Deep Symbols & Our Naming

The Diminishment of Self Through Words

The act of naming is a non-negotiable in life. Thought is involuntary. Thus, we may regard the naming and acknowledgement of experience as involuntary as well. Naming is also less an intellectual exercise and much more a narrative device we embody in everyday conversations. Once again, we often ignore or pay little attention to the words and phrases we use to describe or explain our experience. Is it possible that our lack of attention may render much of life boring, ugly or uneventful or merely misnamed?

One of the most powerful experiences I have had in my men’s group (New Adam) is to be privy to another man's renaming of an experience. The past is something that, by its very nature, forces us to name. We are hearkening back to memory as source of reflection and description. We are looking for the "right" words. Our memory is the Thesaurus and dictionary if you will of our lives. It is out of that collection of words, phrases, and stories that our very life is animated and we grow into a sense of being. To name life is to live.

This is why we need each other. The naming of life as an isolated story without community is a sad one at best. In truth, it is a dangerously overpowering one as well. I have found that my wife and friends have a much more nuanced awareness of how I might want to describe myself. Maybe it is the by product of my fallenness but it appears that my own ability to see, hear, and feel my self into reality is limited. This limitation is due to the fact that I am somehow connected to others as a source for meaning. I cannot offer up my own meaning on my own. Ironic isn't it?

Without the rich offering of another's words and encouragements and blessings, I cannot sustain my place in this world. I have nervous breakdowns, I get depressed, I attempt to find myself in some obsessive hobby, work, or isolated relationship, or I look for a name I think I deserve and cling to it out of my ego. I am young, I am beautiful. I am smart. I am clever. Conversely...I am ugly. I am old. I am worthless.

Each Monday or Thursday night at my men’s group I offer up my heart's Thesaurus and dump out what words I have to date. As rich and alive as my words may be, it is always the case that a brother offers up a deepening and broadening of my sense of self. Each night I engage in this “work” of naming I leave the time with a much more grounded sense of my presence in this world.

I am PRESENT.

I am!

Being alive to the true beauty of our creation is to submit ourselves to others so they can deepen and bring to life our ultimate naming.

Let us fill in today the names we might call each other.

We are forgiven
We are sons & daughters of the most High God
We are blessing
We are gift
We are beauty
We are truth
and on and on...

To the naming!!!!!!!!!

Beauty's Residence-When the True Self Comes Home

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man I want to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy. Thomas Merton (NS 34)

We all long to be known. We hunger for contact with our deep inner beauty. This essence is the child’s heart Christ refers to when he points to the Kingdom & its nature. Our false self, full of pride & sufficiency avoids the death needed to enter the Kingdom thus cannot ultimately submit to its own healing. This beauty becomes hidden & the flaw which could be redeemed & made whole remains an impediment to artistic vision & real life.

Sin is a very ill defined presence in our lives. Because our early years are filled with moralisms which are needful in a child’s ethical pedagogy, we often enter adult life with a grand misunderstanding about sin. We see sin merely as acts that we do rather than a condition of our very being that is inclined to live in darkness.

Sin is a denial of radical need. All our contingencies, our unrealities, are suppressed as we go about life seeking our own way as our source. When our way of seeing & knowing are arbitrated through this false self beauty is dull or even eclipsed .

This place of radical need is always connected to some hurt or lack in our lives. The false self is unable to reveal this radical neediness thus must either pump up what beauty, knowledge or power one feels is resident and then maintain that perception through doing acts that corroborate that naming. In other words, I will tell you who I am knowing full well I am an imposter. But, the imposter is all I know so what am I to do? I must create a world where my friends and acquaintances will tell my false self the lie. That is this…This fabrication of self which we all agree to collectively is the real self. The ultimate downside of this manner of defining and living robs of us of this deeper inner knowing. Our true self or essence is now clouded or hidden from our own site and that of others.

