Art for Arts Sake?

I recently read an article by the founder of The School of Life, Allain de Bottom, who broaches the question “Should Art Really Be For its Own Sake Alone?”  I would highly recommend this brief article to anyone at all interested in the intersection of Theology, the Church and the Arts.  The article reminds me of much of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s critique of the arts in his book Art in Action which I would also recommend.  de Bottom argues that an artist’s reason for creating doesn’t necessarily undermine the value of that which is created.  This of course butts heads so to speak with much of the modernist “art for arts sake” aesthetic, which he suggests loathes any whisper of aesthetic utility.  From this relatively rigid perspective, art must be encountered and experienced only as art, nothing more, and nothing less.  At any rate I wanted to take a few moments and play his assertion, which I generally agree with against another assertion I tend to agree with, Jacques Maritain’s assertion that the artist should create first and foremost for the good of that which is made, and see which one might come out on top. 

I appreciate de Bottom’s concern with artistic content.  Most artists through history don’t share the 21^st century art world’s aesthetic.  Most through the 18^th century at least connected art with some other purpose. Their art wasn’t created solely for its own sake.  Even modern artists respected in the art world have done the same.  de Bottom sites one of my favorite artists Mark Rothko as an example.  He suggests that Rothko himself hoped his work would accomplish something: “allowing the viewer a moment of communion around an echo of the suffering of our species.”  I would suggest many who have seen his work, particularly the layered black canvases he painted for his work for the Rothko Chapel, can attest that he accomplishes this, and perhaps more.  From the opposite direction I was struck on a trip to the National Gallery of Art in DC last year (after reading Art in Action) at the manner in which art work intended for devotional use, for example altar pieces which at one point were installed in churches, were displayed outside of their intended context, with no meaningful nod to their liturgical past.  This removal of an art work from a utilitarian context in order to serve in a purely aesthetic one seems peculiar at best to me.  So I resonate with the assertion that the artist inserts some content into what they create, even if that content is the assertion that what they create carries no content.

On the other side I resonate with the notion of art’s inherent value regardless of its content.  For that I go to Roman Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, who I must confess I read largely through Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of him which she shares in her book on writing Mystery and Manners.  I’ve since read Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, but for some reason I still tend to prefer O’Connor’s Maritain over Maritain himself.  At any rate, I tend to agree with O’Connor that the artist, particularly the Christian artist, should not create as a means to simply promulgate some message.  She would suggest that message lives inside the artist and will reveal itself through the work.  In order for it to be truly heard it must be deeply incarnated into the work, in a manner similar to the way in which the Being and truth of God were incarnated into Jesus, partially to give that truth a greater resonance with those with whom the Divine intended to communicate.  So in short, the purpose the artist hopes to accomplish must be deeply packed into their work.  It must come second to the value of the work itself.  The viewer, hearer, reader of the work’s encounter with the artist’s purpose must be earned through the hard work of the artist to incarnate this purpose into their work. 

So which side wins?  Well, you may have figured out by now if you’ve read any of my blogs that I tend to be a both/and type of person.  I believe both the aesthetic and utilitarian, for the lack of a better word, have to live together for art to function in a manner in which I would tend to recognize as art.  Now I understand the subjectivity of that statement.  And I understand the cans of worms opened by that conclusion, but that’s what the comment section and future blogs are for, isn’t it?

Comfortably Numb: A Restless Prayer

When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown,
The dream is gone.
And I have become comfortably numb

-Roger Waters

I’m not too manly to admit it.  I cannot listen to Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb without tears coming to my eyes.  There’s something about David Gilmour’s 4 minute guitar solo at the end of the song that does it to me every time, which of course is no good when you’re stuck in traffic and trying to choke back tears so the guy in the Beamer next to you doesn’t catch sight of you weeping like a baby in your car.  On a side note, this is why I try not to judge the folks who dance and make hand gestures to the music in their cars to harshly… there are times when I’m one of them. 

