Tag Archives: service

September 24, 2011 · 8:11 am

Don’t Forget What You’re Doing…

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. by Madeleine L'Engle

Sometimes, we forget.

We wake in the morning and hope to find our way to the desk.  We hope to hear from the manuscript in front of us that we are welcome, that our company is longed for, that the stroke of our hands will be healing and full of discovery.  But maybe the sleep cycle got us, leaving us with dull brain, especially in light of the day before, with it’s logey, unproductive hours.   Coffee doesn’t help, Facebook doesn’t help, the stale air in the house doesn’t help, and the fact that its Saturday doesn’t help.   God’s busy, too busy to bother, and something’s wrong with the browser pages so that you have to choose between waiting and killing them.   Sun’s blazing white beauty on the window sill, and all you really want to do is walk.   The desk sits there, waiting, not giving a damn what you feel, which is pretty much true of most things and people.  So you have you feelings, so what?  Will the work get done?  Will the work be served?  Will words land on the page or not?

I pick up an old copy of Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, that powerful little book by Madeleine L’Engle.   Walking on Water was probably the very first book on the slippery interaction between Christian faith and art I encountered, given to me by a friend I eventually lost due to old-fashioned neglect.   Whenever I pick up the book, I’m reminded of that loss, which means I don’t often pick it up.   But this morning, there it is, and I reach for it, and L’Engle, wonderful writer and human that she was, immediately begins to remind me of what I’m doing.

This questioning of the meaning of being, and dying, and being, is behind the telling of stories around tribal fires and night; behind the drawing of animals on the walls of caves;  the singing of melodies of love in spring, and of the death of green in autumn.  It is part of the deepest longing of the human psyche, a recurrent ache in the hearts of all God’s creatures.

–Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water.

L’Engle reminds me, at the very top of the book, to listen to the silence.   “When I am constantly running there is no time for being.   When there is no time for being, there is no time for listening.”  She goes on in that first chapter to give focus to that listening.   “If the work comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve.”   She then quotes Jean Rhys.   “All of writing is a huge lake.   There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys.  All that matters is feeding the lake.  I don’t matter.  The lake matters.  You must keep feeding the lake.”

It’s about listening, serving, and giving yourself over to the work.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere.  When the work takes over, then the artist listens.   But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work.  Getting out of the way and listening is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer.

–Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water 

She also says, quite simply, that bad art is bad religion no matter how pious the subject.

Remembering what I’m doing….

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June 29, 2011 · 5:47 am

How Art Serves

Yesterday, I asked about the service art provides, wondering how to articulate it so that it was somewhat analogous to the practicality of giving drink and food and shelter.

My own reflection begins, as always, with another question.  What sustains human life?  If I mean physical life only, then the answer is food and water, etc.  If I mean spiritual life only, then another answer is in order.  But what I mean neither?  What if by “life” I mean the totality of mind-spirit interaction that makes up what we call a human being?  Some food (and this will differ from person to person, at least to some degree) will nourish both body and spirit, while other food feeds one (say, body) with one quality and the other (say, spirit) with a different quality.   And then there is some food that really nourishes neither very well.

On the non-food, non-water side of things, we can list elements that sustain us by a different kind of ingestion and metabolism, from which our spirits and souls draw life first (although studies are showing more and more the degree to which these non-food, non-water elements impact physiology).   Compassion, kindness, truth, metaphor, words, images, stories, thoughts, dreams, literature, plays, paintings, sculpture, sermon, emotions…these are a few of the nourishing elements that human beings must have is they are to live, and live well.   We all know by experience what it is to “metabolize” these elements, being renewed emotionally and spiritually (during which there is usually a definite uptick in physical feeling and health as well) by a story, a film, a word of kindness, or even a well-crafted defense of an idea.  Art, to my mind, is the shaping of material into meaning form,  usually with metaphor heavily involved, in order to delight, enlighten, challenge, and inform, all of which are opportunities for humans to ingest and metabolize unseen elements that nourish not just the spirit, but the whole of who they are, no less than bread.

