Most people know Henri Matisse (1869-1954) for his elegant, simple shapes in bright, optimistic colors. However, the exhibition Matisse: Radical Reinvention, a collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, reveals a very different Matisse: This is Matisse at his boldest and darkest.

The exhibition’s premise is that between his return from Morocco in 1913 and his departure for Nice in 1917, Matisse took his art in an assertive new direction. His paintings from this period are experimental, increasingly concerned about the act of art-making itself, as opposed to art as representation of its subject.

This casts Matisse as a proto-expressionist, anticipating the work of the likes of 20th-century great Jackson Pollock.

The more than 100 works on display feature scratched-out paint, leftover pencil marks, and blatant signs of reworking which Matisse made no effort to conceal. Perhaps the best way to understand what he was doing is to compare these experimental canvases to his sculpture.

The curators have cleverly juxtaposed these with his canvases. Matisse frequently worked on several pieces simultaneously.

In the first gallery, Blue Nude (1907) hangs beside Reclining Nude (1) (1907) – both works feature women in repose, with the painting clearly modeled on the sculpture.

In Blue Nude, the numerous layers of paint indicate Matisse’s fervent reworking of the figure. The effect is that of a bold display of the process of painting. You can see where Matisse corrected himself, where he has decided to shift the figure, sculpting the paint as he would the clay.

Reinvention also reveals a darker Matisse than the one in popular imagination – the self-doubt and perfectionism which drives the constant reworking is evident everywhere, and the gray and black tones echo the difficulties he grappled with in this turbulent period – the dark cloud of World War I was approaching, and his art was often poorly received.

Portrait of Olga Merson (1911) is a deeply ambiguous painting of a woman with whom the artist was obsessed. Merson kneels on the ground in what seems to be a perfectly pleasant, placid figure. However, a closer look reveals that the left half of her face has been scraped off, leaving a skittering of lines, as though the artist was simultaneously creating and un-creating. Two large black arcs cross her torso and hip. Are they lines of definition or cancellation?

The remarkable Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg (1914) is even stronger in its use of radiating arcs, which seem to trace the energy of the subject rather than her form. Here Matisse has scratched out the arcs, and this lends the painting an energy and urgency – the result is powerful and textural.

One senses that Matisse was working with paint in a new way, layering it on, scraping it off, leaving the edges rough rather than polished.

To further underline the point, Matisse’s four monumental bronzes – Back I, Back II, Back III and Back IV – all female figures in more and more abstract form, range across the galleries, representing his move away from representation towards abstraction in this period.

Each of the Back sculptures was, in fact, a reworking of the plaster cast of the previous one, so here we can catch Matisse literally in the act of re-creation. A fascinating multimedia feature reconstructs this process, showing how the fleshy, realistic figure of Back I morphs into the monumental, almost architectural lines of Back IV.

If his Back series dominate the sculpture of the exhibition, then Bathers by a River (1909-10, 1913, 1916-17), hanging in pride of place in the final gallery, is its canvas counterpart.

This canvas was worked and reworked incessantly over nearly a decade, and serves as the focal point for the whole exhibition.

An informative video again reconstructs Matisse’s process – unearthed by an amazing slew of technological developments, including a delightful reconstruction of the 1913 state of the painting from photographs of Matisse’s studio by American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn.

The new insights into Matisse’s process support the exhibition’s thesis, and the parallel observation in the Back sculptures: the naturalistic scene of 1909 gives way to four sharply divided panels, transforming the canvas from idyllic, Eden-like scene to something more modern and isolating.

However, it is The Piano Lesson (1916), also in the final gallery, that may be most intriguing.

In this large canvas, the painter’s son is depicted on the lower right at the piano. A female figure looks on from behind him. The whole left half of the canvas is a window, blocked out in gray, green and blue. The shaft of light that cuts through this piece is implied, and yet undeniable.

Matisse has captured a moment in time, and turned it into a monument.

What is perhaps Matisse’s most famous work, Danse I (1909), conveniently hangs just one floor below at the Modern.

Its five rhythmic female forms, gracefully dancing in a circle, have become an icon of 20th-century art. However, it is important to remember that when it was first exhibited, it drew lashings of critical vitriol.

Some may find the curiously clumpy, unfinished hand of the figure on the left crude. However, in the light of the Modern’s latest exhibition, this choice makes more sense.

