worship and butterflies

One day last week I experienced great worship…not in a church service, but on my street. After breakfast I got Brady and Cash into the stroller and went for a walk in our neighborhood. We live in the country, on a dirt and gravel road surrounded by trees. There is a lake nearby, and a few streams that run along and under the road…

On our walk we came upon a butterfly, bouncing from one plant to another next to the road, and even fluttering back and forth across the road. I pointed the butterfly out to Brady, then we followed it. The butterfly kept going down the road, always staying close enough for Brady to track him. I pushed and watched Brady; he was fascinated with the butterfly.

Last week at a conference a speaker talked about how to view liturgical art—that we don’t look at it, but through it. The art is not meant to be an end to itself, but a lense, through which we see God. 

That’s how I felt as I watched Brady and the butterfy—that by looking through them and their interaction I could see the face of God--smiling, taking pleasure in His creation. I saw God in the beauty of this butterfly, in the trees and plants around which the butterfly flew. I saw God through the eyes of my son, watching the butterfly with amazement, smiling, laughing, pointing…

It was a beautiful morning, and a wonderful example of this idea of whole-life worship.

Beauty Made Me Do It

Earlier today, I was reading Robin Jensen's book The Substance of Things Seen: Art, Faith, and the Christian Community. Paraphrasing what Jensen tells us, to speak of beauty in reference to God is not about surface appearances.  In theological aesthetics, we have historically understood beauty as a kind of divine attractiveness.  That is, something that draws us to God through its physical properties, evoking wonder, delight, or awe.  In one chapter, Jensen writes about two different styles of architecture and how both the gothic and the ascetic evoke this sense of the beautiful and the splendid.  She also talks about nonrepresentational art, and parallels Mark Rothko's use of color, pigment, and light to apophatic theology by provoking a kind of devotional experience that is nonverbal and nonliteral. 

I have design issues on the mind, so as I read these passages, I considered the sanctuary space at Convergence.  It's a mid-century modern building with tall stained glass windows of bold colors.  Most of the colors of the windows are primary colors. I love that sanctuary because it's a colorful, yet calm place.  That's what I imagine "sanctuary" to be – calming, safe, peaceful but not in a sleepy, boring, way, but in a way that touches and stirs the soul.  The feeling inside the sanctuary changes as the day progresses and the light shifts. It is dim and muted in the evenings.  But in the afternoon, when the sun is streaming through the tallest windows, it is brilliant and dazzling with color.  

I walked into the sanctuary this afternoon with the intention of going to my temporary office and doing some work.  But the beauty of the space stopped me in my tracks.  Color, texture and light invited me to observe and experience Beauty with a capital "B."  Despite my head and heart knowledge about art and faith, I normally don't go around attributing every glorious thing I see to the divine.  It's not that I don't recognize God as Creator – rather it's that I do.  I'm suspicious when people say that God is Creator, and we as humans are created in God's image, therefore we're creators, too - with a little "c" of course. That seems too anthropocentric a picture of God to be ok with me.  Surely we don't create in the way God creates.  So the relationship between God as Creator and us as creators seems more complex than our status as image-bearers of God might permit. 

But what I experienced today gave me a glimpse of what that relationship could be.  I saw God's infusion into human creation, and it attracted me to the transcendent, evoked the glory of God, and provoked me to become a creator myself.  I felt as if that room was allowed me to look through it to see the very presence of God, and that I was called to be a witness to it and to share it with someone else. After I soaked it up for a few minutes, I had to, had to, re-create the experience for whoever would care.  I chose to recreate it in the only way I knew how – through words and pictures.  So forgive me if my attempts are a little clumsy or amateurish.  I'm a creator with a little "c".

--Elise Edwards

I Love Our Church

Prayer of Assurance
(from tonight's gathering)

Christ is our peace;
those who are divided
he has made one.

He has broken down the barriers of separation
by his death and has built us up
into one body, with God.

To all who repent and believe
he has promised reconciliation.
So live as people reconciled.

Amen

I thank God for all of you. Lisa

Merging of the Blogs

Todd and I have decided to consolidate blogs and include entries from other people on here as well. We hope you will join us in conversation about Convergence, God, art and faith. Feel free to comment or send us a post. In the coming year we will be devoting time to exploring questions about artists and worship.

Elise Edwards Ph.D. student studying art, faith and culture will be leading a lecture and discussion series in July at Convergence. We hope to have these podcast and posted on our blog and website. We hope you join the conversation!

