Saturday, August 30, 2008

MIles Davis Once Said

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

For me, music and life are all about style.

I know what I've done for music, but don't call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!

It's always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don't know where it comes from, it's just there and I don't question it.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

You can dominate a game if you dominate on the line... We're just going to have to go out there and work hard and blow people off the ball, and let our runners do what they do best.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Musings on The Beatles "She's Leaving Home"

Sweetest Sensation

The universe stopped and said
“She’s Leaving Home”
Pay attention to the harmony in the chorus
It will settle once and for all this sadness
This is the sound
You have been longing for
The exact replica of eternity’s lamentation
This is the echo
That has resonated down through the ages
This is the Father’s declaration
The clatter and jingle of divine vamping
Let it fashion your desire
Let it enlighten your mourning
Deem it beautiful
Sing the harmony
Enlist all melancholy
And form a Gospel choir
One that preaches the truth of sadness & woe
One that exalts the darker shades
The shadows of distress
Redeemed by song
Restored by the loveliness of heaven’s racket
The heart aflame in stunningly creature like rhyme
And then reconcile the entire history of human trouble
With one harmonic response
Synchronize your soul
And let it rip

Sunday, August 17, 2008

The Age of Beauty

Giving Direction to the Next Epochal Shift

This is the age of self consciousness. It is therefore appropriate that we sense with great existential angst the turning now taking place in our cultural mythos. It is as if all things are suspended and we are suspicious of even doubt itself. Our ways of engaging have turned on us and like a dog tethered to at leash we are finally too tired to try and run away.Call it the grand humbling but few get to see the collapse of such a powerful meta narrative as modernism and live to be involved in the creation of a new language and way of knowing.

On the other side we find a few degrees of true reflection give us this invigorated sense that the "real is returning." We can now let pretense and cynicism fall by the wayside and breath deep the very air of God's imagination. What a wonder this world is. What a wonder the very act of experience is. We can be grateful, We can attribute to Him glory and honor and even resonate with Him on a strange level as a "creator" of sorts. Not the isolated exalted Creator that mocks the brokenness of humankind but the Creative Mind that sees redemption flowing through it all.

This day I will acknowledge the beauty that comes from embracing the dailiness of my life. The sweet soap smell upon my hands. The amazing connectedness of blogging. The comfort of a warm house with books and remnants of a party strewn every which way. The awareness of God's tender touch in my acknowledgment of my inability to understand hardly anything. I am not an expert. I await this new age where God's beauty is pre-Imminent.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

What Does the Gospel Look Like?

Developing a Biblical Aesthetic

Art as Embodied Obedience

What does repentance look like? I have heard that statement countless times in my men's group. The query is to reveal to the penitent a vision of what his repentance will look like in terms of behavior. If I forgive, what bodily activity reveals & manifests that heart condition? If I am grateful, what actual embodiment will be manifest such that others will see and recognize gratefulness? Is it possible that character and discipleship are also involved in what the Gospel will look like on any given Sunday in our worship gathering? Does our worship demand a deeper grasp of embodied obedience and its artistic outworking?

I would contend that aesthetics (art making) needs to come under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I would also put forth that our penchant for music (with lyrics) over the visual, theatrical and performance arts reflects a tendency to make obedience internal, private, and cerebral at the expense of bodily obedience. By bodily obedience I mean that real discipleship looks like something. Real worship looks like something. What does it look like to obey God with our creative talents and why is the Church by in large void of symbolizing artifacts and rituals that are specifically Christian? How is the Gospel displayed or embodied in our worship gatherings?

Is it possible that the emergence of a biblical aesthetic (Christianly way of doing and making art) will only happen when we experience and embrace an ecclesiological redefinition of culture, community, character, and virtue? Why should the church care about the arts? What kind of art would an obedient Christian create? How does that relate to our worship gathering? The convergence of interpretive communities fosters much of the dialogue surrounding the role and biblical use of the arts in our worship gatherings. From the modern church growth movement to the neo orthodox ancient future enclave, many are clamoring for a renewed sense of the arts and their role in the Church. Those with Protestant roots feel much more comfortable with music as one of the arts used in faith formation while our orthodox brothers and sisters seem to feel much more confident with a sacramental view of the arts. Once again, the convergence is generating some great dialogue as to the strengths and weaknesses of certain art forms and why certain traditions feel more comfortable with one than the others.

