In a year I am looking at the same world from a slightly different position. Taken from some eighty-odd locations it creates a sort of holographic effect: the camera circles an imaginary point in space. The imaginary point is me. The camera is also me, recording myself. But only by paying attention to the background, the scene against which—the scene that surrounds me can you tell that I’m the one standing still and it’s the world that’s spinning. That’s relativity: the feeling you feel which the friction, the distance between you and the scene you stand with, creates. The friction is you. You are sound you make when the world rubs up against an imaginary point in space. Approximately. That said all this occurs at speeds so slow you can barely see it—except when your life flashes before your eyes. It creates a depth that’s always there, another dimension that occurs only when the universe observes itself, pays attention to the imagination of its eyes. It creates a kind of fiction and pain. It surrounds you.

“It may be that ultimately this will again become the proper model of Christianity in the late modern West.  I am not speaking, of course, of some great new monastic movement.  I mean only that, in the lands where the old Christendom has mostly faded away, the life of those ancient  men and women who devoted themselves to the science of charity, in willing exile from the world of social prestige and power, may perhaps again become the model that Christians will find themselves compelled to emulate.  Christian conscience once sought out the desert as a shelter from the empire, where those who believed could strive to cultivate the pure eye (that could see all things as gifts of God) and the pure heart (that could receive all persons with a generous love); now a very great deal of Western culture threatens to become something of a desert for believers.  In other parts of the world, perhaps, a new Christendom may be in the process of being born—in Africa and Asia, and in another way in Latin America—but what will come of that is impossible to say.  We live in an age of such cultural, demographic, ideological, and economic fluidity that what seems like a great movement now may surprise us in only a very few years by its transience.  Innumerable forces are vying for the future, and Christianity may prove considerably weaker than its rivals.  This should certainly be no cause of despair for Christians, however, since they must believe their faith to be not only a cultural logic but a cosmic truth, which can never finally be defeated.  Even so, it may be the case that Christians who live amid the ruins of the old Christendom—perhaps dwelling on the far-flung frontiers of a Christian civilization taking shape in other lands—will have to learn to continue the mission of their ancient revolution in the desert, to which faith has often found it necessary, at various times, to retreat.”

~ David Bentley Hart, via The Byzantine Anglo-Catholic

Early in the morning I rise to meet you,
A still heart in a still house.

The darkness is already passing
Though we are still waiting, watching ourselves
Move through motions, creak and shuffle.

The crickets’ song speeds up and will soon be silent.

You have visited us in the night
And left our portion in the land of the living.
I lie in silence on my bed.
I speak to my heart and seek your face. 

(These movements occurring at frequencies
too low to register on our equipment.)

There is at last no fear
That we will go too far or love too much or hurt too deep.
We are brave to life for the first time…
But what is this even now, this empty chatter—
I am here. You are here. That’s all that matters.
If the sun happens not to come out today,
No matter, no difference. You are here.

I have not fully entered you, though you have entered me.
And I am so in love with you that only you will do.
I would rather be with you than blessed.