--Maria
Friday, July 20, 2012
Medium and Message
--Maria
Friday, July 13, 2012
Presence in Writing
As a writer, grappling with the writing process every day, I often come across comments like this, “…the work itself – the practice of the craft of writing – must be its own reward”(Dennis Palumbo, Writing from the Inside Out, 53). Over the years such statements have paled, and in fact, become a source of discouragement for me. Because oftentimes writing isn’t its own reward. Such phrases – art for art’s sake – actually became statements of disillusionment and abandonment.
Recently I intentionally re-read Mark Batterson’s book, The Circle Maker, because I want to grow in prayer and faith. I was surprised to find that much of the same material that applied to me as a spiritual person also spoke to me as a writer. And then it hit me. When I see the word, “prayer,” it’s a word of relationship. When I pray, I’m entering into a relationship with Christ. I’m not alone. But when I utter the word, “writing,” I’m alone. It is no secret that aloneness and loneliness is a “right of passage” every writer must accept. Naturally, then, it would also become core to the writer’s identity.
As a Christian, maybe this is something that needs to be questioned and reassessed. Writing, like prayer, is not only about the inner being, the self, but it’s also about communicating and interacting with the world (evangelium). It’s about finding relationship through the craft. It’s also about being in a relationship with Jesus. When I sit down at my desk, turn on the computer, and look at the blank page – forced to confront myself – it can be terrifying. I realized that much like the effects of prayer, I want Jesus to be waiting there on the other side. I need to know that he’s waiting there.
It’s about entering presence. When I conceive of it that way, I’m not abandoned to figure it out on my own. I’m not begging the blank stare of art for art’s sake to fulfill me. Instead, I’m stepping into glory.
It’s still a struggle, for the daily discipline of writing often feels harsh and unrelenting. But if it is your call, your work, then like prayer, it can also be a conduit into Christ’s presence. Then the raw discipline, the craft, the monotonous constancy isn’t the end in itself. Rather, the reward is an invitation into his presence. It’s an investment and cultivation into something eternal. It’s a journey home.
Thinking, Oil and Wallpaper |
Anita is one of the many talented artists that participated in our seven-week faith and art study, In the Living Room, this past spring. Anita and her husband David are both graduates from Gordon-Conwell Seminary and will soon start a church in Manhattan.
Come to InterArts Fellowship this Monday Night at the W83 Ministry Center as we examine how Eternal Life shapes the present lives of artists. Featuring works by The James Hall Quintet, Anna Hillengas Troester, Maria Fee and guest speaker Cherith Fee Nordling. Artists reception to follow program.
Friday, July 6, 2012
Working at Worship
Friday, June 29, 2012
In My Solitude
I realize that I am addressing urban dwellers so let me explain what may be a nearly foreign concept to people who daily inhabit shared space with about ten million other bodies, and often in close quarters. Case in point, I'm writing this on a train next to three boisterous women who are reminiscing splendidly about New York in the fifties. In between songs on my iPad I'm catching bits of their conversation muted only slightly by my headphones. Then doesn't it seem merciless of me, given our way of life, to suggest that our most formative moments will be found in carefully prepared solitude, away from other people? Besides, you might say, isn't Redeemer Arts always challenging New York artists to seek out community and not to "go it alone"? Why now does it seem like I am saying just the opposite? Let me explain.
There's a difference between isolation and solitude, between feeling completely cut off from life giving community and setting apart time to enjoy peaceful solitude. The beauty of solitude is the discovery that we are never truly alone no matter how lonely we may feel at times. But this emodied sense of eternal presence did not come to us without a price. The lonely death of the incarnate God on a Roman cross won for us these pregnant, peaceful moments alone which would otherwise be utter isolation. But Jesus was cut off so that we would never be truly cut off. He cried out to an empty sky so that we would never have to. It is his isolation from the father in the garden and on the cross that makes possible our blessed solitude. Without the cross we'd all rightfully dread being alone and we as artists would have no hope of finding inspiration in the silence, for silence would only mean the end of fellowship with the ever-present Creator.
In our city it's easy to awake each day to the worship of an aesthetic, a philosophy or technique. These gods of our own making have shed no blood for us, but the One who loves us is waiting to meet us in precious moments of silence apart from the noise of our distracted lives. We receive this comfort in the very place where Jesus lost it, in solitude. It is our own renewed Gethsemane which we can enjoy now because he did not. He suffered the silence of God so that even our silence would be full of promise. Bless the garden in which he suffered, and bless the peaceful solitude we now can access through grace.
