Icon

From Alan~  please send in some original poems to share;  I have a couple of new contributors lined up but it will take a week or two to organise…..  send poems to:
alankeycol@btinternet.com

Meanwhile ….

Our faith is not irrational,  but at the same time goes beyond reason.  But we live in a world where we like to understand and to grasp everything,  and we may be less happy with the uncertain,  the slippery world of symbol and metaphor.  I have grown to appreciate icons, because they convey to us a reality which is not everyday, but from an eternal perspective. ( By that I mean that the subject is portrayed with a sense of the meaning of their existence – and the gift it brings to us -  rather than in a photographic kind of way. )
Similarly,  I like poems -  many of them -  because they are given in sentences which are not
all straightforward and “tied up”;   there is work for us to do,  reading,  reflecting,  and feeling whether we resonate with the spirit or idea of the poem.  I’ve tried to sum this up in this poem :

Poem and icon …
A poem is like an icon;
inexplicit,
requiring delving,
repeated visits,
absence and fresh encounter.

An icon is like a poem,
inexplicit,
requiring delving,
repeated visits,
absence and fresh encounter.

Word and vision taunt us with incompleteness,
The complete is lacking in all subtlety
Yet the incomplete requires courage
to journey to a land unknown;.
Such journeying is to the land of promise,
dreamt of, longed for, but always ahead of us.

Alan

To  illustrate what I mean by the elusive,  symbolic nature of an icon,  see :

www.goarch.org/resources/clipart/saints/beheadedjohn/view

Here we are…

Ah we live in a world shot through with sin and failure,
fear and aggression,
turbulent with crises in gestation

How can we hope for the good
when we see so much deceit;
anticipate justice
when the plumb line does not hang straight.

And if we turn to look within,
there too  is dissonance,
an imbalance of forces swaying us about;
no easy ride to harmony.

“Beauty and brokenness,”
I say to myself, and over again ….
No logic to provide a neat solution;
no resolution;
but perhaps a first step to healing;
“beauty and brokenness”

Alan Amos

footnote : in Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Peace prize address,   he began by referring to a brief and enigmatic quote from Dostoevsky : “the world will be saved by beauty”; Solzhenitsyn confesses that the phrase had puzzled and intrigued him for some time. And yet, he told the distinguished audience, he had come to believe that Dostoevsky was right. ~ And I would suggest that beauty is one of the forms in which we see Christ’s presence in the world, for he is the Word through whom all things were made. – Alan