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!
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
The Lure of the Local
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.
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.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Losing One's Mind to FInd One's Voice
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).
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).
Monday, September 1, 2008
Evidential Power of Poetry
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
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
Saturday, August 30, 2008
MIles Davis Once Said
A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
Do not fear mistakes. There are none.
Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
For me, music and life are all about style.
I know what I've done for music, but don't call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.
I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.
I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.
If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!
It's always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don't know where it comes from, it's just there and I don't question it.
The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
You can dominate a game if you dominate on the line... We're just going to have to go out there and work hard and blow people off the ball, and let our runners do what they do best.
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
Do not fear mistakes. There are none.
Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
For me, music and life are all about style.
I know what I've done for music, but don't call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.
I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.
I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.
If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!
It's always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don't know where it comes from, it's just there and I don't question it.
The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
You can dominate a game if you dominate on the line... We're just going to have to go out there and work hard and blow people off the ball, and let our runners do what they do best.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Musings on The Beatles "She's Leaving Home"
Sweetest Sensation
The universe stopped and said
“She’s Leaving Home”
Pay attention to the harmony in the chorus
It will settle once and for all this sadness
This is the sound
You have been longing for
The exact replica of eternity’s lamentation
This is the echo
That has resonated down through the ages
This is the Father’s declaration
The clatter and jingle of divine vamping
Let it fashion your desire
Let it enlighten your mourning
Deem it beautiful
Sing the harmony
Enlist all melancholy
And form a Gospel choir
One that preaches the truth of sadness & woe
One that exalts the darker shades
The shadows of distress
Redeemed by song
Restored by the loveliness of heaven’s racket
The heart aflame in stunningly creature like rhyme
And then reconcile the entire history of human trouble
With one harmonic response
Synchronize your soul
And let it rip
The universe stopped and said
“She’s Leaving Home”
Pay attention to the harmony in the chorus
It will settle once and for all this sadness
This is the sound
You have been longing for
The exact replica of eternity’s lamentation
This is the echo
That has resonated down through the ages
This is the Father’s declaration
The clatter and jingle of divine vamping
Let it fashion your desire
Let it enlighten your mourning
Deem it beautiful
Sing the harmony
Enlist all melancholy
And form a Gospel choir
One that preaches the truth of sadness & woe
One that exalts the darker shades
The shadows of distress
Redeemed by song
Restored by the loveliness of heaven’s racket
The heart aflame in stunningly creature like rhyme
And then reconcile the entire history of human trouble
With one harmonic response
Synchronize your soul
And let it rip
Sunday, August 17, 2008
The Age of Beauty
Giving Direction to the Next Epochal Shift
This is the age of self consciousness. It is therefore appropriate that we sense with great existential angst the turning now taking place in our cultural mythos. It is as if all things are suspended and we are suspicious of even doubt itself. Our ways of engaging have turned on us and like a dog tethered to at leash we are finally too tired to try and run away.Call it the grand humbling but few get to see the collapse of such a powerful meta narrative as modernism and live to be involved in the creation of a new language and way of knowing.
On the other side we find a few degrees of true reflection give us this invigorated sense that the "real is returning." We can now let pretense and cynicism fall by the wayside and breath deep the very air of God's imagination. What a wonder this world is. What a wonder the very act of experience is. We can be grateful, We can attribute to Him glory and honor and even resonate with Him on a strange level as a "creator" of sorts. Not the isolated exalted Creator that mocks the brokenness of humankind but the Creative Mind that sees redemption flowing through it all.
This day I will acknowledge the beauty that comes from embracing the dailiness of my life. The sweet soap smell upon my hands. The amazing connectedness of blogging. The comfort of a warm house with books and remnants of a party strewn every which way. The awareness of God's tender touch in my acknowledgment of my inability to understand hardly anything. I am not an expert. I await this new age where God's beauty is pre-Imminent.
This is the age of self consciousness. It is therefore appropriate that we sense with great existential angst the turning now taking place in our cultural mythos. It is as if all things are suspended and we are suspicious of even doubt itself. Our ways of engaging have turned on us and like a dog tethered to at leash we are finally too tired to try and run away.Call it the grand humbling but few get to see the collapse of such a powerful meta narrative as modernism and live to be involved in the creation of a new language and way of knowing.
On the other side we find a few degrees of true reflection give us this invigorated sense that the "real is returning." We can now let pretense and cynicism fall by the wayside and breath deep the very air of God's imagination. What a wonder this world is. What a wonder the very act of experience is. We can be grateful, We can attribute to Him glory and honor and even resonate with Him on a strange level as a "creator" of sorts. Not the isolated exalted Creator that mocks the brokenness of humankind but the Creative Mind that sees redemption flowing through it all.
This day I will acknowledge the beauty that comes from embracing the dailiness of my life. The sweet soap smell upon my hands. The amazing connectedness of blogging. The comfort of a warm house with books and remnants of a party strewn every which way. The awareness of God's tender touch in my acknowledgment of my inability to understand hardly anything. I am not an expert. I await this new age where God's beauty is pre-Imminent.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
What Does the Gospel Look Like?
Developing a Biblical Aesthetic
Art as Embodied Obedience
What does repentance look like? I have heard that statement countless times in my men's group. The query is to reveal to the penitent a vision of what his repentance will look like in terms of behavior. If I forgive, what bodily activity reveals & manifests that heart condition? If I am grateful, what actual embodiment will be manifest such that others will see and recognize gratefulness? Is it possible that character and discipleship are also involved in what the Gospel will look like on any given Sunday in our worship gathering? Does our worship demand a deeper grasp of embodied obedience and its artistic outworking?
I would contend that aesthetics (art making) needs to come under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I would also put forth that our penchant for music (with lyrics) over the visual, theatrical and performance arts reflects a tendency to make obedience internal, private, and cerebral at the expense of bodily obedience. By bodily obedience I mean that real discipleship looks like something. Real worship looks like something. What does it look like to obey God with our creative talents and why is the Church by in large void of symbolizing artifacts and rituals that are specifically Christian? How is the Gospel displayed or embodied in our worship gatherings?
Is it possible that the emergence of a biblical aesthetic (Christianly way of doing and making art) will only happen when we experience and embrace an ecclesiological redefinition of culture, community, character, and virtue? Why should the church care about the arts? What kind of art would an obedient Christian create? How does that relate to our worship gathering? The convergence of interpretive communities fosters much of the dialogue surrounding the role and biblical use of the arts in our worship gatherings. From the modern church growth movement to the neo orthodox ancient future enclave, many are clamoring for a renewed sense of the arts and their role in the Church. Those with Protestant roots feel much more comfortable with music as one of the arts used in faith formation while our orthodox brothers and sisters seem to feel much more confident with a sacramental view of the arts. Once again, the convergence is generating some great dialogue as to the strengths and weaknesses of certain art forms and why certain traditions feel more comfortable with one than the others.
Current State of Aesthetics in the Church
First of all, we do have art in our churches. Semiotics, the study of the ideological nature of objects, signs and codes, has revealed that meaning making appears to be what humans do. There is no such thing as a bare wall, and empty platform, a plain sanctuary. Semiotics goes on to tell us that through the study called proxemics, one can determine the values and ideological intentions of a people from their architecture and spatial organization. In other words, our churches, homes, and office buildings do tell us what we value and how we value. Is the housing boom in America directly proportionate to our need to make our homes a sanctuary rather than our sacred worship spaces? Thus, the idea that we have yet (especially in Protestant circles) to utilize the arts is a misnomer. We have utilized a formal sensibility (all be it unconsciously) regarding what we call our sanctuary or sacred space. I would contend that most of our engagement with the arts and symbols in the modern Protestant church has been borrowed from pagan cultures. "How can we sing our song in a strange land"?
Is There Such a Thing as Christian Art?
Is Christian art intrinsically different that pagan art? The emerging church (postmodern) movement borrows heavily from pagan sensibilities and contends that even the fallen world gives God glory and can be redeemed and sanctified. John Howard Yoder's critique of Neihbur's Christ and Culture may shed some light here. Have we allowed the church to be subsumed by pagan cultures in the assumption that culture is really "Culture?" Have we unwittingly offered up the meaning making activities involved in artistic endeavors to those "outside" our borders? Do we have a conceptualization of culture that unwittingly takes away the power of the Church as a meaning making enclave in its own right? In other words, do we use the term "Culture" as if it is monolithic, all pervasive, and autonomous? Do we believe the Church and Christians actually exist in this atmosphere called "Culture" and work out their salvation under the purview of this overarching all pervasive force? Much of the Church's response to modernity in recent years has been deeply influenced by Neihbur's transformationlist approach. His template for the engagement and interaction with culture has unwittingly imbued the secularized understanding of values, beliefs, attitudes, aesthetics, artifacts, etc. to be subsumed under the umbrella, if you will, of "Culture" as defined by years of enlightenment thought.
