More on: mystery

——1 Samuel 3:1   1. these days it seems one can only know ——-what God is not & ——-not what God is fully as though fullness is printed ——-plainly in plain sight & written in the body these days it seems the price for the divine ——-is one we cannot pay ——-though we never could…

an old saying goes that we live out our days clad in a shroud thrown over one shoulder no need to be God to confirm the mystical world of the spirit and angels heaven and hell the almond tree in full bloom and all the rare people who speak on behalf of ineffable truths to…

An Introduction by Guest Editor Scott Teems The first issue of Image I read was Issue 31, in the summer of 2001; it was the first in a subscription gifted me by the Act One screenwriting program in Los Angeles, which I had just completed. Initially, I was intimidated by the journal’s focus on fine…

The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel (Spiegel & Grau, 2016) Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) Wilberforce by H.S. Cross (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015)   STRONG NOVELS IMMERSE READERS in distinct worlds, with their own rules, cultures, and belief systems. The best novels refuse to supply pat answers or…

One of the real tests of writers is how well they write about smells. If they can’t describe the scent of sanctity in a church, can you trust them to describe the suburbs of the heart? _____________________________________ ___________ —Diane Ackerman For your love is more delightful than wine. Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;…

IN THE summer of 1509, as he lay sick in bed, Desiderius Erasmus decided to pass the time by producing a literary gift for his friend and fellow Christian humanist, Thomas More. Within a week, he completed the Encomium Moriae, which can be read as either the “praise of More” or the “praise of folly”…

The following is adapted from the preface to The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery. My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art…

I have begun to think that God is small like a wren, a piece of blue beach glass shining in the wet of sea and sky, that double exposure. Every day the huge sun, the blue vault brimming with invisible stars. Each night the echoing expanse of dark and always God in the palm of…

Lord of worn stone cliffs and the guileless trill          of the canyon wren; Lord of stunted hemlocks, imperiled mussels, seeds that fall on shallow soil;          Lord of boreal forests, of the fragile nitrogen cycle, of vanishing aquifers, spreading          deserts; Lord of neglect and…

Li-Young Lee’s books of poetry include Rose (1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was a Lamont Poetry Selection; Book of My Nights (2001), which won the William Carlos Williams Award; From Blossoms: Selected Poems (2007), and Behind My Eyes (2008). His other work…