Month: December 2012

I was listening to Radiolab this morning. (BTW, Radiolab has to be my favorite podcast!) They were talking about Wilson Bentley. Bentley was the first person to actually photograph snowflakes.

Bentley’s interest in snowflakes began as a teenager. At the age of 15, he would peer at snowflakes through a microscope and attempt to draw the complex images before they melted. By the age of 20, he had attached a camera to the microscope and spent the rest of his life capturing and photographing what he called “tiny miracles of beauty.” Mind you, this was 1885 and way before our modern era of digital photography.

Tragically, Bentley died of pneumonia after walking six miles in a blizzard in order to photograph more snowflakes.

Bentley’s life made me think about beauty. First, here’s a man who spent his entire life enraptured by a beauty that most would rarely ever notice. And he was not only enraptured, but dedicated to endure the hardships necessary to document this beauty. It has made me pause and reflect about what beauty has captured my attention and allegiance.

Second, beauty is not everlasting. Bentley’s snowflakes are the perfect example. Within minutes these “tiny miracles of beauty” evaporate and vanish forever. The vibrancy of a sunset quickly darkens as the sun slips below the horizon. The gleam in a lover’s eye dims with age or sickness.

Third, considering the gazillion unseen snowflakes that have fallen to earth through the ages, there is beauty that will always go unseen by any human eye. There are flowers on a mountain somewhere that will bloom and die, unwitnessed by any terrestrial being. And then I think of the untold beauty throughout our cosmos. Images from the Hubble Telescope can only hint at the beauty that lies far beyond our reach.

Our world has been intentionally infused with beauty, everything from a snowflake, a flower, a sunset to a smile and a caring hand. It makes me grateful that our Creator loves his world so much that he sent his Son. God came into our world to save it and renew it. And this makes me long for that ultimate Day of Renewal when Heaven and Earth will fully merge, all things will be made right and beauty will no longer be fleeting.

“You love me more than I am able to love you.”

That line appears in one of Met Philaret of Moscow’s prayers. And it makes me pause every time I pray it.

In my previous youthful zeal and optimism, it was so easy to proclaim my love of God as though it were a grand thing. My worship was a spiritual facsimile of Tom Cruise jumping up and down on a couch. But the older I become, the more I realize that the truth quoted above is woven into the very fabric of reality. And it has tempered my immature exuberance with what I hope is humility. For my love for God is not something that needs to be proudly proclaimed in public but humbly practiced in silence.

God is love and perhaps the greatest expression of his love was the Incarnation. It was THE event of divine love that would heal humanity and creation and yet it was shrouded in quietude, humility and mystery.

Jesus taught that the greatest command is to love God with everything we have. Again, love is not proclaimed but practiced. But how? The Incarnation whispers an answer for those quiet enough to hear. “God became like us so we could become like him.”

God, who is love, became like us so we could become love like him.

St Paul encourages us to pursue love. This means far more than giving and receiving love, although  this would be a great start for many of us. Rather it’s pursuing Christ’s likeness, who embodied divine love as a real flesh-and-blood human being. We quietly love God by daily becoming the same kind of person he is.

The Incarnation isn’t just a historical event that we memorialize once a year. It’s a daily reality for those who love God. Just as God quietly and humbly slipped into his creation on that mysterious day, he still slips into his creation through our lives as we pursue love and become a little more like him.

Many people believe tradition to be a dead thing. Movies portraying a young man or woman kicking over the traces have become cliche. Tradition is depicted as the tool of the old or entrenched trying to retain social or political power over the young or disenfranchised.

So Fr Stephen’s definition of Tradition is like stepping out of a stuffy room into a crisp winter morning. It jolts the idea with fresh vitality.

Tradition is not the tyranny of the past over the present: Tradition is the adherence to the same eternal reality throughout all time.

Behind Tradition is the eternal reality of an amazing God. He’s a Creating God, giving life abundant expression under his care. He’s an Incarnational God, loving his creation so he becomes part of it in order to renew it from the inside-out. He’s an Apocalyptic God, embodying the ultimate union of heaven and earth so creation is restored and redefined. He’s a Loving God, sharing his life with ours in order that we may be continually reformed into his life and likeness.

So Tradition is the temporal expression of this eternal reality. Tradition is alive, rich, relevant, interactive, invigorating, rejuvenating, renewing, energetic, dynamic and vibrant.

Reading Scripture. Praying prayers. Making the sign of the cross. Honoring the Saints. Receiving the Eucharist. Confessing our sins. All open the windows to the brisk breeze of eternity, shocking us back to what is truly real.

I’ve seen about every trailer and clip for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. And yet I’ve remained a bit skeptical of the entire project. I loved The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But the thought of turning The Hobbit into another trilogy smacked of corporate greed more than artistic vision.

Then I saw THIS CLIP. I think this 1-minute clip is filled with same ethos that I love in the LOTR movies. What draws me to the LOTR movies are not the special effects, the fantasy, or the violence. It’s those startling moments when the curtain of reality is pulled back and we get a glimpse of true Reality. Moments of purpose, companionship, loyalty, and sacrifice that make sense of the pain and struggles we endure.

Those moments in LOTR continually move me to tears. And the last few sentences of the dialogue between Gandalf and Bilbo in this clip created a severe lump in my throat.

Gandalf: You’ll have a tale or two to tell of your own when you come back.

Bilbo: Can you promise that I will come back?

Gandalf: No… And if you do, you will not be the same.

There are moments in life when I can only shake my head in confusion and disbelief. And asking “Why?” provides no adequate answers. But it’s not those moments that are truly real or defining, despite how real they seem. It’s what, or better yet, Who awaits us at the End that is the True Reality and Purpose for everything.

I think it’s in our nature to want to make sense of what’s happening to us. Why am I sick? Why did I lose my loved one? Why am I lonely? But the meaning can’t be found in the moment. In many ways, it’s only after our life’s journey is complete that we will be able to look back with clear hindsight. But by then it’s too late. The paint on our life will have dried.

So the task in the moment is not to figure out Why but to be crafted through those moments into an ever-increasing image of Who. Because the only promise that awaits us is not that we’ll safely return from the journey, but that we’ll never be the same after the journey.