Self Expression

Someone recently told me that preaching in a church is not really an act of self-expression.  It's a creative act that expresses something beyond oneself.

I can't think of anything more self-expressive than a blog.  At their best, blogs offer critical commentary on anything from politics and ideas to food and recreation.  At their worst, they are seething outpourings from a blogger's consciousness, self-expressive to the point of being alienating or intolerable.  Most are somewhere in between, I'm sure.  But in any case, they tend to be highly self-expressive.  What could be farther from the lofty communication of heavenly truth, (which preaching seeks to be)?

And yet self-expression is so seductive for exactly that reason.  In the way a diary is seductive.  A platform, a medium, to express oneself! How nice!  To give thoughts and feelings a verbal form.  To open up one's own interiority and pour it out on the table, arrange it in a meaningful way-- and hope that others read it and find it beautiful.

But what is beautiful about my innermost heart and mind?  The only things I find beautiful are those elements and events that participate in something beyond myself.  Love enacted, a truth discovered, a life lived in the light, the shadow, of a higher meaning that embraces and transcends me.

That is what is beautiful.

But none of that makes itself available for writing down or telling you about.  Its only expression is eminently practical-- Beauty has to be lived.   If it's only told, its not beautiful.  Because it's too self-serving, self-indulgent.  Too self-conscious to be artful.  Too self-concerned to be beautiful.

And so this is my blog.  Not beautiful.  Just a platform for my own privacy-made-public, interiority expressed.   How selfish.