Eden as Past, Future, and Present

A friend recommended Tapestry by Bishop SeraphimSigrist.  I liked it very much.  It’s reads like stream-of-consciousness.  It provides many interesting vignettes.   Here is a meaningful snippet lifted from Chapter 18.  Not that I think there was a literal Adam, still, nonetheless I like this.

Ch. 18  Eden as Past, Future, and Present

Poem by Charles Reznikoff

As I was wandering with my happy thoughts,
I looked and saw
that I had come into a sunny place, familiar
    and yet strange.
“Where am I?” I asked a stranger.  “Paradise.”
“Can this be Paradise?” I ask, surprised,
For there were motor cars and factories.
“It is” he answered.  This is the sun that
    shone on Adam once;
The very wind that blew on him, too. 

New Forms of Spiritual Understanding

I've been thinking a lot about how Christianity is by its very nature not a static thing but adaptable and always changing.  It seems to me that is the way it should be.  The tradition I come from wanted to go back to the first century and RESTORE Christianity to how it was at its founding.  The assumption was that there was one, immutable way for it to be and we must practice only that version of Christianity.  But long ago I lost confidence in that approach.  I came across a quotation this morning while reading Edward Hirsch's book "How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry."  It supports my view.  Edward, on page 193 of my Kindle version, cites this as from Hart Crane and his "General Aims and Theories" which I have not read. 

New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual understanding

Hirsch is discussing art and says of the above that "This key modernist idea, that fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms, has had particular resonance" in the New World . . . .

Even though he is discussing art, I think the principle holds for religion.  Art and religion are intertwined, despite how the Reformation heritage has attempted to squelch the connection.