Let Yourself Go

No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead,
But leaving straining thought and stammering word,
Across the barren azure pass to God;
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird,
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed.

—Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, from “SONNET XXVIII”

Some Tender and Terrible Energy

Marie-Francois Firman-Girard, Autumn Market at Les Halles

"What does faith mean, finally, at this late date? I often feel that it means no more than, and no less than, faith in life—in the ongoingness of it, the indestructibility, some atom-by-atom intelligence that is and isn’t us, some day-by-day and death-by-death persistence insisting on a more-than-human hope, some tender and terrible energy that is, for those with the eyes to see it, love."

~Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss 

The Source of Moral Meaning

Rembrandt’s 1659 rendering of Moses with the Ten Commandments 

Do our great stories create moral meaning? Or do they actually detect and reveal it? 

"Good fiction does not create phenomena; it describes them. Like all art, fiction is a language for communicating a type of reality that can’t be communicated in any other way: the interplay of human consciousness with itself and the world. That experience can be delusional, as when we hear voices, mistake infatuation for love, or convince ourselves that slavery is moral. But the very fact that it can be delusional points to the fact that it can be healthy and accurate as well. When it is healthy, the “common imagination of human beings” can be regarded as an organ of perception, like the eye. Fiction merely describes the world of morality and meaning that that organ perceives."

~Andrew Klavan, "CAN WE BELIEVE?"