Even in his masterpiece, Matisse has displayed a willingness to reveal his sleight of hand, to lay bare his process in a frank and telling gesture. It is refreshing, and yes, surprisingly postmodern.

published at China Daily,  26th Sept 2010, Sunday.

Spotted at the University of the South (Sewanee) with Ben King, ex-chaplain of the Episcopalians at Harvard. Spent the night round a far-place with his New Testament scholar friend, and was very entertained by his complimentary iPad – perhaps warranting the appearance of an Apple laptop on this piece of stained glass…

The last weekend in New York I spent going to Liberty and Ellis islands for a closeup of the Lady with Melissa. She is a regal statue. I haven’t seen her up this close before, and the ranger was very good about telling us about her origins. It seems half the monuments in this country were set up by private citizens rather than the government – including this one (though a joint venture between French and American people, the American people having provided the pedestal through a trickle, then a surge, of donations). As a tribute to tacky American taste, the American’s first act upon receiving the whole thing was to peel the torch apart and turn it into a lighthouse, only to realize that the glass didn’t quite hold up to the weather like the copper did. Now it’s gold plated – the sculptor’s original design.

• I got in on Monday with Janice to get to her Soho apartment on Labor day weekend
• Tuesday I found myself systematically trawling through the Bronx with Tony, a guy I met last summer at Redeemer Presbyterian who works at Columbia (teaching sociology) and Christianity Today (as a journalist). I met him in Brooklyn at a little cafe, where he whipped out a map of an uncovered portion of the Bronx. My task was to write down the name, address, leaders, phone numbers and neighbourhood attributes of all the religious places of worship on every street we went down, and then colour in the streets as finished when we called it a day. It was fascinating. We met with a pastor who literally built his church with his two hands, had lunch at a Mexican place where we argued briefly about whether the term “evangelical” was worth rescuing, then ran into a Puerto Rican lady who had built a neighbourhood garden with her husband. Along the way, we met a police car chasing down a drug-deal related shooting, and talked about Tony’s start in journalism in newly-opened 1980s China.
• I spent Wednesday morning with the good people of International Arts Movement – at breakfast in a lovely little French pastry shop, then I was off to view Matisse: Radical Reinvention at the Moma. Yeah, the Moma pretty much took up the rest of my day.
• Thursday I woke up groggily and hauled myself off to Housing Works Book Cafe, where I spent a leisurely afternoon typing up a review of the exhibition – fingers crossed it’ll get published; otherwise it will come up here, for sure. Then Janice had a friend over for pasta she had hauled over all the way from Boston and we got a little tipsy on the wine
• Friday I moved over to Rachel’s stunning midtown apartment, and we caught up over Dominican stew. It was Fashion’s Night Out in New York, so after drinks at a Soho bar we were milling about the ultra hip and stalking unabashedly into boutiques to partake in their free champagne and cocktails. Then we had dinner at New Malaysia, the best fix for Singaporean/Malaysian I’ve had in the States.
• Saturday I met up with Melissa to see Lady Liberty – a long overdue expedition, where I learned that the Americans, upon receiving the statue, decided it was not functional enough and knocked off the copper of the torch and turned it into a lighthouse, before realizing this severely weakened the integrity of the structure and hastily returned it to its original metal – only this time overlaid with gold. Melissa found some ancestors on Ellis Island, where I pondered once again whether the American Dream is, after all, a thing I want to chase (As seductive as New York can be, I don’t think it is….) And because it was September the 11th I went to St Patrick’s Cathedral at 7 to hear the memorial service, only to be struck with a splitting headache which made me desperately cab over to Janice’s to lie down for a bit.
• Spent a lazy Sunday morning making breakfast at Janice’s, then getting down to Redeemer’s Hunter College service to hear the legendary Tim Keller, who never fails to deliver. We’ve found Janice a church! Then Ramen with Janice and Rachel, this being my final night in the city.
• Monday, and I spent my last hour in NYC treating myself to some Brazilian pasta on Grand and Broad. I sometimes wonder if there was ever or will ever be a city like this city, but then I realize that this is the story of every metropolis of every time – only this is the New York of our time, and that there will always be great cities, where art and life and high and low and peoples from every corner and every nation gather to work and live and love and hate and dance and kill and laugh and play and cry. And that this one, in all its greatness, is not very different.

