What is in Kelvin's Head?

Sunday’s Sermon

29/01/2013

Many people were kind enough to say encouraging things on Sunday after I preached this. Sadly I’ve got some problems with the video and don’t know whether I can make that appear later.

In the mean time, here’s the text:

And the eyes of everyone were upon him.

In the name of God, Creator, Saviour and Liberator. Amen.

I have already spoken to some of you of the most powerful moment in my recent three month sabbatical. It was the moment on the US election day when I found myself in Washington DC and someone had taken me sightseeing. As the votes were being counted, I found myself standing on the very spot that Martin Luther King preached his famous â€œI have a Dreamâ€ sermon to the thousands who had flocked to the National Mall.

As I stood on that spot gazing out into the night, I could imagine the crowds heading off into the distance coming to hear their champion of civil rights lay out his hopes for a better world.

As I stood there and night drew in I could feel America holding its breath wondering whether the people there had done something most people in that former crowd would scarcely have been able to image â€“ that America had re-elected a black president. It was a moment when I found myself unexpectedly in tears. Tears for the loss of Martin Luther King, tears of joy that though there is much still to do, aspects of his dream have become todayâ€™s reality and tears for America â€“ a country where the idea that the blue sky just around the corner is, if not constitutional, almost a theologically defining belief.

The next day I set out to explore the city and returned to the National Mall. As I walked up and down seeing the sights, (more…)

9 responses to “The Lament Question”

kimberly

12/08/2009

ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.

you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.

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kimberly

12/08/2009

the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.

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kelvin

12/08/2009

Its not just me though, and not just fours.

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Aaron Orear

12/08/2009

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)

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Erp

12/08/2009

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.

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RosemaryHannah

12/08/2009

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.

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Elizabeth

13/08/2009

Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?

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Ritualist Robert

14/08/2009

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.

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Steve

14/08/2009

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.

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