Sensuality is the manner in which the human discovers the glory of his/her creation. For artists, the health & maintenance of this human quality is essential. When our sensuality is tainted by sin and the false self, our inner flaws are things to be shunned and despised. Thus, a deep part of our very being is now estranged & sent away from our consciousness. This is what Jung talks about when he refers to the shadow. This is the unconscious part of our woundedness & sin we hide from even ourselves thus see it emerge in habits, addictions, & denied feelings and thoughts. Its impact on our art is powerful as we become further estranged from our true inner essence, our authentic individuality.

There is an expensive price to pay life for the exile of our deepest loving. The self inflicted banishment may last for years until we are too broken & emptied to hide or present the false self. Or more tragically we may live an entire life exalting our gifts, hoarding the praise, lifting up our own beauty never to see or know the glory of our beloved vulnerability. It is this very crack in the soul, the dim light of eternity hidden so unfathomably from our rational selves that secrets this darker beauty.

Meister Eckhart said, “Stand still and do not waver from your emptiness; for at this time you can turn away, never to turn back again.” For the creative person, this willingness to enter the risk filled void of the false self and look for redemption is essential for the creative atonement of the flaw. Because we are fashioned to be in communion with the Most High, we are meant to see & know the sensual beauty of life. When our own being is dark and foreboding & yes “evil” in our own eyes, we are orphans.

Could beauty actually be the redeemed vision of one made whole? Is beauty coming into our rightful position with the Father thus seeing our individuality flourish and prosper? For many of us the degree of self protection is overwhelmingly draining. Tired & weary from the false self operating our insight & reflection we get lost in the destruction of our selves by life, sin, & the collective brokenness and remain there. Deeply imprinted on our very heart is the wound or the flaw. We must hide it from all & even ourselves lest we acknowledge the inner depths of our sin & distance from the Father.

What I am slowly learning is that beauty is not all brightness & light. Even Scripture tells us that God created out of a void and there was darkness upon the earth. This idea of darkness and the wound have been with us since the beginning. Is there a new way to imagine & name the darkness & the wound?

Once again I refer to my mentor John O’Donohue. He tells us that, “The luminous beauty of great art so often issues from the deepest, darkest woundings. We always seem to visualize a wound as a sore, a tear on the skin’s surface. The protective outer layer is broken and the sensitive interior is invaded and torn. Perhaps there is another way to image a wound. It is the place where the sealed surface that keeps the interior hidden is broken. …While the wound is open, new light flows into the helpless dark and the inner night of the body weeps through the wound. In the rupture and pain it causes, a wound breaks the silence; it cries out. It ruptures through the ordinary cover of words we put on things.”

A submitted imagination will allow the false self to play its hand, drain its rage, shout is epitaphs until its true powerlessness is revealed. What was once concealed is now open to renaming. What had blackened the heart & tossed the soul into despair now appears as an extravagant grace. He was never impressed with the false self for He knew him not. He has only known who He made you to be. He sees you through the eyes of His Son so even your sin is covered and atoned. Now your deepest image of self is reflected through His gaze. In His hospitality of gracious wonderings & extravagancies do we encounter this truly safe place to create. It is not free from darkness but in a bizarre twist of irony and paradox we discover the God beyond our limited naming. As much as we struggle to properly name the created world how much more do we find our knowledge of the Father diminished and antiquated? It is at this threshold you are introduced to your true self & the very heart of the Father.

Let me close with another Thomas Merton quote. I am taking liberties here as I am going to replace the word ”contemplative(s)” with the word “artist(s)”. Know that I have taken such freedoms and hope I do not take away from Merton’s ultimate intention.

