Fotis Kontoglou started out as a babe and a
child in a little part of the world, blessed with beauty and joy, protected by
hills, by the vast ocean, by obscurity and unimportance.
The little valley - cuddled by the earth,
smiled-on by the sun, protected and hidden by God – kept him and raised him and
nourished him until he came to love it, so very much that he would never forget
it.
So very much that his heart would long for
that place and for those people always. And anywhere he went, he went, always,
as an exiled man who remembers.
Wherever he travelled and wherever he went
he was a rock of a different color, taken from the shallow ocean bed of that
place, smelling of the sun that casts its light on that place, and the earth
that showed its fullest glory there. Smelling of the sand and of the clearest
sea water.
He was himself a little piece of that eden,
and no matter what rains showered on him and what winds blew roundabout him,
they couldn’t change his color, or dampen his warmth or disperse the scent of
those people and that place that his souls was kneaded with. And so he walked
the streets, and lived in the cities as a testimony of God’s secret art, and he
lived his life as a sacrifice: for the world to know.
His body was a sacrifice: so that we may
know that people come from somewhere. That we have a past and a meaning. That
we have a significance. He was a memorial in the hard and broken streets of the
city to the Man Who Knew God’s Love. And being there, for us, his days were a martyrdom.
I don’t think he ever forgave the sea that
pulled him away and carried him far from the land of his birth. But I don’t
think he ever stopped loving the sea, and burning with a longing for it,
turning his mind to it, and visiting it, hoping always that that same sea might
grab him again and take him back once again to the embrace from which he had
come.
You know, it’s not everyone that God treats
so roughly. It’s not everyone who lives a long death, torn apart by the beauty
he has seen that he can never forget. This man must have been a great man and a
very strong one. Otherwise I truly don’t
think God would have burned him so with the fire of an angel.
I hope that now he has become fully
inflamed and that the light of that beauty that he bore and endured during his
life has become his eternally now. And that it includes him and counts him as
one of its own.
Messenger of God, burning with desire for
the good and the beautiful, shine your light also on us so that we can see our
way.
No comments:
Post a Comment