The Reality of Abundance

On the table of pine

Stood a tiny Bowl of Blackberries (click to listen)

You poured into it the whitest cream.

In the corner her tail

Wrapped around her tiny body

As herself she did softly clean.

Outside on the lawn

Gently blowing the linen

Almost as if it were a dream.

And in the porcelain sink

My sorrows deep.

Pulled the drain and

I sent them out to sea.

My only wish,

For this.

My only wish,

For more of this

by Jonny Rodgers. See it live at the next InterArts.

Something in Jonny Rodgers depiction of that tiny bowl of blackberries served with cream on a picnic table re-affirms for me a sense of the reality of Abundance. There is a place or person somewhere in the universe that truly fulfills the last aching abyss of the human heart. It is only a sense in my deepest heart of hearts, but could there be some validity to this feeling?

Everything in our culture seems to operate at a deficit, home loans, car loans, student loans, national debt....Yet our individual hopes and desires perhaps are running the highest deficit of all. I look at hundreds of faces each day riding the subways. I look at my own face reflected on my desktop as I write. Contentment seems even more elusive today than the large, dark creature I thought I saw while peering intently into the waters of Loch Ness at age sixteen.

When C.S. Lewis refers to our having desires which cannot be satisfied in this life, he hardly seems to paint a picture of Abundance. He does however conclude that we must, then, be made in fact for another world, suggesting the afterlife which is central to the Christian belief in resurrection. Still, it is difficult in the midst of our longings to find comfort merely in the hope of a life to come. Don’t you agree?

The Police, in their harrowing anthem Spirits in the Material World make a similar observation to Lewis’ but arrive at quite a different conclusion. Where does the answer lie, living from day to day? If it’s something we can’t buy, there must be another way. We are spirits in the material world. The answer for Sting seems to be a realization that life in the body is somehow of less consequence than a disembodied life would be. The song gives me a sense of needing to escape my body, a sentiment which was so heart-wrenchingly expressed by the character Evan in Justin Lerner’s recent New York film premiere, Girlfriend. Actor Evan Sneider delivers a stealth performance as a young man with Down’s syndrome who falls in love with a beautiful and troubled single mother in a rural suburb. For Evan, being in his physical body seemed to keep him from his desire for romantic love. Rocking out at my desk to The Police performing this incredibly virile song leaves me with a feeling that we’d all be better off if we could only escape our bodies and live a purely ephemeral, spiritual life. It’s little wonder that the opening lines to the song decry contemporary efforts to reform society or the human condition. Why engage in politics, religion or even relationships if there's no real hope?Indeed, there must be another way.

Being a song-writer and a follower of Christ I am trying to understand the tension between recognizing the brokenness in my own heart and life, and allowing that brokenness to take over my view of myself and the world. If it weren’t for my pain, I wouldn’t have much to share with others. On the other hand, I also have this notion in my gut, having met the resurrected shepherd, that even the darkest night will one day be a distant memory in the face of such beauty as He possesses and which He will one day restore to all things. Living in this hope means loving Abundance: loving the world while regarding only one thing as most precious. That thing is a person, whose mystery is enough to tickle the laughing/crying soft flesh of our longing. Yet, He is master enough to restore all things. The reality of Abundance stares us back in the face through the eyes of this mysterious and masterful person. In holding him dear, all things become dearer to me.

Kenyon

The Practice of Pilgrimage

Amid many recent faith and art conversations, including James K.A. Smith’s Gospel & Culture lecture, one point keeps coming up: talk is good, information invaluable, but transformation also happens through the doing. There is a need in our technological society for Christians to form new practices and disciplines that direct us to the triune God, which in turn allows us to be the physical church in his material world.

Also of late is my back to back attendance of a couple of art and faith conferences. These events have set me thinking how there is an emotional, spiritual, and even physical need for these gatherings and how these short digressions from our noisy lives parallel the Christian practice of pilgrimage. In fact, I’d like to argue that the Christian conference or the neo-pilgrimage is a discipline, a doing, where like-minded people gather to experience and enact a spiritual journey fortified by mutual encouragement. Using Jamie Smith’s term relating to driving desires, there is a liturgy that these specific-themed, extended time, corporate gatherings, offer. (After all, our desires direct us to choose the conference according to its distinct content.)

