What Is Art?

“What thoughtful man has not been perplexed by problems relating to art?” — Leo Tolstoy

A friend recently shared the above photo on Facebook when she visited the Tate Museum in London. The picture of Phyllida Barlow’s sculpture elicited strong opinions and lively conversation about what we consider art. Tolstoy tried to answer this question in “What Is Art?”his essay that stretched into the length of a book. Rather than how art relates to beauty, the feelings it evokes, or any of the other ways we might try to define art, maybe the best answer to the question is an indirect one: art is best appreciated when shared with others.

The responses to my friend’s post were varied. Most were “perplexed,”as Tolstoy said, about a pile of lumber being considered art. But one person considered it from a different perspective pointing out shapes, movement, shades of color, and the many lines inherent in the sculpture. This was the kind of input I was hoping for — someone who could help me see the pile in a different way. I think she tapped into the artist’s thoughts because Barlow stated that two of her inspirations were the river outside the museum and the “tomb-like”galleries. Indeed, in the river and huge open gallery spaces, there is movement, light and shadow, color and shapes. My friend said children were able to vote on the artwork in the museum. I’d love to know what they had to say about Barlow’s work. I’m pretty sure their view would sound something like the lines in Dean Young’s poem, “If I had to pick between shadows/and essences, I’d pick shadows./They’re better dancers.”

Looking at art with other people exposes us to a range of thought different from our own. I remember a book club discussion that completely changed my take on a scene that, with my own interpretation, made me disappointed in a book I otherwise liked. When our discussion leader compared the passage to a John Donne poem, the rich meaning and significance of the character’s actions became clear to me.

In his book Faith, Hope and Poetry, Malcolm Guite refers to the effect a particular speech in The Tempest has on its audience as “widening ripples”in their minds. It builds upon layers of meaning. Thinking through other people’s viewpoints expands our ideas about what art is and “widens ripples”in our understanding about the forms art takes. This leads us to appreciate aspects of art that we may not have considered on our own.

Art discussions bring us together. That doesn’t mean we'll agree on what art is, but it fulfills what Tolstoy called art’s essence “to mingle souls with another."

(Photo by Harriet Montgomery)

The Voice: Faith is by Hearing, Not Seeing

I have never watched the music competition The Voice, though my favorite would always be whoever Usher coaches, since I had the privilege of knowing his grandmother, a dear Christian friend whom we all miss. Such is the extent of my musical knowledge and my interest in musical competitions. The only way I would root for anyone other than Usher’s protege on the show would be if Bob Dylan was one of the other coach’s contestants. I don’t think that likely.

But I am intrigued by the title of the show and of its original set-up. Apparently, the coaches are all seated with their backs to the contestants and vote to take on one of the acts purely on the basis of hearing them sing. Interesting.

“Seeing is believing”has become an oft repeated idiom derived apparently from the story near the end of the Gospel of John in which the Apostle Thomas, not present when Jesus first appeared to the disciples in the upper room, declared that he would never believe unless he saw the nail print in Jesus’ hand and could thrust his own hand into Jesus’ side (where the Roman soldier had pierced Him with a spear while He was being crucified). Jesus graciously accommodated Thomas later, but mildly rebuked him, too, by stating that he believed because he saw, but blessed are those, who, not seeing, still believe (John 20:29).

I don’t think the apologetic concerns behind the phrase “seeing is believing”are generally legitimate. Yes, Mary encouraged Peter and John to come see the empty tomb for themselves, and they came, saw and believed. But they went right back and locked the doors for fear of the Jews. It wasn’t until He spoke Mary’s name in the garden and declared“Peace be unto you”to the disciples in the upper room that they were changed forever.

Gather together all the evidence you can, marshal all the arguments for and against, study them, analyze them. We need such things to understand what it is we have already believed. But faith only comes by hearing the Voice sing. And when you have heard the Voice sing your name, there is no turning back.

Writing against Loss

This summer, along with a talented poet friend, Rosanne Osborne, I co-led a poetry and faith workshop using Dave Harrity’s book, Making Manifest. The book emphasizes writing as a way of recovering an awareness of ourselves and our Creator by focusing on the significance of single moments, both past and present. The makeup of the workshop was both surprising and just right, made up of multiple generations of women who discovered, through writing, how much more they had in common than any of us initially anticipated. For a month, writers in all stages of life wrestled hard with memory, paying careful attention to what Dave Harrity calls “the disappearing instant,”and living inside the particularity of a moment long enough to locate the images and words capable of capturing the moment’s essence and implications.

Writing about memory can be a tricky thing. “The writer must,”poet Jeanne Murray Walker instructs, “learn how to manage time and manage it well.”For writers, this managing of time is a tall order, particularly when, as busy human beings, we feel much more managed than managing. However, there is reprieve in the world of a well-written poem. That poem has the supernatural ability to stop time, to allow for the kind of reflection that counters the pace of the “real”world.

As challenging as it can be to set up the world of a poem, to find a way into the lyric or the narrative, to decide which lines to cut, to settle on the dominant image that, hopefully, will beautifully marry all the poem’s assorted parts, the poem that delves into memory offers the writer and the reader an opportunity to sit still inside of a single moment, to settle into instances crisp as the day they were happening. The poem offers the writer and reader the chance to recover something that has been lost.

Poet Ruth Stone writes that “memory becomes the exercise against loss.”Stone’s words imply high stakes for the writer who chooses to engage the past.   The struggle of that poet is the struggle to recover and locate someone else’s memory in her own, to be both universal and specific, and to do both in the breadth of a page or two. Those poems are difficult to write and often to read. But those kinds of poems are my favorite ones. Poems that strive to unearth the past push us to be our most human selves, to locate our forgotten persons and moments, to pull them from the margins of the past, and give them space to breathe again. Ultimately, such poems offer us the opportunity to have faith that our participation in this act of recovery truly is an exercise against loss.