Modernism's Legacy
The pagan worlds I speak of are those art-making communities that exist in numerous locations from the elite Avant Garde art world and Hollywood to the worlds of capitalism and advertising. By controlling the manner in which art is done and discussed, they frame the argument and force all that enter to accept certain axioms about the nature of creativity and culture. I would offer up that the symbolization of consciousness has been primarily formed by modernists who see suspicion and doubt as much more trustworthy in the search for ultimate reality. They also see tradition as suspect and see the "new" as a natural outworking of humankind's march towards progress. Their view of the sacred is highly therapeutic (Jungian) and disembodied.
Art and the Local Church
So how do we bring the discussion of art making back under the Lordship of Christ and become much more intentional and conscious of our aesthetic responsibilities? The ultimate responsibility of symbolizing our worship gatherings falls on local leadership. There is a great danger in the age of commoditized worship materials that communities default their symbol making responsibilities to "professionals" and performers, and para church organizations. Pagan cultures often set the sonic standards for our musical presentations. Theatrical and drama offerings often draw their vignettes from TV and film characters. Artistic renderings are either tremendously dated or pulled down from the Internet and contextually defined for optimal use. The point here is that our sources for usable symbols are often initially formed with intentions and motivations that are far from Christ like. Can they be sanctified? Certainly. Is all art done outside Christian circles unworthy of engagement? No. The issue here, however, is localized obedience to the challenge of having our worship look like something that springs from obedience and the ongoing story within our midst. What paintings, songs, sculptings spring from a desire locally to tell the story of our redemption?. God is speaking in history and in time. Our story is being told every day of the week as we engage the family of God, non believers, and then when we gather on Sunday for corporate worship. What does this redemption look like? Is it truthfully displayed? Is it beautiful? Is it worthy of the God we serve? Is it offered up as a gift to those in which we walk this sojourn?
For Christians, issues of worth and beauty are attributional. "Worship is about assigning and recognizing worthiness-and ultimate worthiness at that," according to Rodney Clapp in Peculiar People. Thus, we must redeem the act of creativity and the development of a Christian imagination from modernism's attempt to find an all-pervasive definition for beauty. Postmodernism has assisted us in the understanding that aesthetics are locally developed and sustained. Is Howard Finster better than Piccaso? Is Bob Dylan better than Beethoven? Is there such a thing as a classically trained saw player? Regardless of our own personal tastes and the canons with which we honor, it is clear that what and why Christians deem something beautiful has more to do with the person doing it and his or her motivation than some set standard that all people under all circumstances will be able to grasp and identify. This is not to rule out issues of craftsmanship and skill. But even those issues are locally defined and arbitrated. Thus, a part of the redemption of the arts will be to rescue aesthetics from modernism's tendency to abstract art from community and give it meaning as an essence. This is why discussions about art as the sublime tend to disengage the act of art making from community and make it some esoteric endeavor by a genius or "gifted" individual. For Christians, who makes art and why is as important as the assessment of its worth on a personal taste level.
The Outworking of a Biblical Aesthetic
Questions for leaders may look like this. Who are the artists in our community? Even more concretely, who are the painters, the poets, the sculptors, the dancers, the musicians, and the graphic artists? Are they being discipled? Are they seeing their lives as gifts? Does the church make a place for their obedience to be manifest? Does the church recognize beauty as a character trait of God? Does the church desire to empower the community to symbolize itself through its gifts and talents? Is our worship gathering the ultimate vortex where obedience is seen and embodied? So on any given Sunday in any given church those in leadership are struggling to inform and form the experience of worshipping God. More than words, more than songs, more than pictures, more than symbols, this process is a Godly calling wrought with perilous heights and depths. Let us step out of our comfort zones with certain artistic expressions and forms and begin to redeem all things and bring them under His Lordship. The Church can once again become a benefactor of the arts. The Church can once again see a renewal or renaissance of the arts that celebrate God's benevolence in that He allows His creatures to join with Him in the act of restoring His world and people back to Himself.
You are worthy, O Lord to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created. Revelation 4:11.
Art as Embodied Obedience
What does repentance look like? I have heard that statement countless times in my men's group. The query is to reveal to the penitent a vision of what his repentance will look like in terms of behavior. If I forgive, what bodily activity reveals & manifests that heart condition? If I am grateful, what actual embodiment will be manifest such that others will see and recognize gratefulness? Is it possible that character and discipleship are also involved in what the Gospel will look like on any given Sunday in our worship gathering? Does our worship demand a deeper grasp of embodied obedience and its artistic outworking?
I would contend that aesthetics (art making) needs to come under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I would also put forth that our penchant for music (with lyrics) over the visual, theatrical and performance arts reflects a tendency to make obedience internal, private, and cerebral at the expense of bodily obedience. By bodily obedience I mean that real discipleship looks like something. Real worship looks like something. What does it look like to obey God with our creative talents and why is the Church by in large void of symbolizing artifacts and rituals that are specifically Christian? How is the Gospel displayed or embodied in our worship gatherings?
Is it possible that the emergence of a biblical aesthetic (Christianly way of doing and making art) will only happen when we experience and embrace an ecclesiological redefinition of culture, community, character, and virtue? Why should the church care about the arts? What kind of art would an obedient Christian create? How does that relate to our worship gathering? The convergence of interpretive communities fosters much of the dialogue surrounding the role and biblical use of the arts in our worship gatherings. From the modern church growth movement to the neo orthodox ancient future enclave, many are clamoring for a renewed sense of the arts and their role in the Church. Those with Protestant roots feel much more comfortable with music as one of the arts used in faith formation while our orthodox brothers and sisters seem to feel much more confident with a sacramental view of the arts. Once again, the convergence is generating some great dialogue as to the strengths and weaknesses of certain art forms and why certain traditions feel more comfortable with one than the others.
Current State of Aesthetics in the Church
First of all, we do have art in our churches. Semiotics, the study of the ideological nature of objects, signs and codes, has revealed that meaning making appears to be what humans do. There is no such thing as a bare wall, and empty platform, a plain sanctuary. Semiotics goes on to tell us that through the study called proxemics, one can determine the values and ideological intentions of a people from their architecture and spatial organization. In other words, our churches, homes, and office buildings do tell us what we value and how we value. Is the housing boom in America directly proportionate to our need to make our homes a sanctuary rather than our sacred worship spaces? Thus, the idea that we have yet (especially in Protestant circles) to utilize the arts is a misnomer. We have utilized a formal sensibility (all be it unconsciously) regarding what we call our sanctuary or sacred space. I would contend that most of our engagement with the arts and symbols in the modern Protestant church has been borrowed from pagan cultures. "How can we sing our song in a strange land"?
Is There Such a Thing as Christian Art?
Is Christian art intrinsically different that pagan art? The emerging church (postmodern) movement borrows heavily from pagan sensibilities and contends that even the fallen world gives God glory and can be redeemed and sanctified. John Howard Yoder's critique of Neihbur's Christ and Culture may shed some light here. Have we allowed the church to be subsumed by pagan cultures in the assumption that culture is really "Culture?" Have we unwittingly offered up the meaning making activities involved in artistic endeavors to those "outside" our borders? Do we have a conceptualization of culture that unwittingly takes away the power of the Church as a meaning making enclave in its own right? In other words, do we use the term "Culture" as if it is monolithic, all pervasive, and autonomous? Do we believe the Church and Christians actually exist in this atmosphere called "Culture" and work out their salvation under the purview of this overarching all pervasive force? Much of the Church's response to modernity in recent years has been deeply influenced by Neihbur's transformationlist approach. His template for the engagement and interaction with culture has unwittingly imbued the secularized understanding of values, beliefs, attitudes, aesthetics, artifacts, etc. to be subsumed under the umbrella, if you will, of "Culture" as defined by years of enlightenment thought.
Modernism's Legacy
The pagan worlds I speak of are those art-making communities that exist in numerous locations from the elite Avant Garde art world and Hollywood to the worlds of capitalism and advertising. By controlling the manner in which art is done and discussed, they frame the argument and force all that enter to accept certain axioms about the nature of creativity and culture. I would offer up that the symbolization of consciousness has been primarily formed by modernists who see suspicion and doubt as much more trustworthy in the search for ultimate reality. They also see tradition as suspect and see the "new" as a natural outworking of humankind's march towards progress. Their view of the sacred is highly therapeutic (Jungian) and disembodied.
