T-minus 3: Book: Joshua Banner -- Nurturing Artists in your Local Church

My friend Joshua Banner lives in Holland, Michigan. As you can imagine, the town of Holland, with its modest nod to all things Dutch, is a cold place. It's especially chilly in winter. Josh finds himself there because he is the Minister of Music and Art at Hope College. To say that he is a "Minister" at this liberal arts college (alma mater, to wit, of Sufjan Stevens) is another way of saying that he is a genius with students. His weekly responsibility involves, among other things, leading chapel services for two thousand kids at a time. I have to say I am impressed. Anybody who can lead four worship services a week--week after week--is überstark.

I met Josh through his music. It's beautiful, by the way. We liked it so much at Hope Chapel that we invited him to be our co-guest artist, along with Charlie Peacock, at our 2003 arts festival in Austin. With our shared interest in art, church, theology, beards and cooking, Josh and I immediately hit it off. Susanna (née) Childress, I have to admit, hit it off better. She earned her PhD in poetry and then married the boy. But I've always appreciated Josh's heart. I've known him to be a man, as the Psalmist puts it, "tamim" of heart: a man of integrity.

A number of years ago, Josh was the arts pastor at a church in Oklahoma City. Before that he studied literature and philosophy at Wheaton College. Before that he worked with his father and grandfather in the cornfields of central Illinois. That makes him supremely qualified, in my mind, to write a chapter on the similarities between farming and pastoring. "A good farmer," he writes in his opening statement, "loves the land." In the same way, a pastor of artists must first and foremost learn how to love, nurture, attend to and exercise a great deal of humble patience in the care of artists. I love Josh's chapter in our book, For the Beauty of the Church. It is so wonderfully written. It is wise. It is hopeful. And--perhaps best of all in a book full of ideas--it is supremely practical.

I offer you an excerpt as a foretaste of what is to come.

The Importance of Intentionally Pursuing People

As a pastor, I understand that the initiative to bridge the distance is my responsibility. Artists can be shy and self-effacing, or brusque and unresponsive. More significantly, many have not imagined what a relationship with a church might mean. The arts and the church seemingly exist in different conceptual worlds. In order to break into the world of an artist, all I need is sincere curiosity and interest in sharing in the artist’s world.

Rachel was something of a loner. She was acutely independent with a strong personality. I remember watching her stomp to the beat of the worship music in her hiking boots, dreadlocks flying. She enjoyed participating in our worship services, but came only when she felt like it. I met her after leading a Bible study at an apartment near the University of Oklahoma. Something I’d said betrayed my interest in the arts, so she approached me afterwards to say hello. Our first conversation began something like this:

What is your medium?

Printmaking? Oh yeah? What kind?

How long have you been making prints?

What subjects interest you?

Which artists are your influences?

What inspires you?

And the most important question: When do I get to see your work?

I invited myself into her studio space. We met with some of her friends for lunch and then she took me to the art building. She pulled her work out of a locker and let me spend an hour looking over them. Fascinated by her sense of color, I asked to borrow a few pieces. The next time I saw her, she called me her new best friend. In time Rachel became one of my most regularly featured artists.

If an artist doesn’t have a concert scheduled soon or a gallery opening, I invite myself into their studio space. Songwriters often have a couple recorded songs they will give me on a disc. Sometimes I invite them to sit down with a guitar to show me a new song in person. With visual artists, I especially like to visit their creative space and see works in progress. Writers email me drafts of this and that. We don’t need to be experts in each artist’s medium. We simply need to be curious and demonstrate that we believe what artists are doing is important—to call their creative risks “good” just as the Creator blessed his own handiwork in the first seven days—and to bless that work by giving it our attention and sharing in it. If Christians should excel at anything, it is sharing with each other deeply.

Pastoring, I suggest, should be understood as synonymous with nurturing. All Christians are called to nurture and care for others. Yet those in leadership, whether pastors or lay leaders, should be distinguished largely because they are capable of extending care to others. A nurturer possesses the initiative necessary to penetrate the outer shell, the crusted topsoil, of a person’s life. A nurturer is able to till the soil. A nurturer moves past layers of presumption and self-reliance in order to earn a person’s trust so that she will receive love. Each of us will have particular types of artists that we are drawn to and who are drawn to us. The question is: How do we earn their trust?

