nakedpastor

This is this week’s Illustration Friday submission under the theme “wide”. This is an oil on board measuring 10″x14″, sold. It actually became the skeleton to my own logo.

The other day I received an email from someone asking how I would recommend incorporating the arts into the church and what steps could be taken. While I believe the question is one motivated by genuine concern, the only intelligible answer that might satisfy is one that must be given within the programatic and institutional paradigm within which the question was asked. This is the problem. The question exposes the paradigm and presses for an answer that conforms to that paradigm. We must realize that the question rarely reaches beyond itself. The question normally asserts its present paradigm and is usually a dogmatic statement seeking confirmation disguised as intellectual interest. The questioner may be trapped inside a paradigm that the mind hasn’t dreamed must perish.

So the normal way to answer the question would be something like this:

First of all, get permission from the leadership to start encouraging the arts. Then maybe start an art appreciation class. Then maybe an art instruction class. Ask the pastor if creative elements can be added to the church service. This will involve some “creative types”. Request that the leaders allow art to be displayed in the lobby. Set up an editorial committee that determines which art is appropriate for church. Etc., etc..

Just shoot me! Let me show you a better way. The church is generally a censorious community. In this environment art is sanitized, tame and conformist. It is still art, but functions as a reinforcement of the system. Expression is controlled and edited from start to finish. This kills art because it kills creativity because it kills freedom. Instead, allow people to be free without scrutiny. (I even hate the word “allow” because it assumes it needs to be given when it is already ours.) In due time, after people begin to realize that they are loved and accepted unconditionally, the creative spirit will surface and artistic diversity will abound. This is the harder but more genuine way. It means taking care of the roots. If the root is unfettered freedom, then fruitful and artistic living happens. It is the diversity of human expression of personality that makes the artful life. Until this is nurtured art will be repressed.

The fine art photograph titled “Fusion” is the creation of my friend Howard Nowlan.

This is a watercolor piece I did: 20″x30″. It is Illustration Friday’s submission this week for the theme: “electricity”.

I’ve been wondering about the Dionysian elements of our religious phenomenological experience. I say Dionysian because ecstatic manifestations of prayer, worship and miracles were elements of this religion. Some biblical scholars and historians claim, in fact, that much of early Christianity was a response or reaction to or a borrowing from the religion of Dionysius. Emotional or ecstatic expressions of prayer, worship, spirituality and intercession are demonstrated across the religious spectrum. We see it not only in some Christian sects, but also in Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish, Voodoo, Shaman and Wican sects, to name a few. Mysticism is not Christian, but religious, and sweeps across all religious lines. Miracles are not the sole claim of Christianity, but of a segment of every religion and anti-religion in the world. Have you not heard about, not just the evangelists, but the shamans, gurus, sufis, rabbis, psychics, witch-doctors and new-age practitioners with healing and miraculous powers? As Barth would solemnly remind us, with the revelation of God came religion. The human involvement in religion and its expression is total, deep, wide, mysterious, archetypal, ancient and complex.

As Jacques Ellul would suggest:

If one would conform to a true prayer before God, one would need firmly to reject (the) seductive temptations which carry a sort of label of authenticity. Unfortunately it is the label of a false authenticity, one which man authenticates for himself when he confuses his own psychic phenomena with the hidden but solemn presence of the Lord of his life (Prayer and Modern Man, p. 24).

Are we even slightly aware of our own “psychic phenomena”? Are we even slightly aware of our unconscious powers? Are we at all cognizant of the enormous spiritual powers that are immediately accessible to us? Are we informed about the Dionysian spirit that courses its way through every faith community that gathers? Sometimes I wonder.

The fine art photo is the creation of my friend Howard Nowlan.

I just read an article on Emily Carr, “How To Be A Woman“, by Lewis Desoto (MacLean’s, April 28, 2008). I love Carr and appreciated the article. But one section in particular stuck out for me:

Because she was a woman, and an unconventional one, Emily always struggled against the expectations and prejudice of men, as well as other women, both as an artist and an individual.

She had certain “bad” characteristics. She smoked cigarettes. She used strong language. She played cards. She rode a horse astride, like a man, instead of sidesaddle, like a polite young woman. Then there were her friends. She championed a Chinese artist who had been rejected by a local art society because of his race. She often visited a man confined to a lunatic asylum. She took a mentally handicapped boy along on a few of her local sketching excursions. She formed a friendship with a Native woman who was considered an alcoholic prostitute.

