Auth finds much to like in Realism, Impressionism, and modern art. He gives a fair read to Picasso, Seurat, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. He celebrates Salvador Dali’s 1954 “Crucifixion,” which depicts an ascendant, cosmic Christ.
But he’s also clear that the soul searching for God finds little sustenance in art grounded in atheism and secularism.
Dr. Hild’s fervent wish is that we might all come to play music, chant, or sing around the bedside of our dying loved ones.
“Yudina was a strange person, and very much a loner.” “Strange things kept happening to her.” “Yudina saw music in a mystical light. For instance, she saw Bach’s Goldberg Variations as a series of illustrations to the Holy Bible,” Shostakovich observed. “She always played as though she were giving a sermon.”
“The hermitage garden is designed to provide a place where nature, scripture and Glendalough’s history are combined in harmony, delighting the eye, comforting the soul and leading pilgrims to prayer and a deeper awareness of God.”
For all their solipsism, these young men are not self-pitying so much as they’re bewildered: by the state of the world, the culture, and the fact that as young males they’re unseen, unwanted, unremarked upon.
We’ve heard a lot about freedom these past weeks, but the only real freedom, it seems to me, is the freedom to do good. That is a freedom that can neither be granted, nor revoked, by any government, political body, or man-made law.
Pilgrimage doesn’t necessarily involve traveling, or traveling into the country. The journey is to our own hearts, and can thus take place in the poustinia (a sparse hut or room) of our apartments, or by walking through the streets of a city. Wherever we go, we go with bare feet—in spiritual poverty—and because we end up walking into the fragmented stones and sharp rocks of other people’s hearts, our feet get bloody.
At a buck apiece, everyone can afford puff-puff. “The one thing I always cry about and why I love Los Angeles is that the community we serve is not just one community…the African Chop Truck serves everybody.”
I visited the house in Combermere several years ago and was awed by the community’s self-sufficiency. They grow or raise almost all of their own food. St. Benedict’s Acres, the community farm, boasts vegetable beds, cows, chickens, and sheep whose wool is sheared, cleaned, dyed, spun, woven and knit into products for gift shops.
Hornstein notes the role trauma so often plays in mental illness. She finds people who are courageously fully functioning in the world while also managing almost unimaginably heavy psychic crosses.
As with a late Beethoven quartet, or a Cézanne still-life, the intensity of the beauty is almost too much to bear.
“I don’t want to be the guy with the one talent who buries it in the ground out of fear,” says Fr. Nathan. I have a gift. I feel I should use it.”
To my mind it’s the earliest images that most compellingly evoke the wonder and complexity of the human body. People were closer to God then, more aware of the divine plan. Death was a part of daily life, not hidden away and sanitized.
. “Battouflet’s chief concern was the vegetation on the ghostly paths. Cutting and thrusting impatiently, his stick kept open a vestige of the vineyard tracks which would otherwise have been overgrown and lost. It was his single self-imposed task.”