Testimony: One Person's Experience of Last Year's Retreat for Ministers to Artists

I have a report I want to write on my time at Calvin College's worship symposium. It will have to wait, though, till later in the week. I need to catch up on schoolwork. In the meantime I want to post a testimony by Terri Fisher. Terri is a good friend who attended last year's "Ministers to Artists" retreat. I asked her to write up her reflections, and this is her lovingly rendered essay. I'm very grateful to her. I do hope this will help any folks who are still trying to decide whether to come to the retreat--especially those who doubt whether they properly fit the "pastor" category.

We're shy of one month away. March 4 is just around the corner. There is still space to sign up, however, but not that much, so if in doubt, do come because the very worst that could happen to you is that you'd experience a very restful weekend in a refreshing setting of physical beauty.

TERRI FISHER'S TESTIMONY

I love an open freeway with the scenery of southwest Texas flying past, as I drive into the setting sun. In October of 2008 I was headed west on I-10. My destination was the tranquil place known as Laity Lodge, just a little past Kerrville, Texas. Alone in the car I asked myself what in the world I was doing! I barely knew David Taylor and I felt completely unqualified to be attending a retreat for artists. How would I explain my existence to anyone who might ask? I was, after all, just a middle-aged woman praying for direction after my busy nest of motherhood had emptied. For an hour and a half, the scenery flew by and I concentrated on praying away my traveling companions: Fear and Doubt.

Arriving at the Laity Lodge entrance, I tentatively guided my car down the steep canyon road, around sharp bends, and finally to a dead end at the river bed. Really? I knew the directions said to turn left onto the riverbed... but really? As I signaled a left hand turn (to alert the fish of my entrance into their world, I guess) it felt like a baptism. The riverbed, out of sight but rock solid, was waiting. I rolled the windows down and listened to the flowing water lap and splash around the tires. For a half a mile, my anxiety was being carried away in the opposite direction my car was headed. That was only a foretaste.

Grace best describes my first retreat at Laity Lodge. Rather than feeling like I didn’t belong, the artists welcomed me. Rather than feeling an outsider, I felt embraced. When someone would ask me what I did, I replied tentatively that I prayed for artists. Their gratitude and excitement gave me the courage to speak those words with more and more confidence in the coming months. My life has been enriched, expanded, and transformed at both the retreats I’ve attended at Laity Lodge. (And it goes way beyond the delicious food they serve you everyday, the welcoming staff, the comfortable accommodations, and the absolute serenity of the place!)

In April 2009 I once more crossed the threshold of the Frio riverbed (again, signaling the fish before my turn) to join a wonderful group of people who had accepted the call to shepherd artists. Our bodies were nourished, our hearts encouraged, and our souls enriched through worship, discussion, prayer, and opportunity to be still before the Lord. Our pastoral tool boxes were filled with excellent teaching given by Mako Fujimura and David Taylor—both artists, both shepherds. I can’t speak for every single person, but I left the serene setting of Laity Lodge better equipped for my calling to shepherd artists. And it’s a good thing, because the Lord has blessed my heart’s desire to serve artists in lay ministry. I could not have done it without the teaching and encouragement I’ve received from the ministry of Laity Lodge.

In March there will be another retreat specifically targeting shepherds of artists. If you find yourself with a heart longing to pray for the artists in your life, but like me, feel hesitant about what your role might be, banish the companions of Fear and Doubt and join me in attending the upcoming retreat, March 4th-7th. The teaching will be nourishing to your soul and the fellowship unforgettable.

Dt at Calvin and Biola + Improv Everywhere + Conan

Tomorrow I fly up to Grand Rapids. I'll be attending my first Calvin Institute of Christian Worship symposium. I'm quite excited to be going. From a glimpse at the program it looks to be a very stimulating and, I imagine, encouraging time. If you're in the area, stop by and say hello. I'll be there from the 27th through the 31st. My workshop, on both Friday and Saturday, is titled "In Search of the Successful Artist: Pastors & Artists on a Common Quest."

The same goes for folks in the LA area on March 10. I'll be speaking in chapel at Biola University. They asked me to speak on beauty. My talk will happen around the same time as their arts symposium, so it should be a pretty heady week there. Chapel starts at 9:30 and I believe takes place in their Chase Gymnasium. I'll be speaking with the art students the night before, which will be great fun.

