Isolation for Preparation 2

Deuteronomy tells the story of a God imposed isolation on the people of Israel. His chosen people were sent out into the desert to wander for forty years to learn to truly depend on God.

In Deuteronomy 8:2-3, we read that God purposefully lead his people into the wilderness for the purpose of proving himself to them. God used this place of isolation to develop their confidence in him as their God. They did not labor for their living, they simply believed God and received their living. There was no Wal-Mart in the wilderness, therefore they had to trust God for their food, clothing and care. God proved to them that he was their one and only "true source." They would never have received this revelation, without this time of separation and sanctification with God.

We also read that it is essential that they remember this lesson. When the time of isolation is over and they have the option of choosing many other types of food and living in much more comfortable surroundings, they must never forget that God is the source of what they truly need. This deep knowledge and trust in God is called faith. That is the kind of faith needed in times of difficulty and challenge.



Have you ever experienced a time of imposed isolation? Maybe you've lost a job, had a breakup with someone very dear, lost a loved one, moved to a new location. Maybe it is something wonderful like having children and losing alone time and couple time. That time of isolation might be a time of God preparing and positioning you to discover something about God that he cannot reveal to you while you are surrounded by other things. They might be distracting you from hearing and seeing the things he wants to show you. During this time of isolation, we discover things about ourselves that we otherwise would never have known.

Prayer: Take about three minutes to be quiet and ask yourself if you are experiencing an "imposed isolation." Ask God what you might need to make this a time of preparation.

Patience: Saturday January 23

Hebrews 6
"Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure."

God has gone through great lengths to be clear about his hope for us. This verse states this in a very intense way. Spend a lot of time reading this verse over and over and think about what it means to you. If you were to write to God in response to this verse, would you speak to him with the same conviction and dedication in acceptance of his hope? Would your thankfulness match the writers enthusiasm?

Prayer: Pray that every day we get closer to understanding and accepting God's great hope for us and that it would transform the way we view and live our life on a daily basis.

Stewardship - Wednesday December 9

Consider the three exercises on purpose that you thought about Monday
and Tuesday: Your own Purpose Statement, God's Purpose Statement for you
and His Purpose Statement for the world and church.

Looking at your life in it's present situation, how do you feel you currently line
up with these statements? Do you feel you are well on track? If not do
you think you are very far off?

Prayer: Pray that God will help you assess your current direction.

Stewardship - Friday December 4

In church we talked about how God already owns everything so, when we offer of ourselves, we essentially offer back what is already God's.

When you think about offering your life's resources back to God, which are the hardest ones to offer and why? When you think about the things that maybe you should give up to make space for more valuable and healthy things, think deeply about any difficulties you have with allowing yourself to do so.

Prayer: Pray that God will teach you more about the value of your resources as you think about these issues.

Gratitude: Monday November 16

Yesterday in Ephesians 4 we read:

"Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called— one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."

What is the reason for Paul's repeated use of the word "one" when describing both the body of the church and God himself?

Prayer: Pray that God will help you understand the depth of unity he wants us to have with Him and with our fellow believers.

Humility and Spiritual Growth

Is there room in my life for spiritual growth? Strange question for a pastor and leader of a spiritual artists' community? Not really. Like everyone else, I find myself replacing my spiritual life with to do lists and God with x...y...z...

A friend and I were laughing at diamond commercials the other day. The ones we heard make it sound like love=diamonds and the only way you can tell if someone loves you is by the size of diamond they buy you. According to commercials, a person's capacity for love in general can also be gauged by the type of car they drive, clothes they wear, gadgets they own and cool people they happen to know. We came to the conclusion that we must be the least loving, least capable of loving people on the planet!

But, when I really examine what it looks like to love people - deep meaningful relationships, time to spend, freedom to be honest and open, generous, etc. I wonder if I am any closer to showing my love in these ways than I am in the ways the diamond commercial suggests.

Last Sunday, in our worship gathering, we engaged Allen Pearson's exhibit "Creation Sings," to help us put aside the thoughts of the everyday world and begin to notice the complex universe of plants, birds, and people all in varying states of activity all around us.

"Careful observation and thoughtful contemplation of nature soon teaches us how little we know and understand about life and the world. This in itself engenders the humility that is necessary in order to experience the divine.

