God, the Artist and the World: My Guest Post

It's been quite a while since I last posted. I'm pleased to say that while I've been absent from blogging, I've been more active with my own writing (my never-ending project of essays about faith and the writing life). I received a four-credit release from my college this semester to free up a little more time to write, and I'm grateful for that. However, I did complete a post for Ross Gale's blog for his Creativity Series. The prompt he gave was to write about creativity and the role of the artist. I felt happy about the piece I contributed. It distills some things I feel very deeply about what it means for me to be an artist in God's beautiful universe. Ross just published the post on his blog, so I'm inviting you to mosey over to his place to view it. To whet your appetite, the beginning of the piece is below. Otherwise, I hope to be back soon with some musings in this space. As always, thanks for reading and take care.

Photograph: Corbis

When I was sixteen, my father retired from the military, initiating the last move of my childhood to a small town in Wisconsin. I was once again the new kid, the outsider seeking a space, a community, to call my own. That summer, I found myself drawn to night skies, the warm swirl of darkness and stars freed of suburban glow. Laying in the front yard of our home, surrounded largely by farmland, there was something about vastness that eased my loneliness, my wretched anonymity.

I remember cool grass under my shoulders, the sawing of crickets, and a growing sense of immensity. In that space I contemplated my life and the God whose existence I couldn’t shake. That scene remains for me a picture of longing, an attempt to grapple with, to reconcile, the random awkwardness of my small existence with an expansive and patterned universe.

To read the entire post, click here--and feel free to let me know what you think.

Unguarded Selves: Beauty, Tragedy,and the Artist

Last night, I had the privilege of participating in an event with Art House North in beautiful St. Paul that provided space to explore the artist of faith's response to the reality of tragedy, focusing largely on the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut last December. Troy and Sara Groves asked if I'd bring a piece of writing to share that night. I was honored to do so. I took a post that I published shortly after the horror visited upon Newtown and spent the last few weeks fashioning it into a more narrative and artful piece of nonfiction. My words joined with dance, drama, and music as we all grappled with reality of pain and the brokenness of our world.

The Connecticut shooting affected me as a human being who cares about the most defenseless among us as well as an educator who sees these kind of stories becoming tragically more commonplace. My hope is that the horror of this event will stay among us long enough for redemptive change to occur, and I believe thoughtful art, as evidenced last evening, is part of the change.

This creative nonfiction piece contains elements of the original post, but it is changed enough that I decided to publish it here. Thanks for reading.


This morning I sip coffee, climb the ladder of emails, sort papers in my college office while gathering thoughts and photos for the last day of Advanced Writer’s Workshop, something short, pithy, something for our theme of the writing life, wanting to give away pieces of a vision. It is December. We are all itchy for Christmas break. And as I plan a hopeful last word, school children in Connecticut are murdered in their classrooms, the story arriving in chaotic pieces, images of women clutched and crying, SWAT teams jackets draped around huddled children with eyes like dark waters.

The news becomes my comfortless curriculum until afternoon when I cross the campus to class, backpacks brushing my elbow, all of us bundled against the early winter snow and cold, gray breath pushing away from faces, these young people not far removed from their own childhoods, somebody’s son, daughter, faces distinct and precious as the ones before me now in our windowless classroom, bland fluorescent light stretched over us.

My students gather in groups around words they’ve crafted for weeks, a last exchange before their portfolios, seeking careful strings of sentences that witness the face of beauty in story, thought, image. I wander among them, listening, a dozen of us in this little room, and wonder at the efficacy of art, how it can seem too small an offering, thin and defenseless against the unfolding fact of tragedy.

As we collect for the closure I planned, I talk about Vedran Smailovic, a musician in Sarajevo during a time of civil war, who, after starving people were shelled in a bread line near his apartment, took up his cello. He exchanged safety for song, dodging snipers as he played in bombed-out buildings, memorial sites, and cemeteries, beauty his answer to brutality. I offer photos of him dressed in his performance tux, raising his graceful lament in places of ruin. The last, a black and white of the cellist sitting in a graveyard, hand over his eyes, blinded by grief, embodies our artistic vocation, I say, how we must bring our unguarded self, our most lucent art, to desolate places and participate in their agonies.