It’s our last day in New York. I still remember the first time I saw this city with my dad, right this time after freshman year. But it’s my mum’s first time. Tired of walking, she insisted on getting three tickets for the open-top tour buses, so here we are, traffic wind in our faces, trundling down Manhattan. We pass the much-abused Wall Street bull, even now bearing a troop of tourists on his bronze back, and the tour guide directs our attention to the next attraction. “People come to New York and they want to see two things,” she says, “the Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero. If you want to see Ground Zero, get off at the next stop and turn right.” True to form, my mum feels she must not miss the site of the Twin Towers. So we get off the bus and pick our way towards the massive, grating construction site.

There is something peculiar about an attraction defined precisely by its absence. It’s been eight years since 9/11, and that date has not lost its vivid nearness – perhaps because the year has dropped off the end of the date, perhaps because, in the wake of all that’s happened since then, it is necessary for it to stay a fresh, open wound. Ground Zero does seem like a wound, a great gaping hole in the bristling forest of skyscrapers. Three years ago I had been shocked to see it was still a hole, the cardboard timeline of events posted on the wire fence somehow inadequate for the tourists coming to pay homage to the fallen towers. This time around it is still a hole, the construction dust, the grating sound of machines at work a constant from three years ago. Metal cranes heave and creak purposefully in the mess of earth and concrete behind the chain-link fence. A couple of enterprising people have set up booths selling little pamphlets about 9/11, the burning towers superimposed on the statue of liberty on the cover.

I don’t know what it is about all this that was unsatisfying. Everything about the place seems to say, “move along now – nothing to see here”, and yet at the same time it has the look of a recent catastrophe, too recent for anyone to begin to grapple with yet. But we kept on walking along the fence, as though expecting something more substantial – a museum, a memorial? – to appear, even my dad and I, who had been here before. We got to the entrance of what had been the subway station, where a middle-aged black man in a blue windbreaker howls at the passersby – tourists and locals alike, gesticulating wildly – “How many buildings was there, I ask you?” he yells, “Some of these people calls themselves New Yorkers an’ they don’ know! I ask you, how many buildings? How many buildings was in Ground Zero?” His eyes are wide, and he holds in his hand a folder filled with photographs and clippings, which he flips through wildly as he accosts first one and then another group of people, who mostly shuffle away as if to avoid catching the crazy. Around his neck he wears a navy lanyard with “9/11″ printed on it over and over again. I wonder if it’s a uniform he’s given himself – I wonder if he’s out here yelling every day. Something about his crazed fervor makes my parents swerve away from him. Most people give him wide berth, as though craziness, or even passion, can be infectious. But I want to hear what he has to say.
“How many buildings were there here, sir?” I ask. “How many do you think there was?” he asks back. “Two? The twin towers?” my dad ventures. “No, no, no! They always say the twin towers! The twin towers issa nick name, that’s what, look at this picture here…” he flips through his file. “Look, there was seven! You see, seven, but they don’ tell you that, do they? They don’ tell you that! It was like a whole family, you see, with the little ones – ” Sure enough, he has a couple of aerial shots of the World Trade Center before 9/11, and a whole cluster of buildings, now vanished, rise eerily in the shadows of the twin towers. “There was more than just two towers! You see these people, they call themselves New Yorkers, but they don’t know! You see that building there?” I shield my eyes and look up at the tallest thing one in sight. It looms above me. “You look at it here, it’s the same building as here – you see how big the towers was?” he says, showing me a picture of that same building dwarfed by the towers, more than twice its height. Height, I reflect, ceases to mean anything after a certain point, much like the way ten trillion and twenty trillion sound much the same to me. After a certain point, the brain simply ceases to register it and abdicates to infinity. Did the fact that the twin towers were twice as tall as this one make their fall twice as tragic? “So my mum asked me, if I had gone to work that day, and I work in security – how long would you have stayed in there helping people get out? You think about it – one hour, one hour and a half hour – that was not enough time, and the buildings, they just come crashin’ down.”
Happy to have our attention, he goes on to describe the horrors of the facts he’d gathered. He wasn’t working that day – his boss said to take the day off – he was taking his kid to school three blocks down when it happened. He shows us a picture of his son, smiling with the World Trade Center framed behind him. Then he shows us an aerial shot of the collapsed buildings, tells us about the man who was flying a helicopter past that day, who was puzzled to see a whole crowd drift towards the towers instead of away from it, until it dawned on him that they must have been following the first guy in front – blindly, like a lost herd, right into the heart of their deaths. He’d wanted to fly down, to warn them, but knew that the dust rising up from the site would simply sink his helicopter – that all he could do was watch.
“How many people you think died in that buildings?” he goes on, gaining momentum as he flips frantically through his clear folder of newspaper clippings, of photographs – “How many?” There was a list, wasn’t there? A list of missing people… “Yah, there be a list, but what about the little people? What about the illegals? The Mexicans mannin’ the doors? Wha’ about the cleaners? Dey ain’t got no paperwork – and dey died too – No one knows! No one even knows! Their families, they can’t claim insurance! They can’t claim nothin’! No one knows!”
All I could do is watch. I didn’t know what to say. This man had a mission. I don’t know what sort of price he was paying with his family, without his job, just to stand in that street corner however many days it was he stands in that street corner – but something changed in him the day the towers fell, just as something changed in me the day the towers fell. My dreams of America fell that day too, the moment the war machine ground open to a start. The America of Disneyland, of power and strength and generosity and commerce that had lived in my mind, was suddenly substituted for a far more dangerous leviathan. This man’s heart was ravished by the horror, compelled by something strong to tell the truth. A tiny, perhaps unimportant slice of the truth – but nevertheless, the truth. The least I could do was listen.

