Make The Cake And Eat It, Too.

“Lately, I’ve been thinking about Jesus in the manner of how he is all consuming.” Or, it was something in this vein the artist Melissa Beck articulated during my recent visit to her Pratt studio. Evidence of this statement filled my eyes as I perused one of her utensil pieces: a horizontal band of silver-plated forks happily glued to the wall by thick cake frosting.  I was ready to partake in order to taste and see how good God is.

As a new fan of this emerging artist there is one thing I must herald about Melissa’s work: It is not just a cerebral exercise, as most of contemporary art is these days, for it jogs our embodied vision utilizing touch, smell, and taste. Her art is a holistic experience and through her use of food and household objects she explores ideas of consumption along with its tension between abundance and scarcity. This is exemplified by one of her pieces entitled “Drawering Room.” Does the collection of empty drawers hint at hoarding or are they waiting to be filled? These themes have already been explored by CFW guest speakers such as O. David Taylor and Andy Crouch who remind us that in God’s infinite kingdom to gain means we must give away.

Thoughts on the infinite and the finite are further mediated through variations of constructed cakes. Melissa assembles both real cakes oozing with icing and more durable confections made of building materials such as wood, nails, and foam. Her choice of repurposing ordinary objects such as bread, ironing boards, and furniture are overtly charged with nurturing implications redolent of home, family, and community.  Some may see the work as sentimental, but I prefer to view them as markers pointing to the accessibility of an eternal home made possible by our all consuming Christ.

Take in God through the arts!

--Maria

Eternal LIFE: Love & Death

Seeing Werner Schroeter's grotesque and penetrating film Two at the MoMA's retrospective of the German filmmaker this week sent me away with a new awareness of the commonality between love and death.  Outside the theater after the 117 minute screening one wondered if any of the audience, those who stayed until the end, really got anything out of the film other than a slight headache. But if my experience might serve as a case study, the film does have a latent but no less potent effect. Upon leaving the theater a woman and her friend, both looking painfully baffled, asked us..."do you speak French? Did you get it?" I admitted that I did not fully understand my experience but not before she interjected, "something about life I assume". I surprised myself by responding, "I think it's more to do with death actually".


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

Being Displays Itself

Being Displays Itself

We are people of the Word but our beloved text points to gathered sounds that ultimately utter God’s actions. From burning bush to a son nailed onto a tree—we hear activity. The whole biblical narrative from creation, fall, alienation to reconciliation exhibits, as von Balthasar relates, God’s “genuine unfolding of himself in the worldly stuff of nature, man and history.” (von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord). The bible is a divine-human drama that begs for a theology that is just as robust and dynamic.

Following God-patterns employs imagination and theologian von Balthasar explores the Christian drama like a theatre critic trying to make meaning of a play. For Christ has radically changed the stage of history. The pagan dramas between human and divine entities so central to the ancient world has shifted. Through Christ “the dialectic of immanence and transcendence, nature and super-nature” can now find hope for reconciliation. (Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, p. 129) Christ has invited all actors to take the stage and enflesh the Word through their lives.

Just as the torn temple curtain reconciles us to the Holy, the incarnated Jesus also removed the actor’s mask for God to draw near. This also means the Christian actor has the choice to follow Jesus into the tragedies of life. The passage into the dark abyss of the human psyche can only happen because of Christ’s own journey in and out of hell. As von Balthasar relates, “Christianity, with its inner dramatic tension… can take all theatrical aspects into itself in even the darkest moments” only because Jesus travailed through death.  (Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, p. 82)

Observable transformation and authentic hope erodes the meaninglessness we find in much contemporary drama. With Jesus our stories become interwoven with the Christian story and some of these narratives need the stage to fully express its theological import. Theater allows us to publically incarnate these stories with the potential of ushering in his presence. 

Imagine a God who would write us into his drama. Be an actor on his stage.

--Maria

ETERNAL LIFE: This Death Must Come

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

                                                                       

                                                                     -Julian of Norwich

What is the story underlying your journey as an artist? Are you on a path to glory? If I’m honest with myself, the pervasive narrative in which I locate my struggle to create and share art is often rooted in my own imagined “path to glory”. As you can probably guess, viewing my life with this story in my heart often leads to more than a little frustration. It can even lead me to depression. Why does it seem that God is working against this “path to glory” narrative I’ve created? Doesn’t he want me to flourish and shine, if only for the sake of others (and for the years I spent watching VH1 and MTV). How might God see my path unfolding? As we continue our meditation this year exploring the essence of LIFE, please join me in a series of reflections on ETERNAL: LIFE looking forward to our next quarterly InterArtsFellowship with Cherith Nordling and guest artists.

i. This Death Must Come

God’s path to glory always includes death. This is staggering news to us, continually. But he is the Master Redeemer and this is his way. Our way of redeeming is about self glory. That is our natural choice. Whether we are aware of it or not, we actually default to our own self glory in all things. But the Master Redeemer knows us quite well. We were not always so inclined. He also knows the whole of His creation. And he knows the future.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Yet now is the hour of redemption by death alone. This death will come, to the self we seek to glorify. And this is his most loving way. This is his mercy. For his glory is not a matter of self-actualization for the Almighty, as it would be for you and I. That is a ludicrous comparison. No, the Almighty has no maker, he is eternal, the creator of all though not himself created... His glory is for the becoming of all things which are not himself, that they might become glorified by being drawn into his destiny. And this is the magnificent work of the cross.

Through Christ’s death, the death of God, all that is not within God is brought back into him not only for his own glory but for the reclamation of glory for all that he made. The cosmos is swept into the eternal life of God through Christ’s eternal reign over death. All which lives to die, now lives in the shadow of the cross and the hope of resurrection through the risen one. So this death must come, and through it shall come the resurrection of all things by the catalytic, Eternal LIFE of Christ, who is the glory of God.

Kenyon