At any rate, I would venture to say that the song stirs in me something akin to my experience in worship.  Of course what is stirred isn’t a worship of the song, or of Gilmour or Floyd, but of the God who gave Gilmour his hands and feel on the guitar, and gave Roger Waters his creativity with words, concepts and composition.  It’s the same experience of Divine encounter I often feel when playing drums as I individually, and as a member of the faith community, employ music to worship in a church setting.  I know that will sound odd to many ears, and I don’t fully understand why or how that happens, but I’ve been thinking about it, and would like to explore that “why” and “how” a little here.  This may be irrelevant to most folks, particularly if you don’t experience this song in the way that I do, but I’m pretty sure we all have some song, or movie, or television show that regularly, if only fleetingly, pulls back the veil that separates seen reality from the reality not typically available to our senses.  So perhaps this might be helpful to someone other than me.

The music for the song was written by Gilmour who brought it to Waters who then wrote the lyric.  It was included on Floyd’s 1979 concept album The Wall, and is one of only two songs on the album that don’t fully integrate into the story being told.  The song itself can be viewed in 2 sections.  The verses are written in the key of B minor and, depending on the arrangement, can sound ominous and threatening, which is the way Gilmour preferred it.  Waters didn’t take to that arrangement, and so the recorded version sounds less ominous than Gilmour’s live versions.  At any rate, the verses are sung from the perspective of someone other than the song’s “protagonist”, for the lack of a better word.  It’s someone trying to “help” the singer, perhaps a doctor or counselor.  This helper seems to be someone who does not necessary have the singer’s best interests at heart.  The chord progression, Bm, A, G, Em, Bm, is constantly descending.  In short the verses are a constant and continual “downer”.  I would suggest this plays on our conceptual constructs involving angst and depression. We describe it as “feeling down”, and it’s often described as a feeling of “drowning” emotionally.  The verses seem to embody that feeling of being pulled under, of being out of control, a victim of hopelessness and despair. 

The chorus changes keys to D major and seems to be the protagonist’s inner thoughts.  It’s far brighter than the verse and alternates between A and D and then C and G chords, moving in fifths, which embodies a more familiar and comforting quality than the verse progression.  The singer seems to describe an inability to communicate with those outside of his or her body, and in both chorus’ reaches for and cites childhood memories as a type of comfort.  The singer seems to want to push back at the verses’ narrator’s attempts to anesthetize him or her, but seems unable to, ending each chorus with the admission that “I have become comfortably numb.” 

Additionally, latent in each chorus is a sense of unarticulatable spiritual longing for something only fleetingly experienced as a child.  In the first chorus there is the assertion that “this is not how I am”.  This longing is clearer in the second chorus when he admits that as a child he “caught a fleeting glimpse” of something, but “cannot put my finger on it now”  That fleeting glimpse as a child has been replaced with numb acquiescence as an adult to something seemingly less meaningful than that childhood experience with what I might call mystery.  Then at the end of the second chorus we go back to the “downer” verse progression.  It seems the protagonist is stuck in his or her numbness.  The chords seem to answer this inner struggle with, “this numbness is all there is”… but that’s when Gilmour steps in. 

The rest of the song, which is about 4 minutes, a lifetime in rock music, is dedicated to David Gilmour’s brilliant guitar solo.  It’s at this point the waterworks prepare to flow.  At the start of the solo Gilmour tends to hang around the middle to bottom of the guitar fret board, playing “lower” notes.  He even gets down to playing around the 2^nd and 4^th frets on the A string, inserting an open A few times.  The solo starts in the territory of the verse progression, low.  Over the course of the 4 minute solo Gilmore seems to slowly work up the fret board.  Spending time riffing around the 7^th, 9^th and 10^th frets, then at the 14^th and 16^th frets, until finally in the wailing climax of the solo he’s droning for measure after measure on the 21^st and 22^nd frets on the high e string, which is the part of the solo that most deeply affects me. 

