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

Being Displays Itself

Being Displays Itself

We are people of the Word but our beloved text points to gathered sounds that ultimately utter God’s actions. From burning bush to a son nailed onto a tree—we hear activity. The whole biblical narrative from creation, fall, alienation to reconciliation exhibits, as von Balthasar relates, God’s “genuine unfolding of himself in the worldly stuff of nature, man and history.” (von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord). The bible is a divine-human drama that begs for a theology that is just as robust and dynamic.

Following God-patterns employs imagination and theologian von Balthasar explores the Christian drama like a theatre critic trying to make meaning of a play. For Christ has radically changed the stage of history. The pagan dramas between human and divine entities so central to the ancient world has shifted. Through Christ “the dialectic of immanence and transcendence, nature and super-nature” can now find hope for reconciliation. (Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, p. 129) Christ has invited all actors to take the stage and enflesh the Word through their lives.

Just as the torn temple curtain reconciles us to the Holy, the incarnated Jesus also removed the actor’s mask for God to draw near. This also means the Christian actor has the choice to follow Jesus into the tragedies of life. The passage into the dark abyss of the human psyche can only happen because of Christ’s own journey in and out of hell. As von Balthasar relates, “Christianity, with its inner dramatic tension… can take all theatrical aspects into itself in even the darkest moments” only because Jesus travailed through death.  (Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, p. 82)

Observable transformation and authentic hope erodes the meaninglessness we find in much contemporary drama. With Jesus our stories become interwoven with the Christian story and some of these narratives need the stage to fully express its theological import. Theater allows us to publically incarnate these stories with the potential of ushering in his presence. 

Imagine a God who would write us into his drama. Be an actor on his stage.

--Maria

To Dance with God

It takes a lot of imagination to be a Christian. If I believe Christ, then I am one with him just as he is one with the Father and the Spirit, yet they are three persons in one. Still more, if I am in Christ I have been brought into the Trinity itself, that whirling pas de trois of the three-in-one which the early church fathers called perichoresis (dancing around). This is perhaps one of the most imaginative realities that we engage as believers: our being united with the dancing Triune God.

How transformative it must have been for Christians in the early church to make this theological "discovery", though it was hotly, even violently, debated among scholars, clergy and laity alike. When at last the belief was crystallized at the Council of Constantinople and confirmed in the Nicene Creed, there must have arisen a new and existential sense of the relationality of God, a deeper glimpse into who God really is. If you believed in the Son, you became part of the dance of the Trinity and the reconciling power of the gospel was realized!

It's the difference between being at a party together with someone but doing and being altogether apart, or else being found with that person in the center of the dance floor entangled in a heated, writhing knot of dynamic knowing. I dare say that this is closer at least to the relational reality to which we have been invited in the gospel than many of our current ways of imagining what it is to know God. Do we know him as Trinity? Can we conceive of our own sway and leap and dip and grind as we are animated within the dance of divinity? Is it of any consequence in our concept of worship and of vocation?

As artists, we are especially equipped to enliven the awareness of God's people to his perichoretic imminence. The Wild One, the Holy One is dancing among us. He is within us and we are in Him through Christ. How does this truth transform the way we approach art-making or collaboration and even how we relate to our audience? The God of creation, who hovered over the waters, the God of the Exodus, and He who died and raised from the dead is now become your dance (Father), your dance partner (Son) and your music (Spirit).

The people of God have justly been accused of having an atrophied sense of imagination and a scarce appreciation for mystery. We cannot change the past, but let us not tolerate a lack of imaginative exploration in the midst of such wonderment, such mystery and beauty, as the gospel and the Spirit present to us and to the world. Let us look to the dancers and the dance makers. Let us look to the Spirit who calls out, "Shall we dance?"

Kenyon

* Holy Trinity, Andrei Rublev