Averi J ~Gemma May and Guinivere
Who loves Picnik.com? I do. I do. It is like Photoshop for dummies. I just use the free version to change exposure and crop and add effects like vignettes or 1960s coloring. Plus WORDS! I love being able to add lots of words. It is really easy. If I can do it, anybody can! I’ll share some fun little things soon.
Found in drafts folder from last summer. Mea Culpa. This was part of the writings by a group of us who read Sacred Romance last summer and wrote about it. Wrote a lot about it! My apologies to Amy Jo for my delay in posting this, but she did include a quote about April which makes it seem as though it was meant for now. Maybe it was…
Amy Jo and her husband, Damon
From Amy Jo: How lovely that Tolkien, T.S. Eliot and Annie Dillard should all be quoted in the epilogue! Interspersed in our authors’ final thoughts, there are jewels I must point out…
On Living From Desire: It is in this section that the authors quote T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,
“April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire.”
“Sadly, many of us have been led to feel that somehow we ought to want less, not more. We have this sense that we should atone for our longings, apologize that we feel such deep desire. Shouldn’t we be more content? Perhaps, but contentment is never wanting less, that’s the easy way out. Anybody can look holy if she’s killed her heart; the real test is to have your heart burning within you and have the patience to enjoy what there is now to enjoy, while waiting with eager anticipation for the feast to come.” (p.199)
On Rehearsing the Story: “Our acts of remembering must therefore involve both essential truths and dramatic narrative. I believe we need to hold the creeds in on hand and our favorite forms of art in the other. There are films, books, poems, songs, and paintings I return to again and again for some deep reason in my heart. Taking a closer look, I see that they all tell me about some part of the Sacred Romance. They help wake me to a deeper remembrance. As Don Hudson has said, ‘Art is, in the final analysis, a window on heaven.'” (p.205) It is my opinion that the last two sections, Where We Have Come From and Where We Are Headed, are part of the very rehearsing the authors recommend. I am encouraged by the quote of Annie Dillard on p. 209, “The world is fairly studded and strewn with unwrapped gifts and free surprises… cast broadside from a generous hand.” These gifts and free surprises are to me, what inspires encouragement to live, a desire to dream of the future, and an insatiable urge to see, imitate, manufacture, and praise God for beauty.
May God use these things often to refresh my memory of His faithful and Sacred Romance!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Thanks, Amy Jo! And AMEN!
PS – April is being kind of cruel…S n o w ! ? ! today…