Water in Excelsis

Water above the firmament:
    winter rain descending; the roots of vitis vivifera clutching earth.
Spring warmth:
     water drawn through vinestock, stem, and leaf; tendril, flower, fruit.
Summer heat:
     sun fierce upon the hills; in the grape now, water, glucose, fructose, tannin, acid; all beneath the thin
     firmament on which the Spirit's brooding leaves behind a bloom of yeast; Saccharomyces ellipsoideus:
     the thumbprint of the Lord and Giver of life.
Then autumn:
     basket, press, vat; sugar and yeast wantoning; earth's old September love revived:2C6H5OH+2CO2;
     fermentation; the warm must, its jaunty cap set drunkenly, rejoices in the pleasure of good company.
Here sing and brawl now
     alcohol, carbonic acid gas, acetic acid, higher alcohols, succinic acid, glycerol, and, chief among them,
Water come of age
     in the vast pots of this old Cana, where the Word, in silence, orders up new wine.
Finally:
     racking off, barreling, clearing, bottling; the long wait - for esters: alcohol and acid reconciled, wine bodied
     forth to roundness and a nose; for oxidation: tannin and alcohol softened, corners smoothed by the Spirit's
     thumb, purple shaded brown
Until
     (in Heaven it is alwaies Autumne) earth's last best gift is brought to sere and velvet elegance,
To Wine Indeed
To Water in excelsis.

...

Let us pause and drink to that.

Capon, Robert Farrar. The Supper of the Lamb. Smithmark, New York, NY, 1996. Pages 83-85

Alinea Restaurant

William A. Foster says

"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives" (1)

Robert Farrar Capon (an Anglican) says

"For all its greatness, the created order cries out for further greatness still.  The most splendid dinner, the most exquisite food, the most gratifying company, arouse more appetites than they satisfy.  They do not slake man's thirst for being; they whet it beyond all bounds." (2)

Denise Frame Harlan says, in response to that paragraph from Capon's truly marvelous book, "The Supper of the Lamb"

"I'd never known what to do with all the love in my heart for this beautiful, mess of a world.  All this time, I'd been trying to temper and tame my passion for mountains and tea and road trips and cheesecake and people. I'd known God my whole life, had known Christ for a decade, and had focused on Jesus's suffering and sacrifice.  I'd been afraid to love anything too much for fear that I'd disappoint God and prove myself too worldly, too attached to the everyday stuff of creation that would hinder my race toward heaven and the life hereafter.  I'd been afraid, and I'd held my heart back.  Suddenly it occured to me that this fear, this withholding, might be sin.  Maybe I'd had everything all wrong." (3)

Maybe she had.  


I believe that the very good creation of God, when taken in its proper light, can be fingers pointing us, His incarnate creatures, back to the creator, who made us creative in His image.


Alinea is a restaurant that sets the bar high, when it comes to looking intensely at the creation and then continuing the creative act.


I want to go there one (1) time in my life, with my wife.  (A dream my pocket book and consciousness of the needs of the poor forced me to give up as soon as it formed.)


Does anyone want to donate $400? :)


Though the pictures you are about to look at are an exaggerated expression of what I am talking about (with corresponding price tag), I think that God, who gave us all things richly to enjoy wants us to join Him in creation, and enjoy Him in creativity.  

Caramel Popcorn

Apple

Blackberry

Peanut

Bean

PB&J

Chestnut

Tomato

Strawberry

Venison

Hot Potato-Cold Potato

Sweet Potato

Tomato

Note that price at the bottom 

(4)

Citation:
(1) Foster, William A. 
<http://thinkexist.com/quotation/quality_is_never_an_accident-it_is_always_the/226780.html>. Accessed 16 February 2011.
(2) Capon, Robert Farrar. The Supper of the Lamb. Smithmark, New York, NY. 1969.  
(3) Harlan, Denise Frame. "And She Took Flour".  From The Spirit of Food by Leslie Leyland Fields. Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon. 
(4) <http://www.alinearestaurant.com/>. Accessed 11 February 2011

The Beauty of Repetitive Change

C.S. Lewis (Anglican) and G.K. Chesterton (Catholic) are two authors that have often and powerfully influenced my thinking.  Maybe because they both use their initials in their pen name.  Maybe I will start going by D.S. Clark, and see where it takes me.


