Listen for Divine Echoes
They’re all around us, especially in the stories we tell and the poetry we weave. These divine echoes reverberate throughout our lives and culture, calling us back to what’s good, true, and beautiful. Such texts don’t ignore the hard realities of our days, but, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge so memorably puts it, these human creations revitalize what in our world has become “fixed and dead.” Our imaginative exercises are, for Coleridge, a repetition of the ultimate act of creation, renewing and refreshing our spirits, even repairing what’s been broken. Through these works, we are invited into the primordial act of creation, to take up that life-giving task in our finite realms.
And it is indeed life-giving. Amid the cacophony of our culture wars, the animosity of hyper-partisan invective, the dehumanizing tendencies of social media, taking time for literature just might give us a broader perspective and the mental and emotional tools to cultivate a bit of hope. We might, I suspect, remember who we are. Even more, we remember who our neighbor is. And perhaps most important, we recall the unshakable bond we share with our neighbor.
I am, in the end, a die-hard Christian humanist, which I take to mean that we human beings matter because we bear the image of God. What deserves our regard, as Austin Farrer so beautifully puts it, is not merely our neighbor but our neighbor in God and God in our neighbor. It is his divine stamp on us that gives all our strivings their ultimate value, and that justifies and even compels our cultural investigations.
And so this project is simultaneously an act of discovery and devotion, searching out what texts help to tell us about ourselves and offering them up as gifts of renewal, restoration, and flourishing. I would love for you to join me in this endeavor.
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