Incarnation Disclosed

Paintings of Jesus are often painful to look at. Either painfully idealized or obviously ethnocentric, they betray all of our own projections and reveal very little of the truth of who this God-become-man could have been and continues to be.

Lately, my faith stumbles over the Incarnation. A human being who is at once God... it has seemed ludicrous in the extreme. My belief in such a thing embarrassed me.



In searching for the above painting, called "The Contemplator" by Kramskoy, that Dostoevsky mentions in "The Brothers Karamazov," I stumbled upon this painting of Christ in the wilderness.



He is bathed in light, but he willing hunches into His own shadow. His beard is dirty and maybe a little matted. His bare feet touch the earth He created unceremoniously. His hands are clenched so tightly his tendons stand out. His eyes are elsewhere, with a hint of lament. Still, His forehead seems creased with resolution

This is a powerful aspect of Jesus glimpsed through art. It is the concordance of discordance in Christ. It is precisely His Godly humanity. It enlivens my faith in Incarnation, at least for as long as my fickle heart can grasp its Truth.

Godspeed.

Morning Tide of Thought

I think the one of Jesus commands that I'm most focused on these days is to not worry. I'm trying to be obedient, but sometimes I just end up worrying about worrying.

This kind of obedience is especially important for philosophy right now. If I'm doing philosophy to try to meet the expectations of an exterior, posited, super-ego-like standard of what a philosopher should be or do or whatever, I end up lying all the time.

"Sure, I love reading Wittgenstein."

I end up reading things in order to impress people and to try to be someone else. To try to be the REAL philosophy student and not just my fraudulent self.

Even Truth isn't really my goal, if by truth we mean some out-there-now-real that has to be discovered and comprehensively comprehended. If that were the case, I would never stop worrying about all that will inevitably escape my grasp.

No, I think I'm here to do only this: To do the work I love and love the people I'm doing it with.

That and, as Shaq says, not "come inside the paint w/ any weak shit."

No more ambition. It is just the self divorcing and judging itself. It's horrendous doubleness.

If I pursue this place, these people and this work in passionately LOVE, I will be exactly the kind of successful I'm supposed to be.

and nothing more.

Godspeed.