Category Archives: The Arts

From Babel to CERN

Academics & The Arts, Current Events, Education, Humanity & Sin, Living the Word, Music, Politics, The Arts, , , , , ,

From tremendous tower to palatial particle accelerator, we are determined to find God through contrived methods and limited modalities.  We are sure that we can discover and sing the science without being in relationship  with its composer, unwilling to admit that we are only familiar with a derivative of authentic music.  Science is perfectly beautiful but should be studied in relationship with God as the magnificent and extravagant language of God.  Science should never be approached separately from a genuine relationship with God.  Science is knowledge, literally “to know.”  Knowledge apart from wisdom, divided from God, is missing an element essential to its core; something completely necessary to a proper application of knowledge.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, growing in paradise, was a tree of science, a tree of knowing.  This tree was a tree of many branches, of numerous disciplines, all capable of overwhelming our human sensitivities and bringing us to desolate places of ruin apart from the loving leadership of our Creator.  When we disobeyed GOD, made him sad, in other words-sinned- when we took and ate from this tree, we internalized the fruit, the knowing.  This knowing encompassed the good and the evil and implanted in us an awareness of the difference between the two, as we were endowed with a conscience; therefore we are accountable to God for our knowing.  It is our responsibility to acquire wisdom.

We must never give ourselves to the creation, for the creation- life- is absolutely vulnerable to all forms of death and dying apart from her Creator, with physical death at some point guaranteed; rather there is a way to give ourselves back to the Creator.  The way home is to be reunited with GOD, to become one with our Creator; we must accept the blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, as the substitutionary atonement for the sin that produced our original separation from GOD, and maintains our perpetual separation from Him.  We must believe in Christ’s atonement,  through His sinless life, death, burial, and resurrection, accept it and bow our knee in acknowledgment of the Lordship of  Christ; GOD’s plan for our salvation from this world and our translation into the next, where we will  continue to enjoy our Creator and glorify Him forever.  Let the true music begin!

Copyright 2021.   L.L. Shelton.

Some Grow Small

Current Events, Education, Poetry, The Arts, , , , , , , , ,

How is it that you read

Lady Chatterly’s Lover,

And come away simply aroused by a passionate affair?

That you are acquainted with

The Diary of Anne Frank,

And note only the introspections of a young girl becoming familiar with her body?

That you have knowledge of 

Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret,

And are moved merely by the description of menses?

That you read

Huckleberry Finn,

And place your focus on one foul word?

That you study Orwell and are stunned only by illustrations of suffering?

Perhaps you, as Alice, drank a vile potion?

Copyright 2020.   L.L. Shelton.

On Art

Academics & The Arts, Church Culture, Humanity, Humanity & Sin, Poetry, The Arts

As a favorite philosopher/theologian Francis Schaeffer stated quite appropriately in his thesis, How Should We Then Live, art  is merely the expression of a man’s mind.  I’ve spent many years processing this idea imparted to me by Dr. Schaeffer.  I knew I agreed with him from the moment I heard him utter it, but I think I knew there was more that needed to be said.

The true artist is of either the most courageous among us or the genuinely nonchalant; for he dares to create something abiding which will outlast his own existence here.  He is a person of conviction who boldly believes in his right and ability to impress on his own generation and on the ones to come his thoughts, his experience, or he is oblivious to his own place- maybe to his own identity, and in a whirlwind of reactivity leaves a piece of himself behind.

The importance of art certainly can not be overstated as it is of a permanence our physical bodies do not attain.   Art will endure and it will influence and persuade those whom it touches.  It will do these things with or without permission. It will do these things within and outside of boundaries, and it will remain our responsibility as individual souls to respond in a manner conducive to the blessing of our brothers and sisters in humanity.

Copyright 2018. L.L. Shelton.

 

Inside Ethan Frome

Books, Film, Poetry, The Arts, , , , , , ,

Please, I beg you, 
Do not speak kindly to me.
Will you not employ those gentle words;
Words that imply a tenderness toward me,
Words indicating something beyond 
A superficial concern, 
Words proposing that you have cared for me, 
Words to suggest that you have truly seen me?

Again, I implore you, 
Do not ply me with such talk.
Will you not deploy that lasting language;
Language indicating that I am not alone,
Language that wraps round my mind 
As a downy shawl,
Language filling a moment with sweet assurance,
Language laced through with prohibited promise;

Offering to hide me from the ever present cold,
From frigid winter being most of all I’ve known,
Offering to shield me from the bitter wind of envy, 
From the bruising hail of callous rage, 
Offering to shelter me from the flood of frustrated hopes,
From the reckless malice of the unsettled,
Offering to protect me from the rising tide of hatred, 
From the penetrating gaze of the anguished?

Be still, I beseech you.
Your discourse quickens the imagination,
Pledging to spill over the edges of dreams;
To pour into consciousness,
To course down the breast,
To fill the hungry heart
With precious reminiscences 
Of the one who uttered it.

Therefore then
Wield cautiously that fertile expression
Pulsing so near the wasted barren land,
Giving birth to thought disallowed
T’would rush flaming toward 
The dry parched field,
Gently whispering round the ear,
Easily caressing the nape,

Thought delicately
Meandering round the bare shoulders,
Pressing toward the ever willing flesh,
Thought of being lifted, invited in, 
Comforted and made warm,
Threatening to send one
Storming brazenly forth 
To capture a place 
One is forbidden even to visit.

L.L. Shelton, Copyright 2014