And speaking of fun, I gotta say, I love these guys, Improv Everywhere. I think they're completely courageous, insane, free, fun, inventive, subversive, sneaky and without a trace of cynicism. And speaking of cynicism--did you catch Conan O'Brian's last words? I was completely astounded. My admiration for the man shot up to a 10 out of ten. Here's a choice bit (full text of program here):

"To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I'll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism -- it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."

So refreshing to hear on primetime television.

But back to our improv group. Their fearless director went to UNC down the road, and he looks as sweet as a well-mannered southern boy. I didn't think of it first, of course, but I'd join one of their "carnivale" jests in a heartbeat. Here's one of my favorite:

T-minus 4: Book: Barbara Nicolosi -- Artists & Beauty

In this fourth apéritif of our book, For the Beauty of the Church, I am including an excerpt from the divine Barbara Nicolosi Harrington. With the devastation in Haiti fresh in our minds, as artists we will wonder what our role is. Certainly our chief role as Christians is to pray. We pray to God for wisdom and compassion: wisdom to discern our appropriate response and compassion to keep our hearts from growing numb to the inundation of information. But then what?

I think Barbara shows us a way forward. In the face of our world's brokenness, distorted by both material and moral ugliness, the artist announces good news. That news is that there is a God in heaven who hears our cries. That news is that beauty, not ugliness, will have the last word.

In Barbara's excerpt below I am including two separate sections from her chapter. In the first section she describes one specific aspect of beauty. In the second section she describes one distortion or misapplication of beauty.

If you're interested in the whole chapter, which alone is worth the price of admission for her delectable sense of humor, you can pre-order the book here.

[And today is my wedding anniversary. I am thrilled to be married to the lovely Phaedra Jean Taylor. She truly is my best friend.]


THE ARTIST & THE TERRAIN OF BEAUTY

THE NATURE OF BEAUTY
As a precursor to answering this question, I want to lay out a few ideas about the nature of the beautiful, because beauty is the terrain of real artists, and one way to recognize them is if they dwell in this terrain….

Thomas Aquinas gave a definition of the beautiful that is still helpful and relevant seven centuries later. The beautiful, he said, is “wholeness, harmony, and radiance,” and these define the terrain of the artist.

WHOLENESS
Wholeness means nothing is missing. All parts are present, suggesting completeness. No one looks at the Pietà and says, “You know, Mary needs just a little more fringe around her veil. Oh well.” Or, people don’t listen to Mozart’s Ave Verum and say, “Needs another high G in there. Oh well.” There’s something about these works that suggest completeness. Wholeness also means there is nothing extra, nothing gratuitous that isn’t an essential part of the whole. Isn’t that one of the primary complaints about so many movies? “Gratuitous sex and violence.” That is, too often there is no context for these things in a project, so it feels to the audience like they were just slapped in there to try and distract from some flaw in the storytelling. A beautiful work has nothing gratuitous.

And what do we get from wholeness? We are all creatures who have been cut off from our source. There is always a partial emptiness, a longing that can only be filled by divine love. As St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” We yearn to cleave to the One, and when we experience completeness, we have a sense of being at home and at rest. So the beautiful gives us a sense of peace….

WHAT THE TERRAIN OF THE BEAUTIFUL IS NOT

POLITICAL
The first thing we’ve done to wreck art is make it serve the political instead of the beautiful. I don’t necessarily meaning left or right, but statement-making, which is an utter perversion of the concept of radiance. The goal of statement-making is to manipulate, to coerce, to get people to vote a certain way, to propagandize, to merely change behavior.

I can’t think of a better example of this than in the awful statue of Mary that stands over the outside door of the $200 million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. It’s just dreadful. The statue is of completely uncertain gender, with a female torso, but harshly cropped hair and distinctly masculine arms and hands. In fact, my students call her, “Man-hands Mary.” But it’s worse than just androgyny. The image has black lips, Asian eyes, a Latino face, and other scattered Anglo features. When I first went on a tour of the new Cathedral, our guide said, “This statue was conceived so that people of all races would see themselves in it and feel welcome in this place.” And I said, “But it’s kind of ugly. I don’t know about you, but if you saw that kind of freak inviting you into its house. . . .” Well, the tour guide sniffed at me, waved her hand, and said, “The church is not about that anymore.”

It begs the question of whether Japanese people really do look at the Pietà in Rome and shrug, “Well, that’s okay for the white people.” But my point is that the goal of the statue was not to make something that would deliver the beautiful. The goal of the statue was to communicate a political message. The fact that it is ugly and makes my students mock it indicates that it has been a failure as a political vehicle too. In politics, you lose wholeness because the political only tells its own side of the story. As a result, people lose a feeling of rest.

