets but to fulfill them". Religion is the mountain. It will never be the cloud of unknowing/the heavenly unconscious/uninterrupted communion with the Divine, but one must start by climbing it.
Godel helped me understand that even mathematical systems, that I used to regard as sort of absolute truth, are theories that must be built on a series of axioms. And as soon as those systems declare themselves to be all-encompassing, you can write a true "this statement is false" statement using the system's own language. This is the Lucifer/Narcissus phenomenon in which intelligence falls in love with itself, worships its own being, and cuts itself off from the rest for the universe, thereby precipitating its own demise. This stands in opposition to true healthy being which naturally continues to open itself to the world, to take in new things and use them to grow. Pride goes before a fall. (if any mathematicians read this, I hope I represented Godel and the math world at least somewhat accurately).
Brilliant.
Hearing you on all this, Avery.
The image of an asymptote is a strong one -- there's a very clear direction to go in, and you know exactly where you'll end up when you go in that direction, yet you never actually get there until you leave the curve...
In Sunlilies, I think I used the image of flower petals and nectar -- the bees don't drink the petals, they drink the nectar, but they can't see the nectar, they can only see the petals. so they have to be attracted by the petals, but only to go beyond them.
True religion is "antireligious" religion -- religion for pointing beyond religion. but it uses religious language to do so --- which hangs as a gigantic, gigantic ripe dangling fruit that anxious, controlling, dogmatic, black and white, power-hungry people can't resist plucking.
help me out and contrast this to Jesus' parables (parabolic curves in His stories)
we're doing a lot of math tonight!
his parables are parabolic -- they take you out of yourself, into the shoes of the unclean Other, so you can come back to yourself truly, and be at rest.
but each time you do that, you're actually going up and up the hyperbolic curve (the local topography of the hyperbola, mythically speaking, is composed of parabolas. back me up on this, Avery.
@Graham, I love your image of the bees and the petals/nectar! Bees can teach us so much. The Divine reveals so much about himself within nature. All creation convincingly and consistently proclaims the eternal patterns (Psalm 19 and so many other references).
RE the misapprehension/misappropriation of religion: Satan quotes the scriptures almost as frequently as Jesus does. And yes, instead of waiting for the proper time to receive the fruit in its full ripeness, we often grasp it and draw it unto ourselves, the fruit appearing so irresistibly juicy and delicious.
@PHI, I guess I was considering Jesus's ministry generally as a whole rather than specific parables. However, I think you're alluding to the etymological similarity between “parable” and “parabola” where a a parable is 'thrown/sent alongside' to provide comparison/relational perspective.
This forum seems a bit strange for me to dive so deep, but here goes: I used to have a bit of an aversion to the seemingly trite and contrived “ask Jesus into your heart” concept propagated in modern evangelical circles, but I've come to realize that this phrase actually captures something really profound. Take the asymptote, make it three dimensional, and orient it vertically. What you get is a spiral moving upward, constantly approaching the pole at the center (a sort of Christmas tree). We must place the Logos/incarnate Divine/True humanity/best self at the core of our essence, the center of our ontology. The embodied Divine image filled with the Divine Spirit must be that which we are constantly spiraling upward toward. “I am the true vine (trunk), you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you shall bear much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing”. Jesus (Logos/embodied God Man) is actually at the center of creation. This connection is what we long for. Anyway, almost all religions have a compelling narrative/explanation about how we (humans) got here, who we once were, how we were once in true harmony/communion with the Divine, and exactly what acts/decisions led/leads humanity away from this peace/completeness. Few, though, have an incarnate example of or physical character demonstrating how we are to reconcile this, what direction to move individually and collectively, and how to conduct ourselves in order to return to the Garden within the Golden City on the far side of the chiasm. Of course, like the asymptote, we can't repair that connection until death. Death is our glory, for death is conquered only by death. It is the leveling of the playing field for all humans, that which completes us, that which returns us to the Source of all Being, that which dissipates/dissolves our unity in a corrupted form and restores our unity with the Divine. Death is the point at which The Source of Being (I AM, who breathed life into all things) calls all His creatures/creation back into unity with himself. So yeah, I guess we're on the asymptote until death. And to think that we'll return to the fullness of communion before death is deception. To declare “I'm Him” before death is Luciferian and in league with Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and the rest of these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_be_Jesus. In contrast, Jesus remains mostly silent to accusations during his trial and responds truthfully “I am” only when asked directly if he is the Son of God (which by the way, we all are according to Luke 3:38, if we trace our lineage back to Adam).