I lay his story beside the shooting, the calculated clamor of classrooms, hallways, and we feel it, the unbearable stillness of children. What can we lift against the terrible maw of war or madness? The cellist’s story reminds us how much beauty matters, that the words we create can remember the beauty of God in places lost to the amnesia of evil and despair. Our banner is the beauty we seek, a tender thoughtfulness, humanness, and vulnerability that inhabits the best of our work.

What are they thinking as I say these things? Some seem near tears, others quietly zip their backpacks. And me, I’ve spent all these years at sea in the holiness of language, seeking meaning, coherence, a syntax stunning enough for this bright and blemished world. But what if, in the end, the only person beauty changes is me, would that be enough? One person who is a little kinder, a little gentler, who more clearly sees the image of God emblazoned upon the souls surrounding her? And what if there’s more? What if the heart tendered and schooled by beauty finds its way into words, paint, or sound, and maybe a few others understand that something luminous and transcendent is happening on the page, the canvas, the notes, that something irresistibly good and true breathes just behind the veil of the mundane? Would that help? It seems so small, I know, but the way of beauty, along with God’s kingdom, is always faith in the slow way of the mustard seed, barely noticed, but which one day will come to define the whole garden.

In the wake of slaughter, we need conversations about guns and mental illness, but those alone are insufficient. Dorothy Day said we need to create a society where it’s easier to be good. This vision requires love, and love is the foundation of beauty, where we might more fully embrace goodness and truth, realities that find their home in the heart of God.

It is right to be with my students today, a blessing to talk together as we gather coats and bags, and calmly exit our classroom, whole and without fear. I believe there was beauty in their earnest thoughts about writing, glimpses in the poems and stories they coax together. They are just beginning the search for love and meaning in a broken world, to know themselves as broken, to learn that amid the brutal chaos, we are capable of beauty and of knowing the God who is the Beautiful, to understand that we must not fail to open our words, ourselves, to the greater story, the greater goodness, that permeates, changes, and one day completely overwhelms even the darkest of places.

Not by Bread Alone: Christian College Students, Art, and the Church

In my line of work as a creative writing professor at an Evangelical college, I get an up-close look at the handiwork of the conservative church. My English students are wonderful young people, possessing curiosity and a fervor in their faith. However, when it comes to recognizing artistic excellence or how the arts strengthen and enhance their faith, there is often disconnection or perhaps a tabula rasa of sorts.

My beginning genre classes are not simply for teaching tools and techniques to usher them toward constructing good writing. I first have to deconstruct what the students have embraced as admirable writing. Vague, smarmy poems about love or friendship or Jesus. Dull, emotionally shallow stories, sometimes presented as thinly veiled gospel tracts, where nothing very bad happens, with family-friendly language and an ending wrapped up like Christmas. Of course, on the other side, there is the occasional drug-dealer-fueled gun battle at midnight on Christmas Eve in a Perkins Restaurant—written by middle-class kids reared in the suburbs. Their view of art tends to cater to the bread of less lofty human appetites. If the students have cut their teeth on “art” made within Christian culture, the deconstruction task is usually greater, as this culture has the potential to immerse its adherents in a deep and infantilizing level of sentimentality.

This is both the frustration and the wonder of my work.

Amid the talks on technique, I’m privileged to unfold for them the great story of the God of beauty, how artistic enjoyment and vocation is affirmed at the start of creation, how beauty, truth, and goodness create the triune qualities of God present in all God creates. Always I witness a portion of the class eating up these ideas like cake, and I suddenly have the best job in the world.

The arts are not optional for the Church to be the Church. They are not here to doily-up our gray little lives. They are not some peripheral nonsense relegated to bits of our leisure time, if that.

Dana Gioia, whose poem I featured in my last post, has some pointed and eloquent words about the Church and the arts in the current issue of Image. Three questions and answers were particularly powerful, so I’m sharing them. Gioia is talking about the Catholic Church specifically, as that is his tradition, but certainly his thoughts can be broadened to the church as a whole (and the Evangelical Church, which has no significant history with beauty and creativity, is likely in a worse place as far as the arts are concerned).

