And an entire life here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRNOLKMpkJ0&t=36s
I had never heard of Lilias Trotter but I admire her so much. Born 100 years before me, and artist and a serious Christian. I watched it on Prime.
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THanks for the link. I need to look into her work, a bio and the movie!
[EDIT]Just found a bio:
A Passion For The Impossible: The Life Of Lilias Trotter by Miriam Huffman Rockness
[Another edit] @MarkD the movie is in Kanopy, which many libraries provide
And yet another edit:
A brief article about Trotter https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/arts/design/a-renewed-spotlight-on-two-women-artists.html?unlocked_article_code=1.408.N-Yx.NjuqOZlhA9L3&smid=url-share.
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From Many Beautiful Things (about the life of Lillias Trotter, whom MarkD mentions above):
I am now ready to be offered.
Measure thy life by loss, not by gain.
Not by the wine drunk, but by the wine poured forth.
For love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice.
And he who suffers most has most to give.
For her this wasn’t a romatic ideal, it was the summary of her own life. Hers was the Christian life in quiet, obscure action that brought her no fame or glory but deep satisfaction in the beauty and people who surrounded her and the mutual love she found among strangers she went to serve.
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The fuller excerpt from the book When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi occurs between pp182-185 and I had to transcribe it so I could look back on it. So enjoy:
.. Surely enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.
Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning - to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say to believe in meaning, you must believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge.
Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is a product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about mater and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience. The realm of metaphysics remains the province of revelation (this, not atheism, is what Occam argued, after all). And atheism can be justified can be justified only on these grounds. The prototypical atheist, then is Graham Greene’s commandant from The Power and the Glory, whose atheism comes from a revelation of the absence of GOd. The only real atheism must be grounded in a world a world-making vision. The favorite quote of many an atheist , from the Nobel Prize winning French biologist Jaques Monod, belies this revelatory aspect: “The ancient covenantt is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance”.
Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity - sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness - because I found them so compelling . There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the OT and the NT. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.