GOD AND LOVE

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The two most difficult things to get straight in life are love and God.

More often than not, the mess people make of their lives can be traced to failure or stupidity or meanness in one or both of these areas. The basic and biblical Christian conviction is that the two subjects are intricately related. If we want to deal with God the right way, we have to learn to love the right way. If we want to love the right way, we have to deal with God the right way.

God and love can't be separated.

Eugene Peterson

BEAUTY, FRIENDSHIP, & LOSS

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The whole world is either symbolic (images & ideas that are throwing life together) or diabolic (pulling life apart). 

It is the color of what we trust most, love most, focus our gaze on most that dyes our soul. The dye of our soul colors our world.

If you could be one of the two, what would you rather be at the end of your life: proud of what you've done or grateful for what you have been given?

Reality is a cosmic drama of divine revelation and human response. 

We need to accept ourselves as revelations of God to us. 

All of reality is either a temple or a tomb.

I know the music I like.
You like the music you know.

The enjoyment of every created good is an enjoyment of heaven.

God is always speaking to us.
Reality is sacred, always speaking to us.

If you receive something as a gift, you trust and hope and live in the one who gave it to you.

Joy is the response to the possession of the good.

The Bible gives us a reason to do things with a creative endeavor because all these things are sacred.

Comments from Fr. Vince, S.J. at a retreat at Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat Home.

YOUR PARISH IS A RELATIONAL MICROCOSM

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Your parish is a relational microcosm that helps bring many cause-and-effect relationships back together again. Being in collaborative relationships in real life where you live, work and play awakens you to the effects of your actions both on people and on the place itself.

It creates a context where your church can see whether its faith is more than just talk. The local place becomes the testing ground, revealing whether you have learned to love each other and the larger community around you. In essence, the parish is a dare to your faith.

Jason Janz

LINNEA GABRIELLA SPRANSY

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Artist Statement:

Using strict rules, I construct images on the belief that limits have an eerie capacity to generate surprise … even freedom. Chaos and emergent system theory tell us that these limits need not be elaborate, or even obviously visible; in fact, it is often the most humble and self-evident limits, which, in time, behave in the most sophisticated ways. They form bizarre chandeliers of crystal, guide the catacomb construction of ant colonies, the spread of cities, and the swoop of flocks. All, often, with eerie similarity. Awareness of these limits does not guarantee predictive power, or the ennui of omniscience.

This is good, and fascinating.

And it is through this means that I make my work: every piece is the manifestation of a predetermined scheme – a system of small limits with a clear beginning and end. Using abstract symbol (what I call ‘modules’, much like number and letter forms) in a mode of familiar, naturalistic construction, these pieces of visual script are allowed to accrue and to display their peculiar surprises. In this way, an unlikely path of discovery is opened in the midst of certainty- though every step is predetermined and the end known from the beginning, the final form remains enigmatic. Though I have accumulated an extensive archive of ‘research drawings’, end results are stubbornly, delightfully immune to absolute prediction.

Add to these systems environmental pressures (in this case, cataclysmic spills of paint flung over fully realized systems) and the flexibility and regenerative capacity of a given set of rules is tested even further. The system must then respond and rebuild using fragments of surviving information. Images generated this way hover near familiarity but are unable to declare themselves. They occupy both the micro and macroscopic view. They are both geologically slow and disastrously swift.

Working this way, I have become convinced that intelligence can be essentially understood as the ability to create or recognize pattern; perhaps patterns themselves are a form of intelligence – intelligence capable of surprise, without breaking a single rule. Which, in the end, is a satisfying contradiction, an energetic tension of philosophical forces hospitable to constrained freedom and consistent astonishment.