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

BODY LIFE: Hoffen und Unschuld

hoffen und unschuld (hope and innocence)

My wife Emily is a person who genuinely loves life. She is apt to make faces at babies on the subway and gasp with joy at the first appearance of spring in Central Park. Historically, I’ve been suspicious of such optimism, but I am finding myself challenged to further examine the source of this hopeful outlook. The more I seek the more I find that perhaps it is my own cynicism that I should hold in suspicion.

Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the great poets of the German language, believed that in order to write poetry one must live a great deal of life and experience it with subtle inundation. In his first and only novel, Journal of My Other Self, the main character muses that a poet must have many adventures and losses which then seep down into his very being, eventually becoming a source of inspiration. In part, Rilke is saying that a poet must actually love life itself.

It could also be said that love of life is elemental to Christianity since the gospel presents hope for life, even the hope of eternal life. Yet, in the gospel hope is ultimately tied to divine love. Love always protects, always hopes, always perseveres. The story of the gospel portrays divine love as a singular form of activism rooted in irreversible promises and evidenced by violently protective tendencies from the Exodus to the Cross.

If I accept the gospel as true, then I am challenged to accept my own identity as the beloved of God, the focal point of divine love. I suspect that this notion has at least the potential to fill each moment of my small life with palpable hope, a sort of chain reaction of positive realizations: If I am reconciled to God, then perhaps I can be reconciled to my fellow man. If to my fellow man, perhaps there is hope for the complexities of our shared existence in the world.

In this view, it seems that the smile of a baby on the subway might reasonably prompt me to contort my face into a ludicrous expression (perhaps pulling my nose and cheeks upwards toward my eyes and exaggerating the effect with a lipless smile) if for no other reason than to share a moment of solidarity with a child. In the gospel, Divine love has made me innocent again and the world is mine to discover anew as often as I am reminded of this life giving hope.

One artist who certainly understood the human longing for hope and innocence was the incomparable German choreographer, Pina Bausch, whose life and work have been celebrated by director Wim Wenders in the 3D film Pina now playing at select theaters in the city. Certain screenings at IFC and BAM will also include discussions with Mr. Wenders. As we begin the year examining BODY:LIFE at our upcoming quarterly InterArts Fellowship January 16th, this film might help to orient ourselves to the immense care and attention one can give to bodily life and expression.

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

The Physicality of Grace

…You have given me relief when I was in distress. --Psalm 4:1

He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me. --Psalm 18:19

You have not handed me over to the enemy but have set my feet in a spacious place. --Psalm 31:8

If we put ourselves at the center of our lives, the world becomes a very small place. We become like an infant in a crib, pent up and cut off from the physical reality of the world in which we live. But grace offers us a different experience of ourselves and the world. Through grace we receive the physical world and our own bodies again.

When the Psalmist exclaims, “You have brought me into a spacious place…” he imagines a realm over which he does not have complete control. For in the world of his control he finds himself hunted by cruel enemies and tortured by guilt. In this world of his own making he is murderer, thief and adulterer. Yet when “in the day of his disaster” he is met by the Lord, he is led into a spacious place. This large room is an incredibly visceral description of grace as is David’s own physical sense of relief. He no longer feels trapped by his own deficiencies, instead he is lifted up and out. Relief came to him in the body because grace is a physical-realm response to a physical-realm problem. As a man thinketh so is he. But let us not limit this to the rational mind only. As a man thinketh also includes our imagination and our perceived existence in the physical realm.

Holiness connects us to deeper reality and we enter holiness by relinquishing control of our physical life to Jesus Christ. We enter holiness only through the realm of grace and we enter grace through yet another embodied experience. That is, the life that we would otherwise have lived in our bodies now must die in order for us to truly live.

Reflection

When at last we give up trying to protect ourselves against the flood of destruction that is due to us because of sin, and when at last we allow that flood to come crashing down as it has upon our Lord. When at last we put our imaginations to their highest use and remember him who gave himself for us and yet was without sin. When we see him, blazing and bleeding, seated at the right hand of God with our world under his feet and our destinies in the twinkle of his eye…When we see that he became inglorious for us, as shameful as a rapist, as guilty as Macbeth so that we could be wrapped up and held in the safest arms in the universe…Then we will enter the spacious place, that broad room of David, and the great, ancient sigh of relief which only the gospel of grace can induce in a human soul.

Kenyon

The Dialogue Continues

A friend of mine tells a story of a woman he loved and lost to a terminal illness. He recalls how he strove to make her last days so full of life. She dreamed of going to Italy, and because it was clear she would never make it there he transformed her hospital bedroom into a living Italian montage complete with a gondola! He painted the walls with scenes from Venice, Rome and Florence...all to make her feel full of life. He went on to recall being by her side as she lay dying. Offering him some of her last words, she passionately whispered, "He is Life!"