By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
Published on August 6, 2010

I met your kind in college.  It was in Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. Your pages were musty, your spine well-broken.  Your words engulfed me, lassoed me in the undertow of Jamison’s death-thoughts and hallucinations.  You suited her telling just right.  When I closed the cover I knew Jamison, could feel the tumult of living bipolar and discovering it so late in life.

What happened next?  I did not seek another incarnation of you. Instead, I met your cousins, the Personal Essays.  They were enchanting, always touching my arm and pulling me aside to confide some story well worth my time through its hilarity or gravity.  My favorite of these cousins?  Bernard Cooper‘s “Winner Taking Nothing,” Adam Gopnik‘s “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli,” James Baldwin‘s “Notes of a Native Son,” Joan Didion‘s “Goodbye to All That,” and E.B. White‘s “Once More to the Lake.”

Then your sedate, worldly wise, and pondering cousins came to dinner.  These were the books of Literary Journalism.  How I liked meeting Tracy Kidder‘s Mountains Beyond Mountains and Old Friends, Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood, the nonfiction sections of Joseph Mitchell‘s Up in the Old Hotel, and Anne Fadiman‘s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

Next to these sat their children, sun-burnt and bespectacled.  The Researched Essays.  They brought bug jars, binoculars, and yellowed biographies to the dinner table, and whatever our conversation topic, they had some trivia to toss us, or excused themselves and consulted Britannica.  They were brilliant and conversational; still, I chose favorites–Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small, David Foster Wallace‘s “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” Gay Talese‘s “New York is a City of Things Unnoticed,” and John McPhee‘s “The Search for Marvin Gardens.”

Halfway through dinner, in flowed your niece, the Lyric Essay, with emerald rings on her fingers and hair down to her waist.  I loved Lia Purpura‘s “Glaciology,” John D’Agata‘s “Notes Toward the Making of a Whole Human Being,” and Albert Goldbarth‘s “After Yitzl.”  After dinner, we sat in the guest room and I tried on her rings.

Your relatives were such good company that I forgot about you.  And when I turned back to you, I found we’d grown apart.

Full article at The Curator

When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in their local dialect, “These men are gods in human form!” They decided that Barnabas was the Greek god Zeus and that Paul was Hermes, since he was the chief speaker. Now the temple of Zeus was located just outside the town. So the priest of the temple and the crowd brought bulls and wreaths of flowers to the town gates, and they prepared to offer sacrifices to the apostles.

But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard what was happening, they tore their clothing in dismay and ran out among the people, shouting, “Friends,^b why are you doing this? We are merely human beings—just like you! We have come to bring you the Good News that you should turn from these worthless things and turn to the living God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them. In the past he permitted all the nations to go their own ways, but he never left them without evidence of himself and his goodness. For instance, he sends you rain and good crops and gives you food and joyful hearts.” But even with these words, Paul and Barnabas could scarcely restrain the people from sacrificing to them.