And then there were the Indians. It was bad enough that she painted images of what was considered a savage and primitive art form. But Emily went further than that; she actually went to live among the Native people on her trips and slept in their houses. Conventional observers saw this behavior as a betrayal of all the civilizing virtues for which their society stood.

Emily was independent, forthright in her views, and had a healthy disrespect for the established order. Some of her contemporaries considered her selfish, egotistical, and irritable, qualities accepted in a man but deemed unfeminine in a woman. We could also say that she was ambitious, dedicated, hardworking, and didn’t suffer fools gladly, but local society had already filed her away in the category of outsider and eccentric.

Male artists were allowed to be eccentric, bad-tempered, or sexually profligate. Such traits were often attributed to their creative temperament, and might even be seen as a sign of genius. A woman who exhibited the same traits was considered mentally unbalanced.

Now Emily Carr’s work is considered monumentally important, not just because of the daring advances she made in artistic expression, even pioneering ideas 10 years before the Group of Seven, but because of the necessary contributions she has made in our understanding of the early Indian culture on the West Coast. Now she’s “one of us”. Which is fine. This always happens. It even happened to Jesus… a wild, difficult and untamable man who later became the kind teacher in the gospels with a glowing halo, throbbing heart and surrounded by adorable children. Same with Paul, who, it has been said, didn’t always leave behind fond memories during his visits. Now he is the patron saint of the western church where most pastors want to be like him. Time has a way of appropriating what we used to reject.

Desoto points out that Carr’s work was met with silence early on:

All artists at some point ask themselves what use their work is to the world. If Emily thought she had found a use for herself and her talent, she was disappointed. An artist can fight against resistance; some even thrive on it. But to be ignored is the worst response of all.

Which is why I encourage you to explore the edges of the church and Christendom. Are you interested in the natives out there? Do you care about the world? You will get criticized frequently and severely. But mostly you will just be ignored. I went to bed the other night really upset because I was to attend a formal church gathering the next day. I don’t look forward to those events because I feel that we are so misunderstood as a community of faith. I find sitting in that milieu of misunderstanding really unnerving. In the night I had a dream where Lisa and I and our community was way out in the northern wilderness… like Into the Wild kind of wilderness. There was a main road. There were others just off the main road and they were respected because they seemed radical because they weren’t on the main road. But the only way people could make sense of their radicalism was because they were close enough to the main road to be understood. Their radicalism was recognizable because they were close enough to that which they rebelled against. It was a cool radicalism. But we were so far out there, among the natives, in the wild, so far off the main road, that we couldn’t be understood or absorbed. We weren’t cool. We were so far out there that no one even cared because we were so remote. I woke up from that dream  sobered: we are out there and nobody cares; and encouraged: maybe we are doing something necessary and important. It may look like we’ve “gone native“, and we have in a way. But I think this is the incarnational approach to the world. I think that we are not of it, but we are certainly in it. And this will be the source of your criticism, your being misunderstood and even your being ignored.

This is my Illustration Friday submission for the theme “Wrinkles”. I painted this picture to depict how I sometimes feel. There is a sense of solitude but also peace.

When I was down in the Dominican Republic this last week I got up early every morning and walked the beautiful sand beach as the sun rose. I’m an early riser, so it was always a pleasure. One morning I took my journal. When I finished my walk I wrote down exactly, verbatim, what you read here. I do not claim to be a theologian. But these thoughts tease me like certainties that, once grasped with violence, escape me. They are subtle, shy and full of adoration:

1. The love of all things. All beings. All life. My heart swells at the thought. My eyes get wet. The love. The benediction. Permeates all.
2. There is no god with substance, form, location, existence. Yet all is full of benediction, blessing. But even this confines. All-theism. A-theism.
3. Serve. Rescue. Liberate all! Faithful in little, faithful in much. There are none in, none out. All are. Rules divide. Faith expressed through love.
4. Impermanence and transitoriness of all things. All things pass. Nothing is permanent. Change. Urgency. Now!
5. Jesus is the historical event and undying incarnation of all the above. He IS, in whom all are and none aren’t. To speak of him is not to speak of him. To not speak of him is to speak of him.
6. The mind’s perception is the deception. The utter ego-centricity, self-serving, self-serving, self-protecting, self-seeking, narcissistic obsession of the brain. See this and be healed of blindness.

Well, there you have it. See what the sun, sand, and Cervezas can do to you?!