But for today, let us behold the bounty and fullness of our lives, the highs and the lows, which bear witness to our being alive, beholding them without too much theologizing, but with simple gratitude.
-Buddy Stallings
The priest at my church runs a blog, and a few weeks ago he closed one of his posts with this. Coming from him, it’s a theological statement, one about how we should live our lives, the gratefulness we have the ability to carry in our hearts. But I think it’s a beautiful assessment of the world, whether or not it is taken with a religious perspective in mind. With the semester’s end, I find myself looking back at the months we’ve passed, and, even more, looking forward to what is to come, and I am full with what Buddy Stallings calls “the bounty and fullness of our lives.” I like this, that we can be so aware of all the things we have, regardless of the pitfalls and troubles we are living in the midst of. I like that we are able to see through to light, if we push hard through the shadows. That, really, I think, is an enormous part of why we have art. Which is not to say that art is always about good, always about illumination. Sometimes its very purpose is the dark and the shadow. But I think a lot of art has the ability and the intention of increasing our sense of the world. And that, I think, by its very nature, must “bear witness to our being alive.” We live in the fermatas and the brush strokes, in the joy between the letters on the page.