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.
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