The North Rose Window of Notre Dame de Paris. (Source).

Right around January of 2016, Mr. Owen White (formerly?) of The Ochlophobist, issued a challenge to the religious blogosphere asking writers why they adhered to their faiths. The challenge lay in the rules; if memory serves correctly, you could only answer with five or so selections of media by figures who, to the best of your knowledge, were outside that faith. I wrote up my own list, but as I wasn’t blogging at the time, I didn’t publish it anywhere. I just found it again, decided to add an extra two pieces, and thought I’d put it here for anyone who might care. 

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

TS. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

Rest your cheek, for a moment, on this drunken cheek.
Let me forget the war and cruelty inside myself.
I hold these silver coins in my hand;
Give me your wine of golden light.
You have opened the seven doors of heaven;
Now lay your hand generously on my tightened heart.
All I have to offer is this illusion, my self.
Give it a nickname at least that is real.
Only you can restore what you have broken;
Help my broken head.
I’m not asking for some sweet pistachio candy,
But your everlasting love.
Fifty times I’ve said,
“Heart, stop hunting and step into this net.”

Rumi, “The War Inside,” trans. Kabir Helminski

Somehow it has all
added up to song—
earth, air, rain and light,
the labor and the heat,
the mortality of the young.
I will go free of other
singing, I will go
into the silence
of my songs, to hear
this song clearly.

Wendell Berry, “A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall”

“Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes

The Tree of Life, by Terrence Malick

“Mother of the World,” Nicholas Roerich, 1924. (Source).