2
You saw the city of Chicago as creation. You saw creation aflame with life, alive with music, and all things—from trees and sun to stones and sidewalks—bright and whirling in a whirling dance.
3
Painter of motion and music, you also paint the silences: the book, the desk, the eyes, the little windows. And in the foreground a familiar face, a hand outstretched, five candles burning.
4
They say human society is only power and control. They say it is, at bottom, a stew of blood and violence and old bones. But your windows tell the truth: the world is music, poetry, dance, a book suspended in the sky, a dove beating her wings.
5
People speak of love. But let none say they have loved till they have loved a thing as you loved the color blue. What is blue? Blue is darkness and light, warmth and cold, night and day, inside and outside, earth and sky, singing and silence. Blue is all and in all, the living glow of interior light in every created thing. Blue is the secret fire of creation.
6
On the first day God separated darkness from light, blue from blue.
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On the second day God separated the waters above from the waters below, blue from blue.
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If in the beginning God had created nothing but blue, it would have been enough: all the marvelous varieties of that color would sing God’s glory, shout God’s Name.
9
“There is but one single color that gives meaning to life and art—the color of love” (Chagall).
Books
When I was forced to play team sports as a boy, I would wait in diminishing hope as all the other boys were chosen one by one. In the end there would be two of us left, me and the kid with coke-bottle glasses who couldn’t tie his own shoes and who was known to burst into tears if he ever lost the ball or got knocked down. For agonizing seconds the two hairy-legged captains would size us up, until, finally, one would turn to the other and pronounce the cruel verdict: “You can have them.” (I cannot lie: this happened even when my own best friend was one of the team captains.)
Yes, I know what it is to be unwanted. I suppose that’s why Calvinist theology has always appealed to me, and why I was forever bringing home stray kittens as a boy. It is also why I sympathize with the unwanted book, the book nobody else will buy or read, the book that might have languished in embarrassed silence until the end of the world, unchosen. It is part of Christian belief in the resurrection to assert that nothing is ultimately unwanted, nothing finally lost or forgotten. When the last trump sounds and the sea gives up its dead, whatever was neglected or cast aside will be raised up and kept forever in the presence of the one in whom Memory and Love are joined.
So sometimes when I’m rummaging in the darkest corner of a used bookstore, I will choose a book just because it looks lonely and forgotten. I find myself treating the book with special respect, handling it gently, patiently studying the binding, admiring the typeface, before finally taking it to a special place—a favorite café, or the beach, or the shade of a tree I love—where I can read it slowly and in secret. Like one of those orphaned kittens, I love the book even more because it is rejected by the world. By reading the unwanted book, I give my silent witness to the coming day when all the books will be opened and the last will be first and whatever was forgotten will be remembered in love, world without end.
Boredom
The cultural critic Neil Postman said that we are amusing ourselves to death. Our every waking moment is filled with pleasure, and yet, paradoxically, our lives are afflicted by a strange malaise. Never have we been more entertained; never have we been more bored.
On the whole, Christian theologians have harbored dark thoughts about boredom and have viewed it as a sin. Kierkegaard said that “boredom is the root of all evil,” while Jacques Ellul identified boredom—so “gloomy, dull, and joyless”—as a defining perversion of modern social life. Ellul’s view was close to that of Karl Barth, who similarly described “the signature of modern human beings” as neither serenity nor rebellion, but simply an “utter weariness and boredom.” In Barth’s view, “man is bored with himself,” and as a result “everything has become a burden to him.”
In contrast, the Italian philosopher Giorgo Agamben has offered a more positive assessment of the role of boredom in our lives. Human beings, he says, “cannot be defined by any proper operation,” and so our humanness can never be exhausted by any particular task. Agamben speaks of boredom as our “creative semi-indifference to any task.” This semi-indifference is linked to a theological truth about human beings: we are not reducible to our work; we will always exceed any given task. Or as Agamben puts it, boredom discloses the essence of a “simply living being.” Between our work and our being there lies a gap, and boredom marks that gap (Agamben, Means without End).
The gap between being and work is nowhere better depicted than in Andrew Marvell’s 1653 poem “Bermudas,” which portrays work in a primordial paradise:
Thus sang they, in the English boat,
An holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
These unfallen human beings are not singing to keep time in their rowing, but rowing to keep time in their song. They are really working, but they exceed their work, and the labor is a needless embellishment, a fitting but unnecessary improvisation. Or to put it more simply, their real work is praise: the rowing of the oars forms the background rhythm of their song. In Agamben’s terminology, Marvell’s rower could be described as a “being-without-work”—he really works, but his work is superfluous, a celebration rather than a necessity.
But if boredom marks the gap between our being and our work, it also marks the gap between being and enjoyment. At least in the affluent West today, most of us would accept that life cannot finally be boiled down to work. The more sinister threat today is the reduction of life to leisure. A consumer society generates boredom in order to alleviate it. We are always bored, and we are always being rescued from our boredom. As Huxley predicted in Brave New World, our society has become one in which there is “no leisure from pleasure.” Again, we have closed the gap between being and work, except that now enjoyment has become our true and proper “work.”
To face both work and enjoyment with what Agamben calls a “creative semi-indifference” is, today, the gesture of the human being who stands before God and is recognized by God—the human being who is no longer under law (neither the law of work nor the law of enjoyment), but under grace. This human being, this person under grace, is the one whose work and play can never be taken too seriously. They are creative embellishments whose ultimate aim is celebration and praise. Like Marvell’s rowers, both work and play find their place only as they serve the modest role of keeping the time in our song:
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
Breakfast
A prayer with my children
Yours are the bright sun and the blue sky to which we turn our faces as we gather on the lawn. Yours is the smell of steaming pancakes and brewed coffee and fresh-mown grass. Yours is the choreography that sets the wasps in motion while the trees and shrubs applaud.
Felicity has prepared a table for us, and You are the welcome that nearly blinds us as we squint together at the shining plates and glittering knives and forks. You are our fullness as we pile our plates with the pancakes we have made. You are our sweetness as we scoop handfuls of sliced strawberries from the bowl. You are our overflowing bounty, our More Than Enough, as we squeeze the syrup from the bottle, as it oozes