Current State of Aesthetics in the Church

First of all, we do have art in our churches. Semiotics, the study of the ideological nature of objects, signs and codes, has revealed that meaning making appears to be what humans do. There is no such thing as a bare wall, and empty platform, a plain sanctuary. Semiotics goes on to tell us that through the study called proxemics, one can determine the values and ideological intentions of a people from their architecture and spatial organization. In other words, our churches, homes, and office buildings do tell us what we value and how we value. Is the housing boom in America directly proportionate to our need to make our homes a sanctuary rather than our sacred worship spaces? Thus, the idea that we have yet (especially in Protestant circles) to utilize the arts is a misnomer. We have utilized a formal sensibility (all be it unconsciously) regarding what we call our sanctuary or sacred space. I would contend that most of our engagement with the arts and symbols in the modern Protestant church has been borrowed from pagan cultures. "How can we sing our song in a strange land"?

Is There Such a Thing as Christian Art?

Is Christian art intrinsically different that pagan art? The emerging church (postmodern) movement borrows heavily from pagan sensibilities and contends that even the fallen world gives God glory and can be redeemed and sanctified. John Howard Yoder's critique of Neihbur's Christ and Culture may shed some light here. Have we allowed the church to be subsumed by pagan cultures in the assumption that culture is really "Culture?" Have we unwittingly offered up the meaning making activities involved in artistic endeavors to those "outside" our borders? Do we have a conceptualization of culture that unwittingly takes away the power of the Church as a meaning making enclave in its own right? In other words, do we use the term "Culture" as if it is monolithic, all pervasive, and autonomous? Do we believe the Church and Christians actually exist in this atmosphere called "Culture" and work out their salvation under the purview of this overarching all pervasive force? Much of the Church's response to modernity in recent years has been deeply influenced by Neihbur's transformationlist approach. His template for the engagement and interaction with culture has unwittingly imbued the secularized understanding of values, beliefs, attitudes, aesthetics, artifacts, etc. to be subsumed under the umbrella, if you will, of "Culture" as defined by years of enlightenment thought.

Modernism's Legacy

The pagan worlds I speak of are those art-making communities that exist in numerous locations from the elite Avant Garde art world and Hollywood to the worlds of capitalism and advertising. By controlling the manner in which art is done and discussed, they frame the argument and force all that enter to accept certain axioms about the nature of creativity and culture. I would offer up that the symbolization of consciousness has been primarily formed by modernists who see suspicion and doubt as much more trustworthy in the search for ultimate reality. They also see tradition as suspect and see the "new" as a natural outworking of humankind's march towards progress. Their view of the sacred is highly therapeutic (Jungian) and disembodied.

Art and the Local Church

So how do we bring the discussion of art making back under the Lordship of Christ and become much more intentional and conscious of our aesthetic responsibilities? The ultimate responsibility of symbolizing our worship gatherings falls on local leadership. There is a great danger in the age of commoditized worship materials that communities default their symbol making responsibilities to "professionals" and performers, and para church organizations. Pagan cultures often set the sonic standards for our musical presentations. Theatrical and drama offerings often draw their vignettes from TV and film characters. Artistic renderings are either tremendously dated or pulled down from the Internet and contextually defined for optimal use. The point here is that our sources for usable symbols are often initially formed with intentions and motivations that are far from Christ like. Can they be sanctified? Certainly. Is all art done outside Christian circles unworthy of engagement? No. The issue here, however, is localized obedience to the challenge of having our worship look like something that springs from obedience and the ongoing story within our midst. What paintings, songs, sculptings spring from a desire locally to tell the story of our redemption?. God is speaking in history and in time. Our story is being told every day of the week as we engage the family of God, non believers, and then when we gather on Sunday for corporate worship. What does this redemption look like? Is it truthfully displayed? Is it beautiful? Is it worthy of the God we serve? Is it offered up as a gift to those in which we walk this sojourn?

For Christians, issues of worth and beauty are attributional. "Worship is about assigning and recognizing worthiness-and ultimate worthiness at that," according to Rodney Clapp in Peculiar People. Thus, we must redeem the act of creativity and the development of a Christian imagination from modernism's attempt to find an all-pervasive definition for beauty. Postmodernism has assisted us in the understanding that aesthetics are locally developed and sustained. Is Howard Finster better than Piccaso? Is Bob Dylan better than Beethoven? Is there such a thing as a classically trained saw player? Regardless of our own personal tastes and the canons with which we honor, it is clear that what and why Christians deem something beautiful has more to do with the person doing it and his or her motivation than some set standard that all people under all circumstances will be able to grasp and identify. This is not to rule out issues of craftsmanship and skill. But even those issues are locally defined and arbitrated. Thus, a part of the redemption of the arts will be to rescue aesthetics from modernism's tendency to abstract art from community and give it meaning as an essence. This is why discussions about art as the sublime tend to disengage the act of art making from community and make it some esoteric endeavor by a genius or "gifted" individual. For Christians, who makes art and why is as important as the assessment of its worth on a personal taste level.

