Let Every Breath Praise the Lord: Embodied Learning

Patterns for Life Audiobook Chapter 12

It might seem that with all these restrictions of form and pattern we do not have much room for creativity, but in fact this could not be further from the truth. When we come to these limits and place ourselves within their boundaries, we each come to them as unique, unrepeatable persons. We come to them as no other person before us and no other person after us will ever come. As we place ourselves within the boundaries of form and pattern we imbue them with something unique, something wholly unlike what another self will bring. We bring a touch of the infinite and we find that time and eternity, limits and infinity, come together at the center. The chiasm is the grand shape of the Christian life: in each form, in each pattern that we make our own, we see the shape of the cross. We find there a repetition, an image of the place on which the crucified Son of Man is also the Eternal Son of God. We hear within every embodied piece of knowledge an echo of the Incarnation, where the infinite God is contained within a finite human body. The Christian life is all about living out such paradoxes as these.

This is what we are made to long for, to seek, to desire passionately: the Incarnate Christ, the Son of God. Every act of embodiment, from a child’s first attempts at drawing to otherworldly chant, reflects the glory of the Incarnation and points us back to the Person incarnated. When we behold the union of the finite with the infinite, we recognize the face of the Beautiful.

This is why we yearn for and pursue Beauty in all its forms; because every instance of loveliness and transcendence is a reflection of the One who is Beautiful.

Patterns for Life, chapter 12