Art and the Local Church
So how do we bring the discussion of art making back under the Lordship of Christ and become much more intentional and conscious of our aesthetic responsibilities? The ultimate responsibility of symbolizing our worship gatherings falls on local leadership. There is a great danger in the age of commoditized worship materials that communities default their symbol making responsibilities to "professionals" and performers, and para church organizations. Pagan cultures often set the sonic standards for our musical presentations. Theatrical and drama offerings often draw their vignettes from TV and film characters. Artistic renderings are either tremendously dated or pulled down from the Internet and contextually defined for optimal use. The point here is that our sources for usable symbols are often initially formed with intentions and motivations that are far from Christ like. Can they be sanctified? Certainly. Is all art done outside Christian circles unworthy of engagement? No. The issue here, however, is localized obedience to the challenge of having our worship look like something that springs from obedience and the ongoing story within our midst. What paintings, songs, sculptings spring from a desire locally to tell the story of our redemption?. God is speaking in history and in time. Our story is being told every day of the week as we engage the family of God, non believers, and then when we gather on Sunday for corporate worship. What does this redemption look like? Is it truthfully displayed? Is it beautiful? Is it worthy of the God we serve? Is it offered up as a gift to those in which we walk this sojourn?
For Christians, issues of worth and beauty are attributional. "Worship is about assigning and recognizing worthiness-and ultimate worthiness at that," according to Rodney Clapp in Peculiar People. Thus, we must redeem the act of creativity and the development of a Christian imagination from modernism's attempt to find an all-pervasive definition for beauty. Postmodernism has assisted us in the understanding that aesthetics are locally developed and sustained. Is Howard Finster better than Piccaso? Is Bob Dylan better than Beethoven? Is there such a thing as a classically trained saw player? Regardless of our own personal tastes and the canons with which we honor, it is clear that what and why Christians deem something beautiful has more to do with the person doing it and his or her motivation than some set standard that all people under all circumstances will be able to grasp and identify. This is not to rule out issues of craftsmanship and skill. But even those issues are locally defined and arbitrated. Thus, a part of the redemption of the arts will be to rescue aesthetics from modernism's tendency to abstract art from community and give it meaning as an essence. This is why discussions about art as the sublime tend to disengage the act of art making from community and make it some esoteric endeavor by a genius or "gifted" individual. For Christians, who makes art and why is as important as the assessment of its worth on a personal taste level.
The Outworking of a Biblical Aesthetic
Questions for leaders may look like this. Who are the artists in our community? Even more concretely, who are the painters, the poets, the sculptors, the dancers, the musicians, and the graphic artists? Are they being discipled? Are they seeing their lives as gifts? Does the church make a place for their obedience to be manifest? Does the church recognize beauty as a character trait of God? Does the church desire to empower the community to symbolize itself through its gifts and talents? Is our worship gathering the ultimate vortex where obedience is seen and embodied? So on any given Sunday in any given church those in leadership are struggling to inform and form the experience of worshipping God. More than words, more than songs, more than pictures, more than symbols, this process is a Godly calling wrought with perilous heights and depths. Let us step out of our comfort zones with certain artistic expressions and forms and begin to redeem all things and bring them under His Lordship. The Church can once again become a benefactor of the arts. The Church can once again see a renewal or renaissance of the arts that celebrate God's benevolence in that He allows His creatures to join with Him in the act of restoring His world and people back to Himself.
You are worthy, O Lord to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created. Revelation 4:11.
Artists as Aliens in the Church
A number of my friends have access and speak into some of the mega church communities around the country. In our passing conversations it is clear that many of the mega churches (over 2,000 people) have a real challenge in keeping artists on staff and in long term volunteering roles. Why does the Church have such difficulty coalescing an artist’s enclave in their community? Here are some of the difficulties and challenges.
A lack of a biblical aesthetic on the part of the Church
Because we have seen the arts (and especially modern art) as frivolous, esoteric, narcissistic, avant garde and therefore often confrontive and critical, eschewing of tradition, and ultimately a bit unruly (the practitioners that is), it has been easier to find what I would call artist doubles. Much like Saddam Hussein had a double, we want someone to look like an artist, act like an artist, talk like an artist, but at the end of the day not “create” like an artist. Many in the role of “Church” artists are theoretically trained but lacking in the vernacular and dialect of the creative. They can ask for wine and cheese and the train station in creative (the language of creative that is –like French or German) but in truth, they do not know the nuances of speaking “creative.” One conversation with a true artist and their faux status emerges.
Example of disenfranchisement:
I have noticed from my stint with contemporary Christian music, REX and Storyville (small labels I was involved in that birthed Sixpence and a lot of very cool music), and later Grassroots, that many college aged kids (especially) will not even dawn the doors of certain Christian events and conferences. Why?
They perceive it as a propagandistic tool of the entrenched middle class evangelical community.
Now they may not articulate it like that but their reticence to sign up for some GMA competition or attend a Christian festival is that they see CCM as a genre of music that is inherently schmaltzy, saccharine, light on authenticity, and non progressive. Their critique has merit. That is another article.
The Church does not have a biblical theology for the early adaption of art and experience. In the Tipping Point, the fact that certain individuals in a society adapt to some trend or happening sooner than others needs to be factored into the Church’s mission and message. Let me say that being a slave to the “shock of the new” is just as misaligned. But the Church is still denying the struggle to embody the Gospel in real time. I will comment later on the church's fatal attempt to be “relevant” or follow trends” because I think that is still some strange capitulation to modernity, but in truth, early adaption when done biblically is really just being missiologically aware of the culture(s) in which the Gospel is being lived out. Because there are a multitude of different cultures out there, there is no “one size fits all.” This is the danger of the mega church franchise model. It is repeating what denominations did in the past. It may have actually worked somewhat in the past as society was much more unilaterally common in their worldviews but I believe that there have always been enough diverse cultural differences from even the North to the South that the parochial “one size fits all “template for the Church ended up dulling the real process of working out the message of the Church in time and space. In other words, by taking something that works in Ohio and trying to get it to work in Alaska, is in some ways denying the fact that God wants to speak in time and space to people and not just give them a manual. Part of obeying Christ’s mandate is the actual outworking of the Holy Spirit in time and space. Once again, moderns have disembodied the Gospel from its actual outworking in the flesh (meaning: in and through human activity and involvement). I have written in another blog about how developing a biblical aesthetic that is empowering local musicians is PARAMOUNT. They are in our midst. Can we see them? Do we honor them? Do we speak CREATIVE?”
Back to issues of the Church’s estrangement of the “creatives.”
Why would the “creatives” be so leery of the Church?
There is a highly romanticized view (allude to in my article on developing a biblical aesthetic) on what creativity and an artist is. I even think C.S. Lewis may have perpetuated this myth regarding the engagement of beauty and art. However, this is in many ways a response to the Church’s narrow, diminished, perfunctory view of the arts. Because the Enlightenment has fostered so much dualism (i.e. sacred secular split) the Church has perpetuated the idea that liturgical art is superior to what I might call life art. By remaining in the dualistic grid of secular versus sacred, they have made much of life off limits for the Christian artist. Think about it, when is the last time you saw someone paint a picture of Christ that you thought was a really great painter. In other words, the creatives eschew liturgical art as being propagandistic. Artists have left liturgical art to the artist doubles. This is sad. We (the Church) have inadvertently fostered this dualism and told our best and brightest (inadvertently), unless and until you are willing to do art as curriculum, we are not interested. This tendency for the Church to make faith technical and theoretical is another by product of the Enlightenment. We have made the Gospel information and drained it of its visceral mystical dimension. We (the Church) are not truly sacramentalists. We do not even believe in the power of the symbol. It’s all in the explaining. It is all in a second order posture of critique and observation. This is not the disposition of an artist. He/she cannot create from this space. Artists will not ultimately bow down to this perception and mandate.
Artists want to see all of life as imbued with the power and presence of God.
This of course enlivens and broadens immensely the potential subject matter. It sanctifies all of life. Early adapters are helping others see God’s glory through creation. As the secularization of life has become so intrusive via media and such, the Church must spend much of its time dialogically doing a Mars Hill on experience. In many ways the Church needs to draw its artist to Mars Hill and not Josh McDowell’s conference on the rational (note Evidence that Demand’s a Verdict). The Church has wanted evidence; the artist has wanted experience and beauty. Beauty…hum. Now there is a word you do not hear mentioned in the Church much do you? You will note that Mars Hill was a place away from the Church. Paul had to go to them. Where in our neighborhoods do artists hang, jam, and interact. GO THERE!!! GO THERE!!!!! We need more portals of entry into our communities that are fluid, porous, and revelatory of the public Face of God. He has one. Do those outside the faith see it? What do we do with our faith in those settings? We do not explain. That is not the language of this tribe. No….we
DISPLAY - DISPLAY – DISPLAY!!!!!
