No new snow this morning. The scene out the window is mostly back to normal–the roofs of the neighborhood dark again. I haven’t coughed yet–good sign–and soon it will be time to get dressed and head to church. Prayer has seen an uptick, and the time spent with God has been sweeter than usual. Can’t explain why, although, again, the kind of praying I’ve been doing seems like old praying, sitting with God instead of treating Him like a short order cook who’s there to fix all our stuff. Time is on my mind, the passage of it, the length of it, the sheer ineffability of it. I’ll be fifty before long, and time markers are all around me. It’s not that I feel old. It’s more like a feeling of being further down a pathway than I’d realized. I thought I was five hundred miles from the destination, but suddenly I pass a highway sign that says I’m ninety miles away. Lots of traveling left, and the companions are dear and strong and full of life, but the terrain is changing. It is more stark and more lush all at once, and I’d love to slow my steps just to take it all in with more fullness.
I spent a couple of hours last night doing the annual perusal of the web, the visual culture that now expresses itself on YouTube and Itunes and Facebook. Looking at the top ten videos and the top ten viral videos and other such popular visual and musical events. The culture is rich with artistic content, and I’m gratified that imagination, narrative, collage, and other forms are alive and well, perhaps valued more than they’ve ever been, creating opportunity for more and more artists to actually make a living at their respective crafts. It seems both a wonderful and terrible thing. I followed a youth gang roaming the streets of France inflicting violence on mere passersby, watched a young woman crying out for help in a powerful music video simply and appropriately titled “Oh, My God,” and took in various mockeries that are so ubiquitous on YouTube. The smorgasbord of ideas and images is not infinite, but it seems like it. Ten years ago, it was fun to find odd things and show them to my ACU class and feel like I might be ahead of them on the curve. That, of course, is a ridiculous idea today. It’s hard to know what to think of it all.
No final point to this entry, except to say that we live in an exciting time, a dangerous time, a hard time full of all the opportunity for good and evil that has always plagued the race. And I believe that the life of the mind, the life of the imagination, the life of our cognitive reasoning and all the material life that flows from it…that all of this is ours for a reason, that God has gifted us in order choose and create the world alongside Him. That kingdom plot of ground I’m always talking about is packed with rich, deep earth, and the time to plant is now.
What will we make of it?
JEFF BERRYMAN 