Wolterstorff, Validation, the Ides of March 4

1. The first of Duke Divinity School's Distinguished Lectures in Theology and The Arts will be given by renowned scholar Nicholas Wolterstorff and will take place at Duke Divinity School this Thursday, January 21st at 5:30pm. The title of his lecture is:

"Through Beauty and the Aesthetic to Art in Life."

Professor Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. DITA (which stands for: Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts) is directed by Jeremy Begbie. To learn more about Dr. Wolterstorff's lecture as well as upcoming lectures and Begbie's larger vision for theology and the arts at Duke, visit the home site of DITA.

By the way, I copied the above from the New Creations blog, managed largely by Leif Bergerud. He is doing an outstanding job collecting material in the art and theology field. He's also compiled a rockstar-worthy End-of-2009 Best Of lists (but click down to Dec. 31 to see the sheaves of lists).

2. Validation. This is a short film that my friend Martha Rasco sent me. It's brilliant.




3. The Ides of March 4: Or, Why We All Want Spring Break Real Estate

It has been brought to my attention at least 30 times. The Laity Lodge retreat lands smack dab in the middle of the IAM Encounter and the Biola Arts Symposium and a host of other events worthy of our attendance. Let me repeat myself. I am genuinely sorry for the overlap. Our respective events were planned long in advance of each other. We discovered the unfortunate timing only after it was too late to do something about it. I think the world of IAM, and I hope their event succeeds immensely. I also trust that God will guide people wherever they need to be this year. But for what it's worth, I wish folks didn't have to choose.

We've communicated with Mako to offer well-wishing for this year's Encounter. I'm friends with the people behind the Biola conference and their schedule looks tremendous. If you're unsure how to decide, decide geographically: East Coasters go to IAM, West Coasters go to Biola, and anybody in the middle come on down to Tejas.

Otherwise there's always next year.

Mentoring of Artists: New Focus for the Retreat

I was walking towards the gym at Duke in early December. Night had fallen over the campus. It was cold enough to merit a light jacket and, not unusually, I was talking out loud to myself. When I do, I sometimes get stuck on the same phrase. I'll repeat it out loud over and over. This time it was a question: What is it that I've heard artists say the most to me? In the twelve years that I pastored, officially and unofficially, at Hope Chapel, there was one thing I'd heard artists say repeatedly.

They wanted to be mentored.

It didn't matter whether they were 22 and recently graduated from art school or 62 and professionals. They all wanted a mentor. Some wanted an art mentor. Others wanted a spiritual mentor. Still others, masters at their craft, even after longs years of practice knew they had something to learn from their cousins in their craft. Maybe it was a new calligraphic hand. Maybe it was theater actors wanting to learn how to act for film. Painters wanted to learn how to make prints, while poets sought help writing novels and classically trained ballet dancers requested assistance making the transition into modern.

Deep down in our souls we long for a mentor. We yearn for someone who has traveled further down the path that we seek out. Against common perceptions, we are never too old to want or need a mentor.

As I remained outside the gym, pacing back and forth on top of a half wall, I talked to Steven, the Laity Lodge director, on the phone. I told him I wanted to change the focus of our retreat for ministers to artists. I told him I wanted us to swap stories and models for mentoring.

Some of us would be able to share successful stories of being mentored. Others could share dismal stories or stories of holding on to the ache of wanting a mentor but never finding one. Whatever our context, church or school or professional society or coffee shop, all of us are in relationship with people. All of us have something to share.

Steven agreed to the new focus. That night I wrote Luci Shaw and asked if she'd be game. She said yes. I asked her if she would share her artist's biography. So many of us become intimated when we see an artist as a "final product." We think, "I could never become like them." But everybody has a beginning. Everybody has a village of helpers and a series of circumstances, some planned, many unforeseen, that shape us into the person we are today. Rarely, however, do we get to see an artist's winding thrills of unexpected victory and sudden loss, or the slow, bitter slog through day after day of doing the same thing, maybe 10,000 times, in order to get it right, maybe to fail, maybe to learn from our failures, maybe to resent our failures and to see nothing good from them.

I told Luci I'd love for her to share how she started out as a child. Who helped her along as a teenager or a young adult? Who mentored her? Whom has she mentored and what has it looked like? How has God mentored her?

