via Realpsed Catholic: Regeneration:
Of all the damnations I have heaped upon what I call “postmodernism” lately, the one that seems most to surprise my readers is “joylessness”. To be clear, let me begin by explaining what I mean by “postmodern men” (or, “posthuman moderns” as I call them, when my mood is fraying). I mean, the sort of person we see everywhere around us, raised from the 1950s forward, in environments from which all the certainties and decencies of Western civilization had been progressively vacuumed, so that even such concepts as “mom and apple pie” may now be received as alien and controversial….
I think art, broadly, offers many alternative means to the kind of regeneration — moral, and ethical, as well as aesthetic — that can help us out of our enclosed spaces. Learning to draw, from nature; to sing, in key; to dance, in pattern; to write, metrically; even to sew, or to master carpenter’s joints — all such enterprises offer the lost soul an individual direction out of the jungle.
The reason why, is that each is a discipline that restores us to harmony with the natural order of things. Each offers a way of seeing into God’s creation, and puts us in the presence of what is infinitely greater than ourselves.
To be able to draw a single flower, with full attention to all its colours and parts, is to be lifted out of one’s tawdry self into a realm where good, truth, and beauty still prevail. It is to recover joy.
Good find, Peony.