The Job of Attentiveness

Brian Fee, Untitled

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

--e e cummings from i thank You God

We recently attended a lecture featuring the poet and former chairman of the NEA, Dana Gioia.  If you are searching for a good articulation on the wisdom of art, Gioia is your man. Quoting Frost, Gioia reminds us how “poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” And, the former chairman made no qualms citing how impoverished our culture has become, now bereft of beauty. One example is the disparity between a WPA-era built public building, such as the local post office, and its contemporary version. This lack of concern for beauty illustrates how we have we lost confidence in its power.  And, isn't it interesting with the loss of beauty truth soon became untenable? We live in the time of the great no.

Art, however, lifts us from negation to tenderize the imagination. It opens eyes wider and ears deeper to encounter what is unimaginable. Through numerous experiences of cognitive tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, breathing  we develop and strengthen our beauty muscles. Beauty itself is a process. Gioia brakes down the movements into four steps: 1) Beauty causes us to linger. 2) In the lingering we experience pleasure. 3) This pleasure stems from capturing the true-ness of the object that has initiated the lingering. 4) Steps 1 through 3 are fleeting, reminding us we are not in control and that beauty is grace—a gift we have not earned.  Isn’t all of learning a gift?

Simone Weil believes the development of attention (such as in school studies) is “extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer.” (Weil, Waiting for God, p. 105) In our pragmatic obsession with the accumulation of information we have forgotten our aim in learning and the reliability of our senses to teach us how big God is. If Weil is correct, the attentiveness found and strengthened through our work can create the space of prayer.

And, beauty, as Gioia avers, is a reliable way to learn this attentiveness. Art speaks not just to the head, but grasps the heart, utilizes the body, and culls from the recesses of memory.  Thus, aesthetics assist Christ’s mission of restoring us to our full humanity. What does all of this mean for artists? Like Jesus, we bear this burden to restore human wholeness. Artists must pick up the mantle of leadership and forge, with the help of God, new ways of bringing beauty back into all of society.

i thank You God,

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

--Maria

Glory Be

Spend any serious amount of time working in the arts and you're bound to stumble upon one or two or more moments of glory: a triple turn on point, the high C at 10am finished with a buttery vibrato, the character writing himself into your novel as you sit in your pajamas at midnight surrounded by rough drafts. It's all too easy to live in the lingering echoes of such moments. It reminds me of a lonely astronomer sitting in her observatory in the Arizona desert (ok yes, I'm thinking now of Jodie Foster in Contact but I had the generic image first!). I wonder if many of us would continue creating if we could not be refreshed by such blips on the radar.


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

BODY LIFE: Proximity

He who has the Son has life. 1 John 5:12

Do you feel it? I know I do. Fragmentation. There is distance yet between the life I wish to live in my body and the life I am currently living. Just as a pianist is always reworking her repertoire and dance makers constantly rework classic choreography, it feels like I can only ever see or enjoy a proximate measure of beauty in this life as I work to close the distance between truth and experience?

If the Incarnation reminds us that life in the body is not merely a waiting period before the Renewal of All Things, the Ascension shows us that there is a something more that is, at present, out of reach--something for which to hope, a directive for our strivings. The Russian writer, Anton Chekov, in the closing scene of his masterwork Uncle Vanya, examines the idea that those who suffer in the body will finally be at rest. The vision of hope offered, perhaps in desperation, by the character Sonya portrays a kind of relaxing exhalation: “…we shall see all earthly evil, all our sufferings swept away by the grace which will fill the whole world, and our life will become peaceful, gentle, and a sweet caress…We shall rest!” This sentiment also rang true for the writers of early Negro spirituals and twentieth-century gospel singers whose oppressive circumstances fomented their longing for bodily and spiritual rest.