Creativity appears to be a skill that would come under the moniker of common or prevenient grace. Non believers as well as believers have it and we can see it in them. What is it? Simply put for the sake of this diatribe: it is the ability to interpret, fuse, and offer up experience such that our humanness is enhanced. As a believer I see this as bringing God glory. He made me to do this.
As a practical mystic, I do not want to make any part of being human un-spiritual. So….. artists are doing their art. They are namers. The Church needs namers. We need those who have entered the world of metaphor and realize that all of life is symbolized. There is no part that is purely self-evident. God, from Adam on, has empowered humankind with the task of naming. That is what art is. Great artists appear to be able to name things more accurately, noticing the nuances, the subtleties, seeing the connection between experience and knowing.
How do we know we are human? This of course is an epistemological issue but it is relevant to this discussion. Younger kids have a different epistemology than we older folks have. They desire a theology and an epistemology if you will, that is mystical, beautiful, encompassing, and holistic.
I attend way to many conferences and most of them are excursions into more abstract theological theory. I recently attended a conference where more time was spent setting up the art (i.e. explaining) than displaying. I would also contend that much of the explaining was a deep seeded fear that literalists (those who want all experience to be statically undynamic and unchangeable thus definable once and for all for all) would somehow miss the biblical truth “ behind” the art and disavow its appropriateness thus alienating it from the existing tribe.
Creativity is messy as is life. It involves jamming and improvisation. It involves dialogue and exchange. We want our art to fit tightly into some pre determined theological grid that will fit into the Church calendar rather than expand the homilies of the Church to see and acknowledge all of life.
If we want to bring artists into our midst we have to reverse the flow of knowing. By eschewing experience as untrustworthy (and it can be), we make the theoretical explanations of experience as our art double. That is what one of the mega church’s art conferences was to me. We unwittingly imply that art is for liturgical purposes only or primarily rather than sanctify the art artists are already doing.
Pastors who approach the Gospel from a position of objective proof and explanation will make the outworking of faith more about the explanations of the Gospel rather than a DISPLAY. We are called not primarily to explain but to live out, TO DISPLAY THE GOSPEL.
This is what art is. It is a display of humans coming under the Lordship of Christ and bringing all their thoughts, emotions, experiences (imagination?), etc. under His tutelage, under His mind, into His Kingdom. This submission has power. However, asking artists to submit their craft to an ill formed aesthetic, to persons that often feel threatened by the outworking of someone’s gift, is only to inadvertently communicate that God is skittish, that God is afraid, and small minded. Not so..He created the first nudes
This is why the Church does not get the “best” when it comes to the arts. We are not welcoming this enclave in a manner that allows their humanness to be honored. We have an agenda that is somehow more important than celebrating life, somehow more important than creating friendships and collaborations, somehow more important than seeing God in everyday experience. What is it?
THE SUNDAY SERVICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Church (and large churches mind you) inadvertently must come under an instrumentalist view of human consciousness and behavior. In other words:
~ We only have a few hours to do this.
~ Who only have a little money to do this?
~ Everybody get on board and dumb down the dialogue and collaboration or capitulate to some hierarchical structure that blankets creativity.
~ Therefore, let’s hurry up and get something on paper so we can have something for each Sunday service.
Why are many large churches run like businesses? They have to be. How do businesses treat and relate to humans: as machines. By that I mean in ways that organize human experience so it can be repeated and repeated for the sake of order.
ART DOES THE OPPOSITE
Art digs deep into the experience and sees it deleterious side. Art will often reveal the soul of humankind and show how easy it is to kill it through the “marketing” of human experience. This is of course so ironic seeing that I market for a living. However, I get how dangerous it is to have the marketers (art doubles) coming up with the creative side of the template. Marketers will make it
A spectacle
A necessity
An obvious choice
Art, as it has been configured in the last two to three hundred years, pushes all these boundaries. It says that there may be some inadvertent downsides to how we live out our lives. It tells us to see the beauty in things so common, the utter horror of the killing of the soul, the childlike joy in celebration and sensuality. These things are dangerous to the typical evangelical dualist who actually views much of life as being outside the purview of God’s grace.
Artists are in some ways early grace adapters. They go out like spies if you will and bring back experience and bring it under His Lordship.
More thoughts on a bit more philosophical and theological slant..........................
Much of this struggle George Lindbeck addresses in his writings. He might see the current view on art as a highly propositional approach towards hermeneutics that makes art and the church strange bedfellows.
If humanness is formed narratively and through metaphor, then would it not behoove theologians to foster an open dialogue with artists?
There is the death of modernity issues that artists need to confront while the Church needs to engage its faulty hermeneutic and epistemology regarding how humans know and how they are formed.
The artist may fault on the side of experience but he/she does so as part of the process of naming. Proper naming must take into account Church history, biblical language, and the real time involvement of the Holy Spirit in the local. However, the Church has configured this triumvirate through the lens of propositions. Thus, art as it has become accustomed to in the last 150 years, feels like a tool of the Church or state (much like those under Communist rule during the great purgings). In reality, we are all tools. However, the Church must reverse its epistemological flow and allow for metaphor to come from vital authentic communal naming and less from academic, esoteric, estranged, and distant naming via denominations, seminaries, and franchised church leaders.
Let the symbols flow liberally on a local basis and empower that engagement. Art nights should turn into prayer meetings into bible studies, into commentaries, into creeds.
A lack of a biblical aesthetic on the part of the Church
Because we have seen the arts (and especially modern art) as frivolous, esoteric, narcissistic, avant garde and therefore often confrontive and critical, eschewing of tradition, and ultimately a bit unruly (the practitioners that is), it has been easier to find what I would call artist doubles. Much like Saddam Hussein had a double, we want someone to look like an artist, act like an artist, talk like an artist, but at the end of the day not “create” like an artist. Many in the role of “Church” artists are theoretically trained but lacking in the vernacular and dialect of the creative. They can ask for wine and cheese and the train station in creative (the language of creative that is –like French or German) but in truth, they do not know the nuances of speaking “creative.” One conversation with a true artist and their faux status emerges.
Example of disenfranchisement:
I have noticed from my stint with contemporary Christian music, REX and Storyville (small labels I was involved in that birthed Sixpence and a lot of very cool music), and later Grassroots, that many college aged kids (especially) will not even dawn the doors of certain Christian events and conferences. Why?
They perceive it as a propagandistic tool of the entrenched middle class evangelical community.
Now they may not articulate it like that but their reticence to sign up for some GMA competition or attend a Christian festival is that they see CCM as a genre of music that is inherently schmaltzy, saccharine, light on authenticity, and non progressive. Their critique has merit. That is another article.
The Church does not have a biblical theology for the early adaption of art and experience. In the Tipping Point, the fact that certain individuals in a society adapt to some trend or happening sooner than others needs to be factored into the Church’s mission and message. Let me say that being a slave to the “shock of the new” is just as misaligned. But the Church is still denying the struggle to embody the Gospel in real time. I will comment later on the church's fatal attempt to be “relevant” or follow trends” because I think that is still some strange capitulation to modernity, but in truth, early adaption when done biblically is really just being missiologically aware of the culture(s) in which the Gospel is being lived out. Because there are a multitude of different cultures out there, there is no “one size fits all.” This is the danger of the mega church franchise model. It is repeating what denominations did in the past. It may have actually worked somewhat in the past as society was much more unilaterally common in their worldviews but I believe that there have always been enough diverse cultural differences from even the North to the South that the parochial “one size fits all “template for the Church ended up dulling the real process of working out the message of the Church in time and space. In other words, by taking something that works in Ohio and trying to get it to work in Alaska, is in some ways denying the fact that God wants to speak in time and space to people and not just give them a manual. Part of obeying Christ’s mandate is the actual outworking of the Holy Spirit in time and space. Once again, moderns have disembodied the Gospel from its actual outworking in the flesh (meaning: in and through human activity and involvement). I have written in another blog about how developing a biblical aesthetic that is empowering local musicians is PARAMOUNT. They are in our midst. Can we see them? Do we honor them? Do we speak CREATIVE?”
Back to issues of the Church’s estrangement of the “creatives.”
Why would the “creatives” be so leery of the Church?
