Taking The Plunge

It is safe to say artists have experienced the complex distance between what is and what will be. This is usually typified in that stilled moment, the one prior to a performance or clean canvas, when every ounce of being gathers to commence action. It’s like convincing yourself to take the plunge into water, despite the uncertainties of the frigid deep, and the discomfort of stinging eyes. Jumping into action is a faith act, as we follow what will be.

Eventually, swimming with quick peeks and frantic strokes, we accommodate ourselves to the task of consistent motion. Art is the start of a journey between the cold facts of what is, and the exhilarating embodiment of what can be. The broad strokes, the rough gasps for air, the tingling of cold skin, are all part of the excursion into the deep. And, yes, we are changed by the process, soaked, tired, slimy, but we know we’ve done well when others take the plunge in after us.

Lewis Hyde understands these experiences as gifts. He writes, “The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom.” (Hyde, The Gift, p. 25)

The gospel parables call us to plunge into storytelling, where, like Jesus, we show people the world in mysteriously new and refreshing ways.This week Kenyon and I met with Jonathon Roberts and Emily Zempel of Spark and Echo. They hold a unique take on storytelling by incarnating, or rather, “illuminating” the Scriptures through the means of experiencing multi-art disciplines through their website and monthly events. Spark and Echo invite artists to respond to the written Word by making art. Here, art mediates the mysterious depths of God’s word. Don't you want to dive in?

Be refreshed. The kingdom has come, let’s swim in it.

--Maria

How Much is Too Much?, or Wrestling with the Place of Culture in Devotional Life

"I was born in a house with the television always on," sing David Byrne and the Talking Heads in their song Love for Sale. What could be truer than that for most of us? Yet even with the television blaring (and sometimes because of the television blaring), we manage to hear God's voice in the culture...because He's everywhere, and not only in a monastery.

We know that, but we also feel a certain tension. Christians live in a gap between "Be still and know that I am God" and Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message." I for one often feel the pinch, wondering how to mind the gap.

Witness a recent morning, when I started the day with quiet meditation on events in Jesus' life using Ignatian

exercises designed to help me see Jesus aright so that I "might be with Him, become more like Him and serve Him more." After an hour or so in prayerful reflection on Scripture, I went to the gym carrying two novels, a year-end issue of Time, and an iPod with a Tim Keller sermon downloaded and an energy-pumping playlist. I read from and listened to each in the course of an hour. I also had access, anytime I looked up from my elliptical machine, to four television screens, each tuned to a different channel -- as I was invited to think about (for far less than 30 seconds each) the plight of freezing citrus, the unethical treatment of elephants, full-body scanners, "healthiest super-foods" and "why the Sun didn't swallow the Earth." Just an average couple of hours for an average middle-aged woman, trying to orient myself towards God and live out the implications that flow from what I know and where and who I am. All before 9 a.m.

I'm used to trying to pay attention to everything all at once, yet sometimes I wonder if I fully take in any of it. Sometimes I scream an Anthony Newley-esque "stop the world; I want to get off" as I long for solitude and silence. At other times I want to be in the middle of the action. I still wish I'd been in the crowd for Oprah's and The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" flash mob scene on Michigan Avenue last fall. Yes it was commercially produced and motivated; but it was an orchestrated act of joy, and I even imagine it as a foretaste of heaven (probably with different lyrics).

Feeling that tension, I've been thinking lately about the dichotomy between the positive role of popula

r culture in my devotional (yes, devotional) life and the overload I feel when "the world is too much

with (me)."

To continue reading go to its original placement on the Washington Institute's website.

--Cary Umhau

Cary is our guest writer, she regularly blogs at www.holyvernacular.wordpress.

com and can also be found at www.caryumhau.com

Through A Glass, Darkly

1 Corinthians 13:12

my hand groping for my glasses

when I wake in the night, my eyes

reaching through the dark

that is close around me, closing

my reflection as I stand

barefoot before the mirror

my bedroom empty of light

and I dissolving in my nightgown

nothing but a shadow blooming

then out of the gloom

a glimmer: my dark eyes peering

trying to find the edges

of myself, searching for

something more certain

*

how we see

or think we see, ourselves

things outside of and within us

things that are bigger than we are

for now, this waiting for my eyes

to adjust to the dark

and later to the light:

when morning comes

I'll push aside the curtains

and be blinded

how we know

to wait for the light to return

so we can see more clearly who we are

and what makes light

and what it is we're made of

*

my hand now scribbling these lines

in the dark, birthing a poem

I cannot see myself

bringing forth the words

from black of wet womb

into the blanketed grey

pushing it out

this slippery living thing

trusting your hands

will be there to catch it

--Emily Ruth Hazel

More of Emily's work can be found in Body & Soul: Poems by Emily Ruth Hazel (Finishing Line Press). Email maria@redeemer.com for information on how to order. Emily also appears in the second edition of RedeemerWrites, and she will read at the IAF Summer Showcase.