What Art has to do with Faith

Ayisha reflects on how the tenets of the New Church have yet to be fully embodied in forms of art. She ponders how these images may augment our experience of God. What are we waiting for? -Editor.

There's an idea out there that heaven is dull. In fact, I can quote someone on it: “I dunno. Heaven just always seems kinda boring to me. Like, who'd wanna go there?”

It's an understandable view, given traditional interpretations of heaven. Take a person with a Christian-ish background, who has a good work ethic and a general zest for life. If their view of heaven is an expectation that they will be sexless, living to eternity playing a harp on a cloud, with a pair of wings that excludes them from small human luxuries like tree-climbing and sleeping on their backs, then it would be no wonder if their desire for heaven were only an obedient one. They feel they ought to want to go to heaven, but they may dread it in reality.

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Enlightenment: Ilustrado vs. Liviano

With an acknowledged "unpolished style," Heath Synnestvedt playfully considers a range of topics. Violence on television, the human propensity to distraction and understanding the concept of enlightenment are all explored through anecdote and irony. In keeping with his message and manner, Heath intends the use of the lower case "i" for the personal pronoun. -Editor

Reading in this publication, New Church Perspective, i am struck by the unpolished nature of the majority of my own written work. The article that follows received a few taps from a ball-peen hammer, but not much.

Under “Ilustrado” on Wikipedia there's a definition of the adjective “ilustrado”: “Spanish for ‘erudite,’ ‘learned,’ or ‘enlightened ones’.” (There's also an interesting historical anecdote which you may wish to read instead.)

For my part, i prefer to employ the word “enlightened” in the sense of the word “light” as it relates to mass, rather than rays or particles. (I first heard this use of the word in a seminar run by Landmark Education)

If you look up “liviano” in a Spanish-English dictionary the primary usage is “light” (weight) as contrasted with “heavy”. Similarly as in English, this adjective can describe things that are frivolous. It can go even further and be applied to the lewdness of a comedian. Upon discovering this usage as i sat here in a cybercafe i nearly removed the word “liviano” from the title of my article with the desire to morph the piece into something acceptably familiar to my imagined audience.

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