This is by no means a straight line.  There are peaks and valleys.  Sometimes rising, sometimes falling, but always with what I might describe as a transcendent trajectory.  This feels like an attempt to accomplish musically what the verses couldn’t, to climb the fret board, overcome the numbness, and touch that briefly glimpsed mystery.  I can identify with that struggle: which manifests itself in my spiritual life in my pursuit of God.  Not to mix musical metaphors here, but Jon Foreman of Switchfoot articulates this well in their song Restless.  He sings:

Until the sea of glass we meet
At last completed and complete
Where tide and tear and pain subside
And laughter drinks them dry

I'll be waiting
Anticipating
All that I aim for
What I was made for

With every heartbeat
All of my blood bleeds
Running inside me
I'm looking for you

What moves me about the song is that I experience musically what Foreman describes lyrically; that restless search and struggle to find God, which mirror’s Augustine’s ancient assertion that, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  I would suggest this is true even after coming to faith.  Even then we’re restless for a deeper understanding, a greater knowledge, and more complete experience of the Divine.  This is what the song and Gilmour’s solo draws out of me.

The song ends with Gilmour sliding back down the fret board, ending back where he started on the Bm.  Was all of that transcended trajectory for nothing?  Were the verses right?  Is the numbness inescapable? I suppose that depends on how a person hears the song.  I travel up and down the fret board myself.  Sometimes experiencing and reflecting the glimpses of God’s breaking into the world in Jesus, and sometimes acquiescing to the world’s anesthetizing numbness. It’s then, in the pressing numbness, that I find I’m thankful for the restlessness.  There’s a sense in which one can view it as the Spirit’s loving elbow to our ribs, and you can see it in action in the song’s protagonist and his or her longing for the source of that “fleeting glimpse.”  So take heart, even if we find ourselves back where we started, after all of our efforts, we find the Spirit there continuing to draw all of us toward the love of God.  May we have the ears to hear it… in this and other songs.

The Darkest Night of the Year

"Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you Good News of a great joy... This day is born the Savior", that is, he who, as Son of God and Son of the Father, has traveled (in obedience to the Father) the path that leads away from the Father and into the darkness of the world. Behind him omnipotence and freedom; before, powerlessness, bonds and obedience. Behind him the comprehensive divine vision; before him the prospect of the meaninglessness of death on the Cross between two criminals, Behind him the bliss of life with the Father; before him, grievous solidarity with all who do not know the Father, do not want to know him and deny his existence. Rejoice then, for God himself has passed this way! – Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The musical group Over the Rhine entitled their 1996 Christmas album TheDarkest Night of the Year.  The tone of the record matches the title.  It is Christmas sung from somewhere near St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul.  Granted, not everyone will find that appealing, but I have a soft spot for it because anyone who knows me knows that I have a fascination with darkness.  I’m fascinated by our collective instinct in relation to it.  I’m fascinated by the mystery and unknown quality of the darkness, and the potential it has to reveal something of the Being and actions of God.  And I’m fascinated to survey a landscape that God promises will be transformed and imagine what it might look like after that transformation. 

It seems to me most folks aren’t comfortable with the dark, and I include myself in that number.  Leave me alone in a dark unknown room, and the heebie-jeebies that follow have the potential to cause a panic.  So we often try to mitigate the dark, and introduce some level of light into the murk.  I suppose we could ignore it and make due until our eyes adjust.  Or we could sit quietly and wait for a light source to present itself.  Some actually enjoy the dark, and are irritated at any inroads the light might make.  It’s rare though that anyone who prefers a lit room to a pitch black one would be willing to enter a pitch black room and remain there until given permission to leave it, though that of course is the heart of the story we celebrate every December 25. 

With that in mind, I think I’m going to make it a Christmas tradition to post a link to the homily below every year on this blog.  It is a relatively short, but potent review of a story we can tend to be overly familiar with.   It’s also the sermon from which this blog takes its title, Into the Dark With God.  Enjoy.

