Presence in Writing

As a writer, grappling with the writing process every day, I often come across comments like this, “…the work itself – the practice of the craft of writing – must be its own reward”(Dennis Palumbo, Writing from the Inside Out, 53). Over the years such statements have paled, and in fact, become a source of discouragement for me. Because oftentimes writing isn’t its own reward. Such phrases – art for art’s sake – actually became statements of disillusionment and abandonment. 


Recently I intentionally re-read Mark Batterson’s book, The Circle Maker, because I want to grow in prayer and faith. I was surprised to find that much of the same material that applied to me as a spiritual person also spoke to me as a writer. And then it hit me. When I see the word, “prayer,” it’s a word of relationship. When I pray, I’m entering into a relationship with Christ. I’m not alone. But when I utter the word, “writing,” I’m alone. It is no secret that aloneness and loneliness is a “right of passage” every writer must accept. Naturally, then, it would also become core to the writer’s identity. 


As a Christian, maybe this is something that needs to be questioned and reassessed. Writing, like prayer, is not only about the inner being, the self, but it’s also about communicating and interacting with the world (evangelium). It’s about finding relationship through the craft. It’s also about being in a relationship with Jesus. When I sit down at my desk, turn on the computer, and look at the blank page – forced to confront myself – it can be terrifying. I realized that much like the effects of prayer, I want Jesus to be waiting there on the other side. I need to know that he’s waiting there. 


It’s about entering presence. When I conceive of it that way, I’m not abandoned to figure it out on my own. I’m not begging the blank stare of art for art’s sake to fulfill me. Instead, I’m stepping into glory. 
It’s still a struggle, for the daily discipline of writing often feels harsh and unrelenting. But if it is your call, your work, then like prayer, it can also be a conduit into Christ’s presence. Then the raw discipline, the craft, the monotonous constancy isn’t the end in itself. Rather, the reward is an invitation into his presence. It’s an investment and cultivation into something eternal. It’s a journey home. 

Thinking, Oil and Wallpaper

--Anita Kobayashi Sung
Anita is one of the many talented artists that participated in our seven-week faith and art study, In the Living Room, this past spring.  Anita and her husband David are both graduates from Gordon-Conwell Seminary and will soon start a church in Manhattan. 


Come to InterArts Fellowship this Monday Night at the W83 Ministry Center as we examine how Eternal Life shapes the present lives of artists. Featuring works by The James Hall Quintet, Anna Hillengas Troester, Maria Fee and guest speaker Cherith Fee Nordling. Artists reception to follow program.

In My Solitude

It is arguable that the most important time in which an artist may invest is not in networking meetings or collaborative workshops but rather in time spent alone. I am not necessarily speaking of studio time or the practice room either, but of true, unencumbered, undistracted solitude. 


I realize that I am addressing urban dwellers so let me explain what may be a nearly foreign concept to people who daily inhabit shared space with about ten million other bodies, and often in close quarters. Case in point, I'm writing this on a train next to three boisterous women who are reminiscing splendidly about New York in the fifties. In between songs on my iPad I'm catching bits of their conversation muted only slightly by my headphones. Then doesn't it seem merciless of me, given our way of life, to suggest that our most formative moments will be found in carefully prepared solitude, away from other people? Besides, you might say, isn't Redeemer Arts always challenging New York artists to seek out community and not to "go it alone"? Why now does it seem like I am saying just the opposite? Let me explain.


There's a difference between isolation and solitude, between feeling completely cut off from life giving community and setting apart time to enjoy peaceful solitude. The beauty of solitude is the discovery that we are never truly alone no matter how lonely we may feel at times. But this emodied sense of eternal presence did not come to us without a price. The lonely death of the incarnate God on a Roman cross won for us these pregnant, peaceful moments alone which would otherwise be utter isolation.  But Jesus was cut off so that we would never be truly cut off. He cried out to an empty sky so that we would never have to. It is his isolation from the father in the garden and on the cross that makes possible our blessed solitude. Without the cross we'd all rightfully dread being alone and we as artists would have no hope of finding inspiration in the silence, for silence would only mean the end of fellowship with the ever-present Creator. 

In our city it's easy to awake each day to the worship of an aesthetic, a philosophy or technique. These gods of our own making have shed no blood for us, but the One who loves us is waiting to meet us in precious moments of silence apart from the noise of our distracted lives. We receive this comfort in the very place where Jesus lost it, in solitude. It is our own renewed Gethsemane which we can enjoy now because he did not. He suffered the silence of God so that even our silence would be full of promise. Bless the garden in which he suffered, and bless the peaceful solitude we now can access through grace.

Kenyon

*Taking of Christ, Caravaggio

Wiggle Room

Indeed, there are times when artists lament how job pressures keep them from true creativity. We don’t always possess the luxury of pursuing interests, concerns, or longings. Instead we are given assignments, commissions, and roles to embody. We must pay bills, make deadlines. Therefore, reality spurs motivating factors besides predilection to rouse artistic action. But does this really make the work any less creative?

In Shop Class As Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford disputes the romantic concept that freedom or “the unleashing of the self” engenders creativeness. Crawford maintains that creativity is actually a by-product of being present. It takes discipline, “the mastery… cultivated through long practice,” to shape good work. In other words, it’s really submission to given materials that allow artists to be inventive, effective, and authentic. For Crawford one must “dwell” in given tasks to gain any credence in it.

Along this line of thought my writer friend, Garnette, introduced a creative concept he employs which he calls wiggle room. We witness wiggle room every time an actor sparkles despite vacuous B-movie material. Wiggle room utilizes inventiveness and imagination within our specified perimeters and shortcomings. Artists are called to access what Crawford calls “patterns of experience;” the knowledge gained from “confrontation with real things.” Our embodied experiences, no matter how low or mundane, become foundational for good work. We must rely on experience to make our projects ring true. Here is where Crawford connects work with philosophy. While philosophy seeks the good—a way to live life; it is our work that become the context to employ the good. For Crawford we must make use of philosophy, “the desire to know” and examine, in order to embrace and propagate good work.

Perhaps, then, our real problem with creativity is submission. Do we really want to surrender our time and energy on a seemingly unworthy project? Jesus seems to think so when he took on the disastrous human project. Surprisingly, because of the taint, few are interested in investing in his mission to redeem humanity. In The Death of Adam, Marilynne Robinson, bewails how we lost our ability to take pleasure in human presence. She writes “we ceased to enjoy human act and gesture, which civilization has always before found to be beautiful even when it as also grievous or terrible.” Despite the circumstances of sin, Christian artists need to employ wiggle room. We need to be hands on with the work given no matter how inconsequential it seems. Christ came to redeem humanity by becoming present, therefore, calls us to also be substantial, to confront real things, in real time.

Artists, let’s make wiggle room a redemptive part of our work.

--Maria

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

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