This quality of humility is really the summit of the mountain that Abraham was traveling towards all his life. " Who shall go up the mountain of Yahweh and who will stand in the place of His holiness? The person with clean hands and a pure heart..." (Psalm 24:3-4

This idea of humility struck me deeply. It does take humility to stop, slow down and really notice the world around me. How much more so, to notice God.

"To experience the presence of God in nature (and indeed anywhere), one must be willing to detach oneself from the pull of worldy ego-interest so as to become open to higher levels of awareness."

The importance of making time for spiritual growth, intentional time, can not be undervalued. We are working to provide a variety of opportunities of for such growth and reflection. Hopefully this will result in the "fruits" of a life lived in love - what Christians would say is a "life lived in Christ." I hope you will pray for us as we develop these opportunities and walk together as a
community.

(Quotes from Azamra: Torah for our time)

Lisa Hawkins
Artistic Director/Pastor
Convergence: A Creative Community of Faith

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.

Andy Crouch Is Feeling Useless

Last week Todd and I met Elise Edwards (the fabulous designer of Convergence's renovations) at the Transforming Culture Symposium in Austin Texas. The gathering consisted of artists, pastors and academics exploring questions surrounding the role of the artist in church and the responsibility of the pastor/church to the artist. The plenary speakers included Jeremy Begbie (Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts), John Witvliet (Calvin Institute of Christian Worship), Barbara Nicolosi (Act I Screenwriters), Eugene Peterson (The Message Bible), Andy Crouch (Christian Vision Project, Christianity Today), and David Taylor (arts pastor).

The plenary sessions were really excellent and some good conversation emerged around a number of topics - including whether it is even possible to talk about "transforming culture." (We are purchasing the DVDs of the plenary sessions for this symposium and the IAM Exchange and plan to make these available if you would like to see for yourself.)

Some of the impressions/ things to chew on that I walked away with were:
From Andy Crouch
-"Culture cannot be reduced to utility" i.e. the value of art is not based on its usefulness. Rather it is something which is valuable in and of itself. Or, said differently - it is not useful only when it points to something else or can augment something else (a.k.a.) a sermon.
-BUT - even more important is the recognition that worship is actually a "useless" thing as well. Coming together to worship or consider God does not necessarily achieve something or produce something. We do it because the act of doing it is worthwhile regardless of any outcome. Or as a Marva Dawn puts it in her book on worship by the same title: it is a "Royal Waste of Time."
-One more fantastic quote on the role of art in religious communities: "There is too much that is good and right with the world to be constrained to the bounds of religious utility."

The interesting thing about this discussion was not so much the implications on art, but rather a reminder to me about worship and prayer. The Bible talks about these things as worthwhile because it is right to do them. Reducing the questions of whether or not prayer "works" or "did I feel worshipful?" as practically irrelevent. We practice prayer and praise, painting and singing, acting and storytelling because it is good and right to do so in the eyes of God.

We don't have to worry about effecting some end. To quote Crouch again: "We don't need to convince God to be useful to us and God does not need us to be be useful to him."

The act of creating, the act of worship, the act of prayer and praise is worthwhile or useful not in its product or results, but in the act itself. We create because we are creators, we worship because we are worshipers, we pray because we are prayers, we praise because we are praisers.

And finally, this frees us as churches to take on our role as possibly the only institution in our culture which can be the "champions of the 'un-useful."
-"Without a belief in the worth of the 'un-useful' who will champion and value those people deemed by our society 'un-useful?"

And who will encourage us to live lives filled with concern for the "other" when this doesn't "do" much for us?

Just feeling very challenged about our role....

What do you think?

Sunday night we had the State of Convergence address and we threw out a lot of stuff including much of what is in the blogs below. We'd like to hear from you. What are your responses and experiences with what is going on in our world? Creating an alternate value system? Promoting the creative life? Creating true community? I'm hoping you will weigh in so that we can have a little more discussion.

Check back soon for the power point!

There's Got to Be More to Life than Just Makin' Out

“There’s got to be more to life than just makin’ out!" – Grease 2
Michelle Pfeiffer as Stephanie Zinone

Ok, my pop culture reference is kind of dated (and a little embarrassing), but she makes a good point!
Granted, Michelle Pfeiffer’s character was literally talking about making out with boys, but the principle is the same – many people (all people?) feel something deep inside tugging at us wondering: Is “making out,” getting by, making do – enough? Is there more to life than just being able to pay the bills, do a good job at work, taking care of our families, being successful, making progress? Is there some greater purpose or meaning to life?

