The Practice of Beauty

Art, Sadness & the Unresolved Heart

2012-01-23T11:22:00.000-08:00

I wonder if today’s Renaissance men/women are the artistic melancholics of our day. Given the weightiness of our self knowing via the social sciences, faith practices, and the constant barrage of consumptive sensory experiences, we are now “too aware” of our inflated presence in the room. In this magnified display of the self and its proclivities, a degree of loathing is probably healthy. Should we not grieve over our penchant for pleasure at the cost of discipline and service? Should we not ponder the subterranean rage that masks itself as distance and boredom? Should we not feel the sorrow befitting a people cut off from their deepest more spiritual parts?

For a man my age there is so much still unresolved. So much disparity between my values and my actions. So much space between my dreams and reality. This distance can fill up with such profound sadness at times. Rilke speaks so eloquently about the shear terror that beauty offers us in the unresolvedness of life, in the deep meaning of things seeking divine fruition. One of his more profound observations is the idea that the purpose of life is "to be defeated by greater and greater things." As they say...this is a hard saying. Who can know it? Circling around God for years, I, like Rilke, wonder if I am a “falcon, a storm, or a great song."

In moments of holy discontent, this unrelenting sorrow is a blessing as it is my edge. It is the air my lungs need to take in the deep deep richness of the dark. However, it is the paralysis this darkness may bring that frightens me most. When my obsession with the journey takes me into God, the dark is holy and brilliant in its glow. When passion becomes a mania or fixation it becomes unwilling to embrace the questions as divine messengers of a different knowing. In this state these quandaries mock me into disbelief and suspicion. In this place I get lost in the loathing & begin to see it all as a joke. My life is a joke. I am a burden to myself and I cannot bear this yoke of self awareness alone. I need a people, a tribe, and a family who share the same appreciation of the consequences of this awareness. I need a Savior who only allows a heaviness that leads to transformation.

To still have so much uncertainty and reservation within my breast is on certain days overwhelmingly sad. On other days I realize that living in this tension of knowing and unknowing is overpowering only if I refuse its terrifying glory. Only if I refuse to the undertaking, to the divine duty of loving life into the questions. Only then does the disparity become a fruit ready to fall to the ground welcoming gravity’s call. Only then does the silence and solitude unveil the striking likeness of the knowing in the unknowing.

And so I am learning to as Rilke says, "love the questions." I am learning to lean into life as a lover full of sensual heaviness, flinging her hair back with a beatific gaze of pondering and brooding melancholy. This hesitation she sings is my muse, the very enthusiasm my soul needs to pursue.

Today I welcome my melancholy artistic status. Like Rumi, I submit to this powerlessness reason has offered and seek my sojourn in the unanswerability of beauty and the arts. We read to find ourselves in the story. We paint to mine the silent poetry hidden in color, texture and line. We dance to surrender to the passion our body hears. In these forms of expression we in many ways “live out the questions." We discover the mother tongue. We see the sound and hear the colors. We ask our bodies to teach us the melodies running deep underground in our souls. In this place of revealing, beauty remains terrifying and rightfully so. I would not have it otherwise. But here I do not seek the answers but seek to live them. And as Rilke, I will at some distant day, live my life into the very thing I cannot imagine at this very moment. I end with more Rilke..."I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future."

Beauty’s Dwelling: Immanuel

2011-03-11T05:36:00.000-08:00

Perhaps we are here in order to say; house, bridge, fountain, gate, fruit tree, window. To say them more intensely than the things themselves ever dreamed of existing.

Rilke 9^th Duino Elegy

In the wake of centuries of chatter about beauty’s sublime nature, our passion for an embodied felt knowing has not been diminished. In our feeble attempts to repress beauty’s call and memory, we have but heightened our anticipation to the point where all this talk of essences and the dream of art reminds us daily that as Nabokov poets, some divine beckoning is made evident when “the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscape.”

In such times of disconnectedness, mobility for the sake of ambition, possessions made known and named by the corporate language of non representational artifacts (i.e. homes decorated with objects made by machines, in countries that do not even speak the same language, made manifest by colors and shapes unfamiliar with the native tongue of the purchaser) we find ourselves nowhere, seeing little to nothing, collecting more of the same thing that first made us lonely and all the while wondering why beauty has left the building, departed from the sacredness of place.

The beauty of the imagination is that it can discover such magnificent vastness inside a tiny space. John O’Donohue’s - Beauty

Hungry in spirit we are so anticipating beauty’s mysterious welcoming presence into a place, a single place to abide. Beauty calls forth an awakening that envelopes our hearts, enlivens the very space we inhabit. Beauty confirms the uniqueness of each moment. We are not accidents nor are we called to dwell in a particular place by whimsy or happenstance.

Rilke reminds us powerfully as to the dangers of ignoring beauty’s voice and entrance when he says, “being here is so much.” There is no private territory, no place or space outside the pronouncement of beauty’s sacred embrace. Beauty calls us out of exile, invokes an ever-present sacramental pronouncement over the very place in which our soul is currently engaged and present. She calls us to listen, to re-engage and participate with life once again, refuse to objectify creation, self, along with others and this revelation ushers in the creative imagination as the only vehicle through which love can be grasp.

Beauty engulfs and informs presence and space offering transcendence through a revealing that all things cry out to be seen and known. Everyday experiences are enlarged through metaphor, image and other creative gifts that bring us together in a holy conversation. In this unique space, we see the profane and the sacred culminating with the primacy of beauty’s call – which is the reconciliation of all things.

As science has quelled if not silenced the welcoming blessing of beauty’s wooing, without fanfare and by her very nature, full of dignity, beauty incarnates newness to our daily lives. Beauty offers creatively the gift of animating property in an erotic manner such that objects are not merely objects. Things, created by humans for humans, have an attributional communal context to the exchange. Artists must learn to be custodians of these exchanges. Beauty, unhurried and unharried breaks the sacred silence naming the space with extraordinary mysterious care. Out of the mysterious silence an invitation is heard. This silence defines the borders of the enchanted space and evokes a rooted and deeply felt sense of knowing. Much like prayer, the heart is to be wholly present as beauty and its companion, the imagination, welcome the visitation- the Annunciation.

Beauty steps into time as well making sacramental the detailed ordinariness of our lives. Creative attention confesses to its holy longing. Welcoming the beauty into the space is more than ritual. It allows for a committed posture of attribution to avoid diminishment and interpretation as acts of engagement. As if the heart of creation, nature itself, was naturing us along taking upon her the burden of named or ugly space, w are welcomed into a landscape of exquisite presence. Although time indeed is spent or recorded or seen as moving in & through us, the welcoming of beauty makes the disclosure of the moment, the space, and the very sense of place holy.

Lovers of beauty listen to her voice and story. Unheard, the story of rapture and enchantment unfolds, spiraling out into the space filling each and every pilgrim with their own story of the sacred space. So beauty allows for the story to be a dialogue, a welcoming conversation of hospitality.

When beauty is received as gift, enlivened trust is birthed. This trust, much like light and darkness must have trusted the Father in the very beginning, opening space up to the good and the true. Not only does beauty welcome us into the space as if it were meant for us throughout all eternity, but it embraces the longing now free to this empowered open space generated by beauty. Now beauty induces the divine questions here to for hidden or unrevealed in us.

Beauty as well, tutors us in the custodial realm of honoring the erotic life of property and gifts we make for others. Many Christians, afraid of animism, as well as disenchanted Westerners, have desacralized the material world as lifeless and merely stuff. Outside of beauty’s wake, time and space are filled with “no-thing.” Beauty’s welcoming presence unmasks our more profound desires, desires to big for our hearts to fathom without beauty’s buffered hospitality guarding our childlike hearts. Beauty offers life to the material world. Welcomed, beauty dispels any sense of being a burden to the universe. Free to be truly present with beauty’s welcoming permission, my longing to see and know the rapturous wonders hidden in my desire cause me to discover that beauty’s very heart is reconciling all things unto the Father. This is beauty’s calling herself back to herself. Yes…desire heaven. Yes…But beauty’s reconciling radiance calls the space to enlarge itself, to duplicate itself, to share its glory and grace in the now, in this one single space, in time, through material things….the very stuff of earth…the ordinary, the simple.