The Outworking of a Biblical Aesthetic

Questions for leaders may look like this. Who are the artists in our community? Even more concretely, who are the painters, the poets, the sculptors, the dancers, the musicians, and the graphic artists? Are they being discipled? Are they seeing their lives as gifts? Does the church make a place for their obedience to be manifest? Does the church recognize beauty as a character trait of God? Does the church desire to empower the community to symbolize itself through its gifts and talents? Is our worship gathering the ultimate vortex where obedience is seen and embodied? So on any given Sunday in any given church those in leadership are struggling to inform and form the experience of worshipping God. More than words, more than songs, more than pictures, more than symbols, this process is a Godly calling wrought with perilous heights and depths. Let us step out of our comfort zones with certain artistic expressions and forms and begin to redeem all things and bring them under His Lordship. The Church can once again become a benefactor of the arts. The Church can once again see a renewal or renaissance of the arts that celebrate God's benevolence in that He allows His creatures to join with Him in the act of restoring His world and people back to Himself.

You are worthy, O Lord to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created. Revelation 4:11.

Artists as Aliens in the Church

A number of my friends have access and speak into some of the mega church communities around the country. In our passing conversations it is clear that many of the mega churches (over 2,000 people) have a real challenge in keeping artists on staff and in long term volunteering roles. Why does the Church have such difficulty coalescing an artist’s enclave in their community? Here are some of the difficulties and challenges.

A lack of a biblical aesthetic on the part of the Church

Because we have seen the arts (and especially modern art) as frivolous, esoteric, narcissistic, avant garde and therefore often confrontive and critical, eschewing of tradition, and ultimately a bit unruly (the practitioners that is), it has been easier to find what I would call artist doubles. Much like Saddam Hussein had a double, we want someone to look like an artist, act like an artist, talk like an artist, but at the end of the day not “create” like an artist. Many in the role of “Church” artists are theoretically trained but lacking in the vernacular and dialect of the creative. They can ask for wine and cheese and the train station in creative (the language of creative that is –like French or German) but in truth, they do not know the nuances of speaking “creative.” One conversation with a true artist and their faux status emerges.

Example of disenfranchisement:

I have noticed from my stint with contemporary Christian music, REX and Storyville (small labels I was involved in that birthed Sixpence and a lot of very cool music), and later Grassroots, that many college aged kids (especially) will not even dawn the doors of certain Christian events and conferences. Why?

They perceive it as a propagandistic tool of the entrenched middle class evangelical community.

Now they may not articulate it like that but their reticence to sign up for some GMA competition or attend a Christian festival is that they see CCM as a genre of music that is inherently schmaltzy, saccharine, light on authenticity, and non progressive. Their critique has merit. That is another article.

The Church does not have a biblical theology for the early adaption of art and experience. In the Tipping Point, the fact that certain individuals in a society adapt to some trend or happening sooner than others needs to be factored into the Church’s mission and message. Let me say that being a slave to the “shock of the new” is just as misaligned. But the Church is still denying the struggle to embody the Gospel in real time. I will comment later on the church's fatal attempt to be “relevant” or follow trends” because I think that is still some strange capitulation to modernity, but in truth, early adaption when done biblically is really just being missiologically aware of the culture(s) in which the Gospel is being lived out. Because there are a multitude of different cultures out there, there is no “one size fits all.” This is the danger of the mega church franchise model. It is repeating what denominations did in the past. It may have actually worked somewhat in the past as society was much more unilaterally common in their worldviews but I believe that there have always been enough diverse cultural differences from even the North to the South that the parochial “one size fits all “template for the Church ended up dulling the real process of working out the message of the Church in time and space. In other words, by taking something that works in Ohio and trying to get it to work in Alaska, is in some ways denying the fact that God wants to speak in time and space to people and not just give them a manual. Part of obeying Christ’s mandate is the actual outworking of the Holy Spirit in time and space. Once again, moderns have disembodied the Gospel from its actual outworking in the flesh (meaning: in and through human activity and involvement). I have written in another blog about how developing a biblical aesthetic that is empowering local musicians is PARAMOUNT. They are in our midst. Can we see them? Do we honor them? Do we speak CREATIVE?”

Back to issues of the Church’s estrangement of the “creatives.”

