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God, I crave Your beauty.
I want the beauty You’ve dabbed across Your creation. This want is what You placed inside me, I trust, like a fever but also like a soil bed hiding hydrangeas on the verge of sprouting.
I want your beauty as a first, last, and ever source. I want it for my poetry, fiction, and essays. I want it to overwhelm my writing, so that I write Your poetry, Your fiction, Your essays.
What could I to write without Your beauty? Puzzles to tickle my self-satisfaction. Trick mirrors that distort revelation. Lord, prevent me from these flatteries, I want more from the palm of Your hand.
Thank You for all You allow and sustain in this world, God. What You sustain informs what You inspire in me. And that inspiration, brightening and warming like bonfirelight, is what I’m begging to receive from You.
Yours is the glory forever, amen. Thank You for this accord.
Since glory is Yours, and since Your glory transcends the world I see and hear, let me echo it. Please, God, let me echo Your glory on earth, even if I make only a tin-soldier beauty. Please, God, give me Your exactitude and craft, I only need a drop, so I can reflect Your character above.
If I get to have Your beauty, let it glimmer with Your light. It will be only faint, God. And at its best, it’ll only ever derivative. Let me have it. Draw it from one speck of the heavenly palette You wielded to paint the cosmos.
This below world is not my own, amen. Thank You for this accord.
You have placed so many beauties within the world and its people, Lord Father. But this world is not where I belong. It’s not the true home of Your church, not the true home of all who bear Your image. I yearn instead for the sweet-bearing land I’ve never seen. It hurts me, morning, day, and night, but I yearn and it’s Your yearning. Thank You, God, that I feel famished pain for Your Son’s return and Your eternity.
Form that pain into Your beauty, Creator God. And form that beauty into a harmonized note of heaven. Brand every syllable I write with the world to come, I don’t want to escape it while I live here. Burn my every syllable with the greatest rest we’ll ever know.
We all bear Your image like a whittled form, amen. Thank You for this accord.
Thank You for Your voice in my neighbor’s voice, as she gossips on the phone. My father’s hands at the grill are Your hands, and Your spine curls the man sitting on the ledge of his balcony to read a book. What a world of people You whittled, God.
In Your writing, give me Your beauty so I can never condescend to Your children. Please, keep me from mistreating them even once. What if I could meet and mystify and challenge them? What if I could write to them as divine souls ready for the odd, the tender? Thank You for the many-eyed beauty You’ve made. It’s like the peacock’s splayed feathers in bloom. It arrests me, it has a many-sided multiplicity. Make my art arrest Your children in the same way.
We live depraved lives of sin, amen. Thank You for this accord.
Have mercy on us. We’re sinners and snakebitten, but Christ saved us even as we murdered Him. God, I wish we had changed since then, but we haven’t. Christ renews us, and I thank You desperately for it. He renews us as we lie, kill, steal, and defile whatever we can reach. You redeem us, even as You mourn our faithless hearts and our heartlessness against the least of these.
God, make Your art in me seep with tears over man’s sin. Make it mourn the reflexive evil we commit. But also make me write frankly, without flinching. With Your hand on me, boil our stomachs at the sight of depravity. Please, God, breathe your coldest blue into Your art in me, that it becomes melancholia.
You spoke the first words, God. Please, speak my written words also.
My Prayer, God, in Your Lapis Lazuli
Heavenly Father, First Painter, You have made me to crave Your beauty, a dark flower bed already seeded. I beg for Your Right hand upon what I write so it reveals and does not distort Your beauty. Prevent puzzling mirrors that reflect only myself— give me the beauty You flourished in Your days of creation. Be my fountainhead, my first, last, and eternal. Overwhelm my words, that I can write only Your words in a lover's echoed translation. Birth my art from these accords: Transcendent glory over all is Yours; gift me its smallest echo in words. Your light indescribable made the cosmos; allow me one weak glimmer, for Your faintest divinity lights the darkest page. You wrought man for Your own eternal company; sculpt my exile's yearning into art that seeks the above. Famished for Christ's return, may I brand my every word with eternity's touch. You hand-crafted us all in Your image; give me the art that speaks to heaven's souls. Not to misuse them, Creator God, but to arrest all with the many-eyed beauty of Your bloom. Your Son saves us in our total depravity; cause Your art in me to seep with weeping for the sinful hearts of men. Holiness and renewal are Your character and covenant, so please fill my art with unflinching melancholy over sin. Prepare me for death by every word I write, that I may die in utter peace without fear, a silent removal from this world to the next. Now and ever, Creator God, I submit to the exiled longing with which You inspire me. Amen, Lord, and amen, Lord, and amen.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch again on October 31, when we celebrate the first year of A Stylist Submits!
That will mean more navel-gazing than usual, a grateful recap on where y’all have brought this newsletter with your sweet sweet reading, and a significant announcement about our future here.
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Literary Christianity, with humble rigor.
Well done, Kevin. Thanks for sharing.
Nice work, Kevin. Snake- yet beauty-bitten.