As I drove down the hill Sunday, a huge full moon rose out of the lake; I turned the other way to see the sun setting, orange waving through turquoise water. Touched by the beauty; I felt pulled outside myself.
This pull of the “beyond” may come in many ways— “Christ plays in ten thousand places” as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in his poem, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” While my experience of nature (and often my encounter with art) draws me out—toward the divine—they must be rooted in real, material life.
In an essay (collected into a book by the same name)–Mystery and Manners–short story writer, Flannery O’Connor, argues that the human reach toward the divine is universal, but that, being human, we must experience that otherness through the tangible. “Mystery,” she argued, must be experienced in the everyday “manners” of human life.
If you’ve read O’Connor’s short stories, like “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or “Good Country People,” you will have been shocked by her portrayal of the beyond in the grotesque and violent. (O’Connor’s characters are so well-drawn that you can practically smell them!) Her writing, she said, was meant to shock our distracted culture, to “shout at the hard-of-hearing”— so they would encounter mystery through manners.
Many experience this otherness in poetry. Beloved poet Mary Oliver died this past week. Many of us were moved as she showed us mystery, not in manners, but in nature.
Mary Oliver opens her poem, “The Ponds”:
“Every year/the lilies/ are so perfect/I can hardly believe/their lapped light crowding/the black, / mid-summer ponds.”
Then a few lines on: “I bend closer and see/how this one is clearly lopsided —/and that one wears an orange blight —/and this one is a glossy cheek/ half nibbled away —” She goes on: “Still, what I want in my life/is to be willing/ to be dazzled —”
And finishes the poem: “I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —/that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum/of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.”
A real pond, with tangible lilies brings a glimpse of the divine.
This mystery/manners paradox is at the heart of Spirit of the Wilderness church’s annual art show. We invite artists to explore the intersection between spirituality and the arts, the push/pull inherent in this paradox.
Just as O’Connor expresses transcendent truth through characters, and Oliver voices the divine through nature—we challenge artists to this with a distinctly northern theme. This year’s topic—Thin Places: Encountering the Surprising Spirit along the North Shore—calls artists to look at sights and sounds which pull them out of themselves, and then express those in tangible ways, such as paint, clay, photo or glass.
Mystery in manners: I’m very aware of these challenges, since I have a book hot off the press. My latest— OMG: Growing our God Images—has been gestating for almost 10 years (long pregnancy!). In many ways it is a part of me, as I use my life—from childhood to fundamentalism, from an English seminary to South Africa under apartheid, to Minnesota–to trace the growth in my understanding of who God is and what God cares about, expressing the “mystery” of God in the “manners” of my life.
I’m nervous about my “new baby” toddling into the world. Words are the tangible medium available to writers, and words have less slippage than musical notes or oil paint. They must be specific and tangible to be interesting and artistically pleasing.
It’s a risk—but it’s also the pattern at the heart of Christian faith—the greatest mystery of all—God incarnate in one tangible life.
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.
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