Growing up between these two aesthetics, gospel music and classical theater, I was never sincerely interested in the kind of hope that could only offer post-mortem relief from my experiences of suffering. Unfortunately, it seemed that this was exactly what Christianity was selling and I was a reluctant customer. As scholar N.T. Wright revealed in his timely laymen’s book, Surprised by Hope, I was among those believers who survived on “what is at best a truncated and distorted version of the great biblical hope”. How happy I was to learn that there is another way of engaging with Christianity and the grace which will fill the whole world.

For me, I continue to wonder how each encounter with beauty on earth, though temporary, can lead me closer to the culmination of beauty in the earth, Thy Kingdom Come...Certainly the birth of Jesus was the first taste of this beauty, the breaking through of eternal hope in that dark, earthy cave filled with the smell poverty, of animals and the cries of a teen-age mother giving birth. The marring ache of injustice was there at the moment of the incarnation, that knowing which says this is not how it should be! And into this knowing, Jesus was born. In the midst of it, he died on the cross. But perhaps the glory of Christianity is the particular hope which arises if you believe that he who was the first taste of eternal beauty is also the first taste of eternal life.

Belief in the resurrection is almost completely about the hope we have in the body. And this is the hope that I need because, like Uncle Vanya and like my slave ancestors, I am still living my life in my body with all my capacity for joy and suffering. I need a hope which has significance for these years of struggle and ecstasy, inspiration and mundanity. As we celebrate Christmas, earth’s first glimpse of eternal beauty, let us also remember he who is LIFE itself, undying and without fear.

--Kenyon

Passion

The inclination to do good, whether it is conquering a creative technique or a particular ski slope, falls under the realm of the aesthetics. Aesthetics, therefore, relies on desire, this in turn, incites us towards action. This is one of the theories William Dyrness works with in his latest book, Poetic Theology. Here, Dyrness relates how it takes human passion “to act, build, and create;” therefore, we should view these events as deep soul movements towards reaching the good. For Dyrness, our best moments are shaped, not necessarily by what we know, but by the longing “for a life that is attractive.” So, Dyrness asks Christians this question: “In places where community development is in progress, what sorts of practices might best reflect this impulse?”

What are the structures, stories, and events that act like beacons orienting our daily developments? What are our best shared activities that help shape beautiful and good communities? Where do we invest significance? Because of Christ’s redeeming work in the world we should seek out elements and practices that correspond with the gospel in order to sculpt deep and meaningful lives. We need to pick up God’s pattern of play, celebration, and redemption found in the surrounding cultures. Beauty draws people together, beauty also directs us towards God. Beauty, therefore, should also be a hallmark of God's people.

Dyrness further cautions how non-manifested values merely remain separate from us—mere abstractions. As we explore our traditions and the Scriptures we must continually take into account the human drive towards the aesthetic. For Dryness, the impetus to create an attractive life is an expression of God’s presence. We all long to be complete, but as the people of God, this hope relies on Christ's beauty and glory. Far from distractions, we must learn to see worldly goods, this includes our vocation as artists, not as means of power or self-glory, nor as an end in itself, but as a gift pointing us towards a life with God and his good creation; God reflected in and through our cultural patterns and trends. The Hispanic theologian, Roberto Goizueta reminds us how the aesthetic is “rooted” in the concrete. Aesthetics happens through our bodies, for “life is always corporeal.” It, therefore, becomes the artist's job to manifest the human need for the transcendent. Alysha Creighton’s stop action animation The Touch depict these themes of desire, embodiment and the transcendent. The Touch reminds us how the arts, the material, are conduits of God’s touch.

We must question if the desire we have for Christ and his kingdom is purely negotiated through the abstract and propositional. If so, we must devise concrete practices to pull the kingdom into our everyday reality.

Allow your art to draw you, and others, to the love of God. Receive his touch.

Maria

Thank you, Alysha, for granting permission to use, The Touch. Alysha Creighton recently completed a summer residency program at SVA.