Scripture tells that He who has the son, has life (1 John 5:12). If there's one thing we are seeking in New York City it's this sense of really living: to have Life. Artists especially depend on this over- abundant sense of being alive to both suffering and joy.

Last fall we began considering six themes regarding the calling of the artist in view of the gospel. Now, as we start a new ministry year, we invite you to consider one over-arching theme which we will approach this coming Monday at InterArts Fellowship with the help of Steve Garber. The theme is simply Life, capital "L". We intend to explore this theme in four ways:

Abundant LIFE

Body LIFE

Spirit LIFE

Eternal LIFE

Through our programs, events and conversations with you we hope to explore the reality of abundance, the imminence and import of life in the body, the mystery of the spirit and the hope of eternity. Join the dialogue through quarterly gatherings of InterArts Fellowship, in Arts Vocation Groups and on our InterArts Facebook page.

Hope to see you soon. Take care in the city!

Kenyon

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 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

Working Out Of The Resurrection

Just as Jesus becomes the face of the Father, his broken and resurrected body gives access to the Spirit, who helps us live a renewed life. According to N.T. Wright, from the moment of the resurrection, “the forces of decay and death have suffered their major defeat, and from now on new creation is under way, with its first signs being the new life of those who believe the Gospel.” (The Redemption, p.84) Wright understands how the resurrection not only impacts our future, but is a reality that transforms Christians in the here and now. Therefore, Beth Felker Jones is correct in stating “Resurrection doctrine is indicative not only of final hopes, but also of present attitudes toward the bodies of the living.” (Marks Of His Wounds, p. 4) Jones believes God revealed himself through our senses by the Spirit which “has granted us the body of the Son.” It is through a broken body, that new life emerges. What this means for artists is amid the brokenness, “we can invoke nature with proper care…we can appeal to the nature of our own bodies, as we know it through the risen body of Jesus who is the paradigm of our own redemption.” (Marks Of His Wounds, p.100)

Life with the Spirit transforms our thinking about bodies and bestows a new attitude towards the things of this world. In her book Marks of His Wounds Jones directs us to the Augustinian understanding of embodiment and our inordinate desires. Our bodies and the material world are not necessarily the source of our sins; it is our disproportionate desires for these things. Through the Spirit, it becomes possible to possess a right relationship with God, that reorders our desires appropriately. Our art, then, becomes the means through which we can understand God and the world in a deeper way, not an end unto itself. By the Spirit, the material realm no longer enslaves, instead, we become free to value and nuture the things of this world, including art and the things it points to. Miroslav Wolf understands having dominion over the natural world means being responsible for God’s created order not “simply the satisfaction of human needs and wants.” (Work in the Spirit,p. 147) Thus, through the Spirit, we fulfill the Cultural Mandate, not because we must, but because we long to. Christ’s resurrected body prompts our desire to see all things become new again. Therefore the resurrection, according to Paul, allows us to give ourselves “fully to the work of the Lord,” this includes our art making endeavors, because we know that our “labor in the Lord is not in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:58)

--Maria

Embodied Soul Work

Through Christ, love took form as a body. Jesus, the ultimate love offering, is the foundation for a theology of embodiment. How does this theology relate to artists? Since we will soon relaunch a dance industry vocation group let’s refer to a dancer’s work. Hours of discipline result in wounds and pains to the body; artistic activity can be physically challenging. Yet through the bleeding and bruising we are able to witness the wonder and awe of patterned movement and physical elegance. Beth Felker Jones speaking of Christ, but a fitting remark for a dancer, proclaims, “If we want to know the shape of a holy life, we look at the wounded body.” (Mark of His Wounds, p.111)

Stanley Hauerwas commenting on the disciplined life of the artist writes, “Artists, who must learn to submit to the medium in which they work, demonstrate the kind of training necessary for any of us to see the world rightly.” (Hauerwas, “Fully Human; Art And The Religious Sense.” Image Number 60 (2009): 103) But the regiment of an artist is not just an analogy or a paradigm for the well-ordered life of a Christian, it is reflective of true Christian embodiment. Just as the ascetic directs the body to God, the dancer can likewise make room in the body for God to nourish self and others. What makes anyone want to exert such effort? Love—therefore, Jones is correct, “Love must have a body.” (Mark of His Wounds, p.108)

A theology of embodiment is crucial for our technical age, with our rational ethos. The Church needs dancers, painters, and actors to teach us how to inhabit our bodies. Christians are called to be present in space and know how to move in space with real presence in order for love to take shape physically. Let us, then, offer up to God our bodies and our bodies of work and begin to praise him. Let’s dance.

--Maria