The Telling of the World

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

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

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

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

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

Disciple the Technicians and Artists

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

Archive and House the History

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

Test the Art

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

Support the Creative Act

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

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

Redeem the Imagination

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

Art Through the Eyes of Worship

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

How Then Should We Imagine?

Conversations After then End of Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Paint a Miracle

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

David Bunker

Art as a Form of Sabbath

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

Rhythms and Seasons of Creativity

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

Setting Apart as a Response to Life

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

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

I Love Beauty

The audacious poetry of string theory

The ubiquitous emerald greenness of the Gulf of Mexico

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

The rich mahogany staircase of a mid-Victorian home

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

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

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

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

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

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

The drip of fresh musk melon down my chin

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

The eternal view of heaven in a child’s eyes

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

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

The embrace of an old friend brought back in to fellowship

I love creation

I love the hologram the Father calls creation

The entire whole

I love it all

I cry for its entire restoration

I weep for a clearer glimpse of its edenic roots

But through the reflection of the beauatific vision

I see the actual face of God

I see that it is good

He is good

He is present

He is with us.

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

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

For the Artist at the Start of the Day

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

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