So beauty walks the earth, seeking out seemingly emptied wastelands and ever so quietly announces a new naming presence for the space. This is the Kingdom of God. Beauty’s role is to exchange the previously impoverished places with the hospitable grace of the newly redeemed, recklessly innocent, and overwhelmingly unashamed of its powerful desire. As though beauty’s presence carried with her an authority to exchange the ugliness of disenchanted space and time with love, now touched and moved by our being in the space with the 3^rd member of beauty’s original family, we get to share in the ushering in & attributional festivities.

Over and over again beauty tells her story, beginning where someone else left off, creating where someone else grew weary in well doing. Now,,,,no thing could be called abstract. All things belong, all is enlivened and animated and beauty’s force and presence creatively points to both the here and now and the not yet.

Welcomed into the space beauty offers hope and the future is unveiling itself as we speak. Every moment is full, every nook & cranny full of glory and presence, every sound and smell reminds us we desire because we do belong in this sacred space called out home, our street, our town, our world. It is safe to inhabit the space fully and without resignation. Creative callings beckon beauty’s tourist heart and provides all the encouragement to unpacked the gift, to see the space as holy, the entire world as an erotic narrative full of enchanted images waiting for miracles to happen.

Step into beauty’s welcoming hospitable presence today.

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weighs of beautiful things. Elaine Scarry

Deep Symbols & Our Naming

2009-09-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-31T12:57:00.002-07:00

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

2009-04-30T17:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-30T20:54:00.000-08:00

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.

The Cry of Our Times

2008-12-21T06:50:00.000-08:00

The Global Crisis and the Violation of Beauty

All the contemporary crises can be reduced to a crisis about the nature of beauty. John O’Donohue

For what does the human soul long? Sex? Power? Money? Beauty? In recent months the shroud of greed has been removed and the entire world has seen avarice with spiritual clarity. Unregulated markets run by individuals and groups whose only pursuit was acquisitiveness finally devoured their own off spring (as in the case of Madoff) and confessed their ponzie schemes. Their admissions have of course lacked contrition and are only due to their powerlessness to animate the cadaver. Countless economic institutions and their real intent are daily being disclosed and made public and the ugliness of it all nearly overpowers the average person on the street.

The media that months ago was complicit in their generation of “relentless images of mediocrity & ugliness” have now turned on their bosses and a coup is in the works. Even the media are shocked at the daily revelations. What has happened to our sensibilities in these last few months that what is truly ugly is now most visible?

How does a world fall into such chaos? How do political, religious, and economic institutions find themselves thrown into postures of extreme anxiety and uncertainty? There are and will be many declarations and assertions as to how we arrived at this juncture, what it means and what we are to do to put right the planet. I will speculate that beauty will not be pronounced as the foremost antidote for our planet’s woes but I believe it is only beauty that can reconcile and atone for the dangerous state of soul that animates our consciousness.

What happens to a world that represses or ignores the hunger of the soul for beauty? What transpires in the wake of such a lack of attention? In recent weeks it is as if the mask of our collective soul has been removed and we see in each other’s fear, the images to which we have bowed down and worshiped. We have mistaken glamour for the magnificent, Hollywood for our deepest most profound dreams, and technological fancy for the real imagination.

Why did God demand that there be no graven images to reflect His glory? Why were the Jews so prone towards creating idols that were proxies for the transcendent? Could it be that the presence of beauty is much like the Spirit? It goes where it will. Beauty is much like a mystical flame that burns only when stoked with love.

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weight of beautiful things.
Elaine Scarry

When our being is governed by frenetic gratification, our inner ear grows deaf and the call of beauty is lost to the cacophony of the ugly. We have lost our sensibilities regarding what we really esteem as beautiful. From malls built with faux streams and trees to simulated neighborhoods created by nostalgic Disneyesque fantasies, we have smothered our sense of wonder with belongings and ignored what cannot be bought.

What might happen if we were to awaken to the call of beauty? Is it possible that we will hear and see beauty where we could not before? O’Donohue, in his treatise on beauty declares what happens to our deepest nature. “The wonder of the beautiful” now begins surprise us. “Because our present habit of mind is governed by the calculus of consumerism and busyness, we are less and less frequently available to the exuberance of beauty.” Beauty has been repressed by our acquisitiveness and now in the wake of its toppling our inner most yearnings are coming to the surface. Frederick Tuner said, “Beauty…is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency of themes of the universe.”

I am a part of a community that speaks often of liminal space. I believe we are standing within the threshold of new dispensation. I have told many of my closest friends that we are in the throws of a revolution. This revolution is a divine revealing of what truly sustains and animates this world. We are living in exciting times where our creative nature and its empowered nurturance from the Father can be released on this world with courage and service. This is a call to all the “creatives” to become emboldened. Do not shrink back in fear. Now, more than ever, we need celebration. Now more than ever we need the frivolous and extravagant. Now more than ever we need the utterly silly and sublime.

Let us invite beauty into our midst with parties. Let us give our most prized possessions away to the poor. Let us empty our homes of anything that remains unused and unstewarded. Let us repent when we merely consume but do not replace with something beautiful and precious. Let us be reckless in our gift giving. Let us envision a future where there is no lack because there is no hoarding.
Let us look for the beautiful in our enemies. Let us rename the flaw and the broken with magnanimous names of lavishness. Let our only debt be that of love and may we be reckless and wasteful in our welcoming of the stranger.

Let the dance begin! To the emerging New Adam!

The Lure of the Local

2008-09-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

Most educated people say,”Where is it written? Our people say where is it lived?
Steve Gonzales

We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in an epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side by side, of the dispersed.
Michael Foucalt

How will we know it is us without our past.
John Steinbeck

Community is local life aware of itself
Wendell Berry

The White man’s words are no good. They don’t give pictures to your mind
Anonymous Apache

One could say that when an old man or women dies in the Hispanic world, a whole library dies with that person.
Carlos Fuentes

Lucy Lippard in her book The Lure of the Local goes on to say…

“Place is a locus of desire. Every time we enter a new place we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity which is what all “local places” exist of. By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we play a different roll. The lure of the local is a pull of a place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one anecdote to a prevailing alienation. The lure of the local is that undertone to modern life that connects it to the past we know so little and the future we are aimlessly concocting. Every place’s name is a story, out outcropping of the shared tales that form the bedrock of community. Untold land is unknown land. Indigenous names tend to locate resources for common good-pointing out a place where a healing herb grows or the water is bad-or to say what happened there. "

This is why local art’s ultimate power is the chronicalizing of time such that the communal construction of humans can manifest itself in a sense of sacred place or space. Artists must root themselves in a place and consider that the one place out of which all time and space reveal themselves. In this space we discover the sacredness of our human longings, our deepest desire for meaning and purpose. In this particular place our creativity and artistic expression become a reflection of the really real. Root your creativity in a people and place. Know the names of beauty's location.

Losing One's Mind to FInd One's Voice

2008-09-11T17:55:00.001-07:00

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted
Martin Luther King Jr.

I have always been formed by the big questions. A product of the age of doubt and skepticism, I tend to embrace all experience with a degree of aloofness, distance, and separation. This has done me well in the area of academics and the mind as I have aspired to teach and be a part of an intellectual community. However, I found that I also sought to answer the “big questions” with the power and intensity of artistic expression. This posture often seemed at odds with my clinical engagement of experience and my tendencies to deconstruct and analyze. I began to discover that the creative process involved in art making was often opposed or deterred by this purposely detached sense of observation. In fact, it was the very act of theoretical observation that often kept me out of the serendipity of creativity and the growth and nurturing of my imagination.