Thursday, July 10 - 7:00 pm - What is the place of the artist in Christian Community?
Thursday, July 17 - 7:00 pm - Worship Planning and the Design Process
Thursday, July 24 - 7:00 pm - The Connection Between Art, Faith and Civic Engagement
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Todd wrote this and shared in last week's worship gathering on prayer:

I pray because I know I can't make life work on my own.
I pray because I need to be connected to more than just what I can see and touch.
I pray because I need to know that I am not alone.
I pray because I have seen God work supernaturally, in my life and the lives of others.
I pray because I gain strength and insight when I do.
I pray because sometimes at midnight, God is the only one listening.
I pray because the Bible, full of wisdom and insight into God and humankind, tells me it is crucial.
I pray because it helps me feel God's presence.
I pray because I love God.
I pray because I believe God loves me.

Read more about our worship gatherings

The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination

I just watched the commencement address of this year's Harvard graduation given by J.K. Rowling, entitled: "The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination."

This quote goes out to the artist wayers:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. J.K. Rowling

This one is for those who value the power of imagination and see the link to "loving our neighbors."

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. J.K. Rowling

Listen to the speech

Creativity and the Faith Experience, Bud Hensgen

From Sunday, June 1st Dinner and Communion Service
Artist, Bud Hensgen, Vice President, the Arlington Artists Alliance

During the next few minutes I will try to describe something of what for me is the process of creating an abstract painting. I will talk a bit about how I experience this creativity. And then I will try to relate it to how I experience faith.

I believe that creativity comes from many sources, or paths, within us. I would like to talk for a few moments about two of those sources – inspiration and desperation.

What I mean here by inspiration is fairly general and straightforward and I think is something that everyone experiences in life, whether they create art with it or not. It is something that comes from outside us and moves me. For instance, if I am painting outdoors walking through a field and I come upon a woods with the light at dusk reflecting onto the shapes of a row magnificent oak trees, I am likely to be inspired. I am forced to stop, to look, to be silent, to absorb what I am seeing and feeling around me. So inspired, I may try to express that inspiration with my paints.

Desperation, no doubt a word insufficient to express what I want to say here, is the inverse or the opposite. It is something inside me, lying hidden, waiting to -- or crying to --- or demanding to -- be expressed. It has no words and feels rather opaque. Often it is actually nothing at all until I actually begin warming up to paint. Then it may become a wordless energy in my body that wants to be expressed.

It is much harder for me to describe or talk about this second source of creativity, this desperation. But perhaps the word, desperation, is appropriate after all, since it is often unclear to me where I am trying to go. I know there is a path and I hope it will reveal itself to me as I work. I am familiar with what I am trying to do. I know my paints, my brushes, my surface, and I have an idea that I want to develop. But I sometimes find, once begun, that I must take a different path and follow it. I have to stop, to look, to listen.

What is happening inside me may be something delicate, gentle and beautiful, like a tiny green Mayflower shoot one stumbles across and uncovers from the winter’s leaves in the woods in March. Or it may be dark and powerful, like an angry and sorrowful storm that howls somewhere within me. It may be like a storm that whips up leaves and blows scattered papers in every direction. It lifts up sticks and thorns and even rocks and heaves them to a new place, then soaks them with a pounding rain.

My job is somehow to respond, to let go, to get it out and then to look to see if it makes any visual sense at all.

And of course very often it doesn’t, and herein lies yet another sense of desperation, because what if my expression, my creation, doesn’t work on canvas, doesn’t work at all! And I have to move the paint, push it, scrape it, cover it, start over and over again. I look at this formless junk, this undecipherable mess of lines and forms, this patchwork of irrelevance, this meaningless mess, will it ever come together? Will it say something that is authentic, that is real? And it won’t come together, it looks like crap, and then I tire and I have to stop.

Sometimes I find I have to rest and wait, sometimes in silence, sometimes in solitude and sometimes in the midst of a turbulent city throng. I hope the artistic sensibility will return and that I will be desperate enough to get it out and onto the canvas and that it will come together.

But sometimes it does work. It appears before me, perhaps gradually, perhaps suddenly, often unexpectedly. How did I get
here, to this place? What made it come together? Perhaps the images of yesterday’s forms and shapes percolated overnight -- or over years. Whatever the sources, it feels to me to be real, to be engaging, to be authentic and I know it is time to stop.

When I reflect on this rather bizarre and frequently turbulent process, it occurs to me that when I am working to create something, when I am listening to both inspiration and attending to this desperation, I am living in a part of my inner being that may be right next door to religious experience – to faith, hope and charity, if you will.

After all, when I am painting thus, I am working from a source that seems to me to be a mystery, like seeing through a glass darkly. I am on a path that is sometimes dark and sometimes revealed to me and in order to express it I must turn myself over to it and follow it wherever it takes me, and I don’t know where it will lead. And when nothing happens and the path remains dark, I must hope that tomorrow the path will be clearer and that something will emerge. And I hope that what emerges will be authentic, at least to me and perhaps to some others. Finally I desire that this work, this expression of my own personal being will connect me, bring me into a closer relationship with others in this universe that I may never see and know, because I desire with a great desire to be a part, if only a tiny part of the mystery of this universe -- that envelopes you, that envelopes me and contains us all.