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

Exploding Destiny

When Christ, Who is Your life, appears, then you will also appear with Him in glory -Colossians 3:4

I love what some of the great theologians have said about Paul’s radical claims of hope for our lives and destiny in view of the gospel. Reflecting on Colossians 3:4 John Calvin writes, Here we have a choice consolation -- that the coming of Christ will be the manifestation of our life. John Wesley, the great Methodist theologian, sounds almost astonished as he writes,The abruptness of the sentence surrounds us with sudden light. Our life - The fountain of holiness and glory. Shall appear - In the clouds of heaven. Wesley seems to echo Christ’s own words in John 7:38 when He winsomely remarks, Whoever believes in me, streams of living water will flow out of him. What could Jesus possibly mean when he says that if we believe in Him we will become some kind of spring or fountain of life?

In George C. Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum, Junie Robinson, known as The Soldier with a Secret, attempts to describe the look on a dying man’s face. He says, All the hurtin’ that was gonna get done to em and that they was gonna do to other people was right there clear as day…but when He died, all that hurtin to come just left his face…He finishes the eerie soliloquy by speaking directly to the audience with a whisper: I know the secret to your pain.

What George C. Wolfe is hinting at in this vignette is that the only way to be free of all of the brokenness of this world is through death. And he’s right. But Paul in Colossians 3 says that if you believe in Jesus and the hope of the gospel then you are already dead to this world and you have a life that is being kept safe for you with God. Colossians 3 shows us that Christ is the source of all the good that will ever come from your life or that you will ever taste in this life, though for now it is only a taste. Haggai 2:7 calls Him the desire of nations. In the Psalms King David sings, As the dear pants for water so my soul pants for you… and …My body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water. David realized that all of his greatest desires in life were actually longings for Christ Himself.

As artists, we are fortunate to taste Christ’s beauty and glory in relatively small portions here and there through making and enjoying good art. But the hope of the gospel is that if you believe in Christ, then one day not only will pain and death have no power over you, not only will you be in the presence of the source of all goodness, but you yourself will become a source of the ultimate light and glory. At once, in His presence, all our longing for Him will be so overwhelmingly satisfied that we ourselves will burst forth in an explosion of New Life, a detonation of generative potential.

How can we as artists live and work in view of this great hope? Can we, through the power of the gospel, create flares and bursts of the coming explosion when we will be made new? God hasn’t given up you or your art, He intends to make you more prolific than you can imagine…In the gospel, you have an exploding destiny.

Kenyon

Fashionable Beauty

I recently posed the question to a group of artists, why does art matter to God? To my surprise, only one respondent employed the word beauty. Beauty is, forgive the term, out of fashion. Indeed, Crispin Sartwell surmises that the declined value of beauty has much to do with its association concerning pleasure. Sartwell asserts that beauty arouses longing. Thus, Christians’ anxiety with inordinate desires discourages any trek into the territory of beauty. But it’s interesting how the contemporary secular world is just as fearful of beauty as its Christian counterpart. Perhaps this worldly wariness stems from frustration. Beauty produces a longing for perfection, which eventually, leads to dissatisfaction, then topples into cynicism.

How can Christians invest in the beautiful without despairing over desires and disappointments? Let’s follow the lead of the artist who waxes, “One thing I ask of the LORD…that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.” In Psalm 27 desire and beauty are bound up together in the life-long pursuit of knowing God. Therefore, by knowing true Beauty, Christians should be at the forefront of reviving beauty for the rest of the world.

What about combating the world’s dissatisfaction with beauty? Again, we need to follow the artist who proclaimed in the same psalm: “The LORD is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?” To gaze upon the beauty of the LORD will melt away the dissatisfaction and pessimism produced by our longing for perfection. Christians must live and create in the humbling light of true Beauty. True Beauty is our salvation for he accepts our pauper state—that fact that we are not fully clothed in glory—yet.

Seek Beauty. Live and work knowing one day we’ll be wholly wrapped in His splendor.

--Maria