So that's what we're now going to do on March 4-7 out at the Laity Lodge. We're going to explore models and stories of mentoring. We'd love for you to join us. It'll be a great opportunity to learn from each other. Luci and I will each give brief talks, but mostly we want to give space for everyone to share as much as possible. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. And as always, please do pass this along to someone you think might profit from coming.

Oh--and I have a few new features on my blog. It was time to get a slight makeover.

T-minus 5: Book: Andy Crouch -- Art & the Gospel

I can't think of a better way to begin a new year than with an excerpt from Andy Crouch's chapter in For the Beauty of the Church. In the first chapter of our book, Andy grounds all our artmaking in the fundamental category of culture making. (And if you haven't read his book Culture Making, you're missing out on a very important book.) He argues that art is a gift, not an achievement. Like the entire gospel, art establishes its purpose not in its utility but in something bigger than itself: grace. And like worship it pulls us into something bigger than ourselves, pulling all our play and all our pain into the beautiful life of God in Christ.

Here is the excerpt which appears toward the end of his chapter.

The Artist's Vocation: On Play and Pain
There are two things that artists dare to do, it seems to me, that you can only sustain if you ultimately believe that life is a gift, not an achievement. First, they play. We use that word specifically of musical artists. But it is really true of all art. It is play. It can be very serious play, it can be play that takes years of practice to master—but it is play all the same. It is not fully adult to play. I watch my children at play and I can’t help thinking of how little they know about the brokenness and danger of the world, how innocent they are of what will be required of them as they come of age and work, suffer, grieve, and die. How can you play in a world like this world? It is almost an offense—unless, in spite of the grave condition of our world, our world is still a place of grace.

And yet the other terribly useless thing that artists do is to enter into pain, and to bring us into contact with pain. In Western art this begins, as it should, with meditations on the crucified Christ. I was in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts a few weeks before the gathering in Austin, and I couldn’t help noticing that people’s pace quickened when they came to the rooms housing the medieval, and especially Spanish, art that dwells in dark tones on the dereliction of Christ. They were moving rapidly along to the Impressionist room, where they were happy to linger among Claude Monet’s bright pastel lilies and cathedrals. But Monet’s work is less glibly beautiful when you know his story. He loved Camille Doncieux—the subject of his first widely recognized painting, The Woman in the Green Dress.

had a child in 1867, they married in 1870, had a second child in 1878, and in 1879 she died of tuberculosis at age thirty-two. In response, Monet created one of his most haunting paintings, Camille on Her Deathbed, in which the young woman, already drawn and pale, seems to be vanishing before our eyes into a whirlwind of nonbeing. Even our beloved Impressionist Monet painted from a place of pain.

Play and pain are two perfectly useless things, and strangely enough, they have to go together. Play can become escapism when we determinedly play on to avoid facing pain. There is a kind of art that is too easy, too willing to let us off the hook, too comforting and too culpably ignorant of what exactly grace costs. At the moment, we find this most often in the bestselling art of the Christian subculture than in the secular art worlds, but it has had its day in even the most secular venues. Pain, meanwhile, can become sadism and masochism when it is unmoored from any hope of grace, so that the artist begins to conceive his job as an endless cynical flagellation of himself and his audience. Difficulty becomes the only test of seriousness, and “decorative” becomes the only remaining swear word.

We who are privileged enough to live in North America live in a world that is forgetting both pain and play. Our popular culture offers us endless diverting amusements that fall flat and well short of real celebration. Our so-called serious culture offers us endlessly difficult dead ends. Who will be the people who can play gracefully, unusefully, in the world? Who will be the people who turn unafraid toward pain? Who will be the people who believe in beauty without being afraid of brokenness? Who will be the people who champion that which is not useful?

Bits & Bobs

1. John Giuliani's art. I recently stumbled on Giuliani's art, which uses both Native American Indian and Mayan peoples as stand-ins for Gospel characters. I find it wonderfully haunting.

2. On Architecture: "The High Cost of Ignoring Beauty" -- A fine article sent to me by my amiga Kate Van Dyke.

"Architecture clearly illustrates the social, environmental, economic, and aesthetic costs of ignoring beauty. We are being torn out of ourselves by the loud gestures of people who want to seize our attention but give nothing in return."

