I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.’ Luke 19:40
Here is a photograph of a living tree which I pass almost everyday. One day it stopped me in my tracks as an image emerged out of the noise of criss-crossing leaves and branches. This tree was struck by lightening and now bears a recogognizable image:
Scourging and Crucifixion of Christ.
I am an artist and that may make me sensitive to images camouflaged in the ordinary things around us. Not only do I see the Scourging and Crucifixion of Christ in this living tree, but I can also see the Crown of Thorns. As a starting point for mediation, ask yourself, “Why a tree?”
What were they (the Obamas) thinking when they chose to hang an Alma Thomas art piece in the White House. Perhaps, they were thinking, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” The problem with this artist is that her creation, “Watusi (Hard Edge), as Michell Malkin says here , “is an almost exact reproduction of a 1953 piece by Henri Matisse titled “L’Escargot:” ”
“Here they are side by side, with “Watusi” rotated and on the left.”
“Is this fraud? If the new piece has been titled “Homage to Collage” or “Matisse in Blue”, I would think the artist wasn’t trying to hide the copying. But I wonder whether anyone realized that the artist copied almost every aspect of a famous work to sell her artwork. Perhaps everyone involved knew that this is a re-colored reprint. If not, it seems to be an embarrassment for the “sophisticates” who failed to spot a copy hiding in plain sight.”
This is beautiful and celebrates a finite universe, giving us some idea of infinity by the awe it inspires and the Universe’s sheer vastness and complexity.
A Glorious Dawn includes these words:
“But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has it’s own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world.”
It is interesting to note that Carl Sagan, while positing, a purely material universe, was in awe of Possibility. Yet, he won’t admit the possibility of God, and immaterial realities, such as soul. Sagan trafficked in ideas, and ideas, themselves, simply sing and shout God.
While Carl’s science functions on ideas, his materialistic science must measure, weigh, observe and record. This purely materialistic observing and recording is insufficient for describing all of Reality, all that is. Materialistic science can come to know just part of Reality, the material part.
F.J. Sheedsays, “Ask yourself: ‘How much does this idea weigh? How long is it? What color is it? What shape is it? How much space does it take up?’ The answer of course is that your idea has no weight, no length, no color, no shape, and takes up no space. It simply has no material attributes at all. something with no material attributes is immaterial, another word for spiritual.
Carl Sagan glorified ideas, dreaming of future manifestations and possibilities. A solely materialistic view must find a way to account for the immaterial Intellect and for that matter, the Will and Conscience, as well. “Immaterial ideas imply an immaterial faculty capable of forming them. It is impossible for something material to create something immaterial. Therefore the faculty capable of forming spiritual ideas must itself be spiritual.” observes F.J. Sheed in “Theology for Beginners.”
“Here they are side by side, with “Watusi” rotated and on the left.”
Be Holy! 
