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

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

Whenever Our Hearts Condemn Us...

This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him.

And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us. 1 John 3:19-24

It struck me recently that much of the conversation I find myself having with artists who identify themselves as followers of Christ is very seriously concerned with moral perfection. Perhaps it would be better described as a moral burden. This burden or pressure to perform morally and ethically disturbs me for several reasons. The first is simply that this sense of pressure to perform morally is not the intended result of the new birth. In fact, it seems to demonstrate a lack of reception of saving grace and the gospel of grace. Truly, I would hope that artists who actually believe in Jesus would be the freest of all artists, but I find that just the opposite is true. Those whom we might consider to be anti-God or anti-Christian are often the very ones whose lives are seemingly unfettered by self-salvific moralism.

I suppose I'm merely observing what Tim Keller describes in his book The Prodigal God as the older brother/younger brother phenomenon. Not to over-simplify the scenario by applying the parable directly to artists, but I suppose I could apply Tim's reading of the Prodigal Son story and subsequent indictment of the "older brother" who stayed home with the father as being equally as lost as the "younger brother" who cared not for the father or the rules of the household but demanded what was "his". In the end, Dr. Keller shows us that both brothers are equally far from receiving the father's love and grace and the sense of freedom therein. But, as we also learn from Tim, at least the younger brother ultimately humbles himself and receives the fattened calf (a picture of Christ's sacrifice) and the ring-seal of the the father's favor (picture of the Spirit).

Yet, I wonder if it really is as simple as that in this case: believing artists are at home with the father like the older brother and unbelieving artists are like the younger brother whom the father is faithfully seeking on the horizon? Two kinds of lostness...? The application seems too simplistic to me. Certainly the gospel demands a moral response, that is, an embodied response to the Reality of Redemption. This seemingly awkward transition of sinner to redeemed human being is the "already-but-not-yet" moment in which believing artists find themselves. And I think they have a lot of naturally accompanying fears and hopes in the midst of that scenario. As I look on the faces of these would-be artists seeking to follow Christ with all their heart, I have to believe that their sense of over-responsibility is more than just a self-righteous obsession with their own moral rectitude. While this may be the case in many, it does not account for the abject fear I've seen in some of their faces.

So what about this fear? Fear that God will strike you down if you accept a role that is less than wise or write a play that is more vulgar than is good for one, or perhaps you publish a trashy novel in hopes of getting a better opportunity in the future, and the list goes on...I suppose we all want to know what will come of our relationship with God and his people if our story was to include some of these mishaps. And here, I surmise, is the kicker! What will God's people say or do or think about my art work? Not what will God say, think, do...

What will Christians say, think, do about my work?

Isn't that the real fear? Perhaps the grace we are seeking isn't the grace of God but the grace of God's people that is so tragically and egregiously absent in the current relational state of the church to the arts. There is perhaps so little grace between the two communities that artists who find themselves living between them are completely petrified both of stepping on the toes of the lost younger brothers in the arts and the lost older brothers at home in the church. If this is true, then what a situation! How can we increase the level of grace that is extended to artists from the church, particularly those artists who would hope to call the church home? But then of course the question follows, how can we extend grace to artists who are far from home and have not yet grown weary of their lostness from the father? Still more, how can we extend grace to the lost artists who are physically home in the church yet so afraid of the father, desperately trying to secure his favor through moral perfection?

Oh Father, help us! This is a sad picture indeed.

Some prayers of hope:

To the artist who calls the church her home. Let us say to her, Daughter, breathe deeply of grace and fear not the loss of your place in his arms for you did not come home by your will but by his own, and you are not saved by your cleanliness but by his own.

To the artist who has yet to find his home in the church, let us extend a loving and hospitable hand...the hand of a patron, and of a father and of a wise citizen who seeks the flourishing of the city in which he has been exhiled. Let us extend the hands of those who live in covenant with the Almighty, who care for the alien in the land.

Finally, let us all together say to our hearts whenever they condemn us, that we have comfort and a great Saviour in Jesus Christ who was fully drowned in the cup of God's wrath, yet overcame the final judgement because he had not sinned. If we believe in him, then we are blameless by his death. Let us live as artists in the light of this truth.

Let your art-making and your great adventure of faithfulness be in response to the greatest act of love that ever was or ever will be.

Let us make art in this spirit, with this peace in our hearts.

Never fear, for it shames the cross.

Kenyon