Why would the “creatives” be so leery of the Church?

There is a highly romanticized view (allude to in my article on developing a biblical aesthetic) on what creativity and an artist is. I even think C.S. Lewis may have perpetuated this myth regarding the engagement of beauty and art. However, this is in many ways a response to the Church’s narrow, diminished, perfunctory view of the arts. Because the Enlightenment has fostered so much dualism (i.e. sacred secular split) the Church has perpetuated the idea that liturgical art is superior to what I might call life art. By remaining in the dualistic grid of secular versus sacred, they have made much of life off limits for the Christian artist. Think about it, when is the last time you saw someone paint a picture of Christ that you thought was a really great painter. In other words, the creatives eschew liturgical art as being propagandistic. Artists have left liturgical art to the artist doubles. This is sad. We (the Church) have inadvertently fostered this dualism and told our best and brightest (inadvertently), unless and until you are willing to do art as curriculum, we are not interested. This tendency for the Church to make faith technical and theoretical is another by product of the Enlightenment. We have made the Gospel information and drained it of its visceral mystical dimension. We (the Church) are not truly sacramentalists. We do not even believe in the power of the symbol. It’s all in the explaining. It is all in a second order posture of critique and observation. This is not the disposition of an artist. He/she cannot create from this space. Artists will not ultimately bow down to this perception and mandate.

Artists want to see all of life as imbued with the power and presence of God.

This of course enlivens and broadens immensely the potential subject matter. It sanctifies all of life. Early adapters are helping others see God’s glory through creation. As the secularization of life has become so intrusive via media and such, the Church must spend much of its time dialogically doing a Mars Hill on experience. In many ways the Church needs to draw its artist to Mars Hill and not Josh McDowell’s conference on the rational (note Evidence that Demand’s a Verdict). The Church has wanted evidence; the artist has wanted experience and beauty. Beauty…hum. Now there is a word you do not hear mentioned in the Church much do you? You will note that Mars Hill was a place away from the Church. Paul had to go to them. Where in our neighborhoods do artists hang, jam, and interact. GO THERE!!! GO THERE!!!!! We need more portals of entry into our communities that are fluid, porous, and revelatory of the public Face of God. He has one. Do those outside the faith see it? What do we do with our faith in those settings? We do not explain. That is not the language of this tribe. No….we

DISPLAY - DISPLAY – DISPLAY!!!!!

Creativity appears to be a skill that would come under the moniker of common or prevenient grace. Non believers as well as believers have it and we can see it in them. What is it? Simply put for the sake of this diatribe: it is the ability to interpret, fuse, and offer up experience such that our humanness is enhanced. As a believer I see this as bringing God glory. He made me to do this.

As a practical mystic, I do not want to make any part of being human un-spiritual. So….. artists are doing their art. They are namers. The Church needs namers. We need those who have entered the world of metaphor and realize that all of life is symbolized. There is no part that is purely self-evident. God, from Adam on, has empowered humankind with the task of naming. That is what art is. Great artists appear to be able to name things more accurately, noticing the nuances, the subtleties, seeing the connection between experience and knowing.


How do we know we are human? This of course is an epistemological issue but it is relevant to this discussion. Younger kids have a different epistemology than we older folks have. They desire a theology and an epistemology if you will, that is mystical, beautiful, encompassing, and holistic.

I attend way to many conferences and most of them are excursions into more abstract theological theory. I recently attended a conference where more time was spent setting up the art (i.e. explaining) than displaying. I would also contend that much of the explaining was a deep seeded fear that literalists (those who want all experience to be statically undynamic and unchangeable thus definable once and for all for all) would somehow miss the biblical truth “ behind” the art and disavow its appropriateness thus alienating it from the existing tribe.

Creativity is messy as is life. It involves jamming and improvisation. It involves dialogue and exchange. We want our art to fit tightly into some pre determined theological grid that will fit into the Church calendar rather than expand the homilies of the Church to see and acknowledge all of life.

If we want to bring artists into our midst we have to reverse the flow of knowing. By eschewing experience as untrustworthy (and it can be), we make the theoretical explanations of experience as our art double. That is what one of the mega church’s art conferences was to me. We unwittingly imply that art is for liturgical purposes only or primarily rather than sanctify the art artists are already doing.

Pastors who approach the Gospel from a position of objective proof and explanation will make the outworking of faith more about the explanations of the Gospel rather than a DISPLAY. We are called not primarily to explain but to live out, TO DISPLAY THE GOSPEL.