Still not the full response, Avery, but I'm imagining something like y=|x^-1| spun around the z-axis. As z →∞, the curve approaches the central axis -- but by the same token, as z →0, it flattens out to almost horizontal, and x and y go to +/- ∞. What that's illustrating is this simple, basically very childlike "asking Jesus into your heart" notion that you so beautifully raise from the depths here -- it's also a way (as you say) of asking yourself to recognize that Jesus is in fact the heart of Creation itself, as symbolized by the horizon -- the horizontal plane where z = 0. Put another way, anyone and everyone on Earth is already included in him. And also, the closer to the heart of Creation they walk, no matter how waywardly or indirectly, they more they lift "off the ground" as it were, and are carried upward into the Father. There is no way to be outside of Yeshua. And yet the goal is always further inward, further upward--a never ending task, not even with the dissolution of this primate skin-bag.
I'm hitting Like, and then I'm reading this ten more times before I respond...
Darius & the Clouds by Sandra Cisneros:
You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here these is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.
Darius, who doesn't like school, who is sometimes stupid and mostly a fool, said something wise today, though most days he says nothing. Darius, who chases girls with firecrackers or a stick that touched a rat and thinks he's tough, today pointed up because the world was full of clouds, the kind like pillows.
You all see that cloud, that fat one there? Darius said, See that? Where? That one next to the one that look like popcorn. That one there. See that. That's God, Darius said. God? somebody little asked. God, he said, and made it simple.
So beautiful, Matt. And so Matt, Matt, to share the long gem that only dauntless Matt Axvig would have the fortitude to dig long enough for. Thanks, man!
Bubbles & blue skies are the very best! Miss you, Graham. <3
Margaret! Ah!--I miss you too! So good to hear your voice! (I can hear it in my mind's eye...)
Welcome back GP!! Your voice was missed.
JVK -- awesome to see you here, man! I was just thinking about you the other day & wondering about your own journey...
He’s back! This essay was exactly the ray of sunshine I needed today.
Oh man, awesome Miles -- what a delight to hear. Also: My old flip phone died, with all its contacts, including yours...can you text me sometime, no rush? We should get the crew back to the cabin some day when the weather's fair and people are around, maybe summer or whatever...maybe accidentally time it for a pizza night or something...
Oh man! Miles! So glad to hear it -- and so glad to hear your voice, so to speak!
And it was great to literally hear your voice, I love the editorializations in the recording
Ha, cool. I was having morning prayer flashbacks :) I think these'll be fun.
So glad you’re back! Just one essay and I can feel all my ducks aligning again. Thank you, beautiful human❣️
🙏 Hallelujah -- awesome, Cheryl. Glad to be back & to have you here. Looking forward to the new journey for sure...
I like that description of a shroud of exhausted depression you quoted. I just picked up Byung-Chul Han's "The Burnout Society" and he opened it along very similar lines.
I keep wanting to read this guy! Let me know how this one is -- maybe I'll start there, if I can scrounge up a copy.
I certainly will let you know!
Man, I feel you. Online job hunting is like navigating the nine circles of hell. I think we're at or very close to Babel.
Are you familiar with Godel's theorem of incompleteness? Every system is either incomplete or false. A constant reminder to me that, even in the digital and mathematical realm, systems eat themselves when they try to solidify their border/definition completely. Even a castle needs gates.
"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in" - Leonard Cohen
Avery! Man, yeah -- that's it exactly, the nine circles. But without a Beatrice.
But you dropping Goedel and Cohen into the same paragraph is a sunbeam dropping into the darkness. Definitely down with Goedel's incompleteness theorem & I hear you using it as a metaphor for religious boundaries--yeah?