In fact, one of the greatest things about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet was the artfulness of the choice.  What better symbol (which is another reason for being for art–symbol making) for the life Christ calls us to?  It’s got dirt, humility, intimacy, shame, grace, resistance, beauty, and love, and my instinct is that all of these should be part of our processes of making.   We serve by not only by feeding, but also by grappling alongside our audiences as all of us face the chaos of things, all of us hoping to clear away a bit of dust and dirt, so that we can better order our minds, our worlds, and our compassion.   By “order” I do not mean to imply rigidity, control, or hyper-editing, but rather the ability to continually frame disparate experiences in order to find meaning and purpose in the constantly pressing ambiguities and overload.

And frankly, much of this work must be shouldered, at least on the front end, alone.  We serve by being willing to go into the lonely place.  The wars of imagination are fought both in isolation and in community, but the “war” metaphor is an apt one.  In both the private sphere of the mind, as well as the public square of our post postmodern culture, there is, and has always been, an ongoing debate for what is “good” for human beings in the areas of love, family, health, and freedom.   Art makers serve by staring into the most difficult places with or without fear, and being willing to do the hard work of thought and metaphor and image in order to attempt to be helpful to those trying to figure things out.

The human being needs beauty, truth, debate, education, faith, prophecy, inspiration, informed critique and vision casting, and sometimes, something pretty, soothing, or charming to adorn a wall.  All of these fall within the purview of art, and in providing pieces of art to fill these functions, artists serve.

A life without food and water is unimaginable.  Can you imagine a world with no design, where no materials are shaped into meaning form?  No color, no beauty, nothing according to the golden mean?

Art-making serves by sustaining and creating life, much as its cousins food and water do.

It is often said that food keeps us alive, and the arts give meaning to our being alive.  Christians might knee-jerk and call that idolatry, but I would suggest that as we follow the Christ, we take all manner of material and shape experience into meaning form, and that is the artful life of incarnation.

What will you make today, and who will it serve?

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June 28, 2011 · 5:26 am

What is the Service Art Provides?

In what sense is art-making service?

If you give a person a drink of water, when they ingest it, there are immediate, real-world results.  If you offer a hungry person bread, when they eat it, their bodies replenish and become better able to negotiate their day’s tasks and responsibilities.  If you offer a coat to someone who is cold, and they take it and put it on, this new protective layer allows a change of body-state that is palpable, beneficial, and easily identified as something that looks like Christian charity.   Each of these acts of kindness address a physical state of being, providing a temporary remedy to a threat.   Food and drink and shelter and clothing are needs everyone acknowledges as being vital to life in no metaphoric sense, but in actuality.

If you offer a person a painting, when they engage it, what happens?  If you offer a person a song, when they hear it, then…what?  If you offer them a play, and they experience it, is there an analogous benefit that would approach the worth of offering them water or food or shelter?

A teaching friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that he thought the days of having to create an apologetic for art-making were over.   Maybe so, but my sense is that we still have many questions to answer about how art-making actually serves.  Ask yourself this question: if the picture of service is that of Jesus getting up from the table, wrapping a towel around his waist, and washing the feet of his disciples, what is the “foot-washing” art accomplishes?

Some answer the question by connecting their art-making with service organizations, donating whatever profits might come from their art to the supported organization.  In this way, it is easy to make the leap from art-making to real-world meaning and worth in that it literally creates energy for feeding the hungry, fighting injustice, supplying clean water, and so on.   But what if your art and its distribution is not related to social justice issues?  What if you’re really just hoping someone will buy a painting to hang on their bathroom wall so that you can afford supplies to create yet another painting?  And one more thing about the painting sold on behalf of the service organization: once the painting is sold and the profit donated to the service organization, is that the end of its purpose?  Or does it still have service to perform?

Others answer the foot-washing question by granting art the power to engender values such as compassion, understanding, generosity…even love.  And while I will grant that art may indeed have the capacity to do all that, it also has the capacity to create hardness of heart, confusion, miserliness…even hate.   So perhaps art’s service depends entirely on the specific work of art as well as the heart of the artist doing the work.

Even so, I wonder how to articulate what art’s service might be, especially if you try to think of it as an appropriate incarnation of Christ washing the disciples feet.

Tomorrow, I’ll come back and give you my take on this, but I’d love to hear how you answer the question.

Art serves by…? 

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May 19, 2011 · 7:30 am

Counting on the Sublime

The word “sublime” came across the Facebook news feed this morning.   I fell in love with “the sublime” in an old treatise, either 1st or 3rd century CE, attributed to a Greek tradition calls Longinus.  On the Sublime lifted me into the ether of literary contemplation back in graduate school, and I’ve been on the lookout for it ever since.

