Rumours Of Glory.

Alan Jacobs, scholar, essayist, and biographer of C.S. Lewis, is now writing a regular column for Books & Culture:

It seems to me that the careful dance, the difficult balance, of Christian cultural criticism is to be endlessly attentive to the form and the details of the world around us, while simultaneously practicing the "politics of long joy"—and in this way avoiding an unhealthy obsession with "trophies," and avoiding also being conformed to the ways of this world. It's a tough walk to walk, because one of the peculiarities of fallen human nature is that we find it difficult, over the long haul anyway, to remember that there is a world of difference between "I have no control over this" and "this isn't very important." We tend, against all reason, to diminish the importance of everything we cannot shape or direct. But our joy will be short if it is grounded in circumstances and events, because circumstances and events always change: if they please us now, they will displease us later. And then what will we do?

Central to this discipline, for me anyway, is a constant striving to remember who human beings are and what we are made for. Which brings me to the title of this column. On Bruce Cockburn's 1980 recording Humans there's a song called "Rumours of Glory"—a song about "the extremes / of what humans can be," but also about the imago Dei which each of us bears, the divine image that waits always for the discerning eye to notice it. In the song, perhaps his best (which is saying a lot), Cockburn sees the "tension" between what we were made to be and what we in fact are; he sees that human culture is produced by that tension, which generates "energy surging like a storm." At once attracted and repelled by that energy, "you plunge your hand in; you draw it back, scorched." And the hand that has been plunged truly into the human world is always marked by that plunging: it's "scorched", yes, but beneath the wound "something is shining like gold—but better." The truth of who we are, given the extremes of divine image and savage depravity, is hard to discern; perhaps we can only achieve it in brief moments; perhaps we only catch rumors of the glory that is, and is to be. But even those rumors can sustain us as we walk the pilgrim path.

Here's the whole thing.