Acts 14: 8 – 18, NLT

What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you

- Paul, Acts 17:23, to the Athenians

I have been making my way through the book of Acts, and this story, with its attendant picture of Paul and Barnabas waving away people determined to sacrifice to them has never failed to tickle me. Paul’s brief speech upon being mistaken for Hermes, messenger of the Greek gods, reveals a mixture of exasperation and dismay. And apparently, Barnabas must have been an older bearded fellow, because he got to be Zeus. Of course, the incident is at the same time deadly serious – just read on to the next paragraph and you’ll find out the consequences of miscommunication. But what I find most fascinating about Paul’s little speech is this statement: “In the past he permitted all the nations to go their own ways, but he never left them without evidence of himself and his goodness. For instance, he sends you rain and good crops and gives you food and joyful hearts.”

I grew up with stories about European missionaries, recounted in church during sermons, mentioned in the same breath as Paul and Barnabas and with the same kind of reverence and awe. They were incredible stories of bravery and adventure, and the prevalent image of missionaries being boiled in a pot by cannibals in pop culture helped perpetrate the idea of the white man bringing light to dark continents. The more we learn about these cultures, however, the more nuanced a picture we get about the motivations of those who killed Christian missionaries – local politics, the actions of their fellow Europeans which were blatantly exploitative, cultural taboos that were unwittingly broken. But the fact remains that these were brave men and women who ventured into the unknown to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, and some paid the ultimate price for it.

However, these stories were also always laced with the sense of Western cultural superiority – they are imperial tales, of the same world as Kipling’s white man’s burden. In these narratives, the white man is always right, and the native is always wrong; the white man comes bearing the Promethean torch of religion, civilization, sanitation, and stiflingly stuffy European clothes which turn you into buckets of sweat in the tropics; the natives live in hopelessly benighted conditions, half-demon and half-child. It is hardly surprising that many missionaries in the age of colonialism were sweeping in their condemnation of local culture, determined to brand anything that offended their own sensibilities – wearing less clothing, for example – as inherently sinful. So you get old films about missionaries bringing the gospel to small pacific islands, and leaving all the natives in crinolines by the end of the film, thoroughly Christianized. So what’s remarkable about Paul’s statement is that while he is firm that the revelation from Jesus is true in a way that the Greek religions are not, he insists that, on some level, these people already know God – “he never left them without evidence of himself and his goodness”.

In fact, I would go so far as to say the people of Lystra were right that the gods had descended to walk among them. After all, Paul and Barnabas were indwelt with the divinity of Christ. And it was Christ’s power through them that enabled them to perform the miracles that caused the people to declare them gods. It is incredibly moving that the Greek religion provided a point of cultural contact, a means for understanding the gospel: it opened them to draw a conclusion (divine revelation) from empirical evidence (Paul’s miracle): “These men are gods in human form”.

From the sound of it, Paul and Barnabas did not capitalize upon this point of cultural contact; it sounds rather as though they were caught off-guard, and didn’t know the best way to react. Although Paul’s speech is sincere, he was not particularly successful in getting these people to understand the gospel, and, before we know it, the window of opportunity shuts and a faction of jealous Jews turns the adoring crowd into a mob that almost kills him. This is purely speculative, but perhaps if Paul had, instead of rebuking their beliefs as “these worthless things”, said they were partially right – that God did walk among them, but only through human beings, he might have stood a better chance of getting them to understand.

A rather more successful attempt at proselytizing occurs at Athens. Perhaps a little better at this now, Paul ascends to the Areopagus, the centre of debate where the Athenians famously debated new schools of thought and religions, and this time he finds an inroad into their worldview. “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with the inscription, ‘To the unknown god’. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” This gets their attention. Notice he dwells on the positive – he acknowledges that these are open-minded people, spiritual people, who are “very religious”. Even if he thinks their gods “worthless things”, he doesn’t say so. This is not mere sophistry – if you want to be heard, you need to speak the language of the people you are talking to, not close all channels of communication by belittling what they hold dear. Paul even goes on to quote Athenian poetry – “Yet he is actually not far from each one of us for “‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ [from Epimendies of Crete] even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ [from Aratus' poem "Phainomena"]“.

