Claude Monet:  are you familiar with his work?  You may well be, particularly if you like haystacks.  One of the most famous of the nineteenth century impressionists who, together, transformed the nature of art, Monet achieved perhaps his greatest fame for his series of haystack paintings.  Indeed:  he had a haystack for every time and season.

    Yet Monet was more than haystacks.  He painted a number of pastoral scenes, deeply impressionistic reworkings of the French countryside, masterpieces of the subtly of light and color.  They shine with joy, a joy of happiness, a joy of the very essence of the sublime.

    Consider one of Monet's most well known theses:  "I wish to render what is."  In Monet's work we see an effort to take what "is" and make it as we feel it should be.  Not what we think it should be, but what we feel it should be.  We turn rationality on its head; we elevate emotion over all.

    And in so doing, we capture the heart of who we, and the world, most are.  Although we are indeed rational beings, we are also, in our deepest essence, beings of passion, creatures of viscerality, pathos, and imagination.  So do we embrace the world, so do we embrace its hiddenness, the powerfully ordered transcendence that ripples through it.

     We thank Monet for this insight, that amidst our dogged attempts to understand life rationally, perhaps we do better to grasp it as it most fully is:  the passionate renderings of a profoundly passionate creator.