There is a highly romanticized view (allude to in my article on developing a biblical aesthetic) on what creativity and an artist is. I even think C.S. Lewis may have perpetuated this myth regarding the engagement of beauty and art. However, this is in many ways a response to the Church’s narrow, diminished, perfunctory view of the arts. Because the Enlightenment has fostered so much dualism (i.e. sacred secular split) the Church has perpetuated the idea that liturgical art is superior to what I might call life art. By remaining in the dualistic grid of secular versus sacred, they have made much of life off limits for the Christian artist. Think about it, when is the last time you saw someone paint a picture of Christ that you thought was a really great painter. In other words, the creatives eschew liturgical art as being propagandistic. Artists have left liturgical art to the artist doubles. This is sad. We (the Church) have inadvertently fostered this dualism and told our best and brightest (inadvertently), unless and until you are willing to do art as curriculum, we are not interested. This tendency for the Church to make faith technical and theoretical is another by product of the Enlightenment. We have made the Gospel information and drained it of its visceral mystical dimension. We (the Church) are not truly sacramentalists. We do not even believe in the power of the symbol. It’s all in the explaining. It is all in a second order posture of critique and observation. This is not the disposition of an artist. He/she cannot create from this space. Artists will not ultimately bow down to this perception and mandate.
Artists want to see all of life as imbued with the power and presence of God.
This of course enlivens and broadens immensely the potential subject matter. It sanctifies all of life. Early adapters are helping others see God’s glory through creation. As the secularization of life has become so intrusive via media and such, the Church must spend much of its time dialogically doing a Mars Hill on experience. In many ways the Church needs to draw its artist to Mars Hill and not Josh McDowell’s conference on the rational (note Evidence that Demand’s a Verdict). The Church has wanted evidence; the artist has wanted experience and beauty. Beauty…hum. Now there is a word you do not hear mentioned in the Church much do you? You will note that Mars Hill was a place away from the Church. Paul had to go to them. Where in our neighborhoods do artists hang, jam, and interact. GO THERE!!! GO THERE!!!!! We need more portals of entry into our communities that are fluid, porous, and revelatory of the public Face of God. He has one. Do those outside the faith see it? What do we do with our faith in those settings? We do not explain. That is not the language of this tribe. No….we
DISPLAY - DISPLAY – DISPLAY!!!!!
Creativity appears to be a skill that would come under the moniker of common or prevenient grace. Non believers as well as believers have it and we can see it in them. What is it? Simply put for the sake of this diatribe: it is the ability to interpret, fuse, and offer up experience such that our humanness is enhanced. As a believer I see this as bringing God glory. He made me to do this.
As a practical mystic, I do not want to make any part of being human un-spiritual. So….. artists are doing their art. They are namers. The Church needs namers. We need those who have entered the world of metaphor and realize that all of life is symbolized. There is no part that is purely self-evident. God, from Adam on, has empowered humankind with the task of naming. That is what art is. Great artists appear to be able to name things more accurately, noticing the nuances, the subtleties, seeing the connection between experience and knowing.
How do we know we are human? This of course is an epistemological issue but it is relevant to this discussion. Younger kids have a different epistemology than we older folks have. They desire a theology and an epistemology if you will, that is mystical, beautiful, encompassing, and holistic.
I attend way to many conferences and most of them are excursions into more abstract theological theory. I recently attended a conference where more time was spent setting up the art (i.e. explaining) than displaying. I would also contend that much of the explaining was a deep seeded fear that literalists (those who want all experience to be statically undynamic and unchangeable thus definable once and for all for all) would somehow miss the biblical truth “ behind” the art and disavow its appropriateness thus alienating it from the existing tribe.
Creativity is messy as is life. It involves jamming and improvisation. It involves dialogue and exchange. We want our art to fit tightly into some pre determined theological grid that will fit into the Church calendar rather than expand the homilies of the Church to see and acknowledge all of life.
If we want to bring artists into our midst we have to reverse the flow of knowing. By eschewing experience as untrustworthy (and it can be), we make the theoretical explanations of experience as our art double. That is what one of the mega church’s art conferences was to me. We unwittingly imply that art is for liturgical purposes only or primarily rather than sanctify the art artists are already doing.
Pastors who approach the Gospel from a position of objective proof and explanation will make the outworking of faith more about the explanations of the Gospel rather than a DISPLAY. We are called not primarily to explain but to live out, TO DISPLAY THE GOSPEL.
This is what art is. It is a display of humans coming under the Lordship of Christ and bringing all their thoughts, emotions, experiences (imagination?), etc. under His tutelage, under His mind, into His Kingdom. This submission has power. However, asking artists to submit their craft to an ill formed aesthetic, to persons that often feel threatened by the outworking of someone’s gift, is only to inadvertently communicate that God is skittish, that God is afraid, and small minded. Not so..He created the first nudes
This is why the Church does not get the “best” when it comes to the arts. We are not welcoming this enclave in a manner that allows their humanness to be honored. We have an agenda that is somehow more important than celebrating life, somehow more important than creating friendships and collaborations, somehow more important than seeing God in everyday experience. What is it?
THE SUNDAY SERVICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Church (and large churches mind you) inadvertently must come under an instrumentalist view of human consciousness and behavior. In other words:
~ We only have a few hours to do this.
~ Who only have a little money to do this?
~ Everybody get on board and dumb down the dialogue and collaboration or capitulate to some hierarchical structure that blankets creativity.
~ Therefore, let’s hurry up and get something on paper so we can have something for each Sunday service.
Why are many large churches run like businesses? They have to be. How do businesses treat and relate to humans: as machines. By that I mean in ways that organize human experience so it can be repeated and repeated for the sake of order.
ART DOES THE OPPOSITE
Art digs deep into the experience and sees it deleterious side. Art will often reveal the soul of humankind and show how easy it is to kill it through the “marketing” of human experience. This is of course so ironic seeing that I market for a living. However, I get how dangerous it is to have the marketers (art doubles) coming up with the creative side of the template. Marketers will make it
A spectacle
A necessity
An obvious choice
Art, as it has been configured in the last two to three hundred years, pushes all these boundaries. It says that there may be some inadvertent downsides to how we live out our lives. It tells us to see the beauty in things so common, the utter horror of the killing of the soul, the childlike joy in celebration and sensuality. These things are dangerous to the typical evangelical dualist who actually views much of life as being outside the purview of God’s grace.
Artists are in some ways early grace adapters. They go out like spies if you will and bring back experience and bring it under His Lordship.
More thoughts on a bit more philosophical and theological slant..........................
Much of this struggle George Lindbeck addresses in his writings. He might see the current view on art as a highly propositional approach towards hermeneutics that makes art and the church strange bedfellows.
If humanness is formed narratively and through metaphor, then would it not behoove theologians to foster an open dialogue with artists?
There is the death of modernity issues that artists need to confront while the Church needs to engage its faulty hermeneutic and epistemology regarding how humans know and how they are formed.
The artist may fault on the side of experience but he/she does so as part of the process of naming. Proper naming must take into account Church history, biblical language, and the real time involvement of the Holy Spirit in the local. However, the Church has configured this triumvirate through the lens of propositions. Thus, art as it has become accustomed to in the last 150 years, feels like a tool of the Church or state (much like those under Communist rule during the great purgings). In reality, we are all tools. However, the Church must reverse its epistemological flow and allow for metaphor to come from vital authentic communal naming and less from academic, esoteric, estranged, and distant naming via denominations, seminaries, and franchised church leaders.
Let the symbols flow liberally on a local basis and empower that engagement. Art nights should turn into prayer meetings into bible studies, into commentaries, into creeds.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The Color of Soul Making
How do we experience and know the beautiful? Is the awareness of the beautiful a biological response built within our nature? Has God so made us that like the swallows long for Capistrano, we long for the beautiful? Or is this awareness learned? Or, is it both? Are we born with an innate sense of the beautiful and yet the nurturing and enhancement of that awareness grown and expanded through proper care of the imagination.
Is the imagination the human capacity to experience wonder and awe? Is creation therefore, a starting point for the growth and care of the imagination? Are we created to feel some sort of connection with nature and if so how do we differ from the animals? Do dogs experience a sunset as something of grandeur? Do mountain goats look down over the hills of the alps and acknowledge their beauty? Yet we know that animals do respond to the beauty of each other as they perceive it.
Much of beauty is acknowledged in how the genders respond to one another. If beauty were unreal then why would making love to a bar maid be any different than making love to a beauty queen. Some would say that this admission of beauty or noticing is actually attributional on the part of the individual and that awareness is not innate in the object of desire but projected by the one viewing. In other words, someone had to tell this person that that was beauty. This perception seems to have some validation as we see how beauty in terms of genders is very different from culture to culture.
Is the honoring of nature in cultures we may consider more ancient another outlook an admission of beauty? Can we expand the idea of beauty to be the true, and the good?
How do we know beauty? How do we know when we are experiencing beauty? What is the sensate and accompanying engagement of the intellect that tell us we are in the presence of the beautiful? Beauty is an experience besides an idea or concept. The experiencing of beauty grounds us in our humanity.