This morning I read that it even has a verb form: “to sublime.”  Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary says to sublime something is “to cause to pass from the solid to the vapor state by heating and to condense back to solid.   To pass directly from the solid to the vapor state.  (Emphasis mine.)

Funny, that’s what happens when you run into the sublime; something of the solidity of this world drops away and the spirit, in all its vaporous glory, ascends, and our beings are blown and shimmered by the moment, by Beauty, by the Sublime.

Inevitably, we return to earth, passing back into our more solid form, and get on with the business of mucking through.

But encounters with the sublime, the serious encounters, are transforming.   In my experience, the sublime is bound up with beauty, neither of which has anything to do with prettiness or shine.   “The Sublime” and “The Beautiful” are as likely to be found in Haiti this morning, where my friend Milton Jones is installing water purification systems, as they are on the stage of the Seattle Opera, where my friend Beth found sublimity in a recent visit.   Transcendence is no doubt dropping onto the planet like scattered sheets of rain…whether today is a day for you to experience it depends on where you’re standing, and whether you’re willing to get wet.

Encounters with the sublime I rank as encounters with God.   Some are small; the shafting light of a Seattle morning in May streaking into the kitchen to make newly clean knifes and forks glitter, grace in the mundane.  Some are never to be forgotten; a single moment of theatre–the sounds of satins and sheens creating the illusion of wind as a dozen men rush the stage, leaping and turning and fighting for kingdoms like unseen spirits and devils, all to the maddened pounding of drums.   Some are shared; the crowning head of a birthing first child under intense light, intense pressure, intense glory and joy.  Some are lonely; the early morning poem, written seventy years ago, the hand of God guiding the pen of the unknown brother so that the words drift in time and space like an aroma, landing in your breath and in your chest at just the right “now” decades later, in the quiet daily office.  But each time I meet the sublime, in all its major and minor incarnations, I’m reminded that we’re not alone, that somewhere beyond that shadowy unknown on the other side of physical, rational experience is another reality that reveals itself everyday.  We chase it sometimes, like kids after rabbits in the woods, and get little for our efforts, except the occasional brief glimpse of the scooting tail.   Other times we sit quietly, expectantly, and pray that it comes, that God comes, maybe bringing just the healing we need, or at least hope of it, and sadly, God and sublimity doesn’t bother that day.  Absence comes instead and walks us back home, often without saying a word.  Time passes, and you’ve almost forgotten the whole thing, when you turn the corner, and Heaven opens up; a flower, a light, a song, a voice, a touch, a child, a redemption.

If there’s an art to be learned, perhaps it’s the art of creating “an ethos of inspiration” or, as I’m thinking this morning, “an ethos of the Sublime.”   (I first ran into this “ethos-making” idea years ago in a wonderful book called “The Grace of Great Things” by Robert Grudin.) The idea is that inspiration, and by extension, the sublime, cannot be coerced, controlled, or called to appear by fiat or command.  The best we can hope for is to create a world where they would be welcome, were they to choose to come on any given day.   Fidelity, trust, love, sacrifice, hope, goodness, creativity, rigor, discipline, hospitality, openness to innovation, generosity, perseverance…all of these are conditions of the ground that invites inspiration and sublimity on a regular basis.   Who would not want to walk where these are practiced?

Can you count on the sublime?

It is precious and rare, but it’s always on its way.

Hoping you catch a glimpse today…

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September 23, 2009 · 6:46 am

A Reputation for a “Yes Face”

This was a question we asked at church on Sunday.  It’s a different way to phrase the old question of legacy: what do you want to be remembered for?  What heritage do you want to leave your kids?  After all is said and done, what will your legacy be?

One man had a fascinating answer in that he said he wanted to be known as a man who had a “Yes Face.”

A yes-face.

I knew immediately what he meant.   He was referring to that moment when someone in need asks you for help, and you’re caught in that dilemma of responding or not.   He wanted to have a face that always said, “Yes.”

The reason I knew what he meant was that too often I have a “No Face”.  And it’s interesting to think of a “No Face” being no face at all, in that the selfish human loses something of themselves and eventually disappears.   Do we find more and more of our true face as we open it with yeses for those around us?  And do we move toward having less face, less identity, less true self, when we present those who need us with a “No Face?”

What kind of face will we bring today?

I said I wanted to be known as someone who knew how to love…

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