Here, Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, writes about God's gift of repetitive change, and the dark substitution and perversion of that gift into the need for continuous novelty.

(This is written as if by a demon to his "student" demon nephew) "The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart-an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.  The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.  To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.  And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable.  But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balance the love of change in them by a love of permanence.  He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.  He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.  He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.  This demand is entirely our workmanship.  If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas.  Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer.  Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up." ¹

When I read that, I recognized in myself that incessant need for the novel, and I decided to begin to find, rather, delight in God's rhythms that he has gifted us with. 


Later, I was reading Orthodoxy, by Chesterton, and ran across this passage,.

"A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.  Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.  They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.  For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.  It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.  It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God make daisies separately, but has never got tired of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we." ²

These are some of the reasons that I have begun to return to a more agrarian lifestyle, planting gardens, and trying (rather unsuccessfully, to date) to keep bees and chickens.  Beginning to look for the enchantment inherent in the world God has created.  They are also contributing factors in my family beginning to enjoy the rhythms of the liturgical year.

Citations:

¹ Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1961.

Pages 126-129.

² Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw Publishers. 1994. Page 61.

"Trees" and my Grandpa Joe

We named our son after my Grandpa Joe.  Unfortunately, Grandpa's real name was "Joyce".  Fortunately I didn't have to name my son "Joyce" to get the effect of naming him after Grandpa.  And fortunately, there is a good reason that Grandpa was named Joyce: my Great-Grandmother liked a poem, which I also happen to like, about trees, and also fortunately, there is a national forest with some really big trees* named in honor of the poet: Joyce Kilmer. And, also additionally fortunately, he wasn't just any old sissy poet, but rather, he was  Sgt. Joyce Kilmer, a member of the Fighting 69th Infantry Regiment, who died in the battle of the Marne, 1918.


"Trees"

"I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree"

Citation:
Kilmer, Joyce. "Trees". from One Hundred and One Famous Poems. Chicago, Illinois: Contemporary Books, 1958.  pg. 39


*

Peter Kreeft on Beauty

Peter Kreeft, in a speech on "Beauty", espoused a thought that I think David and Paul would have both agreed with*

(Since this came from a talk he gave, I did a little editing to smooth out some of his stream-of-consciousness style)

“A saint is a little Christ.  The connection between the beauty of the saints and the beauty of Christ is the connection between the original and the image. 

And one of the most powerful ways to become a saint is simply to see the beauty of God.

In heaven, we’ll all be saints.

People often ask the question, “Will we be able to sin in heaven?”

And the answer is obviously, “No”

And then their next question is, “Oh, well then God must take away our free will.”

“No.”

“Well if we have free will, we’ll be able to sin, because free will is always a choice”

And the answer is “Yes.”

“Well then, why won’t we?”

And the answer is “The Beauty of God.”

In the Beatific Vision, we will see the beauty of God so clearly, so overwhelmingly that it will be impossible to sin.

Why does anybody sin?  Why does the thief steal money? Because he sees that money can buy attractive things.  The dirty pieces of paper aren't attractive.  The dirty pieces of paper can buy things that satisfy his desires and are attractive to him.

He wouldn't steal cockroaches. He’d steal gold. 

But in heaven, we’ll see that sin is like the cockroach, because we’ll see that God is the real gold. So the vision of the beauty of God makes it impossible to sin.

The more we can get that (vision) here, the more close to sanctity we are. 

Religious art isn't just kicks. It’s not just aesthetics.

It’s a powerful aid to attaining the ultimate meaning of human life: to be a saint.

I love that line of Leon Bloy, 19^th century French Catholic writer, 'In the end, there is only one tragedy, not to have been a saint.' And beauty is a very powerful aid to that.”

Peter Kreeft. Talk on "Beauty". Sacred Arts Foundation. 9/12/09. <http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/38_beauty.htm>.

*Psa 27:4  One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple.(KJV)

*2Co 3:18  But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.(KJV)