Creative power

“When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

What helps you remember?

Beloved

If you would enter into the wilderness,
do not begin without a blessing.
Do not leave
without hearing
who you are:
Beloved,
named by the One
who has traveled this path before you. ~ Jan Richardson

What are your spaces of “beloved” that allow you to enter the wilderness?

Clean pain

I have been pondering Resmaa Menakem’s concept of clean and dirty pain. “Paradoxically only by walking into our pain or discomfort- experiencing it, moving through it, and metabolizing it – can we grow.” ~ My Grandmother’s Hands

Where are your growing edges?

Substance

Art should capture the hypostasis or “the substance of things hoped” that the writer of Hebrews speaks of, to serve our culture to reveal the “evidence of things not seen.” ~ Makoto Fujimura

How do you capture the substance of hope?

Remember

We do not long remember those artists who followed the rules more diligently than anyone else. We remember those who made the art from which “the rules” inevitably followed. ~ Art & Fear

Who do you remember? What new spaces did they open up?

Mystery

“What is our life on earth, if not discovering, becoming conscious of, penetrating, contemplating, accepting, loving this mystery of God’s, the unique reality which surrounds us, and in which we are immersed like meteorites in space? “In God we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).” ~ Carlo Carretto, Letters from the desert

What are your doorways into God’s mystery?