the heavenly country

Ansel Adams

"The object of all great art is beauty, and it makes us nostalgic for God. Whether we consider ourselves people of faith or not, art arouses in us what Pope John Paul called a 'universal desire for redemption.'

All of us are meaning-seekers. We approach every painting, novel, film, symphony, or ballet unconsciously hoping that it will move us one step further on the journey toward answering the question, 'Why am I here?' People living in the postmodern world, however, are faced with an excruciating dilemma. Their hearts long to find ultimate meaning, while at the same time their critical minds do not believe it exists. We are homesick, but have no home. So we turn to the arts and aesthetics to satisfy our thirst for the Absolute. But if we want to find out true meaning in life, our search cannot end there. Art or beauty is not the destination; it is the signpost pointing towards our desired destination.

C.S. Lewis puts it so elegantly in The Weight of Glory: 'The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them. and what came through was a longing...For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.'

My hope is that through our future encounters with music and the arts, we will discover the 'heavenly country' we have not yet visited, but long to find."

~From Chasing Francis by Ian Morgan Cron

horrors or splendors

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations...There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."

~C.S. Lewis

worship

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

~C.S. Lewis

pride

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest."

~C.S. Lewis

silence and shouts

"We need to find God, and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass--grow in silence. See the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...We need silence to be able to touch souls."

~Mother Teresa

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

~C.S. Lewis