The Church After Innovation

Through epiphany, they followed the way of the cross and did the most profound thing that can be done in a world that inflates the self by driving for singularity: they saw and named the personhood of each other. They attended to the other as an epiphany that included their own creativity, not for the sake of performance but for the sake of being p

So how do we find and form (school) these poets of epiphany who pray their poems and whose poems are prayers? We can never control the arrival of the epiphany. We just have to wait (something late capitalism hates). But while waiting, we can form ourselves, and be formed by others, to take on the practices of waiting and discovering the words neede

Innovation, without bearing the cross, is too bound in the logic of money. It is therefore obsessed with forming (schooling) not poets but entrepreneurs. As we’ve seen, innovation overindulges the subjectivity of creativity, glorifying not gift but performance.

this epiphanic aesthetic is needed as a medicine for late-modern overindulgence of the self. For Taylor, the epiphanic aesthetic can hold together the goods of the age of authenticity and the importance of creativity without allowing both to fall into the self-involved temptations of the aesthetic economy and drive for singularity, which we’ve name

Mary shows us that the faithful response to the gift of epiphany is to allow poetry to spill from your being in response to the epiphany.

Almost all craftspersons speak of something like this mystical creativity (Instagram influencers almost never do). Craftspersons speak of a creativity that fully includes the self but has its source far outside the self.

An epiphanic aesthetic is free of this colonization because it is not moneyed. It is pure gift. It is an event of being overtaken by a creativity that has its source not in our self but in something that arrives, in an event of encounter in the world.

This epiphany, and our mystical call to contemplate it in silence and poetry, moves us to find ourselves by losing ourselves in the grand event of God’s arriving in the world. We lose ourselves not in masochistic or pietist religious effort but inside the beauty and glory of the epiphany.

(for Luther, the cross is the hermeneutic of divine action, not a mechanism or machine of atonement). The theology of the cross claims that God’s ministering of life out of death starts and ends with epiphany.