(Illustration by Gurbuz Dogan Eksioglu)

The Mighty Tiny

“It was slow work grubbing them up amid the sand,”Henry David Thoreau said of digging lily-roots in The Maine Woods, “and the mosquitoes were all the while feasting on me.”I can’t help but imagine the walker of Walden Pond slapping and cursing and fleeing. “Mosquitoes, black flies, etc., pursued us in mid-channel,” he continues, “and we were glad sometimes to get into violent rapids, for then we escaped them.” The writing is typical Thoreau even if the response is not; the sentence itself is performative, as those pesky bugs drive Thoreau away from his primary topic, never to return to it.

“How can flies bite?” asks my younger son Aidan. His older brother Micah and I have returned from a trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, where the mosquitoes are bad, but the biting flies are worse.

We’d gone to the BWCA not just for fishing but for something more. I’ve decided that part of my job in educating my children is pointing out beauty. But even in the BWCA, that endeavor is not simple. By taking Micah into wilderness I was putting something at risk. It is possible to miss the forest’s beauty — the sublimity of rocks and trees, water and sky in concert with each other — for the mosquitoes. True to my fears, the black flies never went away during the day and the mosquitoes settled in at dusk.

A few sentences after Thoreau’s rather uncharacteristic reaction to mosquitoes, the man composed himself: “I noticed . . . that there was a lull among the mosquitoes about midnight,”he writes, “and that they began again in the morning.” He can’t seem to help but devotionalize this moment: “Nature is thus merciful.”

I’m not buying it. There may be a sensibility that comes from meditating on mosquitoes and black flies, but it’s more complex and nuanced than what Thoreau gives us, a sensibility found more readily in G.M. Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” or in Annie Dillard’s “Fecundity.” Or maybe I just like the almost comic might of the mosquito, able to drive off the imperturbable Thoreau with its tiny mighty powers.

Despite the black flies and mosquitoes, Micah seemed to have no problem appreciating the glory in the boundary waters, apparent when he pointed our camera at a chipmunk, at the skyline at dusk, at a pine tree that pointed spire-like to the sky.

I’m not so sure Aidan, who by nature, no pun intended, gets more easily distracted and discouraged by things like biting flies, will have the same reaction. Next summer, I’ve promised him his own trip to the BWCA, and my work will be cut out for me in the teaching-to-see beauty department.   For now, his brother starts the lesson on my behalf.

“How can flies bite?” Aidan asks in disbelief.

“Just you wait,” says Micah.

Jabberwocky in the City

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to make sense of the city around me, especially the nonsensical, nonlinear nature of events, whether that’s a ‘light’ rush-hour coupled with a sudden spring-like day or a five-alarm apartment fire sparked by a welder’s torch; an artist painting the crape myrtle trunks blue on the parkway or thieves bashing in car windows night after night along my street. Then things get tricky and hard to put into words—ineffable. This is the impossible task that writers grapple with fairly regularly. How do we get at ‘the beyond’ part of a scene we have just encountered, a conversation we have just had, in words that will do the thing justice?

For me, I have to circle around the ineffable. The complexity of emotion and details of scene get me tongue-tied. So I have to let the experience settle in my mind. In effect, the thing becomes like a piece of grit in a sock—something that’s present, that’s felt, but not always acknowledged. Eventually, I’m aware of its significance and start jotting ideas on the page, pinning down the details. This draft makes a collage of the visual, the tactile, the sonic, noting features that loom large, and aspects that seem too small to even notice. And I discover ideas that might encapsulate the thing—a rhetoric for the poem. Sometimes I can get away with stating an idea plainly; more often, I want the idea to exist in the details, without being stated at all.

I am especially fascinated with some lines in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet, “Hurrahing the Harvest,” the section of the poem in which he is not explicit with ideas, in which meaning circles around the ineffable, while the words are jolting:

Now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior Of silk-sack clouds!

Hopkins has conveyed the scene just as he must have felt it—astounded and thrown off balance. I love these lines. Hopkins’ words carry a rich, sonic quality to allow a listener to know the scene “by ear.” The words fairly hum through the body. The poet has created an experience of synesthesia, which I think encompasses the totality, the awe of the scene. Of course, “Hurrahing the Harvest” also contains a rhetoric in succeeding stanzas; the speaker wants to tell us more plainly about his experience. Yet the more powerful lines of the opening stanza—of “barbarous beauty,” “stooks arising / Around” and “wind-walks,” are substantial and unexpected. It is this kind of expression that I am after when I want to express an aspect of the ineffable, a way to make the poem felt, in addition to being heard.

(Painting by Pat Rocha)

- Guest Blogger, Rebecca Spears (Read more of her work in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.)

Living with the Fragments

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”  ― Flannery O'Connor

There is a picture circulating on Facebook of a gray ceramic bowl that has been broken and repaired, its cracks filled with gold. Kintsukuroi. The caption reads: (n.) (v. phr.) “to repair with gold”; the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

The sentiment resonates. We have all been wounded and broken, and we all can, at least most of the time, acknowledge some blessing. More than that, kintsukuroi marks an event in the history of an object. It tells a story. And the story ends in restoration.

But this feels too neat to me. It feels dishonest. There are wounds that can’t be painted smoothly over with gold. What about the fractured parts that will never be put back together, will never take the same shape again?

Over and over in a million different ways we learn the heaviness of the world, learn to navigate its depth and its jagged edges. It is an act of faith to live with the fragments, even the ones unrepaired by gold, even while there is no resolution, not yet.

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Paintings above by Daniel Barkley: “Vincent B, Arms Crossed,” “Study for Golden Boy,” “Vincent, etude pour Golden Boy,” arranged in this sequence by the author.

