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

Remember

Many view artists as misunderstood loners writing with wadded balls of paper around their feet or as painters wearing paint-smattered smocks, wild hair, frantically muttering to themselves. Nicholas Wolterstorff gives us a more inclusive view “Art—so often thought of as a way of getting out of the world—is man’s way of acting in the world. Artistically man acts.” (Wolterstorff, Art in Action, p.5)

According to Margaret Kornfeld these actions can assist in knowing God. Our “God is a God who wants to be remembered and has created our bodies—with complex neurochemical systems—so that memory is possible.”(Kornfeld, Cultivating Wholeness, p.86) Writing to pastoral caretakers Kornfeld reminds them that “Our bodies remember through our senses.” Art performed for and by a community, say like a liturgy, aids memory, gives direction, breaks down walls of hostility.

Natalie Angier on assignment for the New York Times Science section participated in a symposium on the evolutionary value of art. She notes how looking at the breadth of history the action of art has been a “profoundly communal affair of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees.” Furthermore, she recalls how “passionate town rivalries… gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.” Moreover, it is through shared art experiences people are united together and are “persuaded to treat one another as kin.”

Angier goes on to describe how the lofty origins of art start from the “intimate interplay between mother and child.” The “visual, gestural, and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants” are aesthetic “operations of ritualizations.” (“The Dance of Evolution,” NYTimes) In other words, the human capacity to create art and liturgies are utilized by mothers everywhere, through all time. It’s interesting to note how Angier writing from an evolutionary framework establishes art as a relational operation. “Artistically man acts” because he is responding to its creator.

If the secular world can recognize the aesthetics as a fundamental catalyst for community and relationality why haven’t Protestants fully utilize this particular category of being? Shouldn’t Christians use all possible means to aid our memory of who we are in Christ? Perhaps, then, more embodied activities need to be enacted in our corporate worship. The artist Robert Adams speaks of memory from another perspective: “The thing the artist is trying to give you is a reminder of those rare times when you did see the world so that everything seemed to fit—so that things had consequence. The majority of evidence is for chaos, let’s face it. Most of the time things don’t seem consequential. But the value of art is that it helps us recall transforming times that are of such a quality that they last.”*

Worship allows us to respond to God’s work in our lives. Through a community’s set of symbols and actions they recall how life makes sense despite its perceived chaos. Good Christian liturgies happen to display theology; thus teach theology alongside the sermon, maybe even deepens it.

Artists, please help Christians remember.

--Maria

*PBS art:21 series

Body Life

Kenyon and I have written various times on this arts blog concerning the artist’s role towards undoing the mind-body separation evident in our society. We happen to believe that the aesthetics can mobilize and connect Christian being and doing. This is why the programming at InterArts Fellowship relies just as much on its artistic presentations as it does with its informative speakers. I often, and I admit crankily, critique along with Matthew Crawford “the view that theoretical knowledge is the only true knowledge (Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft, p.171). Crawford wisely perceives how our embodied experiences, especially through working with our hands, allows us to grapple with the material world that lies “outside of the self.” The knowledge gained from such exercises is anything but theoretical. Yet Christians continue to struggle with how to integrate the realities they experience daily with what they know of God.

Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen asserts how Christian anthropology has been shaped by our fear of the material, sensual, and idolatrous. Thiessen relates how this suspicion has specifically affected three areas: “the perception of the senses, the role of the body, and the view of women.” A fourth should be added—wariness towards the non-Western, the other (Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics, p.11). Our emphasis towards science, data, and the analytical gives little attention to the sensed wisdom accrued through the arts, our gender, and non-Western ways of being.

As a woman, an artist, and a Hispanic, I am a bit overly sensitive to the repercussions brought on by this overemphasis on thinking as the sole means of knowing. Our embodied reality seems to hold little significance. Yet through Christ’s incarnation we are called to love him with our entire being: strength, heart, mind, and soul. This is why I believe the artist must continually create and participate in the larger culture. In our contemporary context it is the artist who must be the theologian in order to reconcile the many schisms caused by a disembodied worldview. We have isolated the mind from the body, faith from work, and have caused disruptions between race and gender. Through Christ’s redeeming work artists are called to reevaluate and re-humanize society that we may participate in true body life.

I hope you will be able to join Jenifer Ringer, Ken Masur, Andrew Nemr, Andy Mineo, Abe Cho, John Lin, Tom Jennings and our hosts at Calvary/St George's on Monday night as InterArts Fellowship seeks to celebrate not just our physical bodies, but the unity we possess through Christ as the body.

--Maria

BODY LIFE: Hoffen und Unschuld

hoffen und unschuld (hope and innocence)

My wife Emily is a person who genuinely loves life. She is apt to make faces at babies on the subway and gasp with joy at the first appearance of spring in Central Park. Historically, I’ve been suspicious of such optimism, but I am finding myself challenged to further examine the source of this hopeful outlook. The more I seek the more I find that perhaps it is my own cynicism that I should hold in suspicion.

Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the great poets of the German language, believed that in order to write poetry one must live a great deal of life and experience it with subtle inundation. In his first and only novel, Journal of My Other Self, the main character muses that a poet must have many adventures and losses which then seep down into his very being, eventually becoming a source of inspiration. In part, Rilke is saying that a poet must actually love life itself.