This is what art is. It is a display of humans coming under the Lordship of Christ and bringing all their thoughts, emotions, experiences (imagination?), etc. under His tutelage, under His mind, into His Kingdom. This submission has power. However, asking artists to submit their craft to an ill formed aesthetic, to persons that often feel threatened by the outworking of someone’s gift, is only to inadvertently communicate that God is skittish, that God is afraid, and small minded. Not so..He created the first nudes

This is why the Church does not get the “best” when it comes to the arts. We are not welcoming this enclave in a manner that allows their humanness to be honored. We have an agenda that is somehow more important than celebrating life, somehow more important than creating friendships and collaborations, somehow more important than seeing God in everyday experience. What is it?

THE SUNDAY SERVICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Church (and large churches mind you) inadvertently must come under an instrumentalist view of human consciousness and behavior. In other words:

~ We only have a few hours to do this.

~ Who only have a little money to do this?

~ Everybody get on board and dumb down the dialogue and collaboration or capitulate to some hierarchical structure that blankets creativity.

~ Therefore, let’s hurry up and get something on paper so we can have something for each Sunday service.

Why are many large churches run like businesses? They have to be. How do businesses treat and relate to humans: as machines. By that I mean in ways that organize human experience so it can be repeated and repeated for the sake of order.

ART DOES THE OPPOSITE

Art digs deep into the experience and sees it deleterious side. Art will often reveal the soul of humankind and show how easy it is to kill it through the “marketing” of human experience. This is of course so ironic seeing that I market for a living. However, I get how dangerous it is to have the marketers (art doubles) coming up with the creative side of the template. Marketers will make it

A spectacle
A necessity
An obvious choice

Art, as it has been configured in the last two to three hundred years, pushes all these boundaries. It says that there may be some inadvertent downsides to how we live out our lives. It tells us to see the beauty in things so common, the utter horror of the killing of the soul, the childlike joy in celebration and sensuality. These things are dangerous to the typical evangelical dualist who actually views much of life as being outside the purview of God’s grace.

Artists are in some ways early grace adapters. They go out like spies if you will and bring back experience and bring it under His Lordship.

More thoughts on a bit more philosophical and theological slant..........................

Much of this struggle George Lindbeck addresses in his writings. He might see the current view on art as a highly propositional approach towards hermeneutics that makes art and the church strange bedfellows.

If humanness is formed narratively and through metaphor, then would it not behoove theologians to foster an open dialogue with artists?

There is the death of modernity issues that artists need to confront while the Church needs to engage its faulty hermeneutic and epistemology regarding how humans know and how they are formed.

The artist may fault on the side of experience but he/she does so as part of the process of naming. Proper naming must take into account Church history, biblical language, and the real time involvement of the Holy Spirit in the local. However, the Church has configured this triumvirate through the lens of propositions. Thus, art as it has become accustomed to in the last 150 years, feels like a tool of the Church or state (much like those under Communist rule during the great purgings). In reality, we are all tools. However, the Church must reverse its epistemological flow and allow for metaphor to come from vital authentic communal naming and less from academic, esoteric, estranged, and distant naming via denominations, seminaries, and franchised church leaders.


Let the symbols flow liberally on a local basis and empower that engagement. Art nights should turn into prayer meetings into bible studies, into commentaries, into creeds.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The Color of Soul Making

How do we experience and know the beautiful? Is the awareness of the beautiful a biological response built within our nature? Has God so made us that like the swallows long for Capistrano, we long for the beautiful? Or is this awareness learned? Or, is it both? Are we born with an innate sense of the beautiful and yet the nurturing and enhancement of that awareness grown and expanded through proper care of the imagination.

Is the imagination the human capacity to experience wonder and awe? Is creation therefore, a starting point for the growth and care of the imagination? Are we created to feel some sort of connection with nature and if so how do we differ from the animals? Do dogs experience a sunset as something of grandeur? Do mountain goats look down over the hills of the alps and acknowledge their beauty? Yet we know that animals do respond to the beauty of each other as they perceive it.

Much of beauty is acknowledged in how the genders respond to one another. If beauty were unreal then why would making love to a bar maid be any different than making love to a beauty queen. Some would say that this admission of beauty or noticing is actually attributional on the part of the individual and that awareness is not innate in the object of desire but projected by the one viewing. In other words, someone had to tell this person that that was beauty. This perception seems to have some validation as we see how beauty in terms of genders is very different from culture to culture.