At the Table

“Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. 'It's good to eat something,’ he said, watching them. 'There's more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There's all the rolls in the world in here.’"

     —from “A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver

When asked, I told the editors of this blog that my next post would be about “technology and human flourishing.”But I’m afraid I have nothing so grandiose to say. In fact, I had just one single image in my mind when I named that topic: people setting mobile devices on the dinner table. I know, what a super uptight and grumpy thing to discuss. Still…

When I consider my family and friends and eating together, I want to aim not for some idealized foreign film culinary-religious experience, but for a space where we can genuinely devote ourselves to one another. After all, it was nothing more or less than a supper where the bread and wine of the New Covenant were given for us.

In my experience, the presence of devices on the table, and the ubiquitous expectation that they will be employed at the first sign of wandering attention, can preclude the kind of intimacy that sustains me.

You know how you visit a business in person, then the business’s phone rings while you’re being helped? Often the salesperson makes you wait while he completes an entire transaction with the caller, and you think, “Glad I bothered to show up.”Watching people use devices when I’m at the table with them feels like that. Except worse, because ours is not a business relationship. We can do so much better than profit-driven corporate standards.

I’m not interested in building and defending traditional rhetorical arguments here. But I would like to present one more image to consider. (If you are looking for a compelling argument that touches on some similar themes, read Wendell Berry’s “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,”along with the follow-up letters that Harper’s readers wrote to him, and finally his response to those letters. These can be found in What Are People For?.

Back to my image: I’m picturing Ann and Howard Weiss, the parents of Scotty in Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing.” You’ll recall that Ann had ordered a birthday cake for her son, who then died after being hit by a car. The disgruntled baker, having no idea what had happened to the boy and only anxious not to lose money on the cake, calls the Weisses with irritation multiple times to tell them that they forgot to pick up their order. Finally, Ann and Howard go to the bakery to confront the man, whose calls seemed inexplicably cruel.

When the baker learns what has happened, he expresses deep remorse to the Howards. Then he senses, in an unspoken and profound moment, the rightness of eating and giving attention, which ultimately lead to the beginning of healing—not only for the Weisses but for the lonely baker, too. From that moment, nothing precludes them from entering an unusual, even frightening, depth of communion. (Ironically, it was a phone that led to misunderstanding and isolation. In person, they can break through.) The covenant has to do with presence—embodied love.

The final paragraphs of the story, for me, comprise one of the most spiritually poignant passages in 20^th century American fiction:

"You probably need to eat something," the baker said. "I hope you'll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this," he said.

He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. "It's good to eat something," he said, watching them. "There's more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There's all the rolls in the world in here."

They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he'd worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn't a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.

"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

I would suggest that each one of us is perpetually Ann and Howard. Each of us is the baker. When we break bread together, we bring our hurts and fears, loneliness, the very stories of our lives, to the table. Let us partake while giving one another the attention our communion needs in order for each of us to flourish.

(Painting by Jan Steen)

Do we often stand outside of life?

“... the only way of ‘mastering’ one’s material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant. If he tries to wrest life out of its true nature, it will revenge itself in judgment, as the work revenges itself on the domineering artist.” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 186)

In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers makes the intriguing point that our modern culture typically approaches life according to a scientific or analytic “problem and solution” paradigm rather than what she calls a “creative” paradigm. As she states, modern man views life “as a series of problems … which he has to solve with the means at his disposal. And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of — such as machine power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity. This is particularly disconcerting to him, because he has been frequently told that the increase of scientific knowledge would give him ‘mastery over nature’ — which ought surely to imply mastery over life” (185-6). In short, we try to take a method that’s applicable to a small subset of human experience and try to apply it to all areas of life, indeed to human life itself.

In her creative paradigm, life isn’t a problem to be solved, nor the mystery of the universe an equation to be worked out; for one thing, these imply the ability to master life. Rather, in this view (as Christine Fletcher summarizes Sayers), “life presents a series of opportunities to make something new” (The Artist and the Trinity, 96). The artist, for Sayers, doesn’t stand outside life as an engineer, but, open-endedly, within life, working with the elements of life according to their nature, in order to make something out of them in harmony with their nature, essentially in an ongoing process of being fruitful and multiplying, that is, in all the various aspects of human life and human interaction with the world. Sayers applies this creative paradigm not just to the artist in the narrower sense, but to the fabric of human nature itself, indeed suggesting that “creative mind is … the very grain of the spiritual universe” (Mind of the Maker, 185).

Thus, central to what Sayers is arguing seems to be that modern man does not want to live life (this ongoing fruitful process); he wants to master life. Modern man seeks to overcome even the deeper problems of life through, e.g., analytic or machine techniques, seeking to conform the world to human will. But the creative paradigm doesn’t seek to master nature. It works with the materials received, according to their nature, to bring forth yet new things. Therein, even “the pains and sorrows of this troublesome world can never … be wholly meaningless and useless.” The artist will seek to “make something of them” (192-3). In short, they are the materials for a new creation or a new synthesis. This, Sayers argues, is the pattern that Christian theology provides as well. And there is a striking parallel, e.g., in the Incarnation. The problem of the Fall isn’t simply “solved” in the sense that problematic elements simply disappear by force of will and reason. They become themselves part of the very elements out of which something brand new is brought forth. God enters within the context of human life as things stand and creatively engages with all the factors involved according to their nature (taking on the “likeness of sinful flesh” [Rom 8:3]). Thus all the materials of the fallen order are employed to create something new. To be sure, God “adds” new materials — the supernatural breaking into the natural — but the old materials are integrated into the new, having been transformed into something glorious through God’s creative work. One is reminded of C. S. Lewis’ analogy, in “The Grand Miracle,” of discovering the missing, central passage of a symphony or chapter of a novel, which, when plugged in, transforms and transvalues its whole meaning, making new sense of all the other parts, forming a masterpiece. Thus, though life is often, in large part, made up of tragedy we can rest in God’s promise and his creative power that he can take all of those elements — the scars, pain, loss, and all other seemingly useless material — not simply erasing them or resetting everything to zero, but creatively forming out of them a new creation of unforeseen glory (how else could a crucifixion be the creative means of glorifying the Son of God?).

