Wired Mesh

Man, I love Leitch so much I hate him.

Hey, thanks for this. Always a pleasure reading your posts.

Two things:

Family and Weight of Glory.

Watching Zaida thoroughly enjoy seeing Katie yesterday and reading Andy's blog today made the article by Leitch tintinnabulate. Hing a Hong and Sig a Sog. Can't wait to see you in May.

Not to burst the idyllic mood, but something isn't adding up here. We are pointless, nothing we do matters, and, eventually, it will all be forgotten anyway. But put us together in semi-permanent little groups and the erstwhile amused deity suddenly takes note? Perhaps, when you strip it all away, all we get is naked families.

Kevin, read Leitch like you play the piano, with your gut & soul & emotions.

Josiah, this isn't a case of me being overly analytical to the exclusion of emotion. My reaction to the this piece was a gut feeling: it left me feeling empty and depressed. I enjoyed the article, all up until the paragraph on family. I guess it's a matter of genre. Had this been a work of fiction, a novel or perhaps a movie, about someone who sees the pointlesness in everything he does but then finds meaning in his family, I would have been fine with that. Yet, this is because good fiction, with its ever present themes of redemption, points to something beyond itself, to something transcendent. But this is an essay. So when Leitch says, "At the end, all we really have is family," I have to assume that he really means that this all we really have. And I'm left thinking, "What, no God?" No wonder we're all confused and lonely. He for whom our souls were created to yearn has been replaced by...each other. I prefer Augustine's take on the matter, "Thou hast formed us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee."

Kevin, I find myself with you on Augustine's take, but what it means to find our rest in God takes, well, in my opinion, many forms, one of them in the comfort of family, friends, worship, etc. Just do a good ol' switcheroo with the language (i.e. body of Christ), and Leitch's sentiments get closer and closer to the "bigger" truth.

I dont' feel that the "artis" or "writer" or whatever always has to paint the entire picture. Sometimes they should, but I think it's a case by case thing, and in this case I don't think Leitch hasta jump it to the broader spiritual story.

Josiah, it is one thing to say that the finding of our rest in God can take the form of the comfort of family and friends. It is another to suggest that said comfort inherently entails finding our rest in God. There are people who truly derive a sense of meaning from their work, or their family, or both. People who will be unpleasantly surprised in the judgment. I prefer to think that we can be fulfilled in both of these because, in the end, they are not all that we have. For those who trust in him, God has infused these with his own significance. I agree that a writer need not paint the entire picture (to continue the mixed metaphor), but, in this case, I do think that Leitch should have gone further than he did.