Longing And The Spirit Life

Fresh Pair of Eyes

'Cause I want to be seen
With a fresh pair of eyes
The single white tree
In a black hood of disguise

I want, I want to be seen
With a fresh pair of eyes
The single, the single white tree
In a black hood of disguise

I miss God, I miss God
I miss God, I miss God

-Brooke Waggoner

Longing is one of the visceral affects induced by Wim Wenders’ film Pina. Pina Bausch’s choreography beautifully, and at times with forceful asperity, depicts the body reaching for what lies beyond. Leaving the theater one cannot help but address our hollowness set beside such hallow-ness.

I miss God, I miss God
I miss God, I miss God

The songstress, Brooke Waggoner, also elicits yearning. Longing comes from diagnosing what we miss. Like the Psalmist, we need to voice our apprehensions acknowledging God all the while. To be spiritual means to live and work in the realm of the Spirit—God’s own presence in the world. Through Jesus we are given the Spirit in order to grasp God’s holiness and righteousness. This happen in spite of how we live in the mire of our own muck. When we receive mercy, we know God is near.

The Spirit gives us “a fresh pair of eyes” to enable true relationship with the triune God, with others, and with the physical world. Steven Guthrie relates how “Apart from God’s Spirit, we sink further away from our humanity.” (Guthrie, Creator Spirit, p.36) According to Guthrie this is why the Spirit allows us to see God through artists like Pina Bausch who is able to trace and recover genuine human movement. God’s Spirit does not de-humanize, instead it reorders and transforms our human desires so that we may see Him. In fact, it is because of Jesus’ humanness the Spirit can reveal what has been missed under sin’s "black hood of disguise."

The Spirit life, therefore, is a life dependent on our triune God. Our work must be handed over to Christ’s renewing love that reconciles all things. Cultural renewal comes out of Spiritual restoration. Perhaps Ms. Waggoner also comes to this realization when she croons in her song Wonder-Dummied how “I tried my best alone but it got me nowhere and I can’t do it on my own.” True longing erupts in God’s accepting presence for we finally sense our own inadequacies, “Oh to be of the purest of pure in his arms,” Ms. Waggoner aches:

But I’ve never felt this feel so heavy
And I’ve never felt this feel so low
Yeah it is a wake inside my whole soul
But you are my strength I won’t stand alone

The Christian artist works in the medium of painful longing for we are given the Spirit who directs us ahead to what should be, what can be, what will be. This is why Colin Gunton understands the Spirit’s action as eschatological. The Spirit works to perfect “the particulars by relating them to their source and destiny.” (Gunton, The One, The Three, And The Many, p. 212). Let us not be overwhelmed by the heaviness of longing, but relate it back to its source and destiny for ultimately it is God we seek.

Please join us at InterArts Fellowship on April 16^th when Brooke Waggoner, along with William Edgar, will help us to further examine the Spirit Life.

--Maria

New City Arts Forum

This week Redeemer Arts has invited two close partners to share with you about a new and important art & faith movement which will culminate next month in an exciting way at the New City Arts Forum. To whet your appetite for this event we've asked our good friend Dan Siedell, who will be a featured speaker at the Forum, to contribute a blog introducing the issues he will address at the Forum. You can learn more about Dan Siedell's life and work in his book God in the Gallery or by listening to podcasts at International Arts Movement. One of our favorite articles by Dan is Art as an Aescetic Practice, which you'll find at his blog. Please enjoy reading this article, and we hope you'll consider attending the upcoming New City Arts Forum in Charlottesville.

Kenyon & Maria, Redeemer Arts Staff

A Word from Dan Siedell

The New City Arts Initiative, a network of artists and advocates in Charlottesville, Virginia that is committed to supporting human flourishing through the arts, is hosting it's inaugural conference April 20-22, 2012. Organized around the theme Art, City and Society, a small cohort of artists, scholars and advocates has been invited to facilitate a conversation around the following questions. What is the responsibility of the artist? What is good art? What is the relationship of art and social engagement? Who is our audience? And finally, what is the role of the church?

NCAI has invited me to reflect on the role of the church in the arts from the perspective of God in the Gallery, a book I wrote a few years ago, in which I argued that the church needs to understand modern and contemporary art more deeply and on its own terms in order more effectively to embrace it.

After fifteen years as a museum curator, art history professor, and practicing art historian, I have recently joined the staff of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida as a cultural theologian. This vocational and institutional shift has rotated my approach to the role of the church and the arts in obvious and not so obvious ways. Through the unique opportunities and challenges of Coral Ridge, I will discuss what I have come to believe is the most important role that the contemporary church can play for the arts: love them. It sounds obvious but it is not. The temptation is to make the arts do something for us; make them work for us. But we should love them for their own sake. Love them by examining every nook and cranny of their distinctive practices. Love them by studying their history and theory. Love them by refusing to make them serve as tools for our theology or worldview. It is only through love that the church can support the arts, cultivate a relationship that can bear witness to Christ and the freedom He has won for us—a freedom to love art.

Join us next month in Charlottesville as we explore this and other important and challenging questions together. I will also give you an update on my search, which I discussed in God in the Gallery, for that most elusive and mysterious of creatures, the so-called “Christian artist.”