Do we perhaps often stand “outside” life, seeking to engineer our lives and thereby gain mastery over it through techniques, or (similarly) get lost in imaginary scenarios that could have been but are not? If Sayers is correct, should we not rather stand “within” life, as its servant, imaginatively interacting with what is there, engaging with life in media res, seeking to create new forms and re-integrations of the good, the beautiful, the true (in all walks of life)? While also, of course, admitting to the tragedy and the brokenness and the longing of life that cannot be assuaged by human ingenuity.

(Painting by Frida Kahlo)

I too am a jackass

My favorite nativity painting is this piece by Piero della Francesca. It was completed around 1483, long after the larger inventory of the artist's catalog. It is painted with oils on a panel of wood and, like Piero's other works, it shows the artist's meticulous attention to perspective and composition. The painting is currently on display at the National Gallery in London but many believe the artist intended to have it hang in his family chapel near his tomb.

I love every part of this painting: the singing angels, the silent magpie, the fragile child, the contemplative virgin, the pensive ox, the storytelling shepherds—even the strangely casual portrait of Joseph who nonchalantly crosses his legs as he rests on a saddle. But my favorite part of the painting is the jackass in the center. He was once just an ordinary jackass, but today, with exuberant joy and unexpected privilege, he sings with angels!

And I think of my own life. And I realize that I too am a jackass who, by the grace of God, gets to sing with angels. And I like that.

But Sunday morning becomes Monday. So what will I do with that song?

Mental Hygiene

I’ve become mildly addicted to the campy, corny, classroom social guidance films of the post-war years. These social engineering gems portray the standards of an American society (albeit idealized) so long-gone it may as well be foreign. Yet partly through the philosophy portrayed in mental hygiene films, a couple of generations of American young people were indoctrinated (or not) on subjects as varied as personal grooming, sex education, Communism, and everybody’s Cold War favorite: surviving a nuclear blast with duck-and-cover techniques. In atonal, scripted voices, characters display religious commitment to “fitting in,”“cleanliness and neatness,”and the ominous mantra, “Girls who park in cars with boys are not really popular.” In What Makes a Good Party? there’s not a racy décolleté, beatnik individualist, or hint of postmodern cynicism among the swell teens gathered around the piano. One might wonder if the chaperoning mother contrasted this wholesome tableau with her own wild, Roaring Twenties youth. And me, I’m just a little bit wistful of the whole thing.

I ask myself why I keep watching. Though amateurish in the extreme by current standards, it’s the naiveté and unapologetic dogmatism of these films that draws me, which had to be partly what motivated the psychically fractured Cold War-era adults who produced and endorsed them –– determined that the new generation would enjoy the symmetrical lives they’d been deprived of through the Depression and horrors of war. Mental Hygiene author Ken Smith suggests too that post-war zealots might also have sought to exorcise their own internal demons through moral and social ideation. Cleanliness and neatness! If you kids would just keep those fingernails cleaner, maybe we’d be able to forget the waters that ran red on D-Day.

Sixty years later, our culture dodges its own specters. My children and their friends have been clawed to shreds by the wolves of cultural nihilism, and my numbed heart scans for easy answers, big colorful Band-Aids. I too crave security and order, social niceties, life without serial school shootings or restaurants full of men’s hairy armpits. Tonight, I’ll tune in to another tidy social guidance film, say, Arranging the Tea Table. If I can get that table squared away, maybe everything else will fall in place.

In Praise of Boredom

My daughter spent the night with a friend, swam at the pool the following day, and came home to play video games—and drums—in the basement with three neighborhood boys. After dinner, she met other friends at May Lynn’s ice cream trailer down the road, in the parking lot across from Starbucks. She came home and, still smelling of chlorine, sat on the daybed in pink and white headphones thumbing away at her cell phone. Not thirty minutes later, she tromped into the sunroom where I was reading and pulled her headphones down around her neck.

“I’m going to take a walk with David,”she said.

“Why don’t you take a little break,”I told her. “You need some down time.”

She made her teenage-girl face at me and said, “But I’m bored.”

I’m bored. It’s not just a teenager’s gripe. Boredom is a bad thing, leads to trouble. Keep the kids busy with sports and band, the conventional wisdom goes, and they will not have time to fall in with the dope smokers out behind the high school. In my own childhood, I heard the phrase “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”too many times to count. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes that, “boredom is the root of all evil,”The Apostle Paul has some things to say about the dangers of being idle.

But what of our current attempt to cure our boredom with frenzied multitasking? Haven’t we conflated the idea of being still and alone with being idle? We have become a culture of unremitting busyness, are proud of it, addicted to it; however, as much as it is an addiction to busyness, it is a flight from boredom. We cannot stand to be alone with ourselves. We do not know how to wait through boredom into creative activity, so we slide into ennui. The problem is that we no longer take our boredom alone. We are connected by multiple devices to an endless stream of stimuli. We are not alone and yet we are still idle. We know this isn’t working so we try yoga —I hear it works wonders, though I’ve never done it myself.

Pascal famously said that all of humanity's problems come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. When Kierkegaard writes that boredom is the root of evil, the cure he offers is not keeping busy. As Daniel Boorstin explains it, the only true relief “is to stay home, where the existing individual bores itself into inventiveness.”

When I get a little free time I’m going to try it.

(Photo from Fellini's La Dolce Vita)

Wordsworth and Learning Through Nature

When You send out Your

breath, life is created,

and the face of the earth is made beautiful and is

renewed.

