Imagine a school of feeling that cultivates sensitive responses to the full spectrum of varieties of beauty–actual and potential. There are courses in the arts that enable us to say more than wow, cool, awesome, amazing, it feels so good. Listening to a Mozart piano concerto, seeing a Rodin sculpture or a Rembrandt painting—we can learn to comment intelligently on the aesthetic qualities we perceive in the work.
This school would have a course on beauty and feeling in the life of Jesus. Based on a story of his interaction with others, we would create a little skit in which one person plays the role of Jesus and another person plays the character he is speaking with. But how shall we express his feelings, without adding a note of unrealistic sentimentality to a word of mercy or a tone of self-righteous anger to a warning? It is not easy to know how Jesus would have said it. We can memorize or read a script, but to express his feelings is another matter. Even if we knew Aramaic, and could watch a video of the interaction, we would better comprehend Jesus’ feelings as he responds with heart and soul to the complex situation as he understands it. We could not reproduce his musical voice. But we can come to know Jesus better and can nourish ourselves on his teachings. Then we can reveal him, can live so that he can live through us.
Consider living to reveal Jesus in today’s world, and reflect for a moment on attitude, which is at the core of feeling. Here we are in the midst of an intense bottleneck of change, as planetary evolution swirls all around us with its ups and downs. Our overall attitude to evolution may well be: “YES! Here I am, Lord. Send me!” But just like Jesus’ motivation of love was expressed very differently in contrasting situations, our attitude of YES can express itself in response to specific types of challenge: uncertainty, disappointment, apparent defeat, the sheer difficulty of what needs to be done, the immensity of the problems, and the fact that there are so many things that we can’t explain.
We cultivate the feeling dimension of our life by learning to respond in a sensitively differentiated way to the actual and potential beauty of daily life. It helps to learn to understand the arts, get to know Jesus and his teachings better, and develop our attitude to the evolutionary challenges of our world.
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