Is the honoring of nature in cultures we may consider more ancient another outlook an admission of beauty? Can we expand the idea of beauty to be the true, and the good?
How do we know beauty?
How do we know when we are experiencing beauty? What is the sensate and accompanying engagement of the intellect that tell us we are in the presence of the beautiful? Beauty is an experience besides an idea or concept. The experiencing of beauty grounds us in our humanity.

For Christians, beauty takes on an ethical and moral dimension. Our imaginations are informed and constructed in and through our relationship with God. His way of imagining and creating tell us something about the beautiful. Thus, there can be beauty to the eye that may not be beautiful to the heart. Pornography is like that. Attractive people can be involved in behavior that to the heart one finds offensive. This is why the experience and awareness of beauty is not just innate and or natural. We must learn to see and know the beautiful. Our fleshly natures come into this world with an affinity for knowing and sensing the power of the flesh. Thus we know the power of another human on our eyes and even our hearts.

God is a jealous God. He, and He alone is beautiful because He reflects and embodies the fullness of all things. To know Him, to see Him, to experience Him, is to then be able to know the beautiful. Because we have deconstructed beauty and allowed something to be visually beautiful as in the case of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, we do not understand that in God’s aesthetic, to gaze upon something that was not intended to be gazed upon is to misunderstand the power of the beautiful.

The human body is beautiful. It was meant to be adored, cherished, touched, embraced and even yearned after. However, the power of this experience was to be tempered in the context of marriage. Why? Because of the power of the beautiful. We are so overcome by the beautiful that we often loose our ability to make sound decisions unless we properly interpret the beautiful. How so? The beautiful are those objects, and experiences and people and places that truly make us noble and more reflective of our spiritual natures and capacities.

This is why beauty is taught. Although sexual intercourse may not need to be taught in the strictest sense of teaching, it is clear that instinctual engagements may not bring ultimate pleasure. We humans have the ability to ponder and enhance the inspirational. We can re present experience out side of real time and then reengage that experience again with the depth of out imaginations (e.g. erotic art). Art is the instinctual re presentation of experience such that its meaning, power, and presence can be heightened and enhanced and repeated..

The Forming of the Imagination

Some believe than imagination is actually the soul. The imagination is the capacity of humans to hold experientially, the depth and breadth of consciousness. Thus, the nurturing and care of the soul are the nurturing and caring of the imagination. There is a difference between what is imaginary and what is imagined. The imaginal is the thoughts and responses one has that accompany consciousness such that time and space and experience appear to be real. The grooming and proper care of the imagination is what soul making is all about. Thus, the poem.

The Color of Soul Making

Blue fire
Slipped into my room last night
Sighed heavily
Illuminated my labored breathing
And the shallow rise and fall of sorrow’s chest
As if both color and flame could speak
Their words came forth
“We are your indigo angels.
In this place most call a desert
Your sister the white Iris blooms
In this dryness the soul flowers
Reverie fills the darkened cobalt horizon
Lovers held in suspension
Melt into each other
And weep with longing
Here imagination burns a cerulean glow
Melancholy marries Kandinsky
And all this pondering rekindles
A thousand years of exile
In the unreflective underworld of black and white.”

Friday, August 8, 2008

On Pondering Rothko’s Chapel Paintings

All art is religious
All color, hue and shadow
Name the space we wish to inhabit
There is no private space
No secular terrain
No words free from moral agency
No melody floating above
Waiting for birth in this place

Even the seemingly mundane world of decoration
Marks the moment and space
With my personal attention
My intentional gaze
My need to enchant my world with purpose and meaning
My naming allows me to know for certain
Like Helen Keller’s water
I relish the discovery
And bathe in its glory

Poem by David M. Bunker

Art as Gift

For over a half century I have labored between the often apposing worlds of two economies: the economies of gift and commodity. The embattled land that divides these worlds is one few from either side traverses thus making their connection daunting and full of stridency. Artists tend to see their craft as a gift while business people discover what is beautiful and true and offer a way to create wealth through the exploitation of the gift. Joseph Conrad said, “The artist appeals to that part of our being…which is gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. It is the enduring nature of art making that I am most interested in.

Can one acquire a gift by their own will? (many in American Idol would seem to act as if they could or can). Being an artist today is so enmeshed in the search for belonging and identity. But if you could acquire a gift through your own personal will would it be considered a gift at this point?

Many an artist has a daunting gift placed upon them early in life. Mozart was composing at the age of four. Candid conversations with artists often uncover the awareness of this giftedness and its benevolent bestowing. Even D. H. Lawrence was aware when he commented, “Not I, not I but the wisdom that blows through me.” If we would apply the idea of divine bestowment upon the inner nature of creativity and giftedness, why then would we not apply some kind of spiritual worth to the very creation of the artist, i.e., the painting, the song, the poem? Could it be that our own divine worth as human as a gift to humanity resonates with the art as gift exchange?