A few weeks ago Todd and I attended the International Arts Movement Exchange in New York. I came away enthusiastic that I finally had some language to describe the things that I have been noticing for years. I am amazed sometimes that we have managed to come so far at Convergence as a community without this helpful language. I generally answer the question “so what IS Convergence?” with a series of “umm, well it’s sort like this… and sort of like that… and you know how...?”

I walked away from IAM convinced that it is time (passed time) to establish some concrete language, and I’m grateful to the brilliant people at the conference who have given me some of those tools. I am going to begin to process through some of my notes and develop that language here.

The first piece answers the basic question – “Why? Why Convergence? Why artists? Why churches? Why?

Wesley Hurd is working on a book called “He Said/They Said: The Cultural Conditions for Dialogue in the Arts.” He led a breakout session at the conference that exactly framed the rationale we’ve been operating under here at Convergence.

Hurd expressed that we have been living in a world that is experiencing the results of a deconstruction of our “mental and cultural constructs” which hold the possibility of ultimate truth. This disillusionment, due to the failure of so many of the promises of the enlightenment and the modern era (i.e. education, technical power and progress, free market, etc.) has resulted in a sense of hopelessness and relativity that is leaving us empty. However, we are (or have) moving(ed) through this to something else.

While the Church’s very message is that there is hope, meaning and truth to be had, we are not alone in this proposition. Hurd noted that, “In the Academy there is a group who have not given up on the idea that it is possible to search for Ultimate Truth.” Indeed, in essence, “art and art making is both an exploratory attempt at forming and answering deepest existential questions AND an artifact, evidence, trace, or the reality of the existential core of being human.”

So, there is this space in our current culture, in our current time, in our current world where the Church, Academy and art makers, dare I say it…☺…converge. Hurd calls this the “Critical Zone,” a “mental/spiritual space shared by both religious and non-religious persons.”

This is the beginning of our Convergence. Just acknowledging that the above is true. Saying from within our little church – “Hey there you artists and not necessarily Christian thinkers. I see that you have been exploring some interesting things like transcending the pervasive sense of hopelessness in our world, a desire for healing and reconciliation in our culture and a desire to find alternate value systems to out-of-control consumerism and environmental and social apathy. You are really effective at holding up a mirror and calling a spade a spade and recognizing trends in our world. Want to have a cup of coffee or something? I bet we might be able to learn something from one another. Maybe we even have things to contribute to one another.”

I know it isn’t a novel idea, but at this time building a bridge between two worlds that have (to greater and lesser degrees) alienated one another is a brave thing. And to be perfectly honest, the most worthwhile thing I can imagine doing. The new friends I have made over the last year are teaching me about possibility and the reality of changing the world one choice at a time, one person at a time. Some of them are artists; some are not. Some are people of a defined religious perspective; others are not. All of them have faith of some sort in something and a sense of the something else that is possible. In this “critical zone” in this “convergence” is where we’ve set up camp. It is exciting to us to be in a position to act on the observations and discoveries people like Wesley Hurd, Mako Fujimura and others involved with IAM are making. I have no idea where this is going to take us, but I’m looking forward to it.

Back from New York

It is Sunday morning and I am just starting to feel awake again. Todd and I hit New York on Thursday morning and got back late Friday night. The trip itself was great, no travel nightmares, but my head felt like it had gone to an all you can eat buffet and gorged.

I don't think I am ready to process all of the thoughts, inspiration, challenges and ideas presented at the International Arts Movement Exchange. Right now I am just incredibly grateful to Mako Fujimura and his staff, volunteers and presenters. I have never been to a conference which affirmed and challenged me in this way and I would encourage anyone who would be reading this blog for any reason to put it on your calendar for next year. I don't know what the dates are yet, but put it on the calendar anyway.

I heard so many people in hallway conversations, workshops and even the big plenary sessions saying the same thing: "I just found out about this thing earlier this week and I knew I had to come. I'm not alone! There are other people like me!"

The most exciting thing is that Todd and I came home with a list a mile long of people we want to connect with. We are in an amazing position (and unique at this point in time) to actually begin to act on the theories developing.

I'm going to stop now because I realize this is making no sense, I'm still in babbling mode. I'll give more details and thoughts in installments, but for now - wow!