It could also be said that love of life is elemental to Christianity since the gospel presents hope for life, even the hope of eternal life. Yet, in the gospel hope is ultimately tied to divine love. Love always protects, always hopes, always perseveres. The story of the gospel portrays divine love as a singular form of activism rooted in irreversible promises and evidenced by violently protective tendencies from the Exodus to the Cross.

If I accept the gospel as true, then I am challenged to accept my own identity as the beloved of God, the focal point of divine love. I suspect that this notion has at least the potential to fill each moment of my small life with palpable hope, a sort of chain reaction of positive realizations: If I am reconciled to God, then perhaps I can be reconciled to my fellow man. If to my fellow man, perhaps there is hope for the complexities of our shared existence in the world.

In this view, it seems that the smile of a baby on the subway might reasonably prompt me to contort my face into a ludicrous expression (perhaps pulling my nose and cheeks upwards toward my eyes and exaggerating the effect with a lipless smile) if for no other reason than to share a moment of solidarity with a child. In the gospel, Divine love has made me innocent again and the world is mine to discover anew as often as I am reminded of this life giving hope.

One artist who certainly understood the human longing for hope and innocence was the incomparable German choreographer, Pina Bausch, whose life and work have been celebrated by director Wim Wenders in the 3D film Pina now playing at select theaters in the city. Certain screenings at IFC and BAM will also include discussions with Mr. Wenders. As we begin the year examining BODY:LIFE at our upcoming quarterly InterArts Fellowship January 16th, this film might help to orient ourselves to the immense care and attention one can give to bodily life and expression.

Kenyon

The Fear of Miracles

i.

You must have had your own dreams
the life you always thought you’d lead
the roads you wanted to follow
the secret victories
But God sent you an angel
with his monster’s wings
heavy with heaven’s incense
blue and red, gold and green
And when he finished speaking
this world had turned unreal
the walls around you paper
the sky itself a spell
and singing through it all
the strains of a song
that burned the world with a blue flame
as you began to sing along
but the world was not consumed
only changed
the angel’s wings shone like the sun
the walls faded away
a shepherd became a king
a king became a child
the dead laughed and the lame danced
as the rich men cried
and all the dreams you’d called your own
glowed, then turned to ash
and you nodded your head
and the angel vanished
and left your dreams at your feet
like the cinders they always were
but buried there among them
was a crown made from stars.

--Carey Wallace

Christmas tidings from the Arts Ministry staff. Thank you, Carey, for sharing the first part of your Christmas poem with our readers. Carey Wallace is the author of The Blind Contessa's New Machine.

BODY LIFE: Proximity

He who has the Son has life. 1 John 5:12

Do you feel it? I know I do. Fragmentation. There is distance yet between the life I wish to live in my body and the life I am currently living. Just as a pianist is always reworking her repertoire and dance makers constantly rework classic choreography, it feels like I can only ever see or enjoy a proximate measure of beauty in this life as I work to close the distance between truth and experience?

If the Incarnation reminds us that life in the body is not merely a waiting period before the Renewal of All Things, the Ascension shows us that there is a something more that is, at present, out of reach--something for which to hope, a directive for our strivings. The Russian writer, Anton Chekov, in the closing scene of his masterwork Uncle Vanya, examines the idea that those who suffer in the body will finally be at rest. The vision of hope offered, perhaps in desperation, by the character Sonya portrays a kind of relaxing exhalation: “…we shall see all earthly evil, all our sufferings swept away by the grace which will fill the whole world, and our life will become peaceful, gentle, and a sweet caress…We shall rest!” This sentiment also rang true for the writers of early Negro spirituals and twentieth-century gospel singers whose oppressive circumstances fomented their longing for bodily and spiritual rest.

Growing up between these two aesthetics, gospel music and classical theater, I was never sincerely interested in the kind of hope that could only offer post-mortem relief from my experiences of suffering. Unfortunately, it seemed that this was exactly what Christianity was selling and I was a reluctant customer. As scholar N.T. Wright revealed in his timely laymen’s book, Surprised by Hope, I was among those believers who survived on “what is at best a truncated and distorted version of the great biblical hope”. How happy I was to learn that there is another way of engaging with Christianity and the grace which will fill the whole world.

For me, I continue to wonder how each encounter with beauty on earth, though temporary, can lead me closer to the culmination of beauty in the earth, Thy Kingdom Come...Certainly the birth of Jesus was the first taste of this beauty, the breaking through of eternal hope in that dark, earthy cave filled with the smell poverty, of animals and the cries of a teen-age mother giving birth. The marring ache of injustice was there at the moment of the incarnation, that knowing which says this is not how it should be! And into this knowing, Jesus was born. In the midst of it, he died on the cross. But perhaps the glory of Christianity is the particular hope which arises if you believe that he who was the first taste of eternal beauty is also the first taste of eternal life.

Belief in the resurrection is almost completely about the hope we have in the body. And this is the hope that I need because, like Uncle Vanya and like my slave ancestors, I am still living my life in my body with all my capacity for joy and suffering. I need a hope which has significance for these years of struggle and ecstasy, inspiration and mundanity. As we celebrate Christmas, earth’s first glimpse of eternal beauty, let us also remember he who is LIFE itself, undying and without fear.

--Kenyon

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