Our friends, when they came for dinner recently, brought us a hyacinth, which is now blooming. Beautiful flower! And, it has a long pedigree for beauty. I ran across the following in the Odyssey, describing how Odysseus was prepared to meet the King of the Phaecians:
Athena, the gray-eyed goddess, made him more robust and taller; and she gave him thicker hair, which flowed down from his head in curls and clusters that seemed much like the hyacinth in flower. Just as a craftsman who has learned his secrets from both the gray-eyed godeess and Hephaestus frames silver with fine gold and thus creates a work with greater plenitude and grace, so did the goddess now enhance with grace the head and shoulders of Odysseus. Then by the sea he sat apart, a man handsome and radiant. [Hom. Od. 6.225]
(quoted from the book
All Things Shining, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, p. 77.) The authors point out that the Greek word for "grace" is
charis, the root of our word charismatic. They point out that a charismatic person is literally "one who has been favored by the gods with a gift of grace or talent. The charismatic person lights up a room, as, for instance, the great Russian ballet dancer Nureyev was said to do."
As the U2 song "Grace" says, "Grace finds beauty in everything, finds goodness, makes beautiful ugly things . . ."
Philip Rieff (in his book
Charisma) says that more and more today, the true charismatic is the "unrecognized one," that is, recognized only by a few who can see. Charisma represents the grace of the divine, the true life of God, expressed in truth and adherence to order and goodness, and opposed to the modern conception of charisma as, so often seen, a loose life "graced with" celebrity. (I make no judgment but its worth asking which charisma Nureyev represented. Maybe both.)
The hyacinth in my house now reminds me of
charis, grace, that adorned the head of Odysseus, and that I pray might grace my head (and the rest of me)!
Listen to Debbie Boone, "
You Light Up My Life"
Listen to U2 "
Grace"
Another version of "
Grace" (with images of a true charismatic, Mother Teresa)
My friend, in a recent conversation, related, with some ennui, that his life amounts to "church" and "work" -- he works as a musician and as an usher in a theatre.
Our friends, when they came for dinner recently, brought us a hyacinth, which is now blooming. Beautiful flower! And, it has a long pedigree for beauty. I ran across the following in the Odyssey, describing how Odysseus was prepared to meet the King of the Phaecians:
Where did Mozart's genius come from? Inside him, as the modern way of thinking would have it? From outside, as the Greek world, in tune with the gods, saw things?
In this Sunday's gospel, Mark 1:21-28, Jesus casts out demons. Does this story have meaning for us today? In other words,
I remember hearing a Christian radio commentator say that a cardinal sign of love is that the lover wants to tell others about his beloved. There is an exuberance, an expansion of soul, a desire that wants to publicize the beloved, to say, "Here is my love. Here is nobility."
Thorton Wilder's book The Bridge of San Luis Rey, tells the sad story of innocent suffering. It ends with the pregnant phrase "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
A friend whom I had not seen for a while asked me a practical question when she approached me working with a colleague: "What do you need?" I responded, "Oh, some paper," since I didn't have paper. That wasn't my first thought, however. What I wanted to say, but couldn't find the words for, was "How could anyone want for anything when you are around?"