Lemony Snicket, Martin Luther and Madonna: Truth is Truth is Truth

If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald. – Lemony Snicket

Blessings at times come to us through our labors and at times without our labors, but never because of our labors, for God always gives them because of His undeserved mercy. – Martin Luther

Based on some of the reactions I received when I posted the Lemony Snicket quote on my Facebook page, I imagine many of those who read this will cringe a bit at the proposition that success is not always contingent on hard work, and that hard work does not always breed success.  If the latter were the case, African women would be the richest people on the planet, but alas they are not (yes, I stole that from a friend’s Facebook post).  The Lemony Snicket quote originated in an online post from the character Lemony Snicket/author Daniel Handler entitled, “Thirteen Observations made by LemonySnicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance.”  He makes several keen observations in relation to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.  Much of the post resonated with me, particularly the quotation above.  I tend to be an intuitive thinker, so sometimes it takes me awhile to digest an idea or thought.  In relation to the quotation something about it seemed to “line up” with ideas I already owned and believed.  It wasn’t until I heard the second quote from Luther that it occurred to me why.  Luther essentially says something very similar to Handler (though 500 years earlier), while simultaneously recognizing the Divine source/principal behind why this is the case, the reason why being grace.  This of course means that both express, in varied measure, something of Divine truth.  To draw this out a bit, a bit of scripture may be helpful.  Some of the core of the truth of both of these quotations can be found in Jesus’ Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard in the beginning of Matthew 20.

In the parable a vineyard owner hires workers for his vineyard very early in the morning and agrees to pay them a days wage for a days work.  Later in the morning he decides he needs more workers and so hires more agreeing to pay them fairly.  He does the same at about noon, 3, and 5.  At the end of the day all the workers, those hired at 5 and those hired first thing in the morning, are paid a full day’s wage, which of course raises the hackles of those who had actually worked all day.  When presented with the protests of unfairness, the vineyard owner replies, “I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?” (NIV)  Jesus begins this parable by suggesting that what follows is a metaphor for the Kingdom of heaven, and ends the story by suggesting that in the story we see a dramatic rendering of the free and gracious application of the landowner’s (God the Father’s) generosity.  Many will grasp onto the spiritual application of this and it’s relation to salvation, but many miss the principals in play in the here and now.  God has the freedom to bless whomever God wants to bless through whatever means God chooses.  If God chooses to bless the lazy with “success” (however you might choose to define it) that is entirely God’s prerogative.  If God chooses to bless hard work, that’s God’s prerogative.  One of the truths being fleshed out in the story is that blessings are always from God. No matter how much sweat equity we’ve invested into any given project, we cannot claim the fruit of that labor.  The fruit is always God’s to give.

Now this is no argument against hard work, or for inaction while awaiting a blessing from God.  In fact all of this is a merely the infrastructural support for the point I really want to touch on, which is that both the Lemony Snicket quote and the Martin Luther quote reference the same Biblical truth; perhaps one more intentionally than the other (Handler describes himself as a Secular Humanist), but the viewpoint of any author, or speaker doesn’t change the truth of what they convey.  Neither the person speaking or writing, nor the intent of the person speaking or writing ever changes the truth of what is said or written.  The point, to quote the great theologian Madonna, is that “truth is where you find it.” 

Because of (what I believe to be) the accuracy of this truism, truth isn’t always easily recognizable.  It’s often dressed shabbily, and associates with those of ill repute.  I believe we would benefit greatly if we were able to develop the ability to recognize truth in whatever form it presents itself.  Not only would we benefit personally, particularly if that recognition lead to meaningful, Christ-like action, but we would benefit those around us as we were able to recognize God at work in the culture at large and come join in that Divine labor.  Perhaps a good place to start is to take that song, movie, book, television show, or viral video back to scripture to find out where it resonates, and what it shares in common as a first instinct.  You might be surprised at where you might find God already at work in the culture around us.

The Book of Ruth: A Love Song to the Law

So Boaz said to Ruth, “My daughter, listen to me. Don’t go and glean in another field and don’t go away from here. Stay here with the women who work for me. Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the women. I have told the men not to lay a hand on you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.” – Ruth 2.8,9 (NIV)