Friday, June 22, 2012
The Job of Attentiveness
Friday, June 15, 2012
Glory Be
I suppose the same could be said about our search for God. Much like the observatory, we wouldn't be looking if there hadn't been a contact made at some point. But in the arts we tend to latch onto to these moments don't we? It's more than a blip on the radar, it is our defining moment. The way in which we learn to respond to such anomalies will undoubtedly determine our experience in the arts. As Elizabeth Gilbert so graciously shared in her TED talk, we must learn to attribute these experiences of glory to a divine source outside of ourselves or else we will fall under the burden of re-creating such a feat on our own.
The exact opposite conclusion about glory is expressed by Oscar Hammerstein in the Sound of Music. One of my favorite songs from the score is Nothing Comes from Nothing. This languid ballad celebrates the unanticipated glory and grace of falling in love. Captain von Trapp and Fraulein Maria declare their love by moonlight and ponder that so rapturous and wonderful a love could come to them. The only explanation simply must be that they are the most deserving people on the planet or else it wouldn't make any sense for them to receive such a gift. Nothing comes from nothing...nothing ever could. So somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good. It's a logical conclusion I suppose, but as an artist I immediately think "If this good thing came because of exemplary behavior which I cannot now recall then I'm up a creek from here on out! I can never repeat that glorious moment and I'll be living in its shadow forever!" Does this sound like the way you view God's gifts sometimes, even the gift of your art? You seem to have many experiences of glory in which you create something truly special and share it with others, and yet there's no guarantee that you can produce or experience it ever again. Does it ever cause fear, even anger, that you will never have a sustained experience of glory?
I think these feelings are justified, honestly. God never meant for us to have mere blips and spurts of glory. He created us to live with him in perpetual, radiant glory as his beloved. The fits and starts of creating beauty in this life are like pulling the start cord on an old lawn mower or turning the ignition on an engine that needs some repair. But what Christ accomplished by dying in our place is that we can now get our lives back through his life and our glory back through his glory. As 1 Corinthians 5:14 reminds us, One died for all, therefore all died. And Paul elaborates on this revelation in his letter to his friends in Colossae when he writes, For you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears then you will also appear with him in glory.
At our next InterArts Fellowship, Cherith Nordling and our own Maria Fee will help us explore how our work as artists, though now in fits and starts, will one day be fully experienced and shared in Eternity. That God has won back our lives on the Cross is a fact that sweeps our art work into a true, living and eternal hope.
Kenyon
Friday, June 8, 2012
The Church, the Artist, and the Handshake
Friday, June 1, 2012
Eternal LIFE: Attentiveness
So much of our work as artists is bound up in conscious attentiveness. We must pay attention. We pay attention to choices and how they interact in our media, to colors, to light, to tone. Attentiveness leads us to a weary contentment when at last, in the moment of inspiration, our work transcends form and material. The burden of attentiveness becomes the artist's most auspicious exercise, perhaps because it points to the reality that the present moment is imbued with it's reflective worth in eternity. As Maria Fee wrote this week about our next InterArts which will feature an exhibition of her artwork, "We will seek to explore how Eternal LIFE is part of our present life as artists". But how can we cultivate our attentiveness in order to work with eternity in mind?
At lunch with International Arts Movement Executive Director Bryan Horvath this week, we lamented about the human tendency to be blissfully unaware of all the ways that God is working in and through the arts. It's all too easy to imagine that an artist who may have little regard for God's kingdom or the work of the Spirit is consequently disqualified as a conduit of divine presence and power. But God often chooses to work through such unsuspecting people and circumstances. Curious, isn't it? Could it be that one reason for this phenomenon is simply that everything which we call good work is empowered by the Spirit who blows like the wind and falls like the rain on the just and the unjust? And if this is the case then could it also be said that anyone who cultivates a careful observation of this magnum opus of the Spirit through conscious attentiveness to his good work in essence becomes a careful observer of the Spirit? From this viewpoint it's more than a little embarrassing that we who would, by the Spirit, seek to worship, honor and cherish him through an ancient & divine blood covenant are so often the last to notice his precious presence and activity. So, what's that about? How can we connect our conscious lives in the present to the Eternal LIFE of the Spirit such that our work in the present becomes a reflection to us of it's eschatalogical destiny?