George Steiner, in his book Real Presences, offers with graceful eloquence, the idea of art making as being rooted in a transcendent posture that removes creativity from the world of the scientific or therapeutic impulse. It is in the disciplined worlds of science, psychotherapy as well as post modern deconstructionism which attempt to render art making mere chemical responses to stimuli, objective observations or even nihilistic meanderings about nothing. Steiner contends it is the very act of meaning seeking in art that roots its formative power in the likeness of God's creative urgings. It is when we imbue ultimate meaning to our endeavors that the very process of art making takes us out of this distanced critique into the very presence of a created world. In this pose we are acting like our Creator. In this bearing we are truly present.

This blog is for individuals who have chosen the arts as a vocation or avocation and who also see that act through the lense of faith and spirituality. As a Christian, my lense has taken on a distinctly Orthodox coloring in recent years and for that I do not apologize. In fact, it is out of my faith positions that the bigger questions find a home and place out of which to grow and be manifest. It is under the canopy of faith that my aesthetic draws its purpose and epistemology. It is in this knowing that my personhood begins to find a story and destiny much larger than my isolated self can manifest. I find my self in relation to something larger than myself.

It appears that the nature of self is fluid and highly permeable. This porous nature is part of the wonder inherent in our humanness. However, like flowers, there are particular genus and species. There are roses and there are particular kinds of roses. Not all roses of the same genus and species are alike. Difference is written into our nature as well as similarity. In our early years we often play at difference and adopt the highly formed expressions of differentiation as a badge of honor. We work hard at creating distinction and variance so as to heighten our supposed points of view. But these adoptions are borrowed. Yet these excursions into the aesthetics and machinations of others are not ultimately lost. Much like a child in his or her grade school years, we are learning through rote memorization and repetition. Many musicians first learn their craft in a cover band learning the music of others. The more music one learns the deeper and wider the nuanced lexicon of choices and expressions becomes. Each nuance offers a unique perspective thus adding depth and breadth to our unconsciously submerged perspective. Still, we have only borrowed a view or voice. We are not speaking for ourselves as much as we are repeating what we deem worth repeating. We are learning the grammar of our imagination, the mother tongue of art making.
To begin to speak for ourselves can involve spiritual change. As in the case of all growth and maturity, pain often accompanies the growing awareness of being in our own body, living out of our own history and saga. We continue to speak of life in general, however, we now begin to slow our tendencies to borrow a voice or story from others and allow ourselves to sit inside our own expression and turn of a phrase. For the believer pain, suffering and prayer usually accompany this process. This is due to the fact that speaking our own story is our birthright. Our life is a gift thus our sharing of that life is the return of that gift as stewardship. To steward one’s gift is to steward one’s life. To guard and nurture one’s life is to listen to the heart of God as He knits Himself into the very fibers of our consciousness. The discovery of Him on each page of our life, the sighting of Him in each painting, the naming of Him in each poem, the joy of Him in each dance ushers in the season of speaking in our own voice. Now we begin to speak not merely for ourselves.

This can sound like an isolated engagement and possibly over spiritualized. When one’s true voice is emerging it may feel like everything else but spiritual. This breakthrough is often a breakdown. This experience is an infiltration of an authentic vision and is a sighting only known through the experience of suffering. Why suffering? Affliction and anguish frame our days inside the reality of our death. This imposes an awareness of our creatureliness upon us. This limiting encounter with eternity breaks open our delusion about the drama and grandiosity we can play around in rather than get down to the certainty of life’s limits and our place in that actuality.

Thus we must locate ourselves in a community (not just a local one but a global- i.e. Christian) Out of what tradition do we create? Many have thought that art traditions had more to do with particular styles rather than particular ways in which the imagination is formed. Style it appears is a preference that can change at will. Even one’s sense of being formed out of a tradition can be as well. We are, however, always planted in some tradition, some way of knowing and imagining. When we acknowledge this over arching story we can then work within that canopy of narratives and truly find ourselves inside this larger picture.

Ultimately, the creative act is rooted in a communal act of meaning making. The best art always comes from community. Today, much of art making is done in isolation of a larger task. That considerable undertaking at this point in our human history may very well be the salvation of the earth. Artists are now being called upon to join hearts and hands with the Creator to assemble enclaves of beauty that craft not merely materials in a particular medium, but as Steiner asserts, root us in something truly transcendent. This is art making in a first order presence. This is being there to see and know and speak the beauty while it pours over our souls pointing past the moon to something beyond. This may only take place when we lose the detached distance of a post modern cynicism (lose our minds) and discover the power of our innocent declaration (find our voice).

Evidential Power of Poetry

2008-09-01T13:22:00.001-07:00

Poems are moments of clarity the soul offers up for guidance. They are the faces of a thousand submerged beings unable to offer up their voice in daily conversation. They speak in the reverent moments when we allow them voice.

I am child of the modern. My soul races after meaning even in the midst of ecstasy and worship. I am disconnected, dismantled, strewn all over the formulas and theories of my father and his father. This journey has made me the ultimate personality, the cloud of knowing of everything but the most needed.

Who would have known that I was truly loved? Could anyone speaking the language of proof and boundaries recognize the holy imagination quietly walking in the front gate of my heart and taking up residence? Who would have known God would take up His residence in my heart and love me. Ravish me in those places dark and hidden?

Now years later I am a child again. I look forward to death, to life, to this day to this moment. Life is a journey seeking the restless, pondering and wandering of an orphan’s heart. The very frame work of my soul has been formed in the hollow idealism and the hedonism of the age. I hate what I want but still desire. I see myself with clarity and wish for blindness. I long for more but am too cynical to walk into its possibility. Thus. I am deconstructing. I am collapsing in on myself.

Poems, rants, and essays represent that implosion. Their darkness is my voice; their hopefulness is submerged but ever present. But, in truth, the overall emotionality of these poems speaks of the end of a person. For me, this person is Raymond Webb. This was my original name before I was adopted. Although fairly unaware of my heritage and genealogy, I do mythically realize the nature-nurture hold on my soul. Much of my journey has been the releasing of a sacred self who speaks with a deeper sense of knowing. It is my prayer that these poems will name the countless ruminations of a soul colliding with its many selves. These collisions are gifts of sorts. May the naming bring forth life from death.

Influenza

Under the influence
I raise my hand to my mouth
In hopes to lessen the radiant power of words
Words held back for ions
Words held hostage through possession
Words now in collusion with some psychic filter
In this moment
After years of mute exile
These words
That occupy entire terrains of my soul
Throwing moods left and right
Peaking into the dark
Swooning like a drunken lover
Feigning love as illness
Reveal to me
That which shines ever so brightly in the lunatic dark
More often than not owns my very soul

MIles Davis Once Said

2008-08-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Musings on The Beatles "She's Leaving Home"

2008-08-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

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

The Age of Beauty

2008-08-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

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.

What Does the Gospel Look Like?

2008-08-16T15:45:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

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.

The Color of Soul Making

2008-08-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

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.”

On Pondering Rothko’s Chapel Paintings

2008-08-08T08:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Thoughts on Creatvity & the Arts

2008-08-03T13:35:00.001-07:00

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

Art and the Dark Night of the Soul

2008-07-27T12:52:00.001-07:00

Art as Transformation, Passage, & Sacred Act of Devotion

Between living and dreaming
There is something else
Guess what it is?
Antonio Machodo

Creative expression at its best is alchemical in that it looks for ways to turn all things to gold. All that is objectionable and worthless in the eyes of others may now take on a sacred glow. This glorious deepening takes us downward, outward, and inward into things here to fore inaccessible. Now we sit before the furies we believed so ugly only to find them endearing and even soulfully supportive.