Ruth is a wonderful and wonderfully out of place love story, stuck between the dark and bloody pseudo-nihilism of Judges and the road toward a Kingdom in 1 Samuel.  It is short, sweet, and in its own archaic Hebrew way, romantic.  One can make the case that Ruth is the Harlequin Romance of the Hebrew Bible, though Song of Solomon might throw its pomegranates in the ring to be included in that conversation.  The inherent drama of the love story between Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi, and then between Ruth and Boaz seems to have a filmic quality to it, hewing closely to many of our own cultural romantic narratives.  And the Hollywood-ready happy ending is the icing on the cake.  You can just picture Ruth riding side saddle with Boaz behind her, his arms around her trotting into the sunset at the end.  I recently finished a 2 month Bible study on Ruth. In our discussions and debates I began to see another love story in the book float to the surface, one which I had never seen before, and one which I might suggest reveals some truly practical applications for the way those of us who endeavor to trust and follow Christ live out our faith.  This love story was one between the book’s author and the Hebrew law. 

Now that begs the question, is this an unrequited love story?  How can the Hebrew law love the author in return?  It’s a good question, and one I will table for the moment and return to in a bit.  I suppose a more immediate question is, “How is there anything in the law to love?”  Isn’t it just a bunch of do’s and don’ts that we don’t have to pay attention to anymore because Jesus fulfilled the law?  We don’t sacrifice bulls, or rams or goats anymore, so why should we pay attention to the rest of it?  I might suggest Ruth provides us with a partial answer to that question.  The part of the law that Ruth’s author reveals his or her (though given the circumstances most likely his) affection for concerns its concern for the marginalized, in this case the widow and the foreigner. This concern is the foundation on which the book is constructed.  So I suppose we should peel back the building and inspect this foundation a bit.

In Deuteronomy 10, after Moses received a second copy of the law (since he had destroyed the first copy on frustration), God shares the following with Moses and Israel, giving a glimpse into why God had acted on their behalf in Egypt, and what that meant for the manner in which they were to live their lives:

To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it.  Yet the LORD set his affection on your ancestors and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations—as it is today.  Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer.  For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.  He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.  And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. – Deuteronomy 10.14-19 (NIV)

This is the heart of God’s actions on behalf of Israel, including God’s provision of the law.  In fact, I would suggest this is the heart that beats at the center of the Law because this is the heart of God.  God chooses to work through a vehicle that doesn’t yet exist (Israel) cultivating and maturing it through interactions with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  When it does begin to sprout it grows as a marginalized community of slaves in service to a political powerhouse in Egypt.  God’s choice of Israel here was entirely based in God’s absolute freedom, and God’s grace.  God goes on to suggest that Israel’s actions should mirror God’s in this way: that they value and love those on the margins of their culture and social structures, in this case the fatherless, the widow and the foreigner.  After they are freed from their slavery in Egypt and have a land of their own God concretizes this even further in Leviticus 19 and 23 where God shares this directive, “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you.” (Leviticus 23.22 NIV)  These passages form the foundational scriptural and ethical assumptions on which Ruth was written.

You may ask why I think the author of Ruth loved this law.  The first clue to the author’s love of the Law is the story’s historical setting, “In the days when the Judges ruled.”  These days were practically lawless and tragically violent.  The book of Judges itself characterizes this era as a time where “everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”  Needless to say this is not an era characterized by a widespread love for or adherence to the Hebrew Law.  Yet here we have Boaz not only adhering to it, but going above and beyond the Law’s requirements.  He acts as if he is more concerned with the heart of the law than with the law itself.  He not only does what is right by its stated requirements, but does what is right by the widow (Naomi and Ruth) and the foreigner (Ruth) acting in accordance with the love of the God that loved Israel when they had done nothing to earn that love.  The law here is, in essence, the bare minimum of what is required to behave in a way which is consistent with the character of God.  To truly act in accordance with the heart of God one must go far beyond the bare minimum, which is what Boaz does.  This going above and beyond is the second clue toward revealing the author’s love of the law. 

