Excerpts from the Zettelkasten
Vol. 2, No. 4
Welcome to Creative\\Proofing, a space for hopeful, creative people learning to live wisely by asking questions about the good life: what it is, how to design our own, and how to live it well.
This newsletter is built on the hope of reciprocal generosity: I want to share what I find beautiful and meaningful, and I'd love for you to do the same. If you're inspired by anything I share, it would mean so much if you shared it with others, subscribed, dropped me a line and let me know, or paid according to the value it has for you. No matter what, I hope we can create and learn together.
What a paradox we give ourselves: to create what we think of as limitless freedom and possibility, only to discover we have created Nothing for ourselves.
By hurrying faster and faster toward an endlessly retreating horizon, we pull up everything that makes us ourselves. We leave ourselves with no raw materials with which to work, only the detritus of everything we previously encountered.
God arrives to give us what we need. God's being is in his arriving.
As with most alchemical beings, he brings upheaval and change. We may think we have summoned him, but, like Gandalf, he arrives exactly when he means to, and not a moment else. We may think we have summoned him for our purposes, to fix ourselves in history and define its boundaries in our image, but he arrives in the fire, the whirlwind, and the silence.
"Event" is the hermeneutic by which to understand God's1 identity and incarnation - to be arriving is to be dynamic and historical (contra ancient mythologies where the gods just are, history doesn't exist because nothing really much happens).
He arrives at the end of our plans and dreams, at the edge of our limits, at the pile of roots we have torn up from the soil in which we live, and he asks, "Had enough?"
The event of God's arriving in a secular age is through death and impossibility - he enters the nothingness of our incapacity and un-knowledge; we are like Lewis' UnMan, closed off to possibility, closed off to events.
Creative\\Curations
Every Day is Halloween
photo credit2
A Quick Note
I work from within the Christian tradition, and understand the Divine as the Trinity of father, son, holy spirit. That said, I know we all have different ways of understanding God and the Divine, so if you wish to insert [Other] when I use that phrase, please feel free to do so.
Photo by Marieke Weller on Unsplash