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

Eternal LIFE: Love & Death

Seeing Werner Schroeter's grotesque and penetrating film Two at the MoMA's retrospective of the German filmmaker this week sent me away with a new awareness of the commonality between love and death.  Outside the theater after the 117 minute screening one wondered if any of the audience, those who stayed until the end, really got anything out of the film other than a slight headache. But if my experience might serve as a case study, the film does have a latent but no less potent effect. Upon leaving the theater a woman and her friend, both looking painfully baffled, asked us..."do you speak French? Did you get it?" I admitted that I did not fully understand my experience but not before she interjected, "something about life I assume". I surprised myself by responding, "I think it's more to do with death actually".


Looking back I don't know where I got that idea. But it grew inside of me all evening and into the next day, and the next. I began to notice a change at dinner with a filmmaker friend who had prefaced his invitation to the film with "going to see a very weird German film". I was almost astonished at the insights I gained in our discussions of the film particularly since he, arriving late, had missed the screening altogether. Anyway, this blog will hardly suffice as a review of the film, but since you won't find a public screening of it any time soon and I don't necessarily recommend sitting through it (though I would again just to see the shots on the beach and the dress blowing in the wind like a flag). I will invite you into our post film discussion with the hope of unpacking some of the truth which arose for me as the thesis of the film though perhaps not of Schroeter's body of work as a whole.


 Schroeter so effectively carries us into the mania of our self glorifying existence. The film is comprised from start to finish by a series of seemingly disconnected scenes ranging from stunningly beautiful to viscerally disturbing, sweeping through memories with little prejudice for past or present. The narrative does appear, however, and culminates in an encounter with death, a moment which has led me to draw a kind of emotional thesis from the experience: That love and death are intimately tied together. In death love is revealed and through death love is received and shared. "But how can this be?" my heart asks me...the younger part of myself, perhaps, or the naive one. Is not love a positive thing and death negative? How then can one be dependent on the other?


I presented these questions to Pamela Brown-Peterside, Community Group Director of Redeemer's West Side Congregation, with whom I shared about my experience of the film and how the filmmaker seemed to understand deeply the connection between love and death. She said immediately, "Greater love hath no man than this...that he lay down his life for his friends." This should have been obvious I suppose when you consider that the cross itself is God's proof of his own unfailing and eternal love. This is the love that casts out fear (John 4:18) and what does man fear more than death? I've heard, as well, the declaration from Paul's letters to the Romans: This is how we know what love is...while we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. There it is again, love and death. Not only is all of this evident in scripture but as we learn in Gotham Fellows and in the sermons at Redeemer, the whole story of the gospel is that of creation (life), the fall of man (death) and redemption (life through death). The through-line of this story's action is certainly the incomparable, pursuing love of God.  So then it should not surprise me, this connection between love and death. But as I, looking towards our next InterArts Fellowship, strive to conceive of the impossible reality of Eternal LIFE I am continually confronted by thoughts of death, a death leading to greater love. It seems to be the unsung truth of the gospel: that death leads to life, but ultimately to love. Still my heart says, "but how can this be?". When might death ever provide an experience of ultimate love, other than in some ancient mythical tale of star-crossed lovers?

Schroeter's film presents two characters (both played by Isabelle Huppert) tied to each other by the love of their mother, a love fraught with frustrated longings for affection. The story unfolds to reveal the two are sisters, as it seems, Maria and Magdalena, portrayed as two parts perhaps of one person. He shows us how death, for them the death of their mother, tears us apart and creates another self with whom we can never reconcile until death. So in this case the death becomes the impetus and the culminating element in the character's pursuit of love and reconciliation. The ultimate reconciliation comes through her own death which is achieved or received apparently at her own hand. At that moment Maria-Magdalena, the bifurcated, wounded heart seems to have achieved at last the love that evaded her for so many tortuous and confusing years of thwarted loves and cruel memories. Certainly, Maria and Magdalena each dealt with death differently...one longing for love by seeking it and the other by withholding it from others. Finally, death unites them in solidarity and brings forgiveness for the mother who's death had so scandalized their young hearts. In this culminating scene I was confronted with the notion that love is perfected or achieved somehow in death, which left me confused and a bit battered until I realized that this is the truth on which I have based my life.


