“The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding; and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly, as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky.”

Quoted here is a section from Flannery O’Connor’s 1^st novel “Wise Blood”, in which the writer uses her weird characters as darkish foils to prod the reader into considering timeless things. O’Connor was a brilliant and lonely critic of secularism’s vacuity; she considered modernism naïve. And like Jesus, her harshest stories called out religious emptiness. How would she be illustrating the bigger story for us now? O’Connor would be a good one to read if fiction is a way into your heart, for our world is changing and we need to get a grip on what it is that is truly mooring us.

You wont find what anchor’s your soul in the material world. How can I make such an assertion? I’ve lived enough life; I’ve read the best “good book”; and I know how it ends. If non-fiction is a better way in for you, this is time tested. Meanwhile the National Geographic arrived this week. It is expensively produced, in a ying/yang edition titled “How We Saved the World”, or from back to front “How We Lost the Planet”. Take your pick; they’re giving us only two options. One would think such an organization committed to the earth would offer a few words of acknowledgement to earth’s Maker. But no. And, they admit: they don’t know the future. Only the One who hears prayer does.

The image I post today fits right along with O’Connor’s description, as she teases the imagination higher. Here’s another look-up for you. I’ve had the texture and the hues on this oil panel for some months, but I could not resolve the whole satisfactorily. Then suddenly I realized I needed to give it a window beyond the morass of the now. Voila!