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Beauty is not pasted over suffering but grows out of it—like the proverbial shoot from parched ground. Bruce Herman

C.S. Lewis & Wayne Adams

POETRY & ART

C.S. Lewis: Footnote to All Prayers

Wayne Adams: Prayer Painting I (I'm Sorry Please Forgive Me Thank You I love you)

C.S. Lewis

Footnote to All Prayers

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian* fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

*****

* Pheidias was a legendary statue maker in the ancient world.

Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer and lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. He is best known for his works of fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. 

Wayne Adams: Prayer Painting I (I'm Sorry Please Forgive Me Thank You I love you), 2010, acrylic, 60 x 48 inches.

Wayne Adams is a Brooklyn-based artist, originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who received his B.F.A. from Calvin College and M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000. Adams has exhibited throughout the Midwest, New York, and Vienna, Austria and is interested in how painting can address deeply personal notions through abstraction as well as representational imagery. At times he uses unique materials such as aluminum foil and faux fur to create surfaces which are simultaneously tactile and optically engaging. Read more