To live fully, love wastefully and to be all that God intends me to be.
John Shelby Spong
________________________________________________
Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.
Iris Murdoch
_____________________________________________
___________________________________________
Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Thomas Merton
When the going gets tough –
when we face a crisis or an illness
or we are in a rut or struggling to keep our heads above water –
when God remains silent or distant:
this is the time to stay, to be patient, to do the ordinary things of the day, to find a little space for yourself
(to breathe a little more freely) – to live in and through this time.
Love’s nature is always to communicate – and even amongst these rocks to believe love is speaking to us, holding us, beholding us.
Lindy Lee is an Australian artist born in Brisbane in 1954. Lee’s practice explores her Chinese ancestry through Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism – philosophies that see humanity and nature as inextricably linked.
“We are absolutely fabric to the universe and the universe is fabric to us. The length, the depth, the breadth of everything that has ever existed, exists right now and will ever exist. So that’s what I’m hoping the audience will get out of my work. This sense of actually belonging in this bigness.”
In this post we see images of two of Lee’s works, Heaven and Earth located in Xi’an, China, and Life of Stars located in front of the Art Gallery of South Australia. The work Life of Stars displays a densely perforated surface and creates dappled light, suggesting a universe within, that is both containing and radiating light.
This video brings us Lindy Lee telling an ancient Chinese story that reveals an intense meaning about our humanity.
For a printable PDF of the text of this reflection please click on the link below.
