BODY LIFE: The Irrationality of His Harvest

Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy--Psalm 126:5

Artists understand something of what the farmer knows in his tilling and planting, in his waiting and watering--the one thing we do not control is the harvest. Harvest fruit, whether sheaves of wheat or pages of poetry, is born of divine strength and wisdom. Do we resent this process in our art-making? The mystery and helplessness of not being able to control the outcome? Do we make demands of ourselves and of our work that God would not endorse? Do we even want to scold the Maker for the kind of fruit that he prefers and the harvest he schedules?

God honored our bodily lives by taking human form. He is closely familiar with our prolonged, seemingly limited, seemingly fruitless harvest and yet he says we shall reap with shouts of joy. Where does this shout come from? What kind of paradoxical notion of joy is this? Is this just another religious saying that holds no relevance for real life?

On the cross, Jesus Christ faced the most disastrous dry period that could ever come upon anyone. He was completely and mercilessly cut off from his life source, left to die alone underneath a dark and empty sky with no God to call on and no chance of rescue. And he suffered this experience in the flesh. Now, the worst possible human disaster will never happen to us because it already happened to him on the cross. Ah! now there is that shout of joy from deep inside you. When once it hits you that no amount of dry ground, no seeming hopelessness, will ever be able to destroy the seed of divine life that grows in your body if you believe in him who died and rose again… For those who believe, the ground is never quite dry. For those who believe in him, even death itself can only lead you to resurrection.

Are you waiting for your harvest time? Will you trust him with your dry ground? Will you say with Paul, “Our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that is being revealed in us…” and with King David, “I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living. Be strong, take heart and wait for the Lord”? He is cultivating a shout in your uttermost.

Kenyon

The Art of Suffering

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T.S. Eliot, Second Quartet, East Coker, III

Suffering loosens the belief we are in control. When all we undertake falls apart and God seems to have gone on vacation, distress discerns an action that can be accomplish; that of waiting. What accompanies an artist’s wait? We create in hope. It is this aspect of art that reflects Christ’s redeeming work in the world allowing us to render every act of creativity as a sign of hope. Art reaches for the eternal despite our society’s refusal of such categories. As Christians we understand this hope as the beauty of redemption through the salvific works of Christ.

Edward Farley in Faith and Beauty maintains beauty is a manifestation of Christ’s redemptive work. Redemption allows us to uphold what is deemed valueless. Here, the darkness becomes light, the cast off is repurposed. Artists have the ability to take what is broken then reconstitute and employ it towards art. For Farley it is this transformative action that constitutes beauty. “Redemption reaches and reshapes into new freedoms all the ways in which the human being is infected by sin” (Faith and Beauty, 93).

John Dillenberger goes further and suggests difficult art needs to exist. He relates how the “literary and the visual are… affirmations in their negations; indeed, they negate in order to affirm” (A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities, 224). Artist make plain what needs to be—what should be, what can be. Ultimately, it is hope that drives the impulse of art making for it seeks to grasp Jesus’ work of redemption and transformation. Whether we are believers or not we all long for renovation. The nature of transformation, therefore, must fall under the Christian artist’s purview. In our own work we accept the waiting and the mysterious chaos of our lives then proceed to shape, arrange, and re-form it. Jeremy Begbie encouragingly reminds us, “In Christ, all that is ugly and subversive in the cosmos has been purified, beautified and fulfilled. Therein lies the promise for the transformation of all things” (Voicing Creation’s Praise, 175).

Redemption does not negate or ignore the ravages of sin but restores all things. Jesus’ transformative power goes further to redirect and transforms our inordinate desires. It is in the waiting where our love, hope, and faith finally reaches out for the Triune God. Barbara Brown Taylor speaks about this in terms of disillusionment. “Disillusionment,” she writes, “is the loss of illusion—about ourselves, about the world, about God—and while it is almost always painful, it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for the truth” (The Preaching Life, 8). It is in darkness we begin to see, feel, know. While waiting for God we offer him the pain, suffering and the waiting, which in turn, makes our work his.