3. Article: Nicholas Wolterstorff on "Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle Kissing, Touching, and Crying" (via my friend Kelly Foster)

Great essay for those philosophically minded, but also great for those who feel unease with the way proprietors of fine art all too easily snub the more popular arts. Click down the till you get to the "Philosophy" section.

"Wolterstorff argues that a proper philosophy of art must account for all the various ways in which art has meaningfully appeared in people's lives throughout cultures and times. Along the way, he offers some characterizations of analytic-style philosophy."

4. Journal on Material Religion.

"Material Religion" is an international, peer-reviewed journal which seeks to explore how religion happens in material culture - images, devotional and liturgical objects, architecture and sacred space, works of arts and mass-produced artifacts. No less important than these material forms are the many different practices that put them to work. Ritual, communication, ceremony, instruction, meditation, propaganda, pilgrimage, display, magic, liturgy and interpretation constitute many of the practices whereby religious material culture constructs the worlds of belief."

5. A church website that might need a little trimming of bells and whistles and light saber sounds.

6. "Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing." True or not, it's pretty darn funny.

7. If you missed it, here is the full text of the Pope's recent address to artists.

8. R. R. Reno's un-official "A 2009 Ranking of Graduate Programs in Theology" published in the First Things blog. Duke Divinity fared well in his estimation and it made me grateful for the privilege of studying there.

9. More of the World's Best Microscope Photography (courtesy of KVD).



10. It's all about the fundamentals. Here's a great article about an Asian-American kid playing pretty good basketball at Harvard. It's a poignant story, as are all stories about first or second-generation ethnic families seeking to integrate into American society. But I love what the father says about his boys and their relationship to basketball. I can't think of one domain of life, let alone the artistic, where this doesn't apply.

"I realized if I brought them from a young age it would be like second nature for them," Gie-Ming said. "If they had the fundamentals, the rest would be easy."

11. Gor-geous installations by the artist Gabriela Nasfeter. But do click onto her website, then click "Installationen," and look at images from her first gallery. Her church "lichtpyramiden" are stunning.


12. And because it doesn't get any better than this...

Dating Montage
by smithy00101

Bonhoeffer on Christmas and a Wild Idea

The text at the end of this entry is an excerpt from a sermon which Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave in 1933. It was the third Sunday in Advent. His passage was Luke 1:46-55.

The artwork above is by Albrecht Altdorfer, titled "Birth of Christ." It was this particular work that prompted Bonhoeffer to write a letter to his parents on the first Sunday of Advent, in 1943. Writing from Tegel Prison in Berlin, he wondered at the artist's compositional decision. He found it curious that Altdorfer, who lived from 1480 to 1538, against all tradition, had chosen to place the Holy Family in the middle of a dilapidated house. Perhaps the artist meant to say, Bonhoeffer mused, that "Christmas can, and should, be celebrated in this way too."

A few observations. One, there is something wistful about the fact that this great 20th-century theologian was writing his mom and dad. How often do we think, "Hey, Bonhoeffer's got a ma and pa"? Yet there they were, playing their parental role to the end. Two, his insights are made all the more poignant because his death lay four months away. And three, with regard to his sermon of 1933, he exposes the profound misunderstanding of the Incarnation which a certain Anglican church in Auckland, New Zealand, prominently displays on its website, and he brings to light the rash and nonsensical, and, I add, ultimately hopeless, thinking of its rector. The classical view of the Incarnation is 'ridiculous'? Yes, it is ridiculous. Preposterous? I hope so. Implausible? Not necessarily, and certainly not on the logic that an outrageous claim cannot be true. Surely it's not that simple.

I say, to my fellow parson, hail to the God who overturns all desires for a manageable god. I say hail to the God of the poor and the rich. I say hail to the God of our worst enemy, no less than ourselves, and to the God who looks with compassion again and again on all our weak, tired selves. I say hail to the God who, when we've come this close to figuring out the manger and the cross, beaten into cliche by the rite of annual pageants, leaving us un-disturbed, un-fluttered by mystery, entertained, bored, worn out and wandering through the world with thin imaginations, incapable of resisting the powerful, alternate imaginations of our culture, still manages to surprise us with un-bidden grace, confronting our presumption and yet offering us a taste, yet again, of the Life that is truly life. Thank God for Jesus Christ, Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine.

