Category: Random thoughts

Random thoughts

Looking into one another’s eyes

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

In his essay ‘Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community’, Berry laments contemporary society’s ‘gravitation of attention from the countenance, especially the eyes, to the specifically sexual anatomy’, noting that

the countenance is both physical and spiritual. There is much testimony to this in the poetic tradition and elsewhere. Looking into one another’s eyes, lovers recognize their encounter as a meeting not merely of two bodies but of two living souls. In one another’s eyes, moreover, they see themselves reflected not narcissistically but as singular beings, separate and small, far inferior to the creature that they together make. In this meeting of eyes, there is an acknowledgment that love is more than sex.

Random thoughts

Modern Christianity has stood silently by

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Modern Christianity … has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire.

Wendell Berry, ‘Christianity and the Survival of Creation’, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community

Random thoughts

Sermons and churches

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Most sermons are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without reference to the heritage of church architecture or respect for the place; they embody no awareness that work can be worship.

Wendell Berry, ‘Christianity and the Survival of Creation’, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community

Fiction · Random thoughts

Where to put one’s gratitude

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

Zadie Smith’s On Beauty did never quite engage me in the way that I had expected, but here are what for me were the book’s three highlights:

… poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized.

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people.

It’s like he knows he’s blessed, but he doesn’t know where to put his gratitude because that makes him uncomfortable, because that would be dealing in transcendence – and we all know how he hates to do that. So by denying there are any gifts in the world, any essentially valuable things – that’s how he shortcircuits the gratitude question. If there are no gifts, then he doesn’t have to think about a God who might have given them. But that’s where joy is. I’m on my knees to God every day.

In the last quote it is the book’s male hero’s teenage son speaking and displaying far more wisdom than his father ever manages. There is such profound truth in the equation of gratitude and joy. Being grateful to God – that indeed is where true joy is.