God seeks Himself in us, and the aridity and sorrow of our heart is the sorrow of God who is not known to us, who cannot yet find Himself in us because we do not dare to believe or trust the incredible truth that He could live in us, and live there out of choice, out of preference. But indeed, we exist solely for this, to be the place He has chosen for His presence, His manifestation in the world. His epiphany. But we make all this dark and inglorious because fail to believe it, we refuse to believe it. It is not that we hate God, rather that we hate ourselves, despairs of ourselves. If we once began to recognize, humbly, but truly, the real value of our own self, we would see that this value was the sign of God in our being, the signature of God upon our being.

The artist (contemplative) is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim of God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say in the surrender of our own poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist. The message of hope the artist (contemplatives) offers you, then, is not that you need to find your own way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God; but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present to you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons. The artist (contemplative) has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and to say, that if you dare to penetrate your own silence and dare to advance without fear into the solitude of your own heart, and risk sharing that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you and with you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained; it is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God’s Spirit and your secret inmost self, so that you and He are in all truth one Spirit, I love you in Christ. Thomas Merton 1915-1968 American Cistercian Monk

The Beauty in Desiring God

Creativity as Spiritual Longing

"It will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; And your sons and daughters will prophesy, Your old men will dream dreams, Your young men will see visions. Joel 2:28

The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt. Bono

It’s been said that thoughts are the ultimate pilgrims. Something within us leans into the horizon, yearns for a larger story, a more expansive tale in which our hearts are welcomed towards a homecoming. As though from beyond, beauty beckons us. All the parts of our life that appear in exile intuitively honor this presence we call beauty and await its visitation.

The truly beautiful will always be a mediating metaphor. It will never replace God or seek to make Him an object. In fact, real beauty will continually flee the need to domesticate and capture God. When this spiritual longing is allowed to manifest itself in my heart of hearts I sense my inner most parts formed for eternal kinship with the Father.

As Saint John of the Cross said...

I did not have to ask my heart what it wanted

Because of all the desires I have ever known,

Just one did I cling to

For it was the essence of all desire:

To know beauty

To know beauty. This is the vocation of some. In a time of great ugliness and darkness beauty often eludes my heart. Its glimmering shafts of light are lost in my hurried harried pace. I demand it reveal itself in the shallowness of my habits, the attachment of my heart to sin, the pettiness of my soul towards God’s creation. Occasionally in dreams beauty appears like a doe in the dusk of nightfall. Veiled in its presence but powerfully near in its enchantment, I capture a glimpse. I know such delight in its revealing. But just as quickly it is spirited away & I am left with this longing. I am sad. How would I have known that this journey home meant relinquishing over and over again the very place in my heart that was meant for habitation? He will not allow me to schedule His disclosure. I can only hold it momentarily and then my heart mourns its loss and I begin the entire process over and over again.

But alas, I cannot confine nor take into custody this grand eternal calling. This heavenly sighting serves as a nudge into the urgent arena of creativity according to O’Donohue. What my dreams imagined forth into the visible realm where indeed only gifts of the imagination and creativity that liberated my heart from attachment. Beauty allowed me to sit in the invisible nature of what my mind sees as concrete. At this point I am left with the Holy Spirit's reminder that my very being is eternally sustained and ordered by a Beauty much more overwhelming than the doe. I am being pulled into the very heart of my Father’s love for me. It is this love that all my imaginings have envisioned. All the seemingly poetic make believe or artistic meanderings, all the deposits of awakened humanity, now find a home in the Father’s heart.

O’Donohue says this so magnificently when he poets, “The beauty of God is the warmth of the divine affection. You did not invent yourself or bring yourself here. In terms of human time, the mystery of your individuality was dreamed for millions of years. Your strange and restless uniqueness is an intimate expression of God and who you are says something of who God is.”

And so this sacred hunger, the deep caring, and the unrelenting desire satiated only in the beatific vision of my welcoming makes all so luminous. In the seemingly limitless alone the inconceivable is made intimate and I sing the transcendent. No abstract anonymous force or essence, this desire and longing is for a person. It is not “What is beauty?…but Who is beauty? And so in innumerable apparitions beauty appears and my heart is illuminated and my holy aspirations find refuge and are as our friend C.S. Lewis said so well, surprised by joy.