- Psalm 104:30 (The Voice)

I once had the words "To Lucy" embroidered on a notepad for a friend's birthday. He's been a lifelong fan of Narnia, so I had the salutation stitched on the book to inspire the childlike wonder, receptivity to beauty, and spiritual heroism of Lucy Pevensie in his own writing.

I had mostly forgotten about that notebook until I recently returned to the Romantic poets, specifically Wordsworth. While reading the Lucy poems, I was reminded of the embroidered name and began thinking about what was to be learned from the Lucy of Wordsworth's poems.

In the fourth Lucy poem, “Three Years She Grew," Nature recognizes something extraordinary in the small rural and solitary child named Lucy. In the first three stanzas, Nature speaks of how she will instruct the tender child in the ways of glee, gentle grace, and sympathy. Nature says that she will teach Lucy about the sportiveness of the fawn and the tranquility of insensate, or inanimate, things.  Through her relationship with Nature, Lucy will acquire the "state of floating clouds" and be shaped by grace through sympathetic storm watching. By submitting herself to Nature's guidance, she'll learn to be attentive enough to recognize and admire the dimmest of midnight stars and tune her ear to the obscure and quiet places where rivulets murmur and brooks make gentle whisperings. What’s more, her internal receptivity to beauty will be mirrored in external loveliness, for “beauty born of murmuring sound/ shall pass into her face.”

And then, there it is. The first three lines of stanza six and I am truly stilled.

               And vital feelings of delight

               Shall rear her form to stately height,

               Her virgin bosom swell

In Wordsworth, it is in "vital feelings of delight" that Lucy is brought to the "stately height" of true and admirable maturity. And, I too am reminded of the fruit of living in wonder and delight as Lucy does; I wish to daily live in the maturing gratitude that "the land is satisfied by the fruit of His work," as the Psalmist says (104:13). And while my notion of Nature may be closer to St Francis’ (the patron saint of ecology) “Sister Nature” than Wordsworth’s “Mother Nature,” I still wonder if Lucy could be an exemplar of the reciprocal relationship of ministry our Creator has set up between us and the natural world. As we, in following our Father’s example, minister to Nature through attention and care, Nature, through God's bounty, ministers to us.

Politics and Polecats

Do you know what you stand for? Recent findings, particularly those focusing on Millennials, have given rise to speculation that younger Americans tend to hold self-contradicting opinions about the world they live in. Others have tried to minimize these statistical interpretations as small, explainable discrepancies that are being used to force contradictions onto a fictitious stereotype.

Disclaimer: I’m not an ardent political junkie. But I do have a thoroughgoing interest in psychology, and in this case of apparent incoherence, I was reminded of a short story from Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, a little book written by Dr. Robert Cialdini on principles of influence and their formative power in our lives.

Cialdini presents a study undertaken by researcher M.W. Fox on a mother turkey guarding her chicks from a major threat — in this case, a stuffed animal made to look like a polecat (think “weasel”). The mother seems to act coherently, protecting her chicks like a mother should, attacking the polecat when it approached. Fox found that the turkey’s maternal protection of her chicks was tied to one specific ‘trigger’: the unique vocalization of the chicks.

Fox wanted to see how influential that protective behavior was, so he stuffed a fake polecat with a recorder that continually played the chick’s cheeping. When this rigged polecat “approached” the mother turkey, rather than attack it she attempted to gather her greatest enemy under her wings and care for it.

The devious avian experiment serves to illustrate Cialdini’s argument that we often allow individual triggers — single points, phrases, or even keywords — to color our entire outlook on a given argument or position.

I wonder about the young Americans who participated in the recent polls. What thought was behind their responses? Was it careful, deliberative, informed? Or did they hear a particular keyword, the way a question was phrased, and respond instinctively?

This brief reflection isn’t, in the end, about polecats or politics. It’s about people. It’s about the quiet indictment that comes down on us when the dust settles and our fervor recedes. It’s about that faint voice in our heads asking us why we had to get so worked up. It’s a suggestion that we spend a bit longer thinking before answering, a little more time listening than reacting.

(Painting by Norman Rockwell)

Nobody's Looking

My grandmother went white water rafting for the first time in her fifties, and my aunt began painting and owling in her forties, and another went back to school in her thirties to earn her bachelor’s degree and then her master’s. 

So maybe it’s in my blood, but a month ago I found myself in bare feet and tights in a dance studio, facing the mirror. I’d signed up for a six-week workshop: introduction to modern dance. I’m no stranger to dance studios; in my thirty years, I’ve had about twelve years of ballet classes — in college I went two or three times a week — and even own a pair of pointe shoes from a class I took when I was about twenty. I’ve never been very good at ballet, because my body is close to, but not quite the right type: I’m built a little too close to what women’s magazines call “athletic,” slim but not quite slim enough, and my hamstrings have always been preposterously tight.

Modern dance always intrigued me, though — I make a point to see a lot of it — and so, there I was.

And one week in, I was googling, “Can adults become advanced modern dancers?” I could already tell it was far different from ballet, more about the movement and the rhythm and gravity than hitting the right shape over and over. I was grinning by the end of the first class, enjoying the movement and the feeling of freedom. Just to hold out your arms and spread your fingers and fling yourself around a bit, all to music: it’s wonderful. It’s freeing. It actually really feels like dancing.

That said, any time I start enjoying something, realizing I’m sort of okay at it, I want to set a goal: publish an essay, teach a class, run a half-marathon. Within a week, I was already thinking, This is something I could do. I could really be a modern dancer. For fun, of course, but still. Something about putting my hard work out there in the open where other people can see it makes it real. Right?

Is the work really worth doing if nobody notices?

So I guess maybe that’s the next new thing I need to pick up as an adult: doing the work of learning something new for the sheer joy of it.