As I asserted earlier Boaz lived in a time where the law was barely followed.  In fact, truth be told, the Hebrews had a tough time consistently following the law’s moral, social and ritualistic requirements through the whole of the Biblical narrative.  What we see in Boaz’s “above and beyond-ness” in Ruth is what the practice of the Law was supposed to look like.  It’s the ideal.  We get to see God’s intent for the law put into practice.  You not only have a widow, Naomi, who was at the margins of that patriarchal society because of her dependence on her husband and sons for her provision and survival (and she’s lost her husband and both of her sons), but you also have a widowed foreigner who was even further on the margins because of her lack of standing within the community.  The story places them at the mercy of the function of the law, and in this (I would suggest rare) instance the law works as it was intended.  When it does, we get to see, as if acted out on a stage, the glimpses of what the Hebrew culture could have been had they kept to the law, which would have been a place that rendered visible the loving heart of God.  (And I didn’t even get to the concept and practice the kinsman-redeemer)

So what does this mean for us?  So the author of Ruth loved the Hebrew Law, why should we?  I would suggest we should love the Law because it allows us to “see” the inside of God.  In this Law God rips open God’s chest to reveal the passion of God’s metaphorical heart.  God reveals a love for the humble, the inchoate, and the powerless.  God goes out of the way to reach out to them/us.  I would suggest that God’s heart has not changed in the years since either the giving of the Law or the writing or Ruth.  So if we’re to love what God loves, that must include those on the margins in our own culture.  At the beginning I acknowledged that the Law could not love the author back, but the God of the Law can and does, and I believe the recording of this story is part of the author’s recognition of and returning of that love, for all of posterity to see.  So I would suggest this is the/a practical application to be taken from Ruth: It’s up to us to allow that passionate love to seep into us and the experience of our relationship with God and then allow it to flow out of us as we learn to love and embrace with our actions that which God loves and embraces.  The more this becomes part of our experience of faith, the more we may find the hands of Boaz revealing themselves in our actions, and we can all agree, the world could use a few more Boaz’s couldn’t it?

***The picture above is a reproduction of a woodcut done by Margaret Adams Parker from the book Who are you My Daughter?: Reading Ruth Through Image and Text.  In it Theologian Ellen F. Davis provides her own translation of and commentary on the book of Ruth, inter-cut with Margaret Adams Parker’s wood cuts.  It is highly recommended.

Heaven, Hell and the Handbaskets for Each

...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.”
― N.T. Wright

The world is not going to hell in a hand basket.  “What?” you say?  “Have you seen the poverty in Africa?  Have you seen the individual and corporate greed run amok?  Teens are killed for their shoes.  Children are abused by those they trust.  Pornography is a billion dollar industry.  The rich are healthy.  The sick are poor. We waste precious resources for our creature comforts.  Those on the margins of survival are systematically corralled on the margins by those who benefit from their hardship.  The defenseless are slaughtered.  Government chips away at freedom as if they’re sanding off old paint in order to apply their own new color scheme.  And there’s a Democrat in the White House.”  To all of that I say, “Ok there are a few good points there.”  It’s easy to see that the world around us is a wreck.  It’s easy to look at the world and become discouraged, and even to despair.  I’ve been there.  Sometimes I visit discouragement and despair.  Sometimes they visit me.  When we listen to their voices, the world can seem like a pretty dark and foreboding place, and in all reality it is.  However there is another voice speaking into the wreck, one which should be recognizable to those who have pursued a trust in Christ.  It’s a still small voice, singing a redemptive melody.  It’s hard to hear, and can often be entirely inaudible, but I would suggest that an anchored faith that that voice exists and is active in its song is essential to both preventing our own despair, and to breathing hope into the larger cultural conversation. I’d like to focus in on the theology that is the back beat of that song and draw a few practical applications out of it, if you’d be willing to humor me and my metaphors.