Holidays are always magical times in that we begin to anticipate the gifts that will be coming our way. Birthdays tend to generate the same exhilaration as we prepare to be blessed by those we love. It is clear that Christmas is a metaphor for what Christ brought into the world. He is the Father’s gift and in many ways we model that literally in our own gift giving. Could you imagine paying your friends and loved ones to buy you gifts for Christmas or your birthday? Of course not as those days are days where you are redeemed and atoned for. It is about blessing you and you in turn bless others.
Lewis Hyde, whose book generated much of these musings, said, “...the way we treat a gift can sometimes change its nature.” How many times have you commented on a painting on someone’s house to discover its creation was a loved one who had passed on and the painting then became very “special?” What makes this gift special is its attributes. We decide what something is worth. Even beauty is ultimately attributional

Churches have long honored certain objects and have deemed them sacred or near sacred. Where are the gifts of art that in ages past filled our churches? Have we unwittingly commoditized the spiritual dimensions of art as gift and how can we revitalize that sentiment and posture? Much like Hyde, I do not mean to totally deny the ability of art to be commodified. But can a gift be merchandised and if not where are the gifts of art in the Church?

In recent years I have come to define myself as a creativity coach. This is an odd moniker and one that most people question upon seeing it on my business card. Throw in spiritual direction and ethos experience designer and you’ve got a confused world on our hands. So I heartily agree with Hyde and many artists when they articulate, “Labors such as mine are notoriously non remunerative in a society dominated by market exchange. How is the artist to nourish himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values and market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities,” queries Lewis Hyde.

I have met many artists over the years who do labor under the weight of their calling to be an artist. This is due in part to their unwillingness to create under the shadow of triviality and shallowness. An artist’s service to their gift in some ways demands a degree of submission to gift integrity thus making capitulation to market forces highly improbable if not impossible. But the artist works out their giftedness and salvation as it were under the canopy and cultural contradictions of capitalism. How does one live when an undisciplined acquisitional spirit is allowed to run rampant? How does one carefully guard the integrity and the spirit of the gift such that it continues to bear the fruits of beauty truth and goodness? And if art is made as gift, how can it embrace its very purpose in being if it is not given as such?

I think the Church as community holds some of the answers to these questions. To some degree I am calling art “gifts” because of their sacramental ability to form and inform the inner world of the soul. Why do the gifts of the inner life lack public currency amongst Christians? What does it say about us and to us that we have allowed much of our sacred objects to be bought and sold at such cheap prices and in such tawdry ways? I contend there is livelihood of the Spirit that is missing in today's creative world where Christians are attempting to mine the imagination’s gifts from the inner world. Are there ethics of gift exchange intrinsic to the ethos of Christians and are we neglecting those experiences and demands in our current creative climate?

How do we define wealth? What makes us wealthy? Some might say abundance while others might say the possession of things of worth. Others might see wealth as objects that have history, meaning, and belonging embodied in their creation. What we value in a specific culture informs our material things as being of worth or worthless. Could we be undermining the very worth of certain artistic renderings when we buy and sell them to one another? Some might ask then how would artists make a living? Good question and is especially pithy in a materialistic world where worth once again is often tied to the monetary value given certain commodities. Do we see something as being worth more when we pay a lot of money for it? Is it possible that this may work outside the Church but inside the Church is dangerous and belittling to the exchange of gifts of art?

Art is a language. Certain philosophers contend that language precedes reality. In other words, before we speak it, we are unaware of its “really realness.” If a certain part of our speaking and naming is truncated and diminished, could then certain parts of our being be retarded or crippled or non existent? This is why we artists are at our very core story tellers and namers much like the original Adam.