Dan Siedell, Guest Blogger

Information for Follow Up:

Daniel A. Siedell is Director of Theological & Cultural Practices at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is at work on a book on Christianity and modern art with theologian Willian Dyrness of InterVarsity Press.

To register for the Forum: click here

More about New City Arts: Click here

Read article in Christianity Today re NCAI

Up, Light/Light, Up

The idea of “Christian Art” is a subject that has been continually shrouded with a sense of discord. Few people can reach an agreement on how to define this term, or agree on what type of art this term should define. Yet, for those of us who consider ourselves Christians and who make art (or who participate in the art world in some capacity) it is a phrase we are forced to confront at some point. Given the contentious nature of this label, it is highly unlikely that a consensus will ever be reached, but just because the topic is a difficult one does not mean we receive a free pass to ignore it all together.

The exhibition Up, Light/Light, Up currently on view in Redeemer's new W83 Ministry Center strives to move beyond the stringent label and overt Christian imagery that is frequently associated with “Christian Art.” Instead, the exhibition endeavors to view art through a wider lens of both context and formal qualities. We are able to see how greatly the nature of a space affects the way in which we view objects. If the artworks had been installed in a white walled gallery few of us would perhaps have seen a connection between the collected works and Christianity. But, as the art is installed in a space dedicated to worship, the viewer automatically begins interpreting the works in a way that corresponds with its environment.

As the viewer continues to respond to the environment and the art works themselves, different formal elements in the works begin to take on new meanings. The diamond of light contemplated by a gathering of people in Joyce Lee’s Hover begins to feel like a modern day burning bush whose message the observers are struggling to comprehend. The chevron pattern in Heaven is Fey and Untitled by Wayne Adams lifts the viewer’s eyes higher and higher, seemingly to encourage the contemplation and worship of the One Most High. Or, through the house-like forms in Stephanie Imbeau’s sewn drawing, we are reminded that wherever we worship is considered the House of God, and in turn we are connect to a larger community of churches and believers, creating an expanding network of houses that belong to God. It quickly becomes apparent that in each work there is some bold light source, or upward moving line or shape that continues to encourage the viewer to contemplate ideas of faith and Christianity.

So it is through the quiet encouragement of light, movement, and context, that Up, Light/Light, Up is able to bring the viewer to a place of worship and contemplation. The success of the works in this space makes us wonder how we could ever consider these works to be anything but faith-based art. But it is also here in this same moment, if we are able to take a step back, that we realize just how much we allow our environments to affect the way we view and interact with art. This is not necessarily a bad thing: perhaps it will help us to also realize how precarious our attempts at defining “Christian Art” truly are. Maybe more important then establishing a clear definition of “Christian Art,” is establishing the ability and willingness to see God in the art and gallery spaces all around us, no matter how unlikely it may seem.

-Allison Peller

Up, Light/Light, Up exhibition will be on view this Sunday in Fellowship Hall after all services. Allison Peller is co-curator of Up, Light/Light, Up enlisting many CIVA artists.

Sensible Resurrection

The resurrection of Jesus puts into effect the possibility of eternal life. But what does this incredible event have to do with the arts? CFW’s next Gospel & Culture lecture will feature Dr. Jeremy Begbie who will speak regarding A World Made New: The Art of the Resurrection and the Resurrection of Art.

We'll prime Dr. Begbie’s lecture by reflecting, here on this post, the topic of resurrection. To begin with we must acknowledge how for various reasons our modern world suffers a faith crisis surrounding the sensory. We mistrust the senses; hence we can’t seem to make much sense of art, never mind the idea of someone coming back from the dead. Perhaps John Dewey is correct when he surmised we fear what life may bring, especially since we tend to see opposition between mind-body, spirit-flesh (Dewey, Art As Experience, 22-23). So instead of allowing the resurrection to breathe life into our work as artists, it lives comfortably tucked away in our doctrines and confessions—apart and separate.

Fortunately the narrative of John 20 takes great pains to make sure we understand the disciples encountered not an idea but a risen physical body—nail holes, split side. As John Updike describes in his poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, “molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle.”

In fact, the chapter highlights Thomas’ discomfort with hearsay regarding the resurrection; he needed to see the risen Jesus. A radical confrontation with the concrete cannot question or doubt that God is involved with the stuff of this world. And just as Thomas was accustomed to witnessing Jesus incarnate the wonders of the kingdom, he also desired to look upon the manifestation of eternity in the shape of the risen Christ.

John Dewey remarks how our society utilizes the senses to arouse passion but does not move beyond “to fulfill the interest of insight” (Dewey, Art As Experience, 19). Good art making is dependent on both the senses and good sense. And, in a similar fashion Thomas needed to fulfill this new Godly insight through all of his being—including experience. He needed to touch the ridges of torn skin to thereby and passionately proclaim Jesus as “Lord and God.”

Likewise, some of us are not content with only a theoretical assertion that Jesus is currently living in a marred physical body. We want to make sense of this information in some weighty way. This passion should stir us to mediate this astounding God-action through our actions whether it be through dance, poetry, or just living a full life practicing for the one that is to come.

Thomas’ need allows us to ground Jesus in the fragility of materiality—“regathered out of enduring might,” as Updike reminds us. Seven Stanzas at Easter also calls us to remember:

It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His flesh; ours.

Please join us on Saturday evening, March 10, as Dr. Begbie help us discover A world made new by Christ's bodily resurrection.

--Maria