When We're Away

When I think of what you hold
is it only wine and wheat?
Will this Mystery please unfold
and my hungry heart entreat?

Could all the days of your life,
when you walked this land,
put an end to all my strife
and set themselves in my hand?

All my friends and all your souls
safely swim in holy wine.
God who loves, God who consoles,
You gave me all I thought was mine.

Friends go away and rarely meet
scattered way too far:
crushed grapes and ground wheat
offered upon an altar.

I come to take this bread and wine,
I make my way to You,
You took all I thought was mine:
O Lord, take me too.

The Political Aisle

We're interested in what's right.
You can have whatever's left.

A Word On Time

My word embraces the silence as a drop holds the sea.

            A drop and the sea are thoroughly water: the only difference is time.  

One day a drop will fall and be held by the sea, 

which is nothing but the largest drop 

who receives its dancing brothers on its dimpled face.

            A word is born out of the same silence to which it will return.  

A word is silence through and through, though there is a difference of time.  

In time a word is a moving silence, 

dancing from mouth to ear, mind to mind, heart to heart. 

Then what is 

time? 

Eternity swallows every single moment 

while eternity is carried in every moment. 

            Rather than being a lost and lonely sister to the Past and the Future, 

the Present is their Mother who holds both so close to her breast.  

The Past bemoans her suffering and the Future confides her anxieties.  

The Past recounts her joys while the Future shares her hopes.  

In it all, the Present has selflessly receded to 

more lovingly listen to both her daughters. 

            She is that blink of an eye that embraces everything in sight.

Beauty and Balthasar

I read the following quote almost six years ago,
and then I knew I wasn't alone in my theological interest.

"Beauty is the word that shall be our first.  Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.  Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to udnerstand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.  No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.  We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.  Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.  We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love."

From The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, Part I: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 18.

Tintinnabuli

This spider's evening

is spent weaving 'tween two bells

tolling dying day.

Moving On

"What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile."
Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins: A Novel

Romance in Romanticism

This is one of my favorite moments in German Romantic history.  Schelling was one of the most acute, passionate, and profound thinkers of Romanticism, whose insights challenged thinkers such as Fichte and Hegel.  His thought was incredibly influential to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who would really stoke the fires of British Romanticism.  Schelling's rigorous intellect, strong-willed character, and joyful stoicism was so remarkable, that upon first meeting him, Caroline Schlegel wrote to her brother-in-law, Friedrich . . .

Caroline Schlegel: Believe me, my friend, he is, as a man, more interesting than you concede: a real primal nature [rechte Urnatur]; in terms drawn from the world of minerals—granite.
Friedrich Schlegel: But where will he find female granite?

This is quite a statement coming from Caroline, who was married to another great German Romantic, August Wilhelm. She was a tenacious mind during this period, who between debating Novalis, Fichte, Hegel, Schiller, and even Schelling, was able to find the time to translate Shakespeare's works into German. This poignant moment of correspondence brings a smirk to historians' faces, because after divorcing Friedrich's brother, Caroline proved this moment prophetic moment by marrying Schelling, and showed that granite comes in many forms.