In recent years a small group of us came together around the idea of restoring beauty. ORB, or the Organization for the Restoration of Beauty was created for the sole purpose of recognizing and empowering acts of beauty truth and goodness through the means of artful gift giving. One of the ironies of this emerging enclave was its originating city-Nashville. Nashville, along with LA and New York has always been a bastion of commerce when it came to the arts and especially music. Thus, a group designed to question that ethos by its very nature has an uphill climb. Undaunted we trod forward knowing that for all of us, enduring works of art, although commodified at some point, appeared to be innocent to some extent in their creative origins. How could we help foster a new ethos of creativity where the imagination and the inner world won out over commerce and merchandising? The more we explored the possibilities, the more we discovered an underlying disenchantment that was close to a boil. Buoyed up by the Internet, many younger artists were now able to by pass the art broker who arbitrarily ascribed the value of the gifts offered up. When this broker or wholesaler was taken out of the picture, a new renaissance of art making now had chance to emerge. Praise God.
For years I heard from many in the music industry that the masses always needed to have things dumbed down. Whether it was beauty or worship, give them the Cliff’s Notes. Can real art be Cliff’s Notes version of life? I think not and most artists would heartily agree. For anything of worth to endure, there must be some quality about it that transcends the banality of its time. Being able to step outside your own skin and the skin of your culture (to some extend – no one can do this completely) gives the artist a posture of knowing that is truly experienced and embodied. In ways art making is hyper-immanence that finds itself hidden in transcendence. It is in the gift of God’s only Son that God reveals both His otherness and His willingness to take on our embodied flesh and inhibit it. That is what creation is all about. That is what creativity is all about. Gibbs and Bolger in the book entitled Emerging Churches tell us that, “the urge to create is not ego driven but rather arises out of a theology of personhood and community identity.” Indeed we are discovering that the modern self is myth and that an authentic self is always communally constructed and formed. We become ourselves as we come together with others. The two are simultaneous. Although we are subject to the fall, God’s creation was still good and His image is still imprinted in all things through what the Scripture calls common grace or prevenient grace ( for all you Bible majors) Creativity itself is a gift of worship.

The Language of Art Making

Art as gift is a certain way of speaking. In the context of faith and spirituality, it offers the artist the ability to truly be prophetic as some truths and sentiments are by their very nature confrontational or at the least not going to be popular. If everything’s worth is ultimately seen through its ability to be mass marketed, we will not challenge the masses with issues of spiritual formation that by their very nature are hard to swallow for all people. Lives of simplicity and slowness are not engagements most people in western societies even want to consider. Yet their voice must be heard. How do we build a platform for the voices that by their very nature may be sifted?

Economies of the Creative Spirit

Like Hyde I am most concerned with the gifts that come with power and grace and speak commandingly to the soul. Those offered in fear, spite, rancor, or greed are not my interest here. Whatever we have been given is to be given away again… a principle of gift giving. It is the sharing of art that brings delight. The struggle for artist in a modern or post modern technocracy is the McDonaldization of creativity and consumption. Modernism has tended to focus on efficiency, calculation, predictability and control. This of course presents some real challenges to creativity and a gift. We see this today in American Idol, the ubiquitous nature of My Space, You Tube and other conduits of conversation that tend to raise up the most banal and trivial and then create a place where that spirit is duplicated in mass. The aesthetics of "art making as gift" reframes this cultural force and roots its identify in community and service as well as devotion. These become the philosophical and heartfelt postures from which art making derives its purposes and meaning.Although the fall often pushes us towards misdirection and misplaced motivation ( i.e. self expression as a right, endlessly expressing minute reflections of the self as if interesting redeeming on and on…) Read Suzi Gablick’s work on the death of modernism. Still the urge to create and give that expression as gift remains in our souls as the key that breaks a code. As Christians we see, the kingdom of God as the creativity of God. ( Doug Padgett) We move beyond seeing life as a consumptive rite of passage and more as all gift.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Thoughts on Creatvity & the Arts

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world that in the stock markets or the debates in congress.
Hedrick Willem Van Loon / The Arts


I want to make things that are beautiful and moving. I want to make art; they want to make things that are fast and useful, practical.
Laurie Anderson


An artist needs only three things. First he needs encouragement, the second he needs encouragement, and third he needs encouragement.
Unknown


Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
Thomas Merton

I cannot understand why people are afraid of new ideas. I am afraid of the old ones.
John Cage


There are two fools in every market: One ask to little and, one ask to much.
Russian Proverb


To teach is to show
M.C. Richards


God’s word is in all creation, visible and invisible. The word is living, being, spirit, a verdant greening of creativity. The word manifests in every creature.
Hildegard of Bingen


Man lives by images.
Gaston Bachelard


The imagination seldom sleeps. It is very busy seeking the new.
Gaston Bachelard


Imagination is so vast, so large, so free that is grows our souls and allows us to contemplate grandeur.
Gaston Bachelard


I am happiest when I am caught up in and lost in acts of creativity.
Meister Eckhart


What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
Vincent Van Gogh


At the heart of our dignity lies our power of creativity.
Otto Rank


We write to taste life twice.
Anais Nin


Creativity is our real nature.
Matthew Fox