Ethereum

Heart

Collection

Divinize the Blockchain

Description

The heart on fire is one of my favorite Christian art motifs. Here it's depicted somewhat atypically, in a glowing orb of light, and surrounded by six cardinal wings in a manner often seen with seraphim (that's a type of angel usually depicted with its wings in this arrangement) and surmounted by a cross. It's universal in terms of what it instantly communicates as an image (so much so that they recently made a flaming heart emoji - just an interesting note), yet the idea and theological framework it inhabits is uniquely Christian. You can read about the sacred heart, the heart in western art, etc. - but I also have a personal relationship to it that reflects my own spiritual path that is probably more interesting and relevant for our description here. I used to be on more of an "anti-life" type of mystical path - what I've sometimes heard called "the way of the stone", that being a general name for the varying spiritual disciplines and worldviews that basically attempt to shut out life itself, to draw a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual, and to take on an essentially gnostic framework wherein the world is something bad, something to be avoided. As I came around to the reality of God and His relationship to humanity, my view on this and life itself radically changed. I stopped seeing suffering and the chores of daily life as some type of error, something to be avoided, and started seeing it from the total opposite perspective - that these things I was attempting to ignore were actually some of the most important aspects of life. In a book called "Christian Mysticism" by W.R. Inge, he contrasts "the way of the stone" with "the way of tears", essentially saying that you either lean into life or lean away from it - that life itself either becomes a burden or something integral to spiritual development. In a way this is what the flaming heart says to me - and its use in theological imagery. As a lot of my work, thinking, even this project itself is about the relationship of the divine to seemingly random or mundane things, I had to include this image in this set. Are the various problems we encounter just meaningless glitches to be solved, like a coding error - or do they play some crucial role in the gradual elevation of the spirit? I guess that's up to us.

Token