For Christians, beauty takes on an ethical and moral dimension. Our imaginations are informed and constructed in and through our relationship with God. His way of imagining and creating tell us something about the beautiful. Thus, there can be beauty to the eye that may not be beautiful to the heart. Pornography is like that. Attractive people can be involved in behavior that to the heart one finds offensive. This is why the experience and awareness of beauty is not just innate and or natural. We must learn to see and know the beautiful. Our fleshly natures come into this world with an affinity for knowing and sensing the power of the flesh. Thus we know the power of another human on our eyes and even our hearts.
God is a jealous God. He, and He alone is beautiful because He reflects and embodies the fullness of all things. To know Him, to see Him, to experience Him, is to then be able to know the beautiful. Because we have deconstructed beauty and allowed something to be visually beautiful as in the case of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, we do not understand that in God’s aesthetic, to gaze upon something that was not intended to be gazed upon is to misunderstand the power of the beautiful.
The human body is beautiful. It was meant to be adored, cherished, touched, embraced and even yearned after. However, the power of this experience was to be tempered in the context of marriage. Why? Because of the power of the beautiful. We are so overcome by the beautiful that we often loose our ability to make sound decisions unless we properly interpret the beautiful. How so? The beautiful are those objects, and experiences and people and places that truly make us noble and more reflective of our spiritual natures and capacities.
This is why beauty is taught. Although sexual intercourse may not need to be taught in the strictest sense of teaching, it is clear that instinctual engagements may not bring ultimate pleasure. We humans have the ability to ponder and enhance the inspirational. We can re present experience out side of real time and then reengage that experience again with the depth of out imaginations (e.g. erotic art). Art is the instinctual re presentation of experience such that its meaning, power, and presence can be heightened and enhanced and repeated..
The Forming of the Imagination
Some believe than imagination is actually the soul. The imagination is the capacity of humans to hold experientially, the depth and breadth of consciousness. Thus, the nurturing and care of the soul are the nurturing and caring of the imagination. There is a difference between what is imaginary and what is imagined. The imaginal is the thoughts and responses one has that accompany consciousness such that time and space and experience appear to be real. The grooming and proper care of the imagination is what soul making is all about. Thus, the poem.
The Color of Soul Making
Blue fire
Slipped into my room last night
Sighed heavily
Illuminated my labored breathing
And the shallow rise and fall of sorrow’s chest
As if both color and flame could speak
Their words came forth
“We are your indigo angels.
In this place most call a desert
Your sister the white Iris blooms
In this dryness the soul flowers
Reverie fills the darkened cobalt horizon
Lovers held in suspension
Melt into each other
And weep with longing
Here imagination burns a cerulean glow
Melancholy marries Kandinsky
And all this pondering rekindles
A thousand years of exile
In the unreflective underworld of black and white.”
Is the imagination the human capacity to experience wonder and awe? Is creation therefore, a starting point for the growth and care of the imagination? Are we created to feel some sort of connection with nature and if so how do we differ from the animals? Do dogs experience a sunset as something of grandeur? Do mountain goats look down over the hills of the alps and acknowledge their beauty? Yet we know that animals do respond to the beauty of each other as they perceive it.
Much of beauty is acknowledged in how the genders respond to one another. If beauty were unreal then why would making love to a bar maid be any different than making love to a beauty queen. Some would say that this admission of beauty or noticing is actually attributional on the part of the individual and that awareness is not innate in the object of desire but projected by the one viewing. In other words, someone had to tell this person that that was beauty. This perception seems to have some validation as we see how beauty in terms of genders is very different from culture to culture.
Is the honoring of nature in cultures we may consider more ancient another outlook an admission of beauty? Can we expand the idea of beauty to be the true, and the good?
How do we know beauty? How do we know when we are experiencing beauty? What is the sensate and accompanying engagement of the intellect that tell us we are in the presence of the beautiful? Beauty is an experience besides an idea or concept. The experiencing of beauty grounds us in our humanity.
For Christians, beauty takes on an ethical and moral dimension. Our imaginations are informed and constructed in and through our relationship with God. His way of imagining and creating tell us something about the beautiful. Thus, there can be beauty to the eye that may not be beautiful to the heart. Pornography is like that. Attractive people can be involved in behavior that to the heart one finds offensive. This is why the experience and awareness of beauty is not just innate and or natural. We must learn to see and know the beautiful. Our fleshly natures come into this world with an affinity for knowing and sensing the power of the flesh. Thus we know the power of another human on our eyes and even our hearts.
God is a jealous God. He, and He alone is beautiful because He reflects and embodies the fullness of all things. To know Him, to see Him, to experience Him, is to then be able to know the beautiful. Because we have deconstructed beauty and allowed something to be visually beautiful as in the case of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, we do not understand that in God’s aesthetic, to gaze upon something that was not intended to be gazed upon is to misunderstand the power of the beautiful.
The human body is beautiful. It was meant to be adored, cherished, touched, embraced and even yearned after. However, the power of this experience was to be tempered in the context of marriage. Why? Because of the power of the beautiful. We are so overcome by the beautiful that we often loose our ability to make sound decisions unless we properly interpret the beautiful. How so? The beautiful are those objects, and experiences and people and places that truly make us noble and more reflective of our spiritual natures and capacities.
This is why beauty is taught. Although sexual intercourse may not need to be taught in the strictest sense of teaching, it is clear that instinctual engagements may not bring ultimate pleasure. We humans have the ability to ponder and enhance the inspirational. We can re present experience out side of real time and then reengage that experience again with the depth of out imaginations (e.g. erotic art). Art is the instinctual re presentation of experience such that its meaning, power, and presence can be heightened and enhanced and repeated..
The Forming of the Imagination
Some believe than imagination is actually the soul. The imagination is the capacity of humans to hold experientially, the depth and breadth of consciousness. Thus, the nurturing and care of the soul are the nurturing and caring of the imagination. There is a difference between what is imaginary and what is imagined. The imaginal is the thoughts and responses one has that accompany consciousness such that time and space and experience appear to be real. The grooming and proper care of the imagination is what soul making is all about. Thus, the poem.
The Color of Soul Making
Blue fire
Slipped into my room last night
Sighed heavily
Illuminated my labored breathing
And the shallow rise and fall of sorrow’s chest
As if both color and flame could speak
Their words came forth
“We are your indigo angels.
In this place most call a desert
Your sister the white Iris blooms
In this dryness the soul flowers
Reverie fills the darkened cobalt horizon
Lovers held in suspension
Melt into each other
And weep with longing
Here imagination burns a cerulean glow
Melancholy marries Kandinsky
And all this pondering rekindles
A thousand years of exile
In the unreflective underworld of black and white.”
Friday, August 8, 2008
On Pondering Rothko’s Chapel Paintings
All art is religious
All color, hue and shadow
Name the space we wish to inhabit
There is no private space
No secular terrain
No words free from moral agency
No melody floating above
Waiting for birth in this place
Even the seemingly mundane world of decoration
Marks the moment and space
With my personal attention
My intentional gaze
My need to enchant my world with purpose and meaning
My naming allows me to know for certain
Like Helen Keller’s water
I relish the discovery
And bathe in its glory
Poem by David M. Bunker
All color, hue and shadow
Name the space we wish to inhabit
There is no private space
No secular terrain
No words free from moral agency
No melody floating above
Waiting for birth in this place
Even the seemingly mundane world of decoration
Marks the moment and space
With my personal attention
My intentional gaze
My need to enchant my world with purpose and meaning
My naming allows me to know for certain
Like Helen Keller’s water
I relish the discovery
And bathe in its glory
Poem by David M. Bunker
Art as Gift
For over a half century I have labored between the often apposing worlds of two economies: the economies of gift and commodity. The embattled land that divides these worlds is one few from either side traverses thus making their connection daunting and full of stridency. Artists tend to see their craft as a gift while business people discover what is beautiful and true and offer a way to create wealth through the exploitation of the gift. Joseph Conrad said, “The artist appeals to that part of our being…which is gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. It is the enduring nature of art making that I am most interested in.
Can one acquire a gift by their own will? (many in American Idol would seem to act as if they could or can). Being an artist today is so enmeshed in the search for belonging and identity. But if you could acquire a gift through your own personal will would it be considered a gift at this point?
Many an artist has a daunting gift placed upon them early in life. Mozart was composing at the age of four. Candid conversations with artists often uncover the awareness of this giftedness and its benevolent bestowing. Even D. H. Lawrence was aware when he commented, “Not I, not I but the wisdom that blows through me.” If we would apply the idea of divine bestowment upon the inner nature of creativity and giftedness, why then would we not apply some kind of spiritual worth to the very creation of the artist, i.e., the painting, the song, the poem? Could it be that our own divine worth as human as a gift to humanity resonates with the art as gift exchange?