It is the common ordinary that now becomes wonderful. The very acts we deemed plausible, permissible, and even predictable now are seen with moral clarity and the nobility of the human soul begins to shine. All wounds and scars are spiritual and full of light as well as dark. All weeping and laughing becomes poetic.

The artist begins to learn meditatively to enter the cauldron of experience with a sense of surprise and wonder. Being human is neither a problem to be solved nor the soul a project to be conquered. By renaming our humanness with glory and reverence the focus of our divine assignments takes on less of a search for problems and solutions and more a revealing and unveiling as well as transformation.

Thus, a dark night can paradoxically return us to our childlike wonder about how to engage life. If the soul is not truly the imagination but the part of our being most aware of the soul, then this return to its musings allows us to leave behind the ideas of life as health and prosperity and be welcomed home to this sacred ordeal called life.

A rigid persona is the last bastion of protection to fall for the artist. Wonder by its nature is heightened observation with the ego and meaning held naturally at bay. Rigidity and protective identities will not welcome the hidden beauty of experience as the possibility of being wrong or hurt still hold the persona together. We can be so fearful to discover our worst nightmares. Ironically these dark aberrations and specters of ungrace carry with them the secrets to our beauty hidden in this darkened sphere. The very elixir our deadened somatic weariness longed for is the humid atmosphere within this realm. We begin to drink in the air we thought so full of poison and find it sweet and like a savor to the tongue. We drink in the blackness and discover this hidden color within. Much like the mystics before us we discover the invitation to see arrives in the irrational and beauty of imperfection.

The way of the mystics is an inverted world. Emptiness brings us into the sacred. Clinging to our fullness's makes us feel confused. But holy ignorance is something else. Holy ignorance, only learned in the dark night, is essential for authentic creativity to flow.This poem came from a discussion with a friend. We were talking about how so many seek the way up, the way of light, the way of truth and how in our middle ages we come face to face with our inability to even know what we don't know. This "grand humbling" is a fall from grace (or maybe a divine push) but it is God's way, nature's or creation's way if you will, of offering up a new manner of seeing and knowing. Thus...the poem.

The Fortunate Fall

There is a dark glimpse
A radiant disintegration
A tumbling
A humbling
In it I am broken open
As though a fall had bruised and yet healed my head
Plummeting to the ground
My vision is altered
I lay there gasping and holding myself
Waiting for absolution
My very cells cry along with me
And now..
Nature nurtures me
Folding all the compromise into her bosom
She is created to take upon herself
A portion of this weighty fall from grace
I need not leave myself to find myself
This pain befallen me
Is not me but is me
This diminishment has muddied my head
Clarity not an option
I lay there for awhile
Pondering the very angle of my gaze
On my back
Closer to the end
Closer to my rite of passage
I wonder why I had never seen this before
This state of need is my gift
All that is rigid and self protective seems shattered
This is initiation
This is my offering
The dark glimpse
My redemption

Much of the artist’s sense of the gloriously beautiful is buried within the naming of their perception. How would I know what is beautiful? How and why would I rename this blackness to a highly exquisite sadness that breaks open my sorrow for myself, for others, for the world? Oh that I had known this brokenness offered so much in darker days but……my naming of the beautiful came through my sense of pride and my carefully designed methods of reflecting only that which I deemed clean and carefully safe.

To welcome the dark night is to begin to see all experience as the stuff of glory and transformation. Nothing is outside the purview of transformation and atoning renaming. The intentions and motivations of the immature soul are so riddled with complexity and purposefully so. The more we can avoid the beauty of life through obfuscation the more we can hide from the responsibility to be ourselves. Radical faith and trust are just that; radical by their very nature. I cannot go into the hinterlands of shadow and mystery on a Disney pass. Entry into this territory of the soul comes only through the baton being passed by the mysterious teacher placed into our lives at first unawares. This wise window or door may be a person, a book, a film, a lover, or a parent (often in the throes of their own exchange of longing).

This encounter is a baptism into the authenticity of our being. In this time we begin to feel the long arduous road here to fore filled seemingly with pain and sorrow or mediocrity and capitulation. Now in the din of depression's hauntings or illness and suffering or divorce or business failure, we are forced to listen to the stillness of the soul’s utterings.

As though our place in the world has been waiting for our arrival we ever so slightly begin to hear this voice in the distance telling us of the southland of the heart where respite and welcome await. This is our unique vantage point through the very eyes of our own heart. Only we can see from this location, from this spot. This is our sacred pose. We are who we have been waiting for.

So much of our journey depends upon our ability to believe God loves us and will speak. In an age of so much talk and chatter, it is wise to wonder and test the voices we attribute to God. On the other hand, as Peter Rollins says in How Not to Speak of God, God is both silent and verbose, hidden and yet revealing, distant and yet so present we cannot stand it. This is the paradox of being in a world where we have banished God from our minds and think He has left our hearts. He cannot leave our hearts for He is that space. This is where His home is. Here is the poem...This is my work. This is our work.

Oh That Christmas Were Real!

In its absence
I came upon a room
A room full of angels
Sitting bored and unnecessary
Smoking Pall Malls
Playing cards
Waiting on the cynic

All those grand wings
Feathers of trust and truth
Were folded and put away
Because of undue holiday nostalgia

Standing at the door
I felt compelled to weep aloud
In hopes the winged creatures
Would see their awful estate
But I am mute
For this room is my heart
My protectors have been grounded through my fear
The fear these messengers have no word for me
So this absence is my dismissal

Still uncomfortably drawn into their presence
I reluctantly enter the room
Nearly choking on the smoke
I walk amidst the angels as though invisible

Just a few steps into the space
Nearly inaudible
I hear this chanting
This is no trance
Cast upon these beings
They see me clearly
They are merely waiting
Waiting for my return

I stop and look down at one herald
His gaze transfixes mine
His very countenance alive with awakening,
Startles me into this beautiful surprise
So I am Christmas!
I did not know !

Now the absence begins to speak

“Be not afraid
I bring you tidings of great joy
You have been missed
Now go and tell others.”

I so hungered for this blessing

In this new posture, as our heart's broken open, we begin to accept the limitations of our descriptive trek. We cannot bring to pass all we can imagine. This need not stop the creative work but bring its phoenix wings to the ground at times. These limitations are not mocking us but informing us as artists. This is the frustration of gestation and contemplation. We cannot always bring to pass what we imagine. This is the frustration of artists who see something or hear something they are not yet able to communicate.

As we trek down this new road or step into this new realm we begin to feel the weightiness of the ego and pride in our unique description of our brokenness. To embrace the sacred wonderful is to open up ourselves to the sacred ordinariness even in ourselves. Centuries of telling have now formed our deepest self defining. We are gifted. We are special. We are above, without, and pridefully so.

The self is always implicated in our creative work. During the dark night the gift of our creativity now is revealed as a burden as well as a blessing. We are constrained and restrained by this gifting. It never was merely ours to exploit for personal gain and the building up of the ego. When our creative purposes are designed and empowered through self inflation the importance of our work becomes exaggerated and amplified. Our estimation of the very act of creating takes on the ego's pressure to make this about our worth rather than our mission and sacred pose and place in this life. During the dark night we begin to see how this posture keeps us from speaking the truth in our work as this over valuing is dangerous to our souls. No one can speak into our work, no one can edit, no one can critique, and in fact we may hold our work at bay from all to see as though it were too special to be engaged. Because creating takes a large sense of self the danger in the act is the inability to see beyond oneself to the blessing of the gift.

When we allow our art to be gift ( as opposed to a commodity or mere thing) this empowers one to not have to place commercial concerns over the worth and purpose of the creative act. This is why life blossoms most inside community where even the dark night becomes a gift to others who will indeed traverse this well worn road and enter this murky darkness.