The Beautiful Tedium of Suspended Disbelief

Enchantment as Faith

Tell them more fairy tales! Bruno Bettelheim

A child kicks its legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough... It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again," to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again," to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy

This is My Father’s World – Maltbie Babcock
This is my Father's world,
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world:
I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.

My Back Pages -Bob Dylan
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin' high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
"We'll meet on edges, soon," said I
Proud 'neath heated brow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

What does creation whisper daily to our hungry heart? What messages are deeply planted within the sunrise, the first morning song of wind & birds, the crowning of midday radiance or the impending wispy dusk of welcoming twilight? There is an apparent monotony to the steady and seemingly endless replication of the story of our days. I arise each morning out of routine only to regard the display of the unexplained as intrusions and reminders of my world weary soul. I tire of meeting myself continually broken and invariably suspicious of life’s exquisite richness. Like a youth beginning to question the certainty of Christmas and its enchantment, I offer up my misgivings as prayer and quell any restless anticipation of the lovely, the astonishing, the utterly charming in lieu of skepticism, certainty & the immediately tangible.

There is a cost to the soul when the story of life has been written and no reading of its pages brings soulfulness or illumination. G.K. Chesterton must have stumbled upon this soul numbing encounter when he remarked, “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” So what attenuates this posture of expectancy and eagerness so evident in children and the emotionally challenged?

Bruno Bettelheim in his ground breaking work “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales” tells us over and over again of the importance of storytelling and its formative power in the creation of humanness. For Bettelheim, the impartation of poetic & narrative accounts of life’s struggles and challenges serves to build into the child a resilience rather than a fragile character. Children are formed through these accounts such that they are more readily willing to sit in the realness of life instead of seeking an escape from the inevitable. It should be noted that much of the contemporary stories for children avoid some of the life’s real terrors and offer up instead saccharine & inane replacements.

As an adult I am confronted daily with the vagaries and realities of living in a fallen world. I discover, however, that I am often unable to find symbols and signs from which to draw meaning and purpose. I am unwilling and frequently powerless to grasp the veiled and buried riches concealed in the magnificent rendering of life’s unfolding scenario. What inner opposition renders the grand revealing? What dullness and hesitation turn my heart to disbelief and suspicion?

In recent years there has been a reemergence of the art of storytelling as well as poetry readings and poetry slams. To the delight of many, a new tradition of story tellers is surfacing and much of its energy and value are being supported by local gatherings at bookstores, churches, and community centers. Very young children are of course needful of oral readings as they are preliterate. It is, however, really challenging to find a great story teller. Creative and animated story tellers thicken and empower the imaginative expression of stories in our inner life. We see, know, and experience our being reflective of the penetration and intensity of the stories. Their intrinsic weightiness and force over and in our descriptive engagement with life satiate our imagination allowing us to truly occupy the space in which we live. We are indeed a storied people.

It is interesting to note that Jesus never wrote a book and primarily used stories or parables as his preferred means of expression. Likewise, it is also historically evident that much of the first century remembrances of Christ and His message were also shared through the medium of storytelling, letters, and public speeches. Yet today we talk of the mysteries of life as though they were mere math problems to be solved. We take the parables and Christ’s sermons and scrutinize each word and phrase to the point where our spiritual dialect is more grammatical than conversational. We know how to exegete a verse but fail to sense the utter sway and authority of the words we say are divinely inspired. Just as children ask for us to “read it again” each reading renders up a fresh and original version of what for many of us has become predictable and small. Few of us really experience the life of the story and yet we often walk away with the impression we “know” the story.

Why did our preliterate ancestors seem to grasp with such verve and wonder the power of these stores? Why do children squeeze joy and wonder from each reading? What fascination and enthrallment overtakes the trusting, uncluttered and unencumbered soul?

