the iconoclast's descending

  Unclamping Grace:  A Theological Prose-Poem in the Age of Collapse Douglas Blake Olds  [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL : If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html] A human’s vocation is to discover the sublime by ethics-founded aesthetics--those two or three thrums of embraced inner imaging that capacitate the heart to deroute the mind as harbinger—not of transcendental escape—but of eternal life and lifemaking. Contra Plotinus, the telos is not the One’s stillness, or Heraclitus, the attraction to the one of pure thought, but the re-animating earth under human trusteeship displacing aggrandizing human nature: virtue instal...