Yes, the discipline of pulling away for solitary prayer and reflection is necessary, but just as invaluable is the practice of setting time aside to travel a long or short distance with a group of God’s beloved. Hands down, face to face time beats Facebook entries. Cell phones give way to meaningful conversations. Sharing similar concerns brings about impromptu prayers. Here, lecturers and friends can offer up “a hymn, a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation” for the benefit of God’s people amid a culture that continually pushes relationships into a virtual world.

We need each other to reignite our specific mission in the world. Our journey—we surprisingly find at these gatherings—is not so solitary, after all. In deed, the Center for Faith & Work looks to gather on November 4th and 5th, those who understand the doing is just as important as the knowing. We hope you will join us this fall on our neo-pilgrimage as we examine God’s call towards cultural involvement and human flourishing.

--Maria

Visual Poems

Recently viewing Terrence Malick’s visually stunning, Tree of Life, I revisited another visual treasure, Julian Schnabel’s poetic film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly beautifully conveys the human capacity to create and generate art despite tragic and confining perimeters through the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, jet setter and fashion editor of Elle magazine. After a stroke leaves him paralyzed with Lock-in Syndrome, Bauby grapples with the meaning of life. However, Bauby still possesses control of one body part, an eyelid. It is through the means of blinking, Bauby slowly communicate his story.

After such accomplishments do we dare utter excuses for not making art? The Diving Bell and the Butterfly discloses how our particular vantage point of the world must be shared, even if the sole instrument toward production is the blink of an eye. To work through brokenness is to honor and own our humanness; this is heroic poetry. Tree of Life offers the same message, the cosmic proportions of our spiritual journey, comes through the broken, small and mundane; poetry in motion.

Poetry constructs a defense against despair, and it takes battling despondency for Jean-Dominique Bauby to realize not all human actions had been taken from him, he continues to own and utilize memory and imagination. Memory allows him to cherish relationships and past events—the sensory world he so took for granted—while imagination offers the freedom to visit these moments with a fresh perspective. For Bauby memory becomes aligned with the intrepid explorer clad in an ancient diving bell suit; an ambivalent symbol for both discovery (about himself, the world, his relationships) and claustrophobic confines. The butterfly is the flight of imagination; it signifies incomprehensible hope, beauty and the true freedom our souls and bodies long for.

Schnabel’s film draws on visual and linguistic metaphors to produce a tale of a man and his physical constraints that also relates to our lives. Unfamiliar hardships—the diving bell or personal constrains of our lives--together with the winged butterfly of our imaginations, allow for murky-watered journeys in under-visited and unfamiliar places. The film makes a case for beauty and creativity and how they sanction and hallow our existence.

If our tendency is to think outside of our bodies, as some suggest, Schnabel accomplishes an act of incarnation by placing us inside a body. The camera skirts by eyelashes to view the world through Bauby’s good eye. We, thereby, are forced to enter into the “skin” of Jean-Dominique Bauby. Within his metaphorical shoes we join the groping action of human creativity that strives to make sense of the world. Likewise, as we watch and hear Bauby “grope” to find import within his meaningless body, we too begin to discover the implications of our broken and encumbered lives. Much like Tree of Life, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly celebrates life, and that’s poetry, too.

Be a poem,

--Maria

Summer Prayers

In July

i.

Oh, Holy Spirit,
Come upon me, like a warm breath of air, sweet with the smell of summer;

Or the first telling of lilacs in spring.

Guide me home.

I don't know how to get there myself.
I am incomplete.

ii.
Father,
Weigh heavy on me with desire;

Might I trust the light of your grace.

Part your clouds that I may gaze into a world of light,

And my soul be set free.

I run towards it,

And I don't look back.

I am taken up,

I am part of

A foreign light.

It is not me,

But it must be for me.

Oh wonder! Oh power!

You are terrible,

But my soul longs to be filled with your beauty.

To send off,

Into the glorious adventure.

I run towards it.

Ever and ever and ever towards it.

I don't look back.


iii.
Father,

Do fill me with your purpose.