This glorious dark is wrought with danger and saints like St. John of the Cross have given us a map for traversing this terrain of the soul. Without a map and a community within which to walk along side, the dark power of truth is soul crushing. Artists like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are poets who felt the overpowering call of the awful rowing towards God but never felt any respite as the rowing was shared by others. This seeming absence of God and light is only countered by the presence of others who are acknowledging our naming as beauty and not as despair.

Art in the 20 century especially has focused unduly on the darkness but without the guides of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. We need guides and we need cohorts to traverse this beautiful black water. Without the crossing we remain domesticated in the land of our childhood sequestered on an island we call a continent.

Art as an Act of Devotion

2008-07-25T14:48:00.000-07:00

Ideas for Making Art a Devotional Practice

1) Meditate on the creation story
2) Journal on the impact of the created world on your thoughts & emotions
3) Ponder something in nature of a created object for five minutes
4) Journal on the impact of the environment on your spirit and soul
5) Be open to emotions that art can do in you (e.g. paintings, film, music)
6) Develop a liturgical or sacramental side to your art
7) Go to museums
8) Join an arts group (CIVA)
9) Honor the arts in your church
10) Read books on art

Some Books to Ponder

Art in Action Nicholas Wolterstorf
Rainbows for a Fallen World Calvin Seerveld
Walking on Water Madeleine L’Engel
The Rock that is Higher Madeleine L’Engel
Making Room for Art Sally Warner
Uncontrollable Beauty Bill Beckley (Ed.)
The Healing Power of Stories Daniel Taylor
The Symbolic Construction of Community Anthony P. Cohen
A Rumor of Angels Peter L. Berger
Culture Wars James Davison Hunter
The Soul’s Journey Allan Jones
Imitation of Christ Thomas a Kempis
The Culture of Interpretation Roger Lundin
Living by Fiction Annie Dillard
For the Time Being Annie Dillard
Art After Modernism Brian Wallis (Ed.)
Music Through the Eyes of Faith Harold Best
The Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom
Narrative Imagination Richard Eslinger
The Holy Longing Richard Rohlheiser
Symbols of the Sacred Louis Dupre
A Life in the Arts Eric Maisel
Art Marketing 101 Constance Smith
Listening to the Spirit of the Text Gordon D. Fee
Christian Apologetics in a Postmodern World Timothy Phillips (Ed.)
The Christian Imagination Leland Ryken
Imgologies Mark C. Taylor,
Esa Saarinen
The Repeal of Reticence Rochelle Gerstein
The Scandal of Pleasure Wendy Steiner
The Exile of Beauty Wendy Steiner
Conversations Before the End of Time Suzi Gablik
The End of Modernism Suzi Gablik
The Re Enchantment of Art Suzi Gablik
Art and Great Ideas Mortimer J. Adler
The Creative Life Alice Bass
The End of World as we Know It Chuck Smith
Civilizing Rituals Carol Duncan
Our Christian Symbols Frederich Rest
The Presentation of Self Erving Goffman
Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down Marva J. Dawn
A Royal Waste of Time Marva J. Dawn
The Divine Conspiracy Dallas Willard
The Spiritual Disciplines Dallas WIllard
We’ve Had Hundred Years of Psychotherapy James Hillman
The Culture of Narcissism Christopher Lasch
Art & Soul Hilary Brand &
Adrienne Chaplin
Beyond Liberalism & Fundamentalism Nancy Murphy
Deep Symbols Edward Farley
The Invention of Art/ A Cultural History Larry Shiner
Concerning the Spiritual in Art Wassily Kandinsky
Creating Robert Fritz
Plain Living Catherine Whitmire
Handbook / Pricing and Ethical Guidelines Graphic Arts Guild
Visual Thinking William A. Dyrness
Crying for a Vision Steve Scott
Moral Imagination Mark Johnson
Metaphors to Live By Mark Johnson
The Gift /Imagination & the Erotic Life of Property Lewis Hyde

Burning Man Festival & the Church

2008-07-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

Longing to Belong

From Lollapalooza to Burning Man, secular culture has created some powerful symbols of community in recent years. Regardless of the pagan elements that deify art, hedonism and the individual, there is apparently something powerfully primal & spiritual that takes place at these gatherings. They serve as profane signposts of God hunger.

How can the Church be such a gathering place? How can we foster such a degree of acceptance, welcome, and solace that people feel safe, honored, and a part of something bigger than themselves? There just might be some principles evident in these concerts and gatherings that might give us a clue as to what we are missing in our current configurations and communities.

A cursive look at much of the art currently making the rounds in film, music, and literature, reveals that the fear of death and survival in this complex world is on the minds and hearts of humankind. Sociologists and psychologists have observed that the fight or flight adrenaline engagement of many throughout the world is exacerbated by a deep sense of dislocation. How can I survive in a world that is hostile and ultimately not for me?

Events like Burning Man offer a respite , brief as it may be that says we can survive this currently hostile globe and that there just might be ways of living that could heal and assuage some of these over powering fears. As I age, I am tempted to look at the rage and aloofness of many in their teens and twenties with a degree of disgust and disdain. Get over it I often say but how can those younger than myself get over what in truth is still resident in my soul? I too carry within me a deep sense of dislocation and personal isolation. Who are my people? Where is my tribe?

Extreme fundamentalism in the Muslim world has brought violence onto the world’s stage as one of the primary ways humans solve their problems. If I am threatened, the goal is to destroy those who I deem as threatening me. Now my sense of belonging is built around enemies and fear. Ironically, much of modern day Christian fundamentalism has fostered a degree of this kind of paranoia as well. Even though it is clear than many pundits in the news media see fundamentalism through the lens of disdain for religion of any kind, much of their fodder comes from behavior that fosters little sense of community and belonging.

We (Christians) long for a sense of connection and yet much of our rhetoric to those on the outside is much the opposite. Can we display such a posture to others on the outside and not in fact live out that same posture to one another on the inside? Out of the heart the mouth speaks. We are within how we act without. Events like Burning Man and Lollapalooza seem to welcome everyone. It may appear as if I am over idealizing these events for the sake of a point and I am sure there is some truth here. But anyone researching the Burning Man event will quickly see that a message of belonging is deeply embedded in the core values of the festival’s creators.

The fact that this event takes place in the desert should not be overlooked. Just to attend such an event takes degree of risk and survival skills. Some Christians and others offer food and shelter to those fainthearted who attend the event for the first time and are unaware of just how hot the desert sun can become and how much a few days of celebration can deplete the body and soul. Now that is evangelism!

I am a part of a community that honors but does not worship art. To a few it is evident that something transformational is taking place in the act of creation at Burning Man. Liberation, empowerment, even atonement are concepts that emerge in the living art pieces that are offered up at the event. Creativity brings empowerment. Our community holds artistic expression with a high degree of respect and sees over and over again the healing that art and creativity can bring to those making art as well as those experiencing the expression. Cultural studies have informed of us how important symbols are to any community’s sense of belonging. That is why the indigenous non-commercial nature of Burning Man’s display is vital to the attendee’s sense of empowerment. They are sharing themselves. They are not buying someone else's sense of self or offering up someone else's reflections on life. These are gifts from the tribe. These are the aromas of real soul food. Limits of expression are surely stretched and hedonism may indeed be manifest but deeper into the matrix of this creative orgy one finds delight, abandonment and an unabashed sense of the sacredness of the self. I use the word sacred lightly here but indeed when people offer themselves without desire for fame, power, reimbursement, something can begin to happen. Those receiving the gifts now see them as divine offerings of the glory of the human.