 
Image: What has been the effect of this divorce between the church and the arts?

DG: The schism has hurt both faith and the arts. The loss of a transcendent religious vision, a refined and vigorous sense of the sacred, and the ancient and powerful tradition of symbolism and allusion have impoverished the language of the arts. We see the result of this immense loss in the cynical irony, the low-cost nihilism, the sentimental spiritual pretentions, and the shallow novelty of so much contemporary art.

Please understand, I am not asking that all art be religious. That would be a disaster. What I am suggesting is something more subtle and complex—namely, that once you remove the religious as one of the possible modes of art, once you separate art from the long established traditions and disciplines of spirituality, you don’t remove the hungers of either artists or audiences, but you satisfy them more crudely with the vague, the pretentious, and the sentimental.

Image: What is the impact on the church?

DG: The loss of a vital aesthetic sensibility in the church has not only impoverished worship. It has also weakened the church’s identity in modern society and limited the ways in which it speaks to the world. The graceless architecture of most new churches, the banal and formulaic paintings and sculpture, the mediocre music so indifferently performed, and the tone-deaf language of religious services reveal a Catholic Church that has not only cut itself off from culture, but also lost touch with its own great traditions of fostering beauty and creativity. You see this problem in many ways but perhaps most dramatically in the flight of artists and intellectuals from the church.

Image: Why has this happened? Does the Catholic Church view art as an unnecessary luxury? There has been such a rich tradition of sacred art.

DG: There are many reasons. The church is rightly concerned with issues of poverty, health, education, and social justice. In the US, Catholicism has always been the religion of the poor, especially poor immigrants. These are communities with huge material needs. But, to quote a relevant old phrase, “Man does not live by bread alone.” Even the poorest people—perhaps especially the poor—need beauty and the transcendent. Beauty is not a luxury. It is humanity’s natural response to the splendor and mystery of creation. To assume that some group doesn’t need beauty is to deny their humanity.

I think about Gioia's words, and I remember my students. In their earnestness, some try so hard to do the spiritual life "right," to become good girl and boy scouts, their theological ducks all in a row, as if living only by bread in these strictly human measures were sufficient. But that's not the story we're invited into, and maybe my teaching deconstructs more than notions about bad writing. There's something else being offered in the luminous moments of those discussions: beauty, transcendence, splendor, the spiritual riches of the imagination, the face of God in the world. 

Gioia reminds me that the arts vivify us spiritually and humanly, as well as opening a vital voice to a broken world. While his thoughts could be seen as discouraging—there’s so far to go—I find the way he uplifts the value of beauty and the arts invigorating to me as a writer and as one who desires to shepherd young people into a fuller experience of their faith. As the church, perhaps we've too often tried to live by bread alone when sweet mystery has been closer than our next breath all along.

Through Thickets of Darkness: Solstice Thoughts

Yesterday was the winter solstice, December 21, the shortest day of the year, the day the dark most deeply reigns. Perhaps it’s fitting that the solstice comes so close to Christmas. These days, I refuse the radio songs that push upon me an idealistic image of holiday to which reality could never hope to aspire (“it will be the perfect ending of a perfect day” and all that). The truth is, many of us find ourselves in the slow trudge through thickets of darkness at this time of year. I’m burdened by the end of a long semester and the work its closing piles on my kitchen table, along with wonderings about shifts in my vocation, the dire illness of a loved one, pondering and processing these months that have been among the most difficult of my adult life.

Into my weariness came this poem by Dana Gioia, reminding me to embrace and bear with my one small life, whatever the circumstance. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and one of the nuances of the word poor—ptochos in the Greek—is “one who is reduced to a beggarly dependence, one who is broken.” There’s only one kingdom I know of where brokenness is blessing, bringing me to the end of myself, receptive to a bigger story, and I'm grateful to be a part of it.

 

Here's is Gioia's poem:

Prayer at Winter Solstice

Dana Gioia

Blessed is the road that keeps us homeless.

Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way.

Blessed are the hunger and thirst, loneliness and all forms of desire.

Blessed is the labor that exhausts us without end.

Blessed are the night and the darkness that blinds us.

Blessed is the cold that teaches us to feel.

Blessed are the cat, the child, the cricket, and the crow.

Blessed is the hawk devouring the hare.

Blessed are the saint and the sinner who redeem each other.

Blessed are the dead calm in their perfection.

Blessed is the pain that humbles us.

Blessed is the distance that bars our joy.

Blessed is this shortest day that makes us long for light.

Blessed is the love that in losing we discover.

In an interview in the current issue of Image, Gioia comments on the poem, saying: “It is not a poem for everyone. It offers a set of beatitudes that praise the suffering and renunciation necessary to make us spiritually alert. It celebrates the transformative and redemptive nature of suffering—one of the central spiritual truths of Christianity as well as one easily forgotten in our materialist consumer culture. It is also a poem about facing the hard realities of our existence. Our feel-good society tries to deny suffering—unless it can sell you a pill or product to banish it.”

So I’m going into this Christmas season with darkness and light in each hand, both necessary and paradoxical, both pathways to greater intimacy with the Christ that this day celebrates and remembers, a man of sorrows who embodies humanity’s greatest possibility of joy.

Words for the Last Class: Embracing the Slow Way of Beauty

Last Friday was the final instruction day of the semester, and my Advanced Writer’s Workshop students would be critiquing each others’ work the majority of the time, trying to ready their portfolios. Still, shortly before going to bed, I decided I should plot a meaningful closure for the class, something short, pithy. Wandering about my home office in my pajamas, I gathered some words by Joan Chittister and created a quick PowerPoint of a few photographs. Our theme for the class was the writing life and the writer’s vocation. We spent time during the term discussing the illusion and subjectivity of success, self-awareness and vulnerability, and the role of the writer in restoration of all things in Christ. I wanted to give the students pieces of a vision, a sense of what an artistic calling entails. I wanted to plan a hopeful last word.

The next morning found my computer streaming live coverage of the horrific events in Connecticut--children cut down in school--while I attempted to work in my school office, the story emerging detail by terrible detail. As I pondered my class closure, I instinctively knew we would talk about the shootings.

I told my students the story of Vedran Smailovic (I posted about him here), an accomplished musician in Sarajevo who, during a time of civil war, took up his cello and dodged snipers as he played in bombed-out buildings, cemeteries, and memorial sites, offering beauty as his answer to brutality. I showed my students photos of Smailovic, dressed in his performance tuxedo, raising his graceful lament in places of grief and brokenness. Smailovic’s story reminds us how much beauty matters, I told them, that the words we create can remember the beauty of God in places lost to the amnesia of evil and despair. What can we raise against such overwhelming circumstance in times of war or in the unthinkable madness unfolding at an elementary school? As creatives, what we have is the banner of beauty, a tender thoughtfulness, humanness, and vulnerability that the best of our work exhibits. I shared these words by Catholic nun and activist Joan Chittister:

Beauty is the most provocative promise we have of the Beautiful. It lures us and calls us and leads us on. Souls thirst for beauty and thrive on it and by it nourish hope….We could take down the billboards that turn the landscape into a junkyard of old ideas….Or, we could simply own one soul-shattering piece of art ourselves, put it up in a solitary place over and against the commonplace which normally surrounds us. We could let it seep into the centre of the self until we find that we can never be satisfied again, anesthetized again, by the visual platitudes of the world in which we live.

What we do not nourish within ourselves cannot exist in the world around us because we are its microcosm….We must seek beauty, study beauty, surround ourselves with beauty. To revivify the soul of the world, we ourselves must become beauty. Where we are must be more beautiful because we have been there than it was before our coming.

To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give it away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.

 

Even if the only person beauty changes is me, perhaps that would be enough: one person who is a little kinder, a little gentler, who sees a little better the image of God engraved upon the souls surrounding her. But what if the heart tendered and schooled by beauty finds its way into words, paint, or sound, and maybe a few others understand something luminous and transcendent and irresistibly good is happening just behind the veil of the common? Would that help? It seems so small, I know, but the way of beauty, along with God’s kingdom itself, is always the slow way of the mustard seed, barely noticed most days, but which one day comes to define the whole garden.