There is a part of us that is charmed and delighted by the apparent monotony of life. This deeper self is that part of our being that clings to creation’s collusion with the Father. This space within is a divinely implanted need to collaboratively improvise the unfolding of life. We need the story read aloud so we can respond with amen, hallelujah, prayer or silence? If a yawn is a silent shout, as Chesterton asserts, then much of our dullness and ennui towards realities’ performance is endeavoring to articulate and verbalize our genuine impressions. When willing and able we say, “Read it again, read it again!”

Healing the Wounded Imagination

The Creativity of Hope

It is the task of art to undo the work of our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits…making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us. Marcel Proust

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death. Robert Fulghum

But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Romans 8:25

Ideology is said to be the beliefs and symbols that serve to interpret social reality. Those energies motivate everything from spiritual renewal & political action to artistic expression. We are currently experiencing the shift from one ideology to another and the differences in narrative symbols and beliefs represents a revolutionary time for artists. The collective imagination is often captured by a dominant ideology to the point where much of life and its fullness becomes attenuated or deadened.

What brings back to life the wounded imagination and inspiration such that life’s challenges and setbacks are met with innovation and inventiveness? What can rekindle ingenuity and original thinking and begin to articulate a dream of the future?

Many in the arts community see the act of creativity as a necessity for life’s journey. Real transformation, be it societal or personal, needs a driving energy and resilience to conceive and fashion a world where truth and goodness go hand in hand with beauty. We need the joy of the Twyla Tharp’s dance but we need a world where there is a decent job for everyone willing to work. We need the power of words and poetry be it street rimes of Common or The Roots as well as the melodious sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning or William Wordsworth. But we also need adequate health care for the elderly and the children. We need the sensual exuberance of Frida Kahlo or the Cirque de Soleil, but we also need a clean and healthy environment.

As we move from a time of seeming toxic messages and images to a new page or canvas, there is a spiritual audacity needed to enter this new space. Some say that hope is a core resonance of creativity. It is out of this space that regressive dogmas are returned to transcendent narrative myths which then become life giving rather than death inducing. These legends and symbols expand the world and enliven dialogue and conversation as well as redemption. This re- imaginative act offers hope as an artistic healing force. Although seemingly fragile to the pragmatist and realist, this response to the foundational beauty in creation and one another honors the transformation that is fostered and engender in the creative act. Far from fragile, the force and vigor of imaginative hope swallow up mere optimism and go straight after meaninglessness and depression. This kind of potent conviction redeems the impoverished world of ideas and symbols to new possibilities and a dynamic spiritual life.

As the imagination becomes restored to its rightful exuberance, aspirations become common place. Great anticipation sits with the elders in the town square. Desire is rekindled in the hearts of lovers. Dreams once again reveal the prophetic and the expectation of even the old is to faith and the possibilities of what many deem the original blessing – the ability to create.

When Beauty Gets Silenced

Art as a Voice

The recent downturns in the economy have fostered a mind numbing litany of accusations, pontifications and shear wonderment. The airwaves are filled with the rattle & hum of fear as the American and now global dream of the future takes daily hits. So much at stake and so little reliable declarations made at a time when everyone is waiting for prophecy. Someone please tell us how to get out of this mess, through this calamity with some semblance of life as we thought we knew it. Spoken, written or sung, painted with the tongue or brush, someone please step forward and tell us who we are.

Barak Obama enters the national and international scene during a period unprecedented in my life time. Even his detractors are secretly hoping he knows how to turn this titanic around or at least plug the hole in the ship and allow us to limp into port. It is evident that the man has significant gifts and he very well may prove to be one of the better leaders our nation has ever known. However, in the meantime, the story of life will not be silenced and epic tales are awaiting the poets pondering.