Now I don’t know about you, but I would have found this second speech a lot more palatable, and in fact, far more intriguing, than the first, if I were a first century non-Christian. It is respectful, knowledgeable about the local culture, presented in an appropriate context, and most importantly of all, it doesn’t start out with an insult. What worries me most about cookie-cutter evangelism, in which you prepare a one-size-fits-all speech to rattle off at opportune moments, is that I can only imagine a very few social contexts in which it would be convincing. The gospel message is simple, yes. But it also needs to be truly communicated in love – which means listening as well as talking. Where is the other person coming from? What do they already believe? What does their culture say about God that is similar to what you believe about God?

The gospel, after all, is not something you as a Christian need to get off your chest, as quickly as possible in a formulaic paragraph. It is something with its own life, its own magnetism, and God has already prepared all the inroads in all peoples and all cultures to receive it – in fact he’s guaranteed that all the nations will be present at his throne. But it takes a willingness to learn and listen on the part of Christians to understand where non-Christians are coming from. This means a genuine attempt to understand their worldview, not just their religion but their particular relationship (or lack thereof) with God. And I don’t think that a conversation about Jesus should necessarily always be steered towards say, saying the sinner’s prayer with someone. While that would be a wonderful moment to share, it isn’t always our place or time to do it, and forcing it isn’t respectful of the person you have the conversation with. After all, we are in the business of helping and loving people on behalf of Christ, not trying to string up a headcount, like so many shrunken heads on a necklace to be accredited to us on the last day!

Also at the Harvard Ichthus

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. – Ecclesiastes 12:13 [Solomon]

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
- Proverbs 9:10 [Solomon]

“Do not be afraid,” says the angel to Mary when he appears to her with the news of Jesus’ birth. “Do not be afraid,” says Jesus to the apostles as they stare at him in abject terror when he walks past their boat on the Sea of Galilee. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel to the women who are shocked to find an empty tomb three days after Jesus’ death. “Fear not,” says Jesus to John in Revelation, when he appears to him in a vision in blazing finery, causing John to fall down “as though dead”.

Is there a contradiction between the fact that Christians are called to be bold and courageous, are told repeatedly in the Bible not to fear when they are in the presence of God, and the fact that King Solomon, the wisest man in the history of the world according to the same Bible, says that fearing God and keeping his commandments is the chief end of man? It may seem perplexing, but I think there is really no contradiction. The people who are told not to fear were fearful – that’s the whole point. In the face of the full glory of God, seeing Him in person, the natural response is fear. Just as the natural, and right response to a hurricane, a tsunami, a lightning strike, is fear. Why is it natural and appropriate? Because a hurricane or a tsunami is incredibly powerful and has the potential to wipe you out entirely. It has the potential to destroy you. It is big, huge, overwhelming, and there is absolutely no way you can placate it. Almost anyone, faced with the immediate prospect of being snuffed out by a natural disaster, prays a prayer of some kind. It’s some feeble attempt to placate a thing bigger than you. On a smaller scale, you would be very frightened if a powerful warlord came round and held you at gunpoint, or even simply controlled an area near yours. Because he could, at any time, take a liking to your house or your children or your possessions, and he would have the arms to back him up if he should decide to seize it. In the absence of law enforcement, he could get away with murdering you. In those situations, fear is an appropriate response.

Penitence, acrylic on bamboo plate. By Larry Poncho Brown.

So why shouldn’t it be the appropriate response to THE power behind the universe – the one who gave life, the one who takes it away, the one who sets the rules, the one whose standards matter? If He indeed exists, and is all-powerful, omniscient, and just, and you have done something to hurt another human being, and that human being is precious to him, wouldn’t you be scared? What more, if apparently your wrongdoing was responsible for the utter humiliation and murder of this great monarch’s son – what if the King Himself had disguised himself as a commoner for an evening, and you had kicked him on the side of the road and spit on him for a laugh, not knowing who he was? What if, to your horror, you are called up to the court, and you recognize the face of the beggar in the face of the monarch? Wouldn’t you fall down on your face and beg for mercy?

The people in the first paragraph – the disciples, Mary, John, the women – they were counted as the “righteous” – people who walked with God. Mary was even the wisest woman in the world – the one chosen to bear God’s son. And yet they were afraid, because they knew that before God, they were all sinners, completely unworthy to be in His presence. Yet God, in His mercy, condescends to speak with them, and He gently tells them not to be afraid. Why? Because He loves them. This is an overwhelming message. It’s improbable, counter-intuitive. Why a great power should care about you, not to mention love you, has nothing to do with His greatness – it is an unexpected attribute. After all, wouldn’t you be surprised to hear that your president or prime minister has a personal interest in you and loves you, even though you’ve never met them? God is bigger than that – and yet He has revealed that He does love us.