For people to feel a sense of belonging, a hidden deeper part of themselves must be allowed voice. For people to feel welcomed in our community and empowered, we must quickly offer them a place where who and what they perceive themselves to be has a place of expression. To belong is to feel the release of one’s voice without shame. Could it be that some of what some may consider hedonism and paganism is really a yearning for a sacred place where one can break open into something beautiful? Do we in the Church truly see humankind as beautiful or do we first see them as sinners flawed and broken. I suggest that gatherings like Burning Man appeal to the part in many of us who wonder if people would accept us if they knew our real feelings on sexuality, on politics, on family, on money, on power even on one another. Real dialogue will only come when our love of God’s creation in others transcends are need or desire to share some message of truth. Living the truth leads with love and an open door particularly on weirdness, brokenness, and oddities of all kinds. Just how beautiful might the world appear when we give a place for these "wild" expressions of God's creation?

The Telling of the World

2008-07-24T14:10:00.000-07:00

It’s a Catalyst conference!!! Way up in the nose bleed seats I watch the display below. John Eldridge emerges from the shadows at the rear of the stage while five or six large video screens pulse with his name, his topic, and some non representational images that seem to be there for sensate reasons alone. The band pumps out a popular tune by Switchfoot and the word Epic jumps out on the screen. It is a special moment for sure.

I love story tellers and Eldridge does not disappoint me. With poetic grace and a natural delivery he precedes to offer up a collage of movie clips that tell a narrative. In many ways his presentation of clips are specifically put together such that they tell of a world, a way of knowing, seeing, hearing and feeling. He speaks to us as an indigenous people who are hungry for symbols and artifacts that represent a distinctly Christian picture of the world. He feeds our famished imaginations.

Eldridge may get the attention in the Christian press and publishing world, but it was many “behind the scenes” technicians and artists that enabled that event to take place and it is to those individuals I offer my thanks, prayers, and exhortation.

As the worship renewal movement grows in its scope and depth, we have begun to understand that true worship is a life lived under His Lordship and that no action, thought or deed are outside that purview. This understanding has now challenged us to take back the imagination from pagan cultures and tell our story our way. There in lies the challenge. What is our story? What are our symbols? What artifacts do we create and honor such that anthropologists years from now would be able to acknowledge what we held dear, what we saw as true, beautiful and good?

As technology becomes demystified and properly critiqued, we begin to see how it can be used to empower our local story and hold fast to what has been handed down. How so?

Disciple the Technicians and Artists

Teams that have programmatic function in the Church often improperly elevate those who have technical skills but possibly little theological insight. Train your team to tell the story with doctrinal integrity. Each team may have a resident theologian or biblical aesthetic. Each experience must engender real character change and that comes from doctrinal clarity and compellingly God honoring art. It is not enough to just have an “experience.”

Archive and House the History

Plumb the depths of Christian symbols online as well as through books and periodicals. Make these findings available for accessible research and use. Someone needs to be the “content” person for future gatherings. Their task is to serve as a librarian and historical archiver who chronicles and stores the symbols, artifacts, and sacred writings for future and repeated use.

Test the Art

What kind of people is the display and experience forming? Sound doctrine and experience can be set forth and still have people be pagan in their behavior. Is our display creating Christlike followers? One test is simple. You will know this by the character of the team you create to form the theological aesthetic. If teams are creating powerful art, their lives will reflect back that reality in their presentation and in the way they act towards one another. Humility is visibly tangible as well as love, kindness and unity.

Support the Creative Act

Whether it is the artists themselves or the entrepreneurial support team around them (business people in your community), benifact that activity and process such that new art, new images and symbols, are being created in the local Church community. Many who receive such great artistic renderings each week (i.e. the local Church) have no idea the time and effort and money it takes to make such things come about. This is a challenge for the Church when pagan cultures have such compellingly powerful artifacts that are forming the flock as well. This is not about competition with other culture(s), however, as simple is better, small is beautiful, and home grown will improve as it is empowered and encouraged.

We are in unique times as it appears that the way people see the world is changing right before our eyes. Technology is also going from being a highly massified delivery system to one that can create niche and localized art and experience. It is this understanding that brings us to our final exhortation.

Redeem the Imagination

Many in the modern world just do not understand why fundamentalist Muslims are so outraged at the influx of American film and literature into their cultures. The Muslims see this telling of the world as false, pagan, and profane. What do we allow our imaginations to experience? Do we see and understand how distinctly different our imaginations our compared to other world views and cultures. In our attempt to redeem and sanctify cultural artifacts from other cultures, we must cautiously submit our own imaginations to what is true, beautiful and good. Guard your imagination and the doorway to your heart and re-present His Word and world with outlandish abandon.

Art Through the Eyes of Worship

2008-07-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

Is art way of seeing? And if so, what is the lense through which art envisions, creates, describes, and frames? I contend that for Christians that lense is worship. Although liturgy can be defined as the "work of the people" and surely means the daily acknowledgment of God's will and purpose in this world, I am referring to worship in a more Sunday, communal gathering sense. This collective formative view of worship is under real questioning in some circles. This may in part be due to the recent market driven relationship of many books and musical creations regarding the issue of worship and its outworking. For some, this heavily commercial driven interest is a dumbing down of what real worship is. I too wonder about the depth and purpose of much of this "product." However, this recent surge of interest in the theology of worship and the many expressions of worship can and should be a good thing. For some worship is a private matter and can be done at home, in nature, on a bus and thus the Sunday or corporate outworking of worship is merely a formality. Regardless of the dumbing down of worship's significance and place in a believer's life, this discussion wants to take another look at the role and position of worship in our lives especially and primarily in the lives of those who create for a living or avocation. The world we live in has made worship private and primarily otherworldly. It has become disembodied from any corporate sense. We hear all the time; "I don't need to go to church to worship. I can worship on my own." Can you? I am sure that if one were held without rescue on some desert island, the Spirit of God is sufficient to embrace us and reveal Himself in some manner. Rather than make the anomaly the case, let's just think about our own American world if you will. Every Sunday in thousands of cities and towns throughout this nation, churches focus on some form of worship. They enact some sort of liturgy corporately and through this practice hope to assist their disciples in learning of the God they corporately worship. This rehearsal, learning, and enactment bring with them the narrative of the faith and display openly the symbols that form and inform those who choose to believe. Because for many worship is seen as a retreat into some private inner space, many eschew corporate expressions of creedal faith and corporate involvement (e.g. Communion) as being highly formal and avoid these trappings. It is clear, however, that some sort of formation is taking place based on the symbolization of faith enacted during the time we call the" worship service."In recent conversations with artists I have found that there is significant focus on what many might call the immanence or "sacredness of everyday life". Surely God's creation is good and surely all experience can be brought under His Lordship. He is Emmanuel in His creation. However, I think the inordinately strong need by some in the arts to see daily life as sacred may be a reaction to a deeper need to make corporate worship more holistically formative and less technical and rational. Because many churches focus their Sunday gathering on the sermon as the center of the gathering, worshipers are forced to see God through this lense of reason and logic. God is an idea and worship and service are technique. Don't get me wrong, understanding is important to faith and information and biblical exegesis is vital to the tutorial side of being a disciple. However, this penchant for causing the corporate gathering to be forced through the vortex of rational, propositional prescriptions makes faith more of a science than a pilgrimage, more of a course than a way of living. Corporate worship must be re introduced as the sole purpose for which we gather corporately on any day. Our narrative is rich with history and experience in this regard. Worship need not be a retreat or personal experience centered on the mind or the emotions but a corporate reenactment of what it means to be Christian. Aidan Kanvanaugh (a Benedictine liturgical theologian) tells us that in worship the church "does the world as God means it to be done." It is at this point that the issue of creativity and the arts come in. For creative types, a vantage point is essential. In years past through the lense of modernity, this vantage point has been full of self reflective emotion, therapeutic doubt and suspicion, romanticized projections of a higher awareness, and a cynicism that causes all experience (even worship) to come under undue scrutiny and critique. This lense pushes corporate worship to the side and makes it more about institutional power, more about the confusion of symbols, more about the darker side of church history and its inability to gather the faithful around some sacrosanct formal technique that works for everyone all the time. Ironic is it not that the freedom many in the arts crave is actually destroyed by their own famished imaginations that cannot envision a hopefulness around the powerful formative experience of corporate worship. This famished imagination is starved in part because of the ill focused lense through which they (the aritst) are attempting to frame life. By rooting all experience ultimately in themselves, corporate worship, which to some degree is a willingness to die to self at best and a brief moment of self-forgetting at worst, becomes a cultic activity which powerfully confronts the highly individualized formative lense of modern creativity.The term realism comes up over and over again in the creative lives of many artists I encounter. I ask above if art was away of seeing. If the goal of life is to see reality (life as it really is and I question this as the ultimate goal), my question would be "what is reality." Once again I contend that only through the vantage point of worship does one see what reality really is. We were created to worship God. If art is an attempt to capture the "essence" of life if you will, then one must know when this essence is revealing itself and know how to capture that essence in some medium. Seeing, knowing, capturing are all activities that worship rightly aligns. When we see as God sees then His creation is rightly displayed. We will know as He knows when our experience is formed out of His mind and His creative imagination. When we capture according to His will then the manner in which we perform, inform, and create is equally glorifying. In worship, the moment of truth is not only symbolized but also brought into our understanding. By seeing worship and in particular communion as the source out of which our humanity is made complete and whole and holy, we then can see and rightly divide all manner of experience.Thus, for artists, worship is central to their aesthetic. Without a deep experience in corporate worship I question whether the art that comes forth will ultimately bring the Father glory. He is not selfish but He does want our adoration. This worship will then spill over into Monday and the rest of the week. Everyday life will indeed reflect His glory. God is not held in a box in some formal expression of worship on Sunday. He is, however, powerfully revealed in these practices and artists must humble themselves to find the vantage point from which real creativity will flow. As many artists seek some sort of aesthetic discipline, I suggest that the central discipline to which they submit is corporate worship. Learn of your deepest parts, find and encounter with other pilgrims" the vital presence of the living Lord in the Eucharist, in the bread, in the cup, in the powerful symbols of the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the coming wedding banquet," as Rodney Clapp asserts. Rehearse this with your family. See the very skin of God take on life and breathe the very breath of God on His children. Let your imagination be informed by the very powerful act of worship and let the symbols and metaphors that emanate from your aesthetic find their ultimate meaning in the adoration and worship of our God. Worship is the vantage point through which art becomes truly aligned and redemptive. Get your creativity infused with the power of the Holy Spirit-take communion today with your family. Rejoice and go in God creatively.