(Photo by Lois Greenfield)

The Life of the Local Instagram Celebrity

I followed this blonde woman on Instagram. Her life seemed like an unending vacation: bikini pictures with beautiful friends on white sand beaches, cocktail parties on high rises with cityscapes in the background, jungle hikes to secret waterfalls. I thought she was a local celebrity of sorts, popular and adventurous. I thought maybe I’d meet her someday. Actually, I did.

At work I was called in to the Emergency Room to help a patient without any insurance. I found her lying on a bed, high on drugs. I asked her the necessary questions for the paperwork. “I’m broke,”she said. I couldn’t believe it was her. In her social media profile she was so put together, so perfect. I didn’t imagine this scene in her life would make it onto Instagram.

How do we navigate the complexities and nuances of ourselves? How do we share our lives full of mistakes and sins? It’s not only that we like to broadcast the best story of our selves. It’s that we’re unable to reconcile how to tell the actual story of our life with cultural expectations. So we don’t tell those stories. The truth, we think, is too much. We create unrealities, fictions, because telling stories, the full story, the real story, the ugly story, is too damn hard.

In the Gospel of Mark, when an unclean woman tries to sneak in through the crowd and get healed, Jesus turns around and calls her out. “Who touched me?”The woman, now healed through the power of Jesus, could have snuck off into the crowd, could have hemmed and hawed, said it was an accident. She could have continued her new, healed life without the crowd knowing who she really was or what she had done, what kind of uncleanliness had defined her for so long. But she doesn’t hide her story, her shame, her struggle, her embarrassment. And Jesus, as he’s wont to do, redeems her.

There are tools at our disposal that allow us to tell the real story. Specifically Scripture informing the Christian imagination, and the miraculous work of Christ giving new hope and new life. It’s not Instagram filters or Snapchat stories, but a language and an opportunity to spread the joy of redemption. There is hope in our truth, the truth we can bring to Jesus. That’s a story worth sharing.

Angry at Andalusia

All my pilgrimages are improvised en route –– last minute treks to hallowed sites I never expected to discover along the way. The pilgrimage to Milledgeville, conceived while passing through Georgia the instant I glimpsed the town’s name on a highway sign ––“That’s where Flannery O’Connor lived. We’ve got to go!”–– couldn’t be researched adequately during the twenty-minute detour owing to a weak cellular signal, but no matter. There would be a bronze statue, I figured, probably in the town square, and a bookstore in which to purchase yet another copy of the collected works. Would there be souvenirs, trinkets –– a Misfit t-shirt, peacock keychains, Made in China ball caps bearing the author’s image? I certainly hoped so. Kitsch is not my thing, but for O’Connor kitsch I will make an exception.

We arrived in the rain and had to scour the city for any sign of her. Up and down the stately streets, through downtown and across the glistening cobbles and genteel columned buildings of the university campus, we could discover no indication, however minor, that Flannery O’Connor had ever set foot in the place. No statue, no square, no cottage industry catering to literary tourists. What Milledgeville wants you to know is that it was once the state capitol. That it was once home to the state’s greatest author appears to be a matter of relative indifference.

Eventually we came across Andalusia, the O’Connor homestead, out on a highway across from a car dealership, its location pinpointed by several mismatched signs. By now it was past six and the front gate was locked, so we contented ourselves standing on the muddy drive, gazing down the curved path until it disappeared in the trees.

Ours was the sort of pilgrimage that might have pleased Flannery, I suppose. She might have made a story of it, with myself the object lesson. Still, I grew frustrated, resenting the town for not taking more decided measures to honor the great writer’s memory.

“If this is what she gets,” I told myself, “you can’t hold out much hope for yourself.”

In a parking lot a week later, still unsettled by the abortive pilgrimage, I sat with the engine running and listened to a recording of O’Connor reading her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Her accent is divine, and the 1950s audience laughs in the right places, a comedy club crowd right up to the moment the story takes its turn, at which point an awkward silence descends. Police sirens echo in the background of the recording, and I felt annoyed (as Flannery herself must have at the time). Couldn’t they have been more considerate, these cops? Bank robbery or not, it was hardly worth spoiling a rare recording of the author’s voice.

My silly anger spilled over onto Milledgeville, which could also stand a lesson in consideration, then spread to encompass the whole state of Georgia past and present, then the nation. (“This country doesn’t honor its literary greats. Those sirens would never have sounded in France.”) Eventually I was mad at the world.

“Why are you so worked up?” I asked myself, but myself was not forthcoming. It had nothing to do with the sirens, anyway, or with the closed gate or the statue that isn’t in the town square. I suppose I was angry at history more than anything, the way the marks we leave –– regardless of how large they loom in the mind –– don’t make much of an impression on the actual world. They’re as easy to miss as a sign opposite a used car lot marking a muddy path down which, an hour earlier, you had no intention of traveling.

“The Unforgettable Fire:” Human Destruction, God’s Judgment, and Our Refuge

Seeing U2’s "Gloria" video for the first time changed my life; I was amazed that these four seductively scrappy Irish lads were singing so overtly about Jesus, and that the music was not formulaic, cheesy, or sentimental. It had an honest, raw, edge—and this seemed to match its message. When watching and listening, I let out a junior high sigh of relief without even understanding why. Perhaps I first understood my desire to see the jagged edges of our reality reflected in art by those who endeavor to have a relationship with the author of a Reality beyond those jagged edges.

The title of U2’s fourth studio album, 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, is grounded in the painful history of our collective ability to destroy ourselves and others; the album title was taken from a 1982 exhibit at the Chicago Peace Museum of artwork painted and drawn by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb dropped in 1945 was an unforgettable ball of fire to those that were physically and emotionally damaged by its power of fragmenting destruction.