For me the film's conclusion screams the gospel or perhaps the most cutting edge of the gospel...that death is the way to life and love because Christ's death was an ultimate one. The claim of the gospel is that one died for all and therefore all died that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died (2 Corinthians 5:14). Interesting, of course, that the names of the two characters are Mary and Magdalena (Werner was thought to be obsessed with Catholicism). It was Mary Magdalene who was among those first to see and recognize Jesus after his resurrection and conquering of death. This moment for me was captured in the characters created by Schroeter. Now, to the degree that I see Christ risen from a death he died for me, my death becomes a victory and an entrance into eternal love which is life eternal according to the gospels. This is life eternal, that they might know you, the only true God (John 17:3).


At the end of the film there is a sort of resurrection after death accomplished through diverse mythology and magic in a voodoo-like ceremony. The resurrection portrayed leads to a measure of reconciliation and peace for Maria-Magdalena, and I saw love too. But despite this vague resolution my spirit was comforted that after all of the traumas of memory that Shchroeter subjects us (and himself) to he led us through the grave to resurrection, and by a sacrifice to a new and strange life.  Isn't this the hope we find in Christ? That death no longer has victory? When we allow the self that we have served, worshiped and enthroned with all of its desires and demands, all of its rebellion against truth and reality, even against love...when we seek to end our self-driven life so that we can be caught up in a new life given to us by the resurrected Jesus, then we can enter love...and through love, Eternal LIFE. If we seek self actualization we become more unlike ourselves and the only ground to stand on in the river of our experience is the stones of our memories. But knowing Jesus personally is evidence that we are tasting eternal life, not ephemeral self-actualization but fullness of life.


 How brazenly Schroeter reminds us of the fleeting nature of our lives and the insufficiency of memory to shape our existence. He is merciful to show us this and to point us to death of self as a way of seeking a new life. But we need not use magic to resurrect this new life as Maria-Magdalena used in the final scene of the film. There is at work already a deeper magic as C.S. Lewis would put it. A magic that is not the result of human manipulation or power. No witchcraft here. The resurrection of Christ offers humans a purely arbitrary gift, undeserved and un-conjured, from the powers that be. In Jesus we receive the reconciliation with others that Maria-Magdalena was desperately seeking but we also find peace within ourselves as we cease from merchandising our longings and accept relationship with the God who gave up power and wealth for a moment of intimacy with his beloved...you and I. It was His death on the cross that released the greatest love on earth and it is his life I now seek to live instead of my own.


Kenyon

ETERNAL LIFE: This Death Must Come

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

                                                                       

                                                                     -Julian of Norwich

What is the story underlying your journey as an artist? Are you on a path to glory? If I’m honest with myself, the pervasive narrative in which I locate my struggle to create and share art is often rooted in my own imagined “path to glory”. As you can probably guess, viewing my life with this story in my heart often leads to more than a little frustration. It can even lead me to depression. Why does it seem that God is working against this “path to glory” narrative I’ve created? Doesn’t he want me to flourish and shine, if only for the sake of others (and for the years I spent watching VH1 and MTV). How might God see my path unfolding? As we continue our meditation this year exploring the essence of LIFE, please join me in a series of reflections on ETERNAL: LIFE looking forward to our next quarterly InterArtsFellowship with Cherith Nordling and guest artists.

i. This Death Must Come

God’s path to glory always includes death. This is staggering news to us, continually. But he is the Master Redeemer and this is his way. Our way of redeeming is about self glory. That is our natural choice. Whether we are aware of it or not, we actually default to our own self glory in all things. But the Master Redeemer knows us quite well. We were not always so inclined. He also knows the whole of His creation. And he knows the future.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Yet now is the hour of redemption by death alone. This death will come, to the self we seek to glorify. And this is his most loving way. This is his mercy. For his glory is not a matter of self-actualization for the Almighty, as it would be for you and I. That is a ludicrous comparison. No, the Almighty has no maker, he is eternal, the creator of all though not himself created... His glory is for the becoming of all things which are not himself, that they might become glorified by being drawn into his destiny. And this is the magnificent work of the cross.

Through Christ’s death, the death of God, all that is not within God is brought back into him not only for his own glory but for the reclamation of glory for all that he made. The cosmos is swept into the eternal life of God through Christ’s eternal reign over death. All which lives to die, now lives in the shadow of the cross and the hope of resurrection through the risen one. So this death must come, and through it shall come the resurrection of all things by the catalytic, Eternal LIFE of Christ, who is the glory of God.

Kenyon

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