It's very surreal to listen to your writing, in your voice, as I sit at my desk plodding through fatigue homework (ironic, huh?). I'm glad life is moving along, and glad you're back to writing! Keep it up, Graham.
Ha! The Machine is the Mother now, baby! ;) Awesome to see your name, and your voice, Thomas -- hope you're doing well! And come up to the land with the boys sometime, you'd be floored by the cabin. I lost everyone's phone #s, so just text me or something...
I reposted this from the Charles Eisenstein Substack in response to your “towards a Western reindigeneity, where the Messianic feast and permaculture are one unified and harmonious thing”Funny thing about the future - it can be hard to know what it is because it hasn’t happened yet! I am caught between two opinions about it. Either Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years or so or we will be sliding into the future predicted by John Michael Greer in his books, The Retro Future, The Ecotechnic Future, and The Long Descent. Unfortunately it looks like to me we have passed the point to have a soft landing into what Greer is describing.
Appreciated your confession of not being an OrthoBro. I am not a EvangelBob either. I think the various Christian tribal groupings are jostling overlapping Venn diagrams continuously permutating and hybridizing within the Father, Son, Holy Spirit space. Crisp boundaries to please our Pharisee and Sadducee tendencies are not available.
May the tender witness of the Spirit be with us both.
Also, EvangelBob -- ha ha ha!
Also, I was looking through some subscriber stuff on some other issue, and saw your email address, and was like "Ohhhh, THERE he is!!" Was wondering if you had peaced out or what, but you just changed your name -- awesome. And very glad you're still here. And "May the tender witness of the Spirit be with us both" -- amen, brother, amen. Amen, amen.
Ha, awesome, BeardTree -- just like your name. Sliding, leaping, or careening--we're gonna get there, but "soft" it probably won't be. More and more it sounds like it might get pretty dang incandescent!! Still, I trust in Yeshua that--regardless--his kingdom's gonna keep slowly and secretly growing, like a tiny flower morphing one day into a tree.
Think I’m a fellow scavenger ! Lovely words and look forward to reading more. Yes the search for Order and Beauty has brought me to look at Orthodoxy but I feel already it’s not resonating deeply enough and I am reluctantly brought back to the Anglican tradition in which I was grounded as a child . Rowan Williams and others like CSLewis remind me of the essential goodness and I see I’m too much of a Protestant to fully embrace orthodoxy or Catholicism
finding real Anglican worship isn't simple these days but well worth the search!
finding real ANYTHING isn't so simple these days -- and certainly worth it!
so good to see you here again, PHI...
Very glad to have you here, Jane. Order and beauty, we cannot do without--that's for sure. I don't know, I'm kind of wired different, but I get massive waves of healing from the order and beauty of living trees, standing in their serene, sunlit silence -- whereas wall to wall iconography in orthodox churches really stresses me out; it's overwhelming, and I don't find them beautiful -- that's just me. I love Anglican aesthetics myself, and have fond memories of an Anglican church I went to for about a year in Chicago--a lot of austere, elegant stone beauty, like a cave, plus four part harmonies resounding from the balcony.
Graham, have you seen the work of the architect/designer Andrew Gould? I think that the orthodox churches he has designed for parishes around America are getting towards that 'western reindigeneity' you speak of, by embracing local, vernacular building traditions, not just being cheap copies of some idealized version of what orthodox churches are. That being said I'm sure there's a lot of expense involved and what's also important is getting back to that in our own homes, fields and gardens. I really appreciate your perspective.
Hey, Brennan -- thanks for this. Yeah, I have seen Gould's work -- in Road to Emmaus, I think? And yes, his structures are massively expensive -- but very beautiful, I think. Way better than some of the faux onion dome stuff you see in these parts...but ultimately, yes, I think my gaze is more on the home, the field, the garden -- making these our first temple. Gorgeous buildings are nice, but sort of empty if we don't ourselves know how to relate to the living Earth itself (beyond just using the local vernacular in architecture and building structures that blend with the landscape, though this is certainly nice and important and obviously better than the "default autocad" aesthetic so popular in america...)