The Face Of The Invisible
Idols and icons are ways of seeing the divine, of making the invisible visible. For the Jews of the old testament there was no difference between an idol and an icon – any visible representation of God was blasphemous. But Christians could not ignore that Jesus became a visible representation of the invisible God, yet they do not consider him an idol. And so a distinction had to be drawn between these two concepts.
The Gravity Of Beauty
Can words be art? Can they be wildly expressive, producing bold strokes of color across the canvas of our minds? Can ideas be communicated the way Van Gogh paints? The movement, the shapes, and the colors are not photorealistic, yet we recognize the beauty and truth of what he paints more profoundly than in photorealistic…
Life’s desire for itself bursts through death’s hold.
Suddenly all I know of life and death is subverted. For surely death follows life and is the end. But here, life’s desire for itself bursts through death’s hold. A beginning beyond the end. My logic of cause and effect, inverted. This is no mere historic event that fits into our sequence of time. All…
Tohu Wa-Bohu. God’s relationship to Chaos.
The world has been shaken a bit lately. Normal is no more. Our familiar activities had to be postponed. It might feel like chaos, but if chaos was a monster, what we have experienced in the past month is just the beginning of its awakening. Most of us hope that this monster will be lulled…
The Beauty Of Words And The Beauty Beyond Words
How can silence and revelation be complementary? Revelation implies insights, ideas, concepts, and the words to express these insights. Silence, deep silence, implies the absence of all these – of words and the internal narratives that overflow in speech. I love both the beauty of words and the beauty beyond words – silence. Many are…
Evolutionary Design
Observing the way in which nature co-exist, the flow of life and death, seems to reveal a designed harmony. But what is not immediately observable is the tens of thousands of species that went extinct in order to produce the current order. And so the design we observe is not the usual way we would…