Of course, there are sobering conversations about guns and mental illness that need to happen in the wake of the slaughter in Connecticut, but those alone are insufficient. We need, as Dorothy Day once noted, to create a society where it’s easier to be good. That requires love, and the nature of beauty is desire, a magnetic and focused attraction—an expression of love that helps us to better embrace goodness and truth, realities that find their home in the heart of God.

It was good to be with my students that last day, a blessing to talk together, to calmly exit that room without fear. And I’d like to think there was beauty in their earnest discussions of each other’s writing, glimpses in the words they work so hard to string together. They are just beginning the search for love and meaning in a broken world, to understand themselves as broken, to learn that amid all that we are capable of beauty and of knowing the God who is the Beautiful. I hope our being together helped them in that journey a little, opening them to a greater story, a greater goodness, that permeates, slowly changes, and one day completely overwhelms even the darkest of places.

Remembering Rain and July

It is October. We wake to dusky mornings, light that arrives late and drains from the sky too soon. A dry, ambiguous chill follows us through our tasks queued up in linear time. As I move deeper into the heart of autumn, journeying through a time of change and loss, I want to remember warmth and light and aliveness. I want to remember my vocation and why it matters. So I'm sharing a piece of writing (a kind of prose poem or perhaps just short, poetic prose) I'm working on as part of the collection of essays that I hope to one day compile into a book. It's a piece in progress that I began right after the event it describes, inspired by a William Stafford poem I had just read for the first time, a poem that ignited in me a sense of awe that needed words to complete itself. A few of its lines comprise the epigraph. It's entitled "Summer Morning with Stafford and Rain."

…This interval you spent/reading or hearing this, keep it for life--/What can anyone give you greater than now,/starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

William Stafford
From "You Reading This, Be Ready"

 

The storm begins as meditation, the sizzle of tires on shining streets, and rain slivers the air, early shadow absorbed into a gray, untethered  world, your body softly received on the old sofa.  Low thunder aches from the sky, filling the dusky courtyard, and you look up from a book, thinking, This is July, Linford Detweiler’s piano solos unwinding a slow string of notes touching everything in the room as the rain syncopates through the tree by the screen door as if it were a piano—rough, green—and each pliable leaf a key.  You return to a Stafford poem written two days before his death: Starting here, what do you want to remember?  And you think morning, storm, the words filtering into skin and muscle—these are yours.  But you wonder—two days—would you hide yourself away if you knew that?  How much difference do all these small words make?  Rain unravels the sky, pounds a delicious deluge until the day gathers into one solid thing, and when you put down the book, rise to stand on the threshold of the sliding glass door, you find your place in the poem’s final question, eyes closing, the feel of the torrent’s mist finding your face like fractions of light, like glass almost, cool aliveness everywhere, rivering asphalt, gutters turned hydrants, all motion fluid, full, one encompassing sound the world makes in a hundred different ways: water sifting trees, roof, grass, concrete, limbs bowed heavy, leaves and twigs wrecked on the sidewalk, a landscape shattered, as you are, into a thousand mirrors.  This is how the sky comes to us, lending us its largeness, its endlessness, and you merge with something greater, the rain that touches everything touching you.  You must live with words the way you live the moment of storm, allow every sound to find you, to remember your face, let happen to you a music that glistens with the mad rush of meaning, hope, and attention.  You understand this is what you must carry, the text of these moments, these turnings, when the world awakens as an egress to the holy.  Listen, each day death encircles our frailties.  Survival means to make sing the story you’re given—the one you would have otherwise missed, the little one unfolding in these few sentences—here, now. 

Of Grit, Goodness, and the Third Way: September Musings

It's been a while since I've posted, and I know some people have been watching for new posts. Between the start of school and some life difficulties, the blog has taken a back seat. Connecting with others in this space matters to me, so thanks for reading. I hope to be more regular going forward.