You see, Fear in itself is not a bad thing. Fear is a reaction to power. We know we are limited in our power, and so anything that has greater power is worth fearing. But the thing about the Christian is she does not need to fear anything other than God, because nothing is greater or more powerful than God, and if we fear Him and keep His commandments – if we have thrust ourselves under His protection by accepting the sacrificial atonement of His Son, then He is on our side. To have the all-powerful, omniscient and victorious God, the one who made everything, preserves everything, permits everything and will redeem everything, on our side truly means that there is nothing that we need to be afraid of. And that is the source of courage and boldness – “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”  says Paul, in Romans 8:28-31.

Am I trapped by fear of other things – of the future, of potential sin, of loneliness, of rejection – sometimes? Of course! I am often seized by fear – it comes out of nowhere, a sudden wave of it, and I feel completely thrown for a loop. But the thing is I know I should not fear those things – my fear should be reserved only for the Lord. The thing about the emotion of fear is, like all other emotions, it comes and it goes. I cannot control my emotions, but I can control my response to them. And I can choose to respond: No. I will not fear you. I fear God, and I will keep in lockstep with him, as faithfully as I can. I am more afraid of being apart from Him than I am of any of those terrible scenarios, and if He decides to thrust me into those valleys, I know He will be by my side, and that Jesus has endured them to a far greater extent than I can imagine, and He knows that we can bear them together. I can choose to believe in the God who has been nothing but good to me. I can accept humbly His promise that He loves me and wants only the best for me. I can accept that what I want isn’t necessarily what’s best for me, and that I will eventually come round to His point of view, even if it takes a while, even if it doesn’t happen in this lifetime. I have been bold to Him, I’ve wrestled with Him. I haven’t treated Him with reverence – I argue with Him and disagree with Him. But whenever I demand that He show Himself, I am always struck by fear, and accept that that isn’t really what I want. That it would be like annihilation to see the face of God as a mere mortal. And most curiously of all, whenever I get to that point, I feel at peace. It is an answer from God: it’s a demonstration of His power. And I am so glad that this infinitely powerful, infinitely merciful God is my God.

In the huge, wide-open, sleeping eye of the mountain
The bear is the gleam in the pupil
Ready to awake
And instantly focus.

The bear is glueing
Beginning to end
With glue from people’s bones
In his sleep.

The bear is digging
In his sleep
Through the wall of the universe
With a man’s femur.

The bear is a well
Too deep to glitter
When your shout
Is being digested.

The bear is a river
Where people bending to drink
See their dead selves.

The bear sleeps
In a kingdom of walls.
In a web of rivers.

He is the ferryman
To dead land.

His price is everything.

The Fog Horn blew.

“I made up that story,” said McDunn quietly, “to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The fog horn calls, I think, it comes…”

“But-” I said.

“Sssst!” said McDunn. “There!” He nodded out to the Deeps.

Something was swimming towards the lighthouse tower.

It was a cold night, as I said; the high tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the ravelling mist. You couldn’t see far and you couldn’t see plain, but there was the deep sea moving on it’s way about the night earth, flat and quiet, to colour of grey mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of froth/ And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck And then-not a body-but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water ona slender and beautiful neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.

I don’t know what I said. I said something.

“Steady, bot, steady,” whispered McDunn.

“It’s impossible!” I said.

“No, Johnny, we’re impossible. It’s like it always was ten million years ago. It hasn’t changed.. It’s us and the land that’ve changed, become impossible. Us!”

It swam slowly and with a great majesty out in the icy waters, far away. the fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape. One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disc held high and sending a message in primaeval code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.

“It’s a dinosaur of some sort!” I crouched down, holding to the stair rail.

“Yes, one of the tribe.”

“But they died out!”

“No, only hid away in the Deeps, Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn’t that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There’s all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the worldin a word like that.”

“What” we do?”

“Do? We got our job, we can’t leave. besides, we’re safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing’s as big as a destroyer and almost as swift.”

“But here, why does it come here?”

The next moment I has my answer.

The Fog Horn blew.

And the monster answered.

A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.

“Now,” whispered McDunn, “do you know why it comes here?”

I nodded.

extracted from The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury. Full story here