Gratefulness
While reading the BBC's account of the London bombings, I ran across a feature on Rachel, a woman from north London who was quite close to one of the Underground bombs but survived. She is publishing her memories of the bombing and her account of the daily effort to return to everyday life.
What particularly caught my attention was a single line, written the day after the bombings: "I'm going to sit in the garden today and look at the flowers and the sun and appreciate everything."
It's been a while since I did that. Why? Does it take a close brush with death to remind me to thank the Author of every good thing?
What particularly caught my attention was a single line, written the day after the bombings: "I'm going to sit in the garden today and look at the flowers and the sun and appreciate everything."
It's been a while since I did that. Why? Does it take a close brush with death to remind me to thank the Author of every good thing?
Bless the Lord, O my soul,To begin with, as my mom reminded me yesterday, "You're not going to hell."
And forget not all his benefits.
3 Comments:
This reminds me of a moment on the morning of September 11th... about the time the first plane hit the WTC, I was out in the garden admiring the dew drops on the pink cosmos. I remember the morning seemed to innocent, so beautiful, so perfect, so calm -- and what happened afterwards so jarring in comparison.
In a world torn by terror, beauty has such a ministry... what does that mean for us as writers/artists?
That's a good question. I imagine the answer is complicated. :-)
To put my two cents in, I think it's important for us writers/artists/whatever-we-are to acknowledge both pain and beauty. Sometimes it's easy to paint the world as if it's only painful and terrifying. At other times or for other people it's easy to paint the world as bathed entirely in sunshine, with no shadows at all. Neither one is true--and I think readers/viewers can spot the falsehood the instant they look at art.
Christy has a quote somewhere (Ursula McGuin?) that says that almost anyone can write about pain; the really hard thing is to write about joy.
Another thing I've noticed is the power of detail, of noticing small things like dew drops on cosmos. That's such a poignant picture. Sometimes detail touches the soul where expansive vistas can't.
What do y'all think?
The world is good, but fallen. And will be redeemed. (Proper appreciation to Dr. H. for pointing this out at regular intervals.) Forgetting any one of those three will inevitably mess up one's art.
For my two cents, I think the modern tendency is to focus on the nasty, and therefore it is more important to get across believable joy. There may have been a time when people thought everything was sunbeams and wildflowers, but I rather disbelieve that now is that time. But it also seems (oddly) that people can't take it, and refuse to admit that the evil they see is "evil." And then when something is indisputably evil, like 9/11, they don't know what to do with themselves. Therefore, it's important to portray evil truly, though not exhaustively, and to call it what it is. People will know what you're talking about if you just conjure enough to get your point across; they can fill in the gory details. It's the good (not necessarily = pleasant) details that they need help with.
At any rate, that is my opinion. I've been thinking about it, because I hate the evil half. I don't want to read it, write it, or think about it if I can avoid it--but I can't.
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