Show me that nothing satisfies as fully and as completely

Yet lays on me so gently and so safely.

Don't let me go.

Make me alert.

Show me that strength and perseverance are real.

May your urgency rest upon me.

Make sharp my perception

Yet don't let me stray into superiority or selfishness.

Father,

Make your intentions clear to me.

Might I walk into them without fear

But confident in your ways.
In August

i.
Father,

Melt me into myself,
Quiet and afraid in you,

My protection.

ii.
I am not alone.

These feelings are shared

By Christ.

iii.
Father God,
Teach me to let go.
Would that your warm breath caress against my face,

And comfort me as nothing else will.
That your quiet voice

Would be my strength alone,

To fill this hole inside of me.

Remake me

A creature sensitive

To these things.

John 20: The Second Gardener

In the beginning God affirmed matter and set into the cosmos a generative force that allows for both, beauty and sustainability. Yet the fall obscures our perception of his world; lost is our view of the garden. Our need for glory somehow trumps the Triune God’s. Thus, tarnished by brokenness, we no longer see God or the world rightly. This is one reason why art has held such a tenuous position in the church, as well as our culture, for it reflects the status of our soul—our lost sense of beauty.

If we, therefore, want to include the work of our hands as part of our spiritual formation we must develop a Trinitarian view of God that includes the Father’s affirmation of creation, Christ’s redemptive action in the world, and an acknowledgement of the Spirit that accomplishes the Spiritual—seeing God’s presence in the physical world. Revelation by the Spirit helps us trace the dynamic movement of God towards us, through our grime-encrusted reality.

The Gospel of John takes us on such a journey and to another garden. After the crucifixion of Jesus and his entombment, the bereaved Mary identifies the resurrected Christ as gardener. Some may argue that Mary’s mourning leaves her bewildered and muddled. But, could it be possible that Mary possesses the ability to see the genesis of a new story (just as she was able to perceive the two angels in the tomb unlike Peter and John?)

Placed in a virgin tomb, in a garden, the second Adam now appears and reminiscent of Genesis 2, God, now incarnate and resurrected, breathes onto his followers and tells them to “receive the Holy Spirit.” John 20 holds the key to animate our cultural renewal theologies: forgiveness offers a spectacular view of what God has created and assists wholehearted engagement with the world. Christ breathes his Spirit onto his followers to equip them for this mission of reconciliation. Jesus, through the Spirit, reconciles us to the Father and calls us to do the same.

John 20:23 reads: “If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven: if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” This is a crazy statement considering all the flack Jesus himself received when he forgave sins. But, the power given to us by Christ, through the Spirit, apparently empowers us to forgive sins—God is near! This means we acknowledge the brokenness that corrupts God’s world, but out of the Triune God’s love, we forgive these sins. We can only live as forgiven and hopeful people when we look, as the disciples did in the gospel of John, at the scars bore by the resurrected Jesus. And it’s by these scars, fashioned by Christ’s generative action of forgiveness, that will enable the glory and honor of the nations to enter the Holy City. Beauty will finally be recovered.

However, for Mary, Jesus’ humble role as ultimate gardener, the second Adam, also makes him, Rabboni; the one who instructs and constructs the way for us to be human, forgiven, cultivators of beauty.

Receive the Holy Spirit.

--Maria

Quarternity

Anselm Kiefer’s painting Quaternity depicts a bare wooden interior. The room is the artist’s studio containing three small, seemingly contained fires and a serpent. The three flames are labeled Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the serpent is branded, Satan. I will not presume to read into Kiefer’s symbolism, but for the sake of this entry I will utilize Quarternity to make a statement regarding Christianity and the arts. As I see it they both sit in an upper story, an emptied attic, displaced by the preference for the technological, scientific, rationalistic and pragmatic. Despite the fact our society regards the church in this way, Protestant Christianity has created a similar attic to place art.

Yet Kiefer’s studio holds a key towards the integration of faith and reason, symbol and statistics, spirit and materiality. He depicts the Trinity as flames ready to ignite the embodied soul with real light in order to illuminate our fragmented world. At the same time we must be alert to the serpent in the room undermining the Trinity’s work by fracturing what should be united. Quarternity, four, not three, speaks of a God who acknowledges sin and moves beyond himself to address it.

