About ‘Anesthetic Fog’

“What will all that chatter and hearsay count…when the anesthetic fog which we call ‘nature’ or ‘the real world’ fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?”
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Several folks* have emailed looking for some insight on this painting. For giggles, listen to the following two snippets; it’ll take less than 3 minutes if you jump to the time brackets below:

1. Listen from 0:00 to 1:42 of A.W. Tozer’s chapter on [God’s] Speaking Voice (bear with robo-voice):
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3iwxcP7pBQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player
2. Now here’s Brian Greene’s secular, scientific explanation of why the universe is the way it is.  Watch from 15:00 to 16:17

   http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_on_string_theory.html

I have a vague memory of someone clumsily describing the process of placing faith in God by likening the process to sitting in a chair.  That illustration seems a little weak, but I reckon all of our understanding is shallow compared to the depth of reality and truth that actually exists, irrespective of our ability to comprehend it.

After considering the above lines by Lewis, Brian Greene’s documentary The Elegant Universe (for context, a great subtitle would be “Quantum Physics for Dummies”), and reading “The Speaking Voice”, a chapter in A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God,  I’m convinced that these three works are corporately striking some inaudible chord of harmonic Truth.  In combination, these three media nuggets have bolstered my faith that God is present in ways we are incapable of comprehending, but in a way that’s more real than our ability to comprehend it.  This painting was an attempt to visually synthesize the overlapping agreements of these notions that seems to dissolve when translated into language – especially a blog.

I believe the chair you’re sitting on, and everything around, is not only physical, but profoundly spiritual – by nature of its mere existence and what holds it together.

Another possibility is that I’m insane and have no idea what I’m talking about.

Either way, thanks for your interest in the painting!  Stay tuned; there’s a new one getting ready to come off the easel.  Updates to follow soon.

*Several = my mom, and a friend