The other day was overcast, cool, the air a thin veil of rain much of the day, the day before sunny and over ninety degrees. The walk across the campus green to Riley Hall for my classes feels different every time so far. It’s the push-pull of early fall after a summer of extremes, talking over the rasp of air conditioners in ancient classrooms or flinging open the windows to a snappy brace of air. The grass remains lush while the leaves think about edging into color. I love the symmetry of the campus green: myriad of plants, stone fountain, classic buildings encircling it all. It’s breathing a different kind of air again, the old signal—school’s back in session, another year, my nineteenth.

This half-term, I’m teaching my biennial Christianity and Writing class, geeking out three times a week with a tribe that seems to revel in discussions about writing, art, and faith almost as much as I do. I’ve assigned my fab fifteen the likes of Tom Andrews, Christian Wiman, Ron Hansen, Andy Crouch with many more authors and artists to come. The crew turns in their first faith-influenced writing projects tomorrow. Much of our discussion has come back to culture, and they read Crouch’s thoughts on that subject:

Culture is the stuff we make of the world. And it is the sense we make of the world. Culture is material, and culture is meaningful. And the two go together. The way we make sense is by making stuff. The way we find our way to meaning is to make something new. Culture is meaning-making.

I love Crouch’s linking of culture to our search for meaning and the creation of art. Culture, he declares, is a gift.

Crouch’s thoughts remind me of a quote from David Gruesel’s article (noted in my last post) where he traces the church’s growing indifference with the world of art since the late nineteenth century. He laments the “divorce” between the arts and the church, saying, “What the church failed to realize at the time was the degree to which art defines spirituality in human culture.” So culture becomes that which traffics in meaning, significance, beauty, spirituality, self-definition—core things that make us who we are as human beings. And the Church has abandoned the prominent role it held in culture and the arts for its first 1900 years.

Conservative faith communities generally—and Evangelicals specifically—have a peculiar relationship with culture. Culture sometimes has become synonymous with the world or that which is worldly—all the ungodly things we’re instructed to not be “of.” While it possesses much goodness and beauty, culture can easily lose its head, inviting people clad in what amounts to a dinner napkin to prance across our television screens or rasp vulgarities through our car radios.

For some, the evils of culture lead to complete disengagement and further entrench an “us versus them” mentality. The unfortunate result is that we’ve created our own arts and culture silo—self-contained, uncontaminated. Quality and content issues give our novels, music, movies, etc. little appeal outside of conservative Christianity, and truthfully, we don’t need or expect them to penetrate further than the walls of the silo. We form culture under the banner of “Family-Friendly,” using artistic genres to, as Flannery O’Connor put it, “tidy up reality” and fortify a sentimental and oversimplified vision of the world.

Because my students almost exclusively come from Evangelical backgrounds, we’re talking about culture these days, about silos, and seeking a third way when confronted with the excesses of culture and of the conservatives’ abdication of the same. And I believe they desire that third way where they inhabit all of culture, holding the tensions of grit and goodness, seeking engagement beyond their tribe. They want a bigger world where they can offer their creativity to fashion something more true and right and beautiful than what is already there. I appreciate the Millennials' belief that they really can change the world. May I never be the one to quash that notion.

So I keep crossing the campus green every day in sun and rain, cold and heat, as we all walk into another autumn. The columned buildings and grass and sidewalks are a part of this particular Midwestern college culture. What I notice most about it today is the people: professors with briefcases briskly walking, students tossing Frisbees or loitering in front of the Community Commons, faces open to a book or the sun or a friend. And I think how we’re all trying to figure things out—God, love, other people, who we are, and how the world works. Culture is ultimately people on a quest for what it means to be human, to be alive. Sure, sometimes we get lost, get it wrong, but in the end, culture is a gift, and it’s beautiful.

Wendell Berry wisely wrote: “There are no unsacred places;/there are only sacred places/and desecrated places.” Here’s to a new season where we use our creativity to find meaning and beauty with and for everyone, weaving our best energies together to say a holy “yes” to the sacred places and mend as best we can that which is marred and amiss.