The hub around which this wheel turns is the notion that God is in the process of completing God’s redemptive work in the world.  We get snap shot images in scripture of the shape and feel of this completed work.  See Isaiah 25, 35, 61 and 65, and Revelation 19-22.  If we were looking for words that we could glean and reconstruct from these passages that would help provide that feel, we might come up with: peace, justice, equality, love, joy, sanctuary, and community.  In these passages God reveals to us how the story ends; or to push the music metaphor a bit, the song, or better, the symphony God has been composing, conducting, and perhaps even improvising through history has a glorious end which God is longing to share with this beloved world.  What must be remembered if we’re not to be overcome by the voices of discouragement and despair is that this symphony is still being written, and those of us living here now are caught in one of the symphony’s taut movements, full of dissonance and unresolved tensions.  If we allow these dissonances to define all the symphony is in our minds, we lose the beauty and attractiveness of the story being told through the music.  This, I believe is part of the reason God lets humanity in on the end of the story, to provide a modicum of hope that the unresolved tensions that surround us do not define the whole of reality.  What is even more beautiful is that God at times allows us to hear hints or foreshadows of the glorious conclusion that is waiting at the symphony’s end, both in scripture (see the Resurrection) and in our experiences.  God even allows and requests us to participate in the playing of this song.

Thus, our efforts to learn the prior movements and glorious end of this symphony, and recreate them using the instruments God provides (ourselves) are a good part of what we have to offer the world around us.  To unwind the metaphor a bit, the more Christians share the good news of God’s self revelation of the depths of God’s love for humanity revealed through the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the more we embody that love and the peace, justice, equality, joy, sanctuary, and community that characterize the symphony’s conclusion the more we get to participate in the still small voice’s part in the larger cultural conversation.  It’s then that we not only fight our own despair, trusting the promise of the symphony’s finale, but play our part in the symphony, attracting people to its composer and come alongside God as a voice of hope, continually singing to the world.  It’s then that we learn and trust that the proverbial hand basket is not heading toward entropy and destruction but is actually heading toward a bright, glorious and divine future.

Occupy Church?

The “Occupy Wall Street” protests have captured my imagination, and probably not for the reasons you might suspect.  There is a lot to be said for the collective indignance being articulated by the Occupiers in relation to earnings and wealth disparity.  On a side note, for all the voices that speak of their expectations to the contrary, they are revealing that “Gen Y” does possess a moral center.  It may not be your moral center, but they are making moral arguments against the current economic construct.  Now, there is also something to be said for the oddness of much of the protest, and many of the protestors.  Another strike against the Occupiers is their difficulty in succinctly articulating either all that they’re for, or even all they’re against.  They seem to represent a pretty diverse group of interests who seem to share in common a frustration with a financial system they see as constructed by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful.  Well, they seem to share that frustration, and a collective interest in horizontal as opposed to hierarchical organization.  This is actually what interests me most, particularly in relation to the church.

I’m intrigued because the occupiers are embodying a means of organizing I’ve been fascinated by for years, particularly in regards to how it relates to the church.  I was introduced to this idea of a horizontal organization of church by Tom Sine’s Mustard Seed Versus McWorld, and Neil Cole’s Organic Church: Growing FaithWhere Life Happens.  Both suggest a radical rethinking of how we organize church, creating smaller community structures, less dependent on brick and mortar facilities, and allowing for greater spontaneity and liquidity in movement.  In different ways they argue that hierarchical structures have the strong potential to slow the church’s work as those involved commit considerable amounts of time to both the organization and the facilities associated with the organization.  I have to say their ideas held and continue to hold my imagination.  As much as I love church as I’ve known it, and as much as I love being a part of the organization and the family atmosphere of the organization, it has always seemed rather unwieldy to me.  The trouble is I’ve had a hard time imagining what an alternative would look like.  I even tried to find ways to take these ideas from the page to the real world; from the construction of an intentional community to alternative liturgies and ecclesial structures, without much success.  Enter the “Occupy Wall Street” folks and their experiment in “horizontal democracy.”

This is what seems to me to be at the heart of their protests, and the one thing shared in common, a commitment to shy away from hierarchy.  You can see this in their decision making process, attempting to decide by group consensus as opposed to majority vote.  Granted it takes longer and less gets “done”, but by doing so they embody the alternative to that which is the root of their indignance, the power of the few over the many.  I appreciate this commitment to live this philosophy given my interest in the idea of Incarnation.  Given the importance of Incarnation to Christianity, this should get our attention.  Their message in reality is their action.  Because of this the value of this protest thus far, at least as I see it, isn’t in their propositions, but in their actions.  I pray that some day the same can be said of me.