During Lent, members of the clergy at St Mary’s are giving addresses at Choral Evensong on the theme “If I had just one more sermon to preach…”
Here’s mine:
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
If I had just one more sermon to preach, I’d tell people that God loved them.
The truth is, (more…)
ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.
you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.
the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.
Its not just me though, and not just fours.
I think because sorrow touches the core of the human condition – we are mortal but can perceive immortality. “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11)
I understand Aristotle talks about catharsis and various philosophers have followed up on that idea.
Perhaps it arouses sadness both from the art itself but also from our own sources festering within and allows us to let go. We feel better for the letting go, the lessening of our own internal sadness, and so perceive the art as beautiful.
Kimberly was there before me. However, even I, a nine, can sometimes see the beauty in sad things. For me they do two things (may be more but two are most obvious). The first is the catharsis thing. The second is to make me less lonely. Look, here am I weeping, but all around me people sit in the same sorrow. It is not just my sorrow – I am not alone.
I have long thought there is another answer, one I do not properly understand but I have (I think – and who am I to think it). Deep in God there is a huge well of sorrow. Unless we experience sorrow we cannot understand God. When we sorrow we tap into that well, and become closer to him.
And being a nice cheerful nine, I will now add that I live in hope that having sorrowed with him, we will share also and even more fully in the joy which swallows the sorrow. Delete this last paragraph from your mind on reading, it will only spoil the joy of the sorrow.
Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?
Surely it’s because the concept of beauty is independent from concepts such as ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ – just as a G major chord might be loud or soft, but that volume has no effect on its G major-ness.
I remember Augustine saying (don’t ask me where) that for a picture to be beautiful it requires dark colours as well as bright.
There is also a hint of an answer in this poem by Edwin Muir:
Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.
This time next week, the “Cascade Conversations” will be taking place in Pitlochry. This is an attempt to allow discussion in the Scottish Episcopal Church about issues relating to homosexuality. I won’t be there because I’ve not been invited and I’m sorry about that as I would have liked to listen to what others were…
What a joy to be in this place today celebrating the resurrection. We began on a high last Sunday and have made our way though this Holy Week. People sometimes call that a journey, a waymarked path, a pilgrimage. But for me, that doesn’t begin to describe it. For me it is more like being…
In the middle of the busy days of Holy Week comes the news that Jim Cotter has died. Jim was a poet-priest – someone for whom words were as important as breathing. He wrote prayers in which unicorns danced. He was also I think the first out gay priest I ever met, coming to preach in…
Many thanks to all those who made Palm Sunday so special at St Mary’s. (I’ve been ill for a fortnight, so it wasn’t down to me!) Thanks to Stewart Macfarlane for capturing this pic. A reminder that Holy Week starts with joy.
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