How Then Should We Imagine?

2008-07-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

Conversations After then End of Time

We are all crowded into the tiniest of spaces. This space is not deemed sacred as of yet. It is not on our maps to date. We did not arrive here for it is beyond destination. We are still in mourning over the death of time and history. We speak of things as though they were still. We remain encased in a way of seeing aand knowing that blurs what is beyond. We strain and squint for clarity only to see ourselves reflected back over and over again.

This is the end of time. Corporate lamenting longs to explore but alas we cling to the edge of time unable to imagine another world. Our assumptions, much like a mobius strip, keep bringing us back to the same place. We have accurately described the past but find that old language unable to inform the felt meaning that is brushing up against this razor thin edge. Our former ways of knowing are collapsing right before our eyes and the blind understanding drains our hearts of desire. We are being emptied of ourselves.

In this emptying something radiant appears beyond the horizon. Is it the futility of everything attainable? How can this futility orb with beauty? How can this collapsing serve us? Finally modern humankind is beginning to see true beauty breaking into to this tiny space, this old broken crucible of time. It is a blessed event.

The story is unfolding. It contains us. It forms us. It draws into its narrative vortex. The portal to this emergence is our imaginations. The imagination is the language of the soul. It is the faith needed to name, discern, negotiate, and pray. We do not know the world through a concrete set of principles but imagine it. The imagining is beyond real in the sense of its manner of engagement. It is felt knowing that the imagination offers us. It takes us out of time in that it reveals the eternal nature of our souls. Some may call it ecstatic but it is really the only way the imagination can inform us of something that knows us beyond the literal. To know in this manner is to discover God. That is the ultimate message of our transcending. More than beyond, it is here, for here is sacred in light of this revelation. Our imaginations illuminate the revealing. Our imaginations know the narrowness of time and the vast unveiling of wonder that comes through the attributional recognition of His beauty. He is speaking. Can we taste Him? His aroma is wafting through our hearts can we see Him? In this synethesia, the beauty of the rainbow sings, the mountains dance, and the very God of the universe offers Himself up as bread for our souls.

This capturing is an eternal dance. We are lovers, we are radiant with expectation, and we are illumined by passion. The incarnation breathes from our very lungs. My heart is His heart. It takes courage to imagine a world as revealed through revelation, the long and beautiful story of the Church, and the story of those close to my life at this juncture. My fallenness continually paints and arranges experience as though I were the center of the universe. I want all things to flow towards my benefit. I want all individuals to love me as I long to be loved. But alas, this seldom happens. So I can at any time fall into despair and lament my seeming lack. To imagine a source of joy that goes beyond my self interest, to see a world where beauty, truth, goodness, and love are preeminent responses. What am I to do? Submit my imagination to a vision beyond myself. Place myself inside a story that is larger than my own personal story. This does not negate or lessen the meaning or power of my own personal narrative. It merely gives it context.

The imagination may very well be the mother tongue of the soul. To speak of its depths is to listen to its musings and with great care and stewardship name and tell the world with devotion and wonder. We need a place where the divine in the ordinary is observed. This will be a place where songs, lamentations and confessions begin to emerge as their voice and presence approach the threshold of God with us. Let our imaginations prepare the way.

How to Paint a Miracle

2008-07-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

First you take the vapor like membrane between realms
And ever so slowly
Pull it away from the soul
Hold it up to the sun
Make sure it is a day
Clear and warm with light
To the left of the entire sky
Outside the world’s frame
St. Francis is singing
You will not hear the melody
But its colors will resonate
With your outstretched soul
Move your hands away from your sides
And prepare to be stigmatized
From the wounds
Azure blue will pour
Retain this sound
For it is both tragic and glorious
Only the red finch
Was made aware of this revealing
He is so delighted and will
Trumpet your ecstasy
As you arise from this enlargement
Pay close attention to the sounds
Of trees and stones directly in your purview
Tears will flow freely
At first this may feel disquieting
Do not be afraid
Angels are withholding nothing
From this unveiling
As you see now you know
It is good
These witnesses are sacraments
And along with azure blue offer themselves up
The veil is now removed……….Your miracle may now be painted

David Bunker

Art as a Form of Sabbath

2008-07-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

Resting from activity is an intentional manner articulates a posture of the soul. It says that business, obsessive activity, and grandiose perceptions of one’s own talent are mechanisms of avoidance. They are purposeful excursions into the realm of nowhere, nothing in particular, and abstraction. For my art to have the resonance of authenticity, my life must be lived. Lived in a place, in time, with a people, for a purpose that transcends my own dreams and desires. This is not to lessen the power of those dreams but to give them context.
The fear of creating and the fear of rest are kindred emotions. God’s desire to create humankind was born of a deep longing for fellowship and community. The triune nature of God’s character in eternity is a powerful metaphor. It is a cosmic example of who God is and how God acts and engages. To see rest and the Sabbath as postures necessary to “live” in wholeness is to truly see how God sees you. You are a gift to His creation. Made in His image, He not only allows but intends for you to interact in such a manner that your life deposits that aroma and presence of His heart. Thus, it is vital for artists to experience God’s love and care on a personal level. This is more than a theological assent. It is willingness to sit through the emptiness and inability of humans to truly love themselves as God does thus longing for something more.

