Covenants

I find it significant that God always initiates his covenants in a different location than he fulfills them; that is, they always include a command to "Go". This means we are called to leave our current location–that place which is both dangerously comfortable for us and deceptively close to God–the place we were before God called us and the place where he met us.

Thus, Noah is called to steer to a new world; Abraham (or his father) is called to move out of Ur and Haran; Moses is called to leave from Horeb to lead from Egypt; the people of Israel are called to march from Sinai to a new country; etc. Similarly, Elisha is made to leave both his mission field and his homeland to walk 40 days into the wilderness to meet God on 'the mountain of God'. I mean, what's the mountain of God doing in the wilderness anyway? Shouldn't that term refer to Mount Zion?

In the New Testament, the disciples are called to leave their homes and wander the lands, following Jesus, and eventually to transverse the known world seeking his people. If some Christians today find their mission field to be in their hometown, they are still called to plan for a final move to better mansions above. It is as if God wants to emphasize that we can bring absolutely nothing to the bargaining table–nothing we have done, nothing we are, not even any aspect of our current condition, such as location.

The Decay of Truthing

All the best novels I have read have had one thing in common - they are true, even more true perhaps than what is commonly accepted as 'true history'. What do I mean by this? Not that they are fitting allegories for this world—better that this world is a fitting allegory for them. I mean that the feelings expressed or evoked in them are not particular to them, but our fundamental to my nature, having awaited only such a summons. After all, how do you really know what is history and what is fiction? You take what someone tells you and judge it by comparing it with what other people have told you, and (more importantly) with what your own heart tells you. And these stories resonate within my soul more deeply than many superficially factual histories have done.

From this I derive four doctrines of aesthetics:
1. Good art never focuses on itself, but expresses universal truths.
2. Bad art comes from abstracting art, and elevating it into an ideal.
3. Art imitates Life far more than Life imitates Art.
4. Truthing, the telling of beautiful true things, is the proper aim of Art.


Edit:
After I wrote this I found this quote by Thornton Wilder:

The response we make when we 'believe' a work of the imagination is that of saying: "This is the way things are. I have always known it without being fully aware that I knew it. Now in the presence of this play of novel or poem (or picture or piece of music) I know that I know it." It is this form of knowledge which Plato called 'recollection'. We have all murdered, in thought; and been murdered. We have all seen the ridiculous in estimable persons and in ourselves. We have all know terror as well as enchantment. Imaginative literature has nothing to say to those who to not recognize—who cannot be reminded—of such conditions.

And this by G.K. Chesterton, in Twelve Types:

'Jane Eyre' is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum.

New York Citiers

New York Citiers are neither rude nor friendly until they notice you; until they are forced to treat you as an individual. Before that, you are just a physical obstacle, with no more person or character than a ball of tumbleweed has to a cowboy in Arizona.  That's not inherently a bad thing; in fact it is the only way to keep your sanity in a crowd of n million people. It permits them to brush past you brusquely on the subway, but still be helpful if you ask for directions. It's not ideal (I'm always afraid I'll be rude to someone I know), but it's just not possible here to know all your sheep by name. The problem (an insidious one) is not with how you treat others, but how you treat yourself. By treating others impersonally, you treat yourself that way as well. If a cowboy indifferently bumped into enough tumbleweed, he'd be acting like a ball of tumbleweed himself. So by failing to allow others their individuality, the New York Citier denies it of himself.