Wait—for the darkness shall be light,

Maria

The Spirit's Work

In my apartment building in Queens, I am fortunate to have a superintendent with a kind and humble heart. James is a man of principle and deeply committed to his family, including his autistic son, Jason. We live in an old pre-war building with lots of issues so I am in regular communication with James for repairs. The problems in my apartment don't seem to be unique among the other 60 rentals in our building because this year James installed a little drop box in the lobby with instructions for how to make a service request and a little pen dangling from a string. It works like this: the tub gets clogged...again, and I drop a little note in the box explaining the problem, the level of urgency and a range of times that I can be available to receive the work. So, far it's been a pretty efficient little system, with perhaps one drawback. I'm never exactly sure when he's coming or how long it will take to do the repair. Most often, I find myself interrupted from REM sleep by the doorbell and jolted unexpectedly from my Tempur-Pedic pillow about an hour before I had intended to wake up on a weekday morning.

I can't help but notice the similarities of this ongoing relationship to that of my prayer life. I receive so many answers to my prayers with the same scraggly disposition that James meets when he shows up at my door, toolbox in hand. What do we imagine the Spirit's work will look like when we pray, "Lord, change my heart. Make me more like you"? It is far more the will of the Father than my own that I be transformed into one who reflects his character. The disconnect comes in how I tend to think about and imagine the process of bringing about this transformation.

For the most part I think we have quite a different view of our hearts than God has. It's fitting. The plumber has quite a different view of your toilet than you do as well. For you, it's part of an unconscious habit of doing a business about which you take no particular notice until something has gone wrong. In God's reality your heart is a place of massive devastation, and yet also a place of glorious beauty and potential. This has everything to do with who he is, and the quality of his nature. In his nature lies the hope of our hearts. He's on the job. But are we awake to receive him?

Kenyon

Art and Suffering: Some Thoughts On Referencing Without Resting

A recent trip to with friends to the United Nations NY Headquarters, and a subsequent perusal of its main gallery's current photographic exhibition, DeterMined, prompted me to revisit some thoughts on art and suffering. With the biblical prompting to "look after" those who suffer (James 1:27), I am particularly provoked by works that deal with the subject.

DeterMined showcases the work of international photographers Kike Arnal and Arne Hodalic. A series of large-scale color and black and white photographs display portrait-like images of survivors of cluster munitions explosions in Lebanon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The photos are well done, but painful to gaze at for long. In one, a preteen floats in a suffocating circular pool whose radius extends just beyond the boy’s outstretched arms and two unequally-stubbed thighs. A veiled woman clutches a mechanical contraption with her truncated fingers, boldly and ironically grasping the culprit with its own affect.

Collectively the works imbue a tired tenacity, humanity's perpetual flailing to remain afloat in life’s harrowing waters. Reminiscent of the work of Dorothea Lange - whose depression-era Migrant Mother Series at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles always moves me - they are aesthetically pleasing but weighty.

Quickly crossing 2^nd Avenue to return to Midtown away from the UN gallery with its nagging heaviness, I paused in front of the construction site of a new consulate building as my friends, a block behind me, sought to catch up. The shredded blue tarp surrounding the high metal meshing of fence and rough plywood waveringly discouraged viewers from witnessing the rubble of the site’s previous occupant. Through an eye-level opening in the plastic, I gazed at the jumble of broken concrete and metal rods, the splints that would soon welcome new growth and infrastructure. I thought about how art on a gallery wall, like the hole someone had created in the plastic tarp, perhaps likewise acts as a pealing away of something we’d like to cover.

But why did the exhibit bother me so much? The ending lines of a research paper I once wrote about Picasso’s Guernica perhaps provide a subtle answer: “As long as pain and struggle accompany the politics of our public and private lives, surely [the work] will maintain its impact.” There is a universality to suffering that instills in us desire to witness it. It is the artist's task to discover how to reference such depravity without resting there.

--J.A.D.

J.A.D. has helped lead the Art Leaders and Vocation group.