Rhythms and Seasons of Creativity

The doing and the resting
The pondering and the concluding
The wondering and the decision making
The imagining and the making real
The thinking and the doing

Setting Apart as a Response to Life

Our sojourner status will always place us in a miss ional position to this world. Being ”in but not of” is the constant posture we take and we begin to see that is this theological conundrum that underlies how we are going to engage, pay attention to, and honor our experience and the experiences of others.

Real art clearly sees the intricate interweaving of dark and light, falleness and wholeness, beauty and ugliness, goodness and evil, truth and falsehood. To truly see the ongoing tension of living in the world while seeing it for its transient fleeting nature and yet not grow callous and cynical can only be accomplished through one’s own personal redemption. I cannot offer forgiveness to others beyond the depth of my own redemption and atoning.
As we approach the emptiness almost as a sacred pilgrimage, we begin to find that at the core of this frightening quiet and seeming emptiness is love and care. To beloved in fullness is to be completely emptied. This is the irony of this Sabbath resting. It is an acknowledgment of one’s own limited gifts to even fulfill oneself let alone the world or others.
When life is lived in all its glory, that glory is God’s reflection in my very being. When I am present to my own condition, I will feel and know at a much deeper level. I will move into the world from a place of rest and trust. This allows the creator much more sway in my soul.

I Love Beauty

2008-07-05T08:41:00.000-07:00

The audacious poetry of string theory

The ubiquitous emerald greenness of the Gulf of Mexico

The over powering gaze of an Afghan women caught unaware at work

The rich mahogany staircase of a mid-Victorian home

The sensual warmth of patchouli oil in a San Francisco head shop

The wafting message of Italian bake goods on the west side Chicago restaurant

The clang clanging of cow bells on the edge of the Swiss Alps

The abandoned joy of the tango meringue and salsa in a west side Chicago flat

The strange cacophony of Jewish men’s prayers being offered up at the Wailing Wall

The psychedelic colors of an exotic deep sea fish and all his cousins at the Shedd Aquarium

The drip of fresh musk melon down my chin

The guffaws of old men gathered for breakfast at Millers Diner in Washington Courthouse Ohio

The eternal view of heaven in a child’s eyes

The wholeness of being in time and space, knowing and living it during corporate worship

The gaze of respect I see in the face of a white teenager during the concert of B. B. King

The embrace of an old friend brought back in to fellowship

I love creation

I love the hologram the Father calls creation

The entire whole

I love it all

I cry for its entire restoration

I weep for a clearer glimpse of its edenic roots

But through the reflection of the beauatific vision

I see the actual face of God

I see that it is good

He is good

He is present

He is with us.

Can you see Him? Can you stand inside that idea? Rest there for awhile.

This is the beginning of beauty. It is His handiwork. His imagination is our inheritance. He is the imagining power of all creation. Could God actually be imagination itself? Close to God, we can imagine along with Him. We experience this beauty consciously. We can see the shear wonder of an incoming hurricane even though we know its powerful danger. Animals flee for survival. We too flee but can look over our shoulder and ponder the magnificence of the power. The textured beauty of the darkened clouds rushing on the horizon. Likewise we can see beauty even in the despair. Even in the falleness, not just small remnants but large expressions of His goodness call out. (Shindler’s List)) Are we listening? Are tasting? Are we looking?

For the Artist at the Start of the Day

2008-07-01T12:11:00.000-07:00

May morning be astir with the harvest of night;
Your mind quickening to the Eros of a new question,
Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse
That cut right through the surface to a source.
May this be a morning of innocent beginnings,
When the gift within you slips clear
Of the sticky web of the personal
With its hurt and it haunting
And fixed fortress corners,
A morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence,
May your imagination know
The grace of perfect danger,
To reach beyond imitation,
And the wheel of repetition,
Deep into the call of all
The unselfish and unsolved
Until the veil of the unknown yields
And something original begins
To stir toward your senses
And grow in your heart
In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard
That calls space to
A different shape
May it be its own force field
And dwell uniquely
Between the heart and the light
To surprise the hungry eye
By how deftly it fits
About its secret loss

To Bless the Space Between Us
A Book of Blessings
by John O'Donohue: His Last Book and Legacy

Art & Permenance

2008-07-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

In many ways, the technocratic capitalistic world has unwittingly created a deep sense of rootlessness. This perpetual restlessness has in some sense been harnessed only by the incessant need to buy and consume. Most of our art world is driven and subsidized by the world of advertisement and regardless of how beautiful the experience of art one may have in a commercial venue or exchange, the final realization is that the beauty was inspired and brought into being solely for the purposes of commoditization.

Thus, much of the deep alienation humanity has been in part due to the lack of permanence inherent in the world of art and beauty. We expect to see this world rust, decay, to see buildings torn down, to see wetlands and nature destroyed solely for the purposes of big business’s expansion.
We have this holy longing for something that is indestructible, immutable, and transcendent. We hunger for something that is capable of enduring, of remaining long after our mortal coil leaves this realm. This age of transience brought on by extreme relativism, has taken the durability of art ands tradition built out of love and community and replaced it with an age of trickle down hip.

It is said that when Teilhard de Chardin was a young boy he ran crying from the room after his first haircut. Some days following he began to collect little bits of iron but when he discovered their corrosion, he began to collect rocks instead. “Later as an adult his great mind attempted to seize onto truths that were indestructible, capable of standing up to the ravages of fire, and rust, whim and fashion, relativity and contingency.” Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas Teilhard, The man, the Priest, the Scientist (New York, Doubleday, 1977, pp. 23ff.

There is s restoration taking place on many levels in our world today. The restoration of beauty is just one of them. However, I do not find it odd that when the Tsunami hit, artists banded together to do a concert which was broadcast world. Why? Because great art moves the soul of humankind. It can make us noble. It can make us hunger and a thirst for truth. IT can soften our hearts to our own hard heartedness.

The nobility of the human imagination has been marred in recent years. Perverse modernism has made the ugly, the cynical, the despairing the center piece of our human engagement. This movement has honored the brokeness of our existence over against any of the parts of our humanity that calls out for change, for truth, and goodness.

In many ways the restoration that is taking place in the art world is a restoration of faith. In some cases it manifests itself in actual returning to the religious roots that fostered much of the great art in ages past. May we discover the trinity of truth, goodness, & beauty once again.

The Poetry of Loss

2008-06-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

There is a way of tears that one must travel. It seldom comes in youth and hardly ever during the years when our egos see us as saviors of the world, beauty incarnate or adoringly sensual. The way of tears comes in the luminance of darkness, in the bitter taste of the wine bottle’s final drops when we are still not numb enough to sleep. This way of tears tells us that we indeed are alone in this world. If there is no God we are all being mocked by some cruel joke the pundits of story and rhyme that has been cruelly thrust upon us. Even sleep is fitful and knowingly impermanent.

So we weep and we weep. This emptying sucks something out and let’s something in. I now have learned to welcome the weight of the mortal coil. It rests heavy upon my soul’s covering. I cannot breathe and I should not breathe for in these moments the heart of God weeps as well and I feel Him unlike other times of hubris and self inflation.

But, I cannot wish the way of tears upon me anymore than I can wish it away. It is the muse of both hinterlands. It touches both realms and let’s me see how dark I am... how dark we are ....how dark He is but oh so luminous as well.
So the way is never requested but cannot be denied. No one can ultimately describe this path for it words are such small and puny ciphers of reality and truth. There is no truth on this way for there is no falsehood either. This way is beyond the symbols of ritual and code. The revelations come beyond the reading of the page, outside the view of the heart and only let the soul embrace the furies in moments of divine loss and emptying.

Somewhere on the journey we catch a glimpse of the severe mercy that guides our steps and we know that being broken open sends our soul outside our knowing to places only our compassion will ever remember.

So now we can be comforted for we know this darkness and we know that someone has gone before and the well worn dirt of this secret road was meant as a guide just for us. Out of this forest of black we walk and yet long for another glimpse of its radiance. This is the poetry of tears.