So let us pick up
the stones over which we stumble,
friends, and build altars...
Let us name the harsh light and
soft darkness that surround us.
Let's claw ourselves out from the graves we've dug.
Let's lick the earth from our fingers.
Let us look up and out and around.
The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked,
and
our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning.
Oremus.
Let us pray.
~ Padraig O'Tuama in DAILY PRAYER WITH THE CORRYMEELA COMMUNITY
The recovery of faith in our creativity and in the artist within each of us and the artists among all of us is no small thing. It has to do with the rekindling of the spark of hope and vision, of adventure and blessing, that a tired civilization needs...
The recovery of faith in our creativity
and in the artist within each of us and
the artists among all of us is no small
thing. It has to do with the rekindling of
the spark of hope and vision, of
adventure and blessing, that a tired
civilization needs...
If it is true, as Paul says, that "we are
God's work of art," then everything we
have said about art as meditation applies
to the delight, wonder, admiration,
surprise that God takes at our birth and
continual unfolding.
One hundred years ago the painter and poet William Blake lamented the ever-increasing violence of industrial society with these words: "Art degraded, Imagination Denied, War Govern'd the Nations." The dominance of war and war mentalities... all this is the price we have paid in the West for denying imagination, repressing or forgetting it, and thereby degrading art… To create is always to learn, to begin over, to begin at zero... With art as meditation we truly listen to the cosmos within us and around us and give birth to the ongoing cosmogenesis of our world...
