In reality, both the idealised and the practical view of the farm give me only part of the picture of the total reality. The role of the artist is to see things as they are. More than that, however, we must extract the beauty from the most ordinary of scenes and convey that beauty to the reader. We are the proclaimers of the manifold goodnesses of creation.
Even when things aren't good, though, we have to do more than simply report the tragedies of life or attempt to gloss over them. Finding grace in the midst of pain has to be one of the greatest arts of life, and if we as artists can help others to find that grace, we will have done well.
Similarly, when I interact with a person, I often attempt to force them to conform to my expectations of what they should be like. My expectations are generally based on some abstract ideal or on the ways that person may have behaved in the past. This patently unreasonable practice is particularly easy to fall into when it comes to loved ones.
But, as a fellow senior said in one of the few university chapel speeches I remember from five years ago, we need to give people the grace to change. I want to push this idea even further. In order to love people properly, we need to be willing to look -- and look again*: to take the time (and risk the disillusionment) to see people as they truly are, rather than as we have pegged them to be or would like them to be.
At the risk of setting off every cliché-ometer known to man, real love should set free, not bind. I Corinthians 13 tell us that love doesn't insist on its own way (v. 5), but rejoices in the truth (v.6). Furthermore, when all is made new, we will know fully, as we have been fully known (v. 12). I believe God's agape love is to be our example and goal. We ought to foster in ourselves a love that seeks to know fully, to connect to other souls in the deepest, most profoundly giving, sort of way.
If I am caught in a constant web of my parent/child/spouse/friend/significant other's wishes for me to be a certain way, how can I grow into the person I am meant to be? Not to say that love should never have expectations. I hope my friends will never cease to challenge me to become a better person, but that doesn't necessarily mean I will or ought to become the better person each of my friends/loved ones envisions me being. Human beings are far too interesting to fit into the stereotypes we make for each other.
All that to say, I am challenging myself to take another stab at looking, and at loving. Especially as an idealist myself (with occasional bouts of cynicism), I don't expect it to be easy to hold my ideals more loosely and let reality flood in. It will take divine intervention to get beyond myself and see the world around me and the people in it as bearing the weight of glory (II Cor. 4:17) and therefore worthy of my undivided (and not predetermined) attention and love.
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns. George Santayana
*Phrase borrowed, and possibly paraphrased, from a tube billboard.
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Arundel Castle.
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