We Resolve to Awe and Wonder

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 January 2014.

I see what you mean regarding manageability.  My initial thought is that it is a lot more manageable (devil often lurking in the details, of course).

We are writing and otherwise producing volumes of stuff that works within our narrative, because our narrative had already embraced meta-narrative as an integral element long before this recent development.

This is just taking it one step further.

As far as the digital proficiencies, I consider myself pretty capable having been a long-time technology coach/point person in my district.  I've never been a big blogger, but I am adept at mastering and integrating new technologies.  I see a lot of what I like in certain blogs and feel I can replicate the basics of what I see there.  That said, I want to dink around with things for a while before opening it up to the general public.

In terms of losing the wow factor of finished products, I see the concern...

But I feel like our current model has us continually falling off everyone's map (as if we were ever there in the first place).  I have a lot more time to make my way over to the computer or down into the basement than I do to lug equipment to this or that practice or show (which I nonetheless still maintain as one of our preeminent goals).  If we share songs and longings and ideas, faithful followers can potentially have the excitement of seeing sad, lonely chords banged out on a piano transformed into full-fledged extravaganzas with guitars blazing, etc.  And they can participate, they can commune, they can contribute...just like we intended in the first place!

I like what you said about the meta-narrative as well, how it should not just be the domain of relativism.  Instead of necessarily pointing toward the relative, I see it as pointing toward the irrational, which is a wholly baptize-able concept.  Irrational, in mathematical terms, means "cannot be reduced to a ratio or fraction."  So pi, phi, square root of 2, etc. are irrational.  Many times, what Jesus said is irrational in the sense that I've defined above.  Think ye on this (1 Corinthians 1:22-25):

For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,
but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

I don't think it irreligious to say that we can't reduce God and/or His Universe to straightforward formulas, patterns, and quantities.  Without talking about religion all the time, I think that we--having been created in the image and likeness of that most irrational Creator--might very well partake in that irrationality in our own creations.  Does that mean that God is without symmetries, without rhyme or reason?  Of course not.  But we won't be pigeonholing him in our small-minded human projects and conceptions, reducing down him into comprehensible fractions, integers, natural numbers, etc.  That would be the conceit of the Enlightenment and its intellectual progeny.

As you say, we resolve to awe and wonder.