The U2 album that takes its name from the exhibit refers both directly and indirectly to the human capacity for inward and outward violence, including such harrowing topics as heroin addiction (“Bad”), racism and murder (“Pride”), and the sad decline of a cultural idol (“Elvis Presley and America”). But the title track itself, a deeply evocative song full of longing, sadness, and hope, does not initially seem to specifically allude to the exhibit or tragic event that gave it its name.

But on revisiting both the song and video through a lens of Psalm 46 (a line is quoted in the song itself), I would have to disagree with the many music critics and fans that share this view. Although the lyrics are admittedly cryptic in many parts, they make sense on an emotional level—and this emotional richness is intensified by the video’s images. Both the song and the video open with a vivid image of “these city lights”that “shine as silver and gold.”The song also speaks of the seductive lights of a carnival where the “wheels fly and the colors spin”. Yet as the music builds dramatically, we see video images of a fairground ride transforming into an exploding atom bomb and a cityscape that is struck by lightening before experiencing a violent rainstorm.

Yet directly after these images of violence and destruction, Bono alludes to Psalm 46: 2 as he sings “And if the mountains should crumble or disappear into the sea, not a tear, no not I.”But how does any of this of this relate to the bombing of Hiroshima? Psalm 46 speaks about the “trouble”that we must endure on this blood stained, war loving earth—but that God Himself will bring “desolation”to the earth as “He breaks the bow and shatters the spear.”In a sense, the Psalm speaks of God’s judgment and his ushering in of justice and peace, putting an end to human cruelty and injustice.

At the very beginning of “The Unforgettable Fire”video, just as we see Bono’s grief-stricken face against a dazzling cityscape, we also see the rising of a blood-red moon. In one of the accounts from the exhibit titled The Unforgettable Fire, a survivor drew and described a moment when “the sun appeared blood-red in the dark sky.”We also read in Acts 2:20 and Joel 2:31 that “The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood”before the “Day of the Lord”comes. In these allusions, the video opens by alluding to both human destruction and God’s judgment.

The same city that we see throughout the video is emblematic of modernity’s narrative promise of an efficient, comfortable, and exciting heaven on earth. Later, the members of U2 descend into the bowels of the city itself as they walk into a large blue-tinted factory space; here we see the promise of technology. Soon after, we see the carnival ride explode in a mushroom cloud and realize that the same seemingly messianic technology that produces our amusements, also enables us to annihilate other human beings as we appoint ourselves false gods of this earthly “paradise,”the city. As the lightning strikes and the rain waters come down, the video alludes to even more biblical narratives of God’s judgment against those who have taken this heretical role.

The video’s images are not, however, only of the doomed city; as Bono sings that one should “walk on by, walk on through,”we see a transition to a shot of The Edge walking a lonely, snowy path in an open space. We see the same beautiful scene as Bono sings“I am only asking but I think he knows. Come on take me away, take me home again….”. Although the mysterious lyrics do not name God, there is no other reference point that would possibly explain the mention of a knowing “he.”

Towards the end of the video, there is a striking image of Bono’s face, illuminated by a flame, superimposed over another image of the band warming their hands over a fire in a snowy field. As Larry Mullen, Jr. smiles, we see the familiarity and connectedness between the band members, the only moment of warmth and joy in the video. As the video and song both end, Bono tells us to “save your love,” and we see the same serene face dimly light by a constant fire. Perhaps the title “The Unforgettable Fire”has a two-fold meaning: it alludes to both the horror of the A-bomb, its image forever burned into the psyche of its survivors—but it also alludes to the eternal fire, giver of life, warmth, and illumination. Just as Psalm 46 tells us that God is a refuge and fortress, a constant source of strength that we will know profoundly if we can “be still,”“The Unforgettable Fire”video reminds us that justice will be done, that even if “the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea”there is a constant source of strength and calm.

What Communicates

When my two-year-old wants a drink he says, “Up. Up.” When he needs my help with something, he also says, “Up. Up.” “Gra-gra” can mean motorcycle, cracker, airplane, or Grandma. When he says “Oosh” he may mean he wants juice or that he wants to put on his shoes to go outside. If he goes, “Zha-zha,” he may be talking about his sitter, Andrew, his favorite person, Suzie, or the Frozen soundtrack. He refers to himself as “Unh-unh,” but he may do so to indicate that he wants the same treat his brother just received or that he wants to walk in front of the stroller. About the only things he says that don’t have multiple possible meanings are “Mama,” “Dada,” and the sign for hungry.

The wonder of raising a child is that all these things actually communicate. They don’t always work smoothly or without confusion and false starts, but they usually, ultimately, work—I eventually figure out the proper interpretation of his sounds and my son gets his needs met.

Working at a Christian college, I think a lot about interpretation. Protestant thinkers, in particular, are very concerned with interpretation because it seems to represent a problem of getting at the truth. James Smith, in The Fall of Interpretation, engages some major figures for whom interpretation was not part of the original creation and will not be a part of the restored creation. For these thinkers, we don’t want to interpret; we want to just know. Interpretation doesn’t produce the certainty that we want to base our lives upon.

But Smith argues that interpretation would seem to be part of being a finite creature, and though Heaven may entail the conferral of eternal life, it doesn’t obviously entail the conferral of infinitude. To become infinite would be to become equal, intellectually, to God. It doesn’t sound right when put that way, does it?

Part of the trouble is training our minds to get away from a propositional truth and into something different that still preserves the authority of truth. The medievals thought our propositions about God were at best analogically true, that is, were true enough but unable to express the whole truth, but since the scientific revolution, we have wanted to have a propositional truth that was adequate and complete.

Actual language use teaches us otherwise. In the relatively trivial truth that my son wants popcorn or to ride the swings, what communicates does so not because we have found a precise and complete language but because we have worked out a language game within the context of our relationship. The truth of his needs extends well beyond his ability to express it, but we make up for that through knowing one another.