Holidays are always magical times in that we begin to anticipate the gifts that will be coming our way. Birthdays tend to generate the same exhilaration as we prepare to be blessed by those we love. It is clear that Christmas is a metaphor for what Christ brought into the world. He is the Father’s gift and in many ways we model that literally in our own gift giving. Could you imagine paying your friends and loved ones to buy you gifts for Christmas or your birthday? Of course not as those days are days where you are redeemed and atoned for. It is about blessing you and you in turn bless others.
Lewis Hyde, whose book generated much of these musings, said, “...the way we treat a gift can sometimes change its nature.” How many times have you commented on a painting on someone’s house to discover its creation was a loved one who had passed on and the painting then became very “special?” What makes this gift special is its attributes. We decide what something is worth. Even beauty is ultimately attributional
Churches have long honored certain objects and have deemed them sacred or near sacred. Where are the gifts of art that in ages past filled our churches? Have we unwittingly commoditized the spiritual dimensions of art as gift and how can we revitalize that sentiment and posture? Much like Hyde, I do not mean to totally deny the ability of art to be commodified. But can a gift be merchandised and if not where are the gifts of art in the Church?
In recent years I have come to define myself as a creativity coach. This is an odd moniker and one that most people question upon seeing it on my business card. Throw in spiritual direction and ethos experience designer and you’ve got a confused world on our hands. So I heartily agree with Hyde and many artists when they articulate, “Labors such as mine are notoriously non remunerative in a society dominated by market exchange. How is the artist to nourish himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values and market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities,” queries Lewis Hyde.
I have met many artists over the years who do labor under the weight of their calling to be an artist. This is due in part to their unwillingness to create under the shadow of triviality and shallowness. An artist’s service to their gift in some ways demands a degree of submission to gift integrity thus making capitulation to market forces highly improbable if not impossible. But the artist works out their giftedness and salvation as it were under the canopy and cultural contradictions of capitalism. How does one live when an undisciplined acquisitional spirit is allowed to run rampant? How does one carefully guard the integrity and the spirit of the gift such that it continues to bear the fruits of beauty truth and goodness? And if art is made as gift, how can it embrace its very purpose in being if it is not given as such?
I think the Church as community holds some of the answers to these questions. To some degree I am calling art “gifts” because of their sacramental ability to form and inform the inner world of the soul. Why do the gifts of the inner life lack public currency amongst Christians? What does it say about us and to us that we have allowed much of our sacred objects to be bought and sold at such cheap prices and in such tawdry ways? I contend there is livelihood of the Spirit that is missing in today's creative world where Christians are attempting to mine the imagination’s gifts from the inner world. Are there ethics of gift exchange intrinsic to the ethos of Christians and are we neglecting those experiences and demands in our current creative climate?
How do we define wealth? What makes us wealthy? Some might say abundance while others might say the possession of things of worth. Others might see wealth as objects that have history, meaning, and belonging embodied in their creation. What we value in a specific culture informs our material things as being of worth or worthless. Could we be undermining the very worth of certain artistic renderings when we buy and sell them to one another? Some might ask then how would artists make a living? Good question and is especially pithy in a materialistic world where worth once again is often tied to the monetary value given certain commodities. Do we see something as being worth more when we pay a lot of money for it? Is it possible that this may work outside the Church but inside the Church is dangerous and belittling to the exchange of gifts of art?
Art is a language. Certain philosophers contend that language precedes reality. In other words, before we speak it, we are unaware of its “really realness.” If a certain part of our speaking and naming is truncated and diminished, could then certain parts of our being be retarded or crippled or non existent? This is why we artists are at our very core story tellers and namers much like the original Adam.
In recent years a small group of us came together around the idea of restoring beauty. ORB, or the Organization for the Restoration of Beauty was created for the sole purpose of recognizing and empowering acts of beauty truth and goodness through the means of artful gift giving. One of the ironies of this emerging enclave was its originating city-Nashville. Nashville, along with LA and New York has always been a bastion of commerce when it came to the arts and especially music. Thus, a group designed to question that ethos by its very nature has an uphill climb. Undaunted we trod forward knowing that for all of us, enduring works of art, although commodified at some point, appeared to be innocent to some extent in their creative origins. How could we help foster a new ethos of creativity where the imagination and the inner world won out over commerce and merchandising? The more we explored the possibilities, the more we discovered an underlying disenchantment that was close to a boil. Buoyed up by the Internet, many younger artists were now able to by pass the art broker who arbitrarily ascribed the value of the gifts offered up. When this broker or wholesaler was taken out of the picture, a new renaissance of art making now had chance to emerge. Praise God.
For years I heard from many in the music industry that the masses always needed to have things dumbed down. Whether it was beauty or worship, give them the Cliff’s Notes. Can real art be Cliff’s Notes version of life? I think not and most artists would heartily agree. For anything of worth to endure, there must be some quality about it that transcends the banality of its time. Being able to step outside your own skin and the skin of your culture (to some extend – no one can do this completely) gives the artist a posture of knowing that is truly experienced and embodied. In ways art making is hyper-immanence that finds itself hidden in transcendence. It is in the gift of God’s only Son that God reveals both His otherness and His willingness to take on our embodied flesh and inhibit it. That is what creation is all about. That is what creativity is all about. Gibbs and Bolger in the book entitled Emerging Churches tell us that, “the urge to create is not ego driven but rather arises out of a theology of personhood and community identity.” Indeed we are discovering that the modern self is myth and that an authentic self is always communally constructed and formed. We become ourselves as we come together with others. The two are simultaneous. Although we are subject to the fall, God’s creation was still good and His image is still imprinted in all things through what the Scripture calls common grace or prevenient grace ( for all you Bible majors) Creativity itself is a gift of worship.
The Language of Art Making
Art as gift is a certain way of speaking. In the context of faith and spirituality, it offers the artist the ability to truly be prophetic as some truths and sentiments are by their very nature confrontational or at the least not going to be popular. If everything’s worth is ultimately seen through its ability to be mass marketed, we will not challenge the masses with issues of spiritual formation that by their very nature are hard to swallow for all people. Lives of simplicity and slowness are not engagements most people in western societies even want to consider. Yet their voice must be heard. How do we build a platform for the voices that by their very nature may be sifted?
Economies of the Creative Spirit
Like Hyde I am most concerned with the gifts that come with power and grace and speak commandingly to the soul. Those offered in fear, spite, rancor, or greed are not my interest here. Whatever we have been given is to be given away again… a principle of gift giving. It is the sharing of art that brings delight. The struggle for artist in a modern or post modern technocracy is the McDonaldization of creativity and consumption. Modernism has tended to focus on efficiency, calculation, predictability and control. This of course presents some real challenges to creativity and a gift. We see this today in American Idol, the ubiquitous nature of My Space, You Tube and other conduits of conversation that tend to raise up the most banal and trivial and then create a place where that spirit is duplicated in mass. The aesthetics of "art making as gift" reframes this cultural force and roots its identify in community and service as well as devotion. These become the philosophical and heartfelt postures from which art making derives its purposes and meaning.Although the fall often pushes us towards misdirection and misplaced motivation ( i.e. self expression as a right, endlessly expressing minute reflections of the self as if interesting redeeming on and on…) Read Suzi Gablick’s work on the death of modernism. Still the urge to create and give that expression as gift remains in our souls as the key that breaks a code. As Christians we see, the kingdom of God as the creativity of God. ( Doug Padgett) We move beyond seeing life as a consumptive rite of passage and more as all gift.
Can one acquire a gift by their own will? (many in American Idol would seem to act as if they could or can). Being an artist today is so enmeshed in the search for belonging and identity. But if you could acquire a gift through your own personal will would it be considered a gift at this point?
Many an artist has a daunting gift placed upon them early in life. Mozart was composing at the age of four. Candid conversations with artists often uncover the awareness of this giftedness and its benevolent bestowing. Even D. H. Lawrence was aware when he commented, “Not I, not I but the wisdom that blows through me.” If we would apply the idea of divine bestowment upon the inner nature of creativity and giftedness, why then would we not apply some kind of spiritual worth to the very creation of the artist, i.e., the painting, the song, the poem? Could it be that our own divine worth as human as a gift to humanity resonates with the art as gift exchange?