Perhaps we can learn from actors in this matter. Let us look to the theater! Actors endeavor to be present in the moment of each scene while also being fully aware of and aspiring toward the play's culmination. The skill of the actor then is to employ their bodies and imaginations in the service of their character's highest ends with an acute attentiveness to every detail of staging, lighting, music, direction and their fellow actors. All of this must happen concurrent with a collaborative effort to move the story forward for the audience with a tremendous amount of focused intention until the dropping of the curtain. This proves even more difficult in film when the scenes are disparate, often shot out of order and over the course of several months. But is it possible in our real lives to be fully present, attentive and yet future-minded? Tall order huh?
It seems impossible to me, until I remember the words of Jesus to his disciples upon his departure from the earth, I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high." (Luke 24:49). Jesus speaks here of the coming of the Holy Spirit and his instruction for his disciples is to wait in eager expectation even as the creation now waits for the Spirit of God to be revealed in human beings (Romans 8:19). Our conscious attentiveness, then, is no empty meditation but pregnant with anticipation of power from on high. It is the promise of Christ and the proof of his faithfulness (death on a cross) that becomes the subject of our attentiveness and the source of our power as we anticipate the culminating work of the Spirit in our world. We, like the disciples, must wait in the city for power from on high. And we do not wait in vain for God has shown us that he has held nothing back from us, pouring out his very essence even on those who reject him. Let's pray for eyes to see more of his magnum opus in the artists and industries to which we have been called.
Kenyon
Friday, May 25, 2012
Make The Cake And Eat It, Too.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Eternal LIFE: Love & Death
Looking back I don't know where I got that idea. But it grew inside of me all evening and into the next day, and the next. I began to notice a change at dinner with a filmmaker friend who had prefaced his invitation to the film with "going to see a very weird German film". I was almost astonished at the insights I gained in our discussions of the film particularly since he, arriving late, had missed the screening altogether. Anyway, this blog will hardly suffice as a review of the film, but since you won't find a public screening of it any time soon and I don't necessarily recommend sitting through it (though I would again just to see the shots on the beach and the dress blowing in the wind like a flag). I will invite you into our post film discussion with the hope of unpacking some of the truth which arose for me as the thesis of the film though perhaps not of Schroeter's body of work as a whole.
Schroeter so effectively carries us into the mania of our self glorifying existence. The film is comprised from start to finish by a series of seemingly disconnected scenes ranging from stunningly beautiful to viscerally disturbing, sweeping through memories with little prejudice for past or present. The narrative does appear, however, and culminates in an encounter with death, a moment which has led me to draw a kind of emotional thesis from the experience: That love and death are intimately tied together. In death love is revealed and through death love is received and shared. "But how can this be?" my heart asks me...the younger part of myself, perhaps, or the naive one. Is not love a positive thing and death negative? How then can one be dependent on the other?
I presented these questions to Pamela Brown-Peterside, Community Group Director of Redeemer's West Side Congregation, with whom I shared about my experience of the film and how the filmmaker seemed to understand deeply the connection between love and death. She said immediately, "Greater love hath no man than this...that he lay down his life for his friends." This should have been obvious I suppose when you consider that the cross itself is God's proof of his own unfailing and eternal love. This is the love that casts out fear (John 4:18) and what does man fear more than death? I've heard, as well, the declaration from Paul's letters to the Romans: This is how we know what love is...while we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. There it is again, love and death. Not only is all of this evident in scripture but as we learn in Gotham Fellows and in the sermons at Redeemer, the whole story of the gospel is that of creation (life), the fall of man (death) and redemption (life through death). The through-line of this story's action is certainly the incomparable, pursuing love of God. So then it should not surprise me, this connection between love and death. But as I, looking towards our next InterArts Fellowship, strive to conceive of the impossible reality of Eternal LIFE I am continually confronted by thoughts of death, a death leading to greater love. It seems to be the unsung truth of the gospel: that death leads to life, but ultimately to love. Still my heart says, "but how can this be?". When might death ever provide an experience of ultimate love, other than in some ancient mythical tale of star-crossed lovers?