Therefore, we too, must move beyond the ground floor status of rationality and integrate with the upper story. Our one God, Father, Son, and Spirit is the source of all creation. We must worship him not just with mind, will, and intellect, but with our whole embodied being. This means putting into our Spiritual practices things like drawing and data entry. God as one and three, restores matter and revelation and re-cast the idea of living inter-relationally with a dependence on both fact and fiction, faith and finance, relationships and retreats, art and religion.

The incarnate Christ has prepared a place for us in the Father’s house. To be sure it has many rooms, so with the Spirit’s help--the one who creates porous boundaries between disparate properties--let’s practice living life in the whole house, not just the attic.

--Maria

Regarding this entry listen to Jamie K.A. Smith's Gospel and Culture Lecture, Culture As Liturgy.

The Deep Places: Accessibility and Responsibility

ac-cess /'ak,ses/ , n. a means of approach or entering a place.

ac-ces'si-ble, adj. easy to reach or influence.

As artists we have access to a key environment in the structure of a human being. Nigel Goodwin calls it "your belly". Martha Graham calls it "your center". Aretha Franklin calls it "my soul" and King David called it "my innermost being". This deep place exists between dreaming and waking where we are most ourselves, in which no pretense could ever possibly materialize, where the passions and fears that drive our lives are cultivated. But we would be kidding ourselves to think that artists have some kind of original authority or credential at the gateway to the deep places of the human heart. No, it is only in collaborating with the most mysterious Artist of all that we ever even come close to accessing the deepest realms of human longing. It is in this place, the deep place, that we need God to meet us most of all.

So, much of our work as artists is a kind of active or skilled waiting, as we delve into this mysterious place where the Holy Spirit is quite impressively on the move like a merchant sailing a trade route in hostile waters. Much of our work, indeed, is looking, listening and waiting to respond or simply be awed by what the Holy Spirit is doing in us, through us and around us. Unlike us, He is not limited by time, place or resources. He has infinite power to access the deep places in every human heart.

Might we consider that the spiritual responsibility of the artist could be a matter of stewarding the access we’ve been granted to this most potent environment? How are we doing as artists with stewarding the access we have to human hearts? How are we doing as a community of artists within churches...within families...within society? As individuals? Have we learned the discipline of listening, looking and waiting? Are we aware of how He might be moving in our own deep places? Understanding accessibility and responsibility might help us discover an important aspect of our spiritual calling as artists, particularly within the church. But certainly, the first environment we must explore is our own.

Have you been met in the deep places by the Spirit of the living God? Certainly we are being met by many other presences, personas and influences in the deep realms of our hearts from which our longings stir us to daily actions and ways of being; or to use James K. Smith's helpful description, our cultural liturgies. Has the risen Christ stepped into your "inner most being" lately and impacted your "center"? Would you notice if He did? Does He sometimes seem to take flesh in your dreams, or perhaps he's used the melody of a song or a childhood memory to take apart your facade until you crumble at His feet? Has He undone you with His skillful, compassionate artistry? Has he melted your heart with warm fear and penetrating hope?

If artists do not learn to articulate and understand the nature of the spirit’s work through the various mediums of the arts then we may ourselves begin to conceive of a lesser value for the power and access we’ve been given by the grace of God. In this world, we need merciful merchants on the waters of that deep river. Artists do not control the heart, but we can know Him who is the Desire of nations.

It is because of Grace that artist’s can operate in the deep places. Grace was bought with a price. Let us give the Lamb of God the reward of His sufferings. What He seems to desperately want in all of this is to create hearts that are awed by Him and Him alone. As He says, to remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Isn't it ironic that all of the other things that move us deeply and control our lives only make us harder, colder, less alive, less human? But He works with all the maniacal devotion of a research scientist who's discovered a cure, using his own body and blood as the test subject.

Let's look and listen and wait for the Holy Spirit to invade the deep places of our hearts; and as He gives us grace to move others, let's move them to awe at the One who paid such a price to have full access to our hearts.

Kenyon