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