Schroeter's film presents two characters (both played by Isabelle Huppert) tied to each other by the love of their mother, a love fraught with frustrated longings for affection. The story unfolds to reveal the two are sisters, as it seems, Maria and Magdalena, portrayed as two parts perhaps of one person. He shows us how death, for them the death of their mother, tears us apart and creates another self with whom we can never reconcile until death. So in this case the death becomes the impetus and the culminating element in the character's pursuit of love and reconciliation. The ultimate reconciliation comes through her own death which is achieved or received apparently at her own hand. At that moment Maria-Magdalena, the bifurcated, wounded heart seems to have achieved at last the love that evaded her for so many tortuous and confusing years of thwarted loves and cruel memories. Certainly, Maria and Magdalena each dealt with death differently...one longing for love by seeking it and the other by withholding it from others. Finally, death unites them in solidarity and brings forgiveness for the mother who's death had so scandalized their young hearts. In this culminating scene I was confronted with the notion that love is perfected or achieved somehow in death, which left me confused and a bit battered until I realized that this is the truth on which I have based my life.
For me the film's conclusion screams the gospel or perhaps the most cutting edge of the gospel...that death is the way to life and love because Christ's death was an ultimate one. The claim of the gospel is that one died for all and therefore all died that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died (2 Corinthians 5:14). Interesting, of course, that the names of the two characters are Mary and Magdalena (Werner was thought to be obsessed with Catholicism). It was Mary Magdalene who was among those first to see and recognize Jesus after his resurrection and conquering of death. This moment for me was captured in the characters created by Schroeter. Now, to the degree that I see Christ risen from a death he died for me, my death becomes a victory and an entrance into eternal love which is life eternal according to the gospels. This is life eternal, that they might know you, the only true God (John 17:3).
At the end of the film there is a sort of resurrection after death accomplished through diverse mythology and magic in a voodoo-like ceremony. The resurrection portrayed leads to a measure of reconciliation and peace for Maria-Magdalena, and I saw love too. But despite this vague resolution my spirit was comforted that after all of the traumas of memory that Shchroeter subjects us (and himself) to he led us through the grave to resurrection, and by a sacrifice to a new and strange life. Isn't this the hope we find in Christ? That death no longer has victory? When we allow the self that we have served, worshiped and enthroned with all of its desires and demands, all of its rebellion against truth and reality, even against love...when we seek to end our self-driven life so that we can be caught up in a new life given to us by the resurrected Jesus, then we can enter love...and through love, Eternal LIFE. If we seek self actualization we become more unlike ourselves and the only ground to stand on in the river of our experience is the stones of our memories. But knowing Jesus personally is evidence that we are tasting eternal life, not ephemeral self-actualization but fullness of life.
How brazenly Schroeter reminds us of the fleeting nature of our lives and the insufficiency of memory to shape our existence. He is merciful to show us this and to point us to death of self as a way of seeking a new life. But we need not use magic to resurrect this new life as Maria-Magdalena used in the final scene of the film. There is at work already a deeper magic as C.S. Lewis would put it. A magic that is not the result of human manipulation or power. No witchcraft here. The resurrection of Christ offers humans a purely arbitrary gift, undeserved and un-conjured, from the powers that be. In Jesus we receive the reconciliation with others that Maria-Magdalena was desperately seeking but we also find peace within ourselves as we cease from merchandising our longings and accept relationship with the God who gave up power and wealth for a moment of intimacy with his beloved...you and I. It was His death on the cross that released the greatest love on earth and it is his life I now seek to live instead of my own.
Kenyon
Friday, May 11, 2012
Being Displays Itself
Friday, May 4, 2012
ETERNAL LIFE: This Death Must Come
Friday, April 27, 2012
Kingdom Waiting
Friday, April 20, 2012
Time Continuum
Friday, April 6, 2012
Not As The Flowers
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
-John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter, Stanza 2
The lilies that will adorn our churches this Sunday are redolent of fresh life, yet for Updike this symbol is much too subdued. Christ’s resurrection signals so much more: we can forget about Easter fineries, for we will one day wear Spiritual bodies. And just like the angel at the tomb in John Updike’s poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, we will be weighty, “opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen, spun on a definite loom.”
The resurrection indicates a new way of being. A life animated by the Spirit, tabernacle in a physical body— the earthbound people of God. Easter for artists signals the re-creating capacity set into motion by our Triune God: the Father’s undying love, spurs the Son’s self-giving, and the Spirit’s creative activity overcomes death for all. For artists this dynamic movement reverberates into our own lives as we continually advocate and sacrifice for art to then experience some semblance of renewal. If our God re-creates out of brokenness, even death, please consider this Easter what this means for your art. “Let us walk through the door:”
The stone is rolled back; not paper-mâché,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
-John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter, Stanza 5
--Maria