That word "context" was a big problem in the late-70s/early-80s when Jacques Derrida appeared to suggest that, because context can never be finally pinned down, meaning itself is impossible. Smith patiently explains that Derrida never actually made any such self-contradictory claim, but that he in fact was emphasizing the risk of communication, namely, that it won't communicate. Consider how many of our jokes are about failed communication or miscommunication. Every attempt to speak to another exposes our speech to interpretation, but amazingly it works more often than not.

Comedians make us laugh at miscommunication because it is, at times, a source of anxiety and insecurity. But I'm not sure it has to be a scary idea for Christians, however. Extended to the Bible, it suggests interpretation depends on our relationship with God and with the Christian community rather than the direct communication of the translated words. Don't we already believe that? Maybe the problem is that we feel like God is the two-year old saying, "Oosh," and we're stuck trying to figure Him out. Maybe we should assume we are the ones going, "Gra-gra," and have faith that God is able to interpret our ill-expressed needs.

Edge Effect

“Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying,” ~ Pablo Neruda

Life liquefies at the shore. The apparent boundaries of unique eco-systems collide in powerful, beneficial exchange. In landscape architecture we call it edge effect. It is primordial. In Genesis, it happens in three acts of separation: dark from light, water from water, and the lower waters gathered from the ground. The waters are called sea, and the dry ground, land, and it was good. It was good. The dynamic shore. Edge effect.

My wife and I are an it. We are in our thirtieth year of it-ness and will celebrate this year in Booth Bay Harbor, Maine, and with thanks and hope, we will contemplate the mysterious lobster. Blessing and prospect are clearer at the shore. A few Saturdays ago we went to Indian Rocks Beach. As we walked from the public parking lot and crested the dunes I was astonished by the hundreds and hundreds of us already gathered, sunning, running, sheltering ourselves from the bright sun. We all looked helplessly bipedal ambling north and south on the shore. The birds and breezes moved where they would. But we were fixed within a ribbon of sand and shallows as far as we could see. The flat, wet land accentuated our lengths, walking foot to foot with our reflections posted beneath us as if on the sky. We walk for a time, though we'd swim like fish if we had gills, fly like birds, given wings. Edge effect attends to prospects.

Pelicans are the ungainly gods of Indian Rocks. Everything about them is other. Clumsy on land they are made for water, and there they are lightly buoyed, bill to breast, resembling some sea-born monk, bobbing. Then convulsing, thrashing the water with fearful wings, they break with physics and glide the currents. The one I watched saw beneath the water to fish, folded itself and scissored violently into the gray waves, rose to the surface, clapped its bill and swallowed, bobbing again. I made some frantic notes. How shall we be convinced of a transformation we can taste except in the desire exposed by a force of limits? How shall we imagine it without strange beings that transgress those boundaries before our eyes? Edge effect glimpses the imagined place.

The Spanish word for pelican is alcatraz. Alcatraz Island was named for its pelicans. In 1827 a French Captain wrote "...running past Alcatraz's Island [it is] covered with a countless number of these birds. A gun fired over the feathered legions caused them to fly up in a great cloud and with a noise like a hurricane." The eponymous prison would have been the right place for a penitentiary, but it was a prison with windowless cells. It housed the least penitent of those in the Federal prison system. As was said, “If you break the rules, you go to prison. If you break the prison rules, you go to Alcatraz.”Inmates lost their names to a number. The last inmate to leave when it closed was AZ-1576, Frank Weatherman. He said, “It’s mighty good to get up and leave. This Rock ain’t good for nobody.”Today, even the pelicans are gone. Edge effect has its limits.

As Saturday ends the earth hurtles eastward toward the dark. Gulls chide in last flights and the tide licks our feet. We sit quietly on the sand, listening, and watch the western sky.

Intercessions

At 4:30 a.m., the respiratory therapist wheeled his apparatus through the open door. The order called for medicated oxygen to be forced into our five-year-old daughter’s lungs. For the treatment to work, the seal of the mask over her mouth and nose would have to be airtight.

“No, thank you,” Maddie murmured as he tried to fix the strap behind her head. She pulled away, and broke the seal again and again. By then, she’d been awake for eighteen hours. A failing lung had made her breathing shallow and rapid.  Sleep was all she'd wanted, but strangers kept breaking in, jolting her awake: red strobed light, motion, punctured skin.

The technician grew impatient. Again he held the mask against her skin; again she wriggled free. He straightened his back and let out a breath, which was when my wife snatched the mask from his hand, clambered through the tangle of tubes and wires, and huddled close to her daughter’s body. She drew the mask toward her own face and held it there. She breathed. She smiled. She placed it back upon the air between them. “Please,” she said. "We need to do this.”

My daughter’s eyes were wide with recognition. She nodded. The seal held.

She was not cured overnight. We remained in intensive care for two more weeks, including the ten days and nights she lay intubated beside us, forced asleep as the ventilator breathed. There were, to use the word that doctors do, many interventions to come. But the one my wife performed that morning — the one compelled by love so selfless and savage it cannot help but interpose between life and death — is the one that taught our daughter not to fear.

Earlier that year, my senior class and I had read a Raymond Carver story, about a couple who lose their child in an accident, and, disoriented by distress and misplaced anger, find themselves in a bakery, where the owner, a relative stranger, absorbs their anger and takes them in. He offers them a place to sit, a shared space in which to be still, and a warm loaf of bread. “You have to eat and keep going,” he tells them. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.”

And then those same seven seniors from our small school appeared at our door at St. Francis, with a bag of pears, and coffee, and handmade cards.

And all of this comes to me now, intervenes, when something in me wants to wallow only in the wounded part of time, wants to feel that life is made of loss and the fear of losing. It wakes me from my torpor and turns me toward my daughter, reading here on the patio with me, seven years nearly to the day when her lungs were proven clear.

(Painting by Edward Knippers)