As the nation broods over the next step regarding the economy, harsh sacrificial measures are being offered as the only way forward. We are an age who has emptied our coffers just before a drought. We have leveraged the seed intended for next year’s crop and are now looking for someone or something to sacrifice at the altar of our presumption. Yearend bonuses and record breaking profits of companies like Exxon remind us that in the midst of all the downward spiral something unjust and unsettling remains. More than ever, we long for the resolve of a more powerful explanation. All the cacophony can unfortunately make life seem as if it is about nothing. Just a series of unrelated, unconnected voices all calling out for a hearing but at the moment sounding like noise. Who helps draw these desperate sounds, symbols and images together? Who brings nobility to the suffering, justice to the pitiable, healing to the ailing, and a home to the vagabond? Are there parts of the human condition that can only be awakened through the balm of creatives willing to listen?


In many ways there is a violent struggle right now for power over the who gets to form the story. From the partisan battles of Republicans and Democrats to the terrorist and peace niks, many contingencies are lining up at the soap box that is the media and offering up their reflection on this screen play in the making. Oddly enough, at a time when all are experiencing such great loss, more than ever we need those committed to listening to and for the healing & hopeful stories needed for the naming.

“The future may depend on our remembering that everything has in it a dream of itself,” Rachel Naomi Remen once said. Could this be the genius of creativity and the imagination? Out of these dark spaces and places, could a more hopeful mythos emerge? Ironically, it appears the arts have once again been marginalized and silenced.

As the bailout turned into TARP and TARP into Obama’s new plan, special interests once again lined up at the governmental troughs not convinced this was really a crisis. Lobbyists came out of the closet and knew from past experiences that something this large would certainly allow for millions of dollars to be designated for their causes and interests. Even as we speak, it is clear that a crisis of this magnitude cannot cure the illness of special interests. If we get ours, that is enough.

In so many of the discussion by politicians and media pundits, it appeared that one group or endowment was certainly unworthy of any assistance. After all, we are in times where people need jobs, companies need capital, and the consumer needs confidence. It was odd as time after time the Endowment of the Arts would be first or second line item to cut on the list of groups that certainly did not need any funding or help during this kind of crisis. From pro-lifers upset at family planning clinics birth control perks to parks and wildlife groups who stand to lose their assistance, everyone seemed to dismiss the arts as a coterie worth mentioning. Why? Because the art community is an easy weak victim. They have little collective voice in the circus that is politics and media.

History has told us over and over again what happens when the arts are silenced. In the twentieth century, writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn cried out from the Gulags warning us of a world of the horror taking place in the Soviet Republic. Even African American artists in the 50’s & 60’s like Miles David revealed the darkened heart of a nation caught up in racism. When will we learn that the voice of the artist gives pathos to the sorrow? When will we learn that creativity is often unleashed most powerfully during times when the human soul seems defeated and nearly destroyed?

There is a voice that is the arts. From the dance of Twila Tharp to the comedic social commentary of Lennie Bruce to the ecstatic offerings of Paul Klee, we are enriched by the extravagance of beauty in the midst of loss and exile. More than ever, the arts need to be supported and sustained even sacrificially. Whose voice will frame this current age? Will it be the Wall Street tycoon full of himself and his leveraged world? Will it be the politician convinced his occasional nod to the common man makes him a man of the people? Will it be the angry religious zealots from numerous religions hoping this is the apocalypse so there end times story trumps the world?

Who will offer up a gentler naming? Who will supply us with laughter when our tears have been emptied in full? Who will draw us towards the dance floor for one more round of twirls and spins that can only feed our childlike hearts? The artist will. So I am writing letters. I am sounding off. I am angry at the seeming dismissal of the arts as not only expendable but not even worthy of a discussion. Sing out in protest. Dance a silly dance when everyone is telling you to get serious. Paint your face, hum aloud in a library, and finally lay for an hour gazing at nothing but the canopy of splendor that is our sky. It is our sky. Before it gets sold at auction, let’s enjoy the everlasting. This story is not over. Thank you Jesus.