And I say bah humbug to the dumbing down of Christmas. It irritates me how quickly our culture, out in the world and in the church too, exchanges peace on earth for stress on earth. Is it really the most wonderful time of the year? I drive around town and find that it's one of the most tiring times of the year. Tired, haggard, distracting, frazzled, burdened with the anxiety of expectations that may never be met. And then there's the ubiquitous pottagy mush of Christmas music. It's about as silly as this dance by Stephen Colbert (courtesy of Travis & Leslie Hines):



Does your average civic religionist know the vicious origin of the carol "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"? Probably not. Or the concrete history behind any carol, save "Silent Night"? Unlikely. How can they when, by dint of repetition, carols are flattened into innocuousness.

But here is my wild idea.

Can you imagine if Christians in North American decided one year not to buy any gifts? Let's estimate a conservative number. Say 100 million Christians in the US and Canada did everything else associated with the season but we cut out purchasing gifts. Not a single one. Instead of buying and receiving presents we spent our time, money and energy being together. We served those with less. We shared simple meals, or even extravagant ones. We did things which invigorated our physical bodies. We entertained each other with not a single electronic device, but only whatever instruments or talents were to be had in the room, even if it meant telling really bad jokes all night long. We relished silence. We prayed for the persecuted church around the world. We asked the Holy Spirit to help us attend to the Incarnation; awaken our imaginations with deepened understanding; and give us the grace, for one moment, to experience the freedom from false wants that play havoc on our hearts.

Can you imagine how much time we'd have on our hands if we cut from our schedules running to the stores and surfing the internet for gifts?

Forget "one gift less" efforts? (Although I love what the guys behind "Advent Conspiracy" are on about.) Let's try no gifts. Just one year. Our economy might buckle, sure. And the church would need to be ready to help folks who would suffer. But just think of the new ways that creative energy might be unleashed. Just think how we might arrive at January 1 feeling, well, refreshed.

Ahhhh.

Well, it surely can't hurt to imagine.

Here, then, is Bonhoeffer's comment on the Magnificat.

"If God chooses Mary as his instrument, if God himself wants to come into this world in the manger at Bethlehem, that is no idyllic family affair, but the beginning of a complete turnaround, a reordering of everything on this earth. If we wish to take part in this Advent and Christmas event, then we cannot simply be bystanders or onlookers, as if we were at the theater, enjoying all the cheerful images.

No, we ourselves are swept up into the action there, into this conversion of all things. We have to play our part too on this stage, for the spectator is already an actor. We cannot withdraw.

What part, then, do we play? Pious shepherds, on bended knee? Kings who come bearing gifts? What sort of play is this, where Mary becomes the mother of God? Where God enters the world in the lowliness of the manger? The judgment of the world and its redemption--that is taking place here.

And the Christ child in the manger is himself the one who pronounces the judgment and the redemption of the world. He repels the great and the powerful. He puts down the mighty from their thrones, he humbles the arrogant, his arm overpowers all the proud and the strong, he raises what is lowly and makes it great and splendid in his compassion.

Therefore we cannot approach his manger as if it were the cradle of any other child. Those who wish to come to his manger find that something is happening within them."

Phaedra's sassy Holiday art sale

Phaedra's turning into a proper businesswoman. I'm quite proud of her. I've seen her overcome the terrifying fear of venturing into the business world. Artists will be the first to tell you. Just because they're an artist, that doesn't mean that they're a manager/marketing director/ad campaigner/legal consultant/administrator. A few thrive in the business of selling their work. Many do it because they have no alternative. Most never give it a try. It's like asking a professional clown to be a National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineer also. Sure, some can pull it off. But it's usually rare.

That's why we need the church to kick it in. We need business men and women to come alongside artists (and vice versa, presumably) to help them get their work into the market.

I told Phaedra I'd play her amateur manager. This entry is a little effort in that direction. The following includes some of the work she's has produced in the last couple of months.


If you're interested, you can contact her here. See here for her initial note on her recent Holiday Boutique. See here for her report.

And, finally, see here for a huge range of photographs of her work. I've included a sample below. And here are her prices:

- Handwarmers: Small - $7, Large - $9
- Hand Painted Ornaments - $3.50 or 3 or $10
- Paper and Beeswax Ornaments - $6 for a bag of 7 - 2 large, 3 medium, 2 small
- Mohair Scarves - $32.00
- Hand Printed and Calligraphed Bookmarks - $3 - $5
- Small Encaustic Artworks - $30 - $50
- Framed Linocut Prints and Original Watercolors - $150.00 - $475.00