Holidays are always magical times in that we begin to anticipate the gifts that will be coming our way. Birthdays tend to generate the same exhilaration as we prepare to be blessed by those we love. It is clear that Christmas is a metaphor for what Christ brought into the world. He is the Father’s gift and in many ways we model that literally in our own gift giving. Could you imagine paying your friends and loved ones to buy you gifts for Christmas or your birthday? Of course not as those days are days where you are redeemed and atoned for. It is about blessing you and you in turn bless others.
Lewis Hyde, whose book generated much of these musings, said, “...the way we treat a gift can sometimes change its nature.” How many times have you commented on a painting on someone’s house to discover its creation was a loved one who had passed on and the painting then became very “special?” What makes this gift special is its attributes. We decide what something is worth. Even beauty is ultimately attributional
Churches have long honored certain objects and have deemed them sacred or near sacred. Where are the gifts of art that in ages past filled our churches? Have we unwittingly commoditized the spiritual dimensions of art as gift and how can we revitalize that sentiment and posture? Much like Hyde, I do not mean to totally deny the ability of art to be commodified. But can a gift be merchandised and if not where are the gifts of art in the Church?
In recent years I have come to define myself as a creativity coach. This is an odd moniker and one that most people question upon seeing it on my business card. Throw in spiritual direction and ethos experience designer and you’ve got a confused world on our hands. So I heartily agree with Hyde and many artists when they articulate, “Labors such as mine are notoriously non remunerative in a society dominated by market exchange. How is the artist to nourish himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values and market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities,” queries Lewis Hyde.
I have met many artists over the years who do labor under the weight of their calling to be an artist. This is due in part to their unwillingness to create under the shadow of triviality and shallowness. An artist’s service to their gift in some ways demands a degree of submission to gift integrity thus making capitulation to market forces highly improbable if not impossible. But the artist works out their giftedness and salvation as it were under the canopy and cultural contradictions of capitalism. How does one live when an undisciplined acquisitional spirit is allowed to run rampant? How does one carefully guard the integrity and the spirit of the gift such that it continues to bear the fruits of beauty truth and goodness? And if art is made as gift, how can it embrace its very purpose in being if it is not given as such?
I think the Church as community holds some of the answers to these questions. To some degree I am calling art “gifts” because of their sacramental ability to form and inform the inner world of the soul. Why do the gifts of the inner life lack public currency amongst Christians? What does it say about us and to us that we have allowed much of our sacred objects to be bought and sold at such cheap prices and in such tawdry ways? I contend there is livelihood of the Spirit that is missing in today's creative world where Christians are attempting to mine the imagination’s gifts from the inner world. Are there ethics of gift exchange intrinsic to the ethos of Christians and are we neglecting those experiences and demands in our current creative climate?
How do we define wealth? What makes us wealthy? Some might say abundance while others might say the possession of things of worth. Others might see wealth as objects that have history, meaning, and belonging embodied in their creation. What we value in a specific culture informs our material things as being of worth or worthless. Could we be undermining the very worth of certain artistic renderings when we buy and sell them to one another? Some might ask then how would artists make a living? Good question and is especially pithy in a materialistic world where worth once again is often tied to the monetary value given certain commodities. Do we see something as being worth more when we pay a lot of money for it? Is it possible that this may work outside the Church but inside the Church is dangerous and belittling to the exchange of gifts of art?
Art is a language. Certain philosophers contend that language precedes reality. In other words, before we speak it, we are unaware of its “really realness.” If a certain part of our speaking and naming is truncated and diminished, could then certain parts of our being be retarded or crippled or non existent? This is why we artists are at our very core story tellers and namers much like the original Adam.
In recent years a small group of us came together around the idea of restoring beauty. ORB, or the Organization for the Restoration of Beauty was created for the sole purpose of recognizing and empowering acts of beauty truth and goodness through the means of artful gift giving. One of the ironies of this emerging enclave was its originating city-Nashville. Nashville, along with LA and New York has always been a bastion of commerce when it came to the arts and especially music. Thus, a group designed to question that ethos by its very nature has an uphill climb. Undaunted we trod forward knowing that for all of us, enduring works of art, although commodified at some point, appeared to be innocent to some extent in their creative origins. How could we help foster a new ethos of creativity where the imagination and the inner world won out over commerce and merchandising? The more we explored the possibilities, the more we discovered an underlying disenchantment that was close to a boil. Buoyed up by the Internet, many younger artists were now able to by pass the art broker who arbitrarily ascribed the value of the gifts offered up. When this broker or wholesaler was taken out of the picture, a new renaissance of art making now had chance to emerge. Praise God.
For years I heard from many in the music industry that the masses always needed to have things dumbed down. Whether it was beauty or worship, give them the Cliff’s Notes. Can real art be Cliff’s Notes version of life? I think not and most artists would heartily agree. For anything of worth to endure, there must be some quality about it that transcends the banality of its time. Being able to step outside your own skin and the skin of your culture (to some extend – no one can do this completely) gives the artist a posture of knowing that is truly experienced and embodied. In ways art making is hyper-immanence that finds itself hidden in transcendence. It is in the gift of God’s only Son that God reveals both His otherness and His willingness to take on our embodied flesh and inhibit it. That is what creation is all about. That is what creativity is all about. Gibbs and Bolger in the book entitled Emerging Churches tell us that, “the urge to create is not ego driven but rather arises out of a theology of personhood and community identity.” Indeed we are discovering that the modern self is myth and that an authentic self is always communally constructed and formed. We become ourselves as we come together with others. The two are simultaneous. Although we are subject to the fall, God’s creation was still good and His image is still imprinted in all things through what the Scripture calls common grace or prevenient grace ( for all you Bible majors) Creativity itself is a gift of worship.
The Language of Art Making
Art as gift is a certain way of speaking. In the context of faith and spirituality, it offers the artist the ability to truly be prophetic as some truths and sentiments are by their very nature confrontational or at the least not going to be popular. If everything’s worth is ultimately seen through its ability to be mass marketed, we will not challenge the masses with issues of spiritual formation that by their very nature are hard to swallow for all people. Lives of simplicity and slowness are not engagements most people in western societies even want to consider. Yet their voice must be heard. How do we build a platform for the voices that by their very nature may be sifted?
Economies of the Creative Spirit
Like Hyde I am most concerned with the gifts that come with power and grace and speak commandingly to the soul. Those offered in fear, spite, rancor, or greed are not my interest here. Whatever we have been given is to be given away again… a principle of gift giving. It is the sharing of art that brings delight. The struggle for artist in a modern or post modern technocracy is the McDonaldization of creativity and consumption. Modernism has tended to focus on efficiency, calculation, predictability and control. This of course presents some real challenges to creativity and a gift. We see this today in American Idol, the ubiquitous nature of My Space, You Tube and other conduits of conversation that tend to raise up the most banal and trivial and then create a place where that spirit is duplicated in mass. The aesthetics of "art making as gift" reframes this cultural force and roots its identify in community and service as well as devotion. These become the philosophical and heartfelt postures from which art making derives its purposes and meaning.Although the fall often pushes us towards misdirection and misplaced motivation ( i.e. self expression as a right, endlessly expressing minute reflections of the self as if interesting redeeming on and on…) Read Suzi Gablick’s work on the death of modernism. Still the urge to create and give that expression as gift remains in our souls as the key that breaks a code. As Christians we see, the kingdom of God as the creativity of God. ( Doug Padgett) We move beyond seeing life as a consumptive rite of passage and more as all gift.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Thoughts on Creatvity & the Arts
The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world that in the stock markets or the debates in congress.
Hedrick Willem Van Loon / The Arts
I want to make things that are beautiful and moving. I want to make art; they want to make things that are fast and useful, practical.
Laurie Anderson
An artist needs only three things. First he needs encouragement, the second he needs encouragement, and third he needs encouragement.
Unknown
Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
Thomas Merton
I cannot understand why people are afraid of new ideas. I am afraid of the old ones.
John Cage
There are two fools in every market: One ask to little and, one ask to much.
Russian Proverb
To teach is to show
M.C. Richards
God’s word is in all creation, visible and invisible. The word is living, being, spirit, a verdant greening of creativity. The word manifests in every creature.
Hildegard of Bingen
Man lives by images.
Gaston Bachelard
The imagination seldom sleeps. It is very busy seeking the new.
Gaston Bachelard
Imagination is so vast, so large, so free that is grows our souls and allows us to contemplate grandeur.
Gaston Bachelard
I am happiest when I am caught up in and lost in acts of creativity.
Meister Eckhart
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
Vincent Van Gogh
At the heart of our dignity lies our power of creativity.
Otto Rank
We write to taste life twice.
Anais Nin
Creativity is our real nature.
Matthew Fox
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
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Art and the Dark Night of the Soul
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.
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.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Art as an Act of Devotion
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
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
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?
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?
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