Musings

Artful Resurrection

It was a cube consisting of many separate pieces of charred wood, each piece dangling from a thin black wire, hanging from the ceiling of the De Young Museum in San Francisco. This  artwork by Cornelia Parker was entitled “Anti-Mass”. It was a compelling sight. It reminded me of the way blackened embers  are suspended in air above a fire, as if momentarily weightless. The installation was a thing of simple beauty,  taking the mind to a place beyond words.

          

Then I read the card next to the installation and found that I was looking at the creatively re-arranged remains of a black Baptist church in Alabama which had been destroyed in a racist arson attack. “Anti-Mass” was at least a double-play on words – referring to the airborne wood, and the violent act against the worship of the congregation that once met inside it.

          

As soon as I knew the story behind the wood, I sensed that I  was in the presence of the sacred. In a  way, this work of art was the resurrection of that burned church. The artist had taken that terrible act of  racist arson and turned it inside out and upside down. Just as the early Christians turned the crucifixion inside out and upside down, transforming the cross from a terrifying symbol of Roman state power into a hopeful sign of salvation.

          

When I got home from the museum, I reflected on the striking difference in my experience of the artwork between my first glance at it and my later discovery of the wood’s source. It  revealed how influenced I am by the emotional and spiritual associations that I  make, or that others make for me. It  revealed that I, and the rest of us, seem to be primed for experiences of the  sacred.  There is a God-shaped cube inside of  me, ready to be filled by encounters with divinity.

          

It also revealed the resurrecting, redeeming power given to  each of us by God. We have within each of us a remarkable measure of divine energy which we can use to turn hopelessness into hope, violence into compassion, despair into positive vision, destruction into creativity. If a church building, burned down in an act of hatred, can be brought back to life in such a remarkable manner, what isn’t possible for us, both as individuals and as a collective?

          

What  creative, redemptive leap can our nation take to help the people of  Iraq turn seared flesh, twisted metal, and dusty rubble into elements  of peace and prosperity? How can we take the emotional charge from the injuries and insults we each suffer, and direct that energy toward healing and wholeness? What can we do to transform the church from being a reliquary for old dogma into becoming a living spiritual community for the present?

          

If an artist can bring about a resurrection with nothing more than wire and bits of burnt wood, think of what you and I can bring to life! Each counter-intuitive action we take to change ourselves and the world for the better is a form of artwork, as worthy of “ooohs” and “aaahs” as anything hanging in a museum...

      

 

      

 

Four Spiritual Awes

They are still in circulation, all these years later. I remember young, earnest, long-haired converts to Christianity passing out these tracts at the beach when I was a teenager in Santa Cruz, California. The Four Spiritual Laws were created by Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical group, as a way of boiling the religion down to a simple formula: 1.) God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life. 2.) Man is sinful and separated from God.  Therefore, he cannot know and experience God's love and plan for his life. 3.) Jesus Christ is God's only provision for man's sin. Through Him you can know and experience God's love and plan for your life. 4.) We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God's love and plan for our lives.

There are serious flaws in these “Spiritual Laws”. They present a negative view of human nature, and a chauvinistic, dogmatic kind of religion. They beg questions that the tract can’t answer. If “man” is so sinful and separated from God, how can “man” know anything of God through Jesus, either?  If God has a plan for your life, why hasn’t God shown it to you already? Does it make any sense to claim that Jesus is the only way to God, when clearly so many other people have found God through other religions?

There must be equally simple ways to express a humbler, kinder Christianity. So I offer an alternative:

The Four Spiritual Awes

1.) Awe for freedom. God’s awesome love enables you to choose your life’s plan for yourself. Through prayerful communion with God, and in soulful service to others, trust that you will find the meaning and purpose of your existence.

2.) Awe for divinity. You are born in the awesome image of God, who is love. Your failings are reminders to return to your divine nature which, like all people, you so easily forget.

3.) Awe for the journey. There are many paths that can help you remember your divine nature, and following Jesus Christ is one of them. The path of Jesus can be hard; it’s not easy to love even your enemies, as he did. But it is an awesome challenge that is supremely worth your life. 

4.) Awe for growth. Both individually and collectively, God calls us to ever-more awesome expressions of compassion and spiritual awareness.

The one thing I’ve always admired about the original “Four Spiritual Laws” tract is its circle diagram illustrating the principle of putting God at the center of our lives. The tract showed a circle with the word SELF emblazoned in the middle, with a little cross next to the circle. The next image is of a circle with a big cross in it, with the word “self” in smaller letters next to it inside the circle. The message: put Christ at the center of your life, instead of your self, and you’ll experience a better life on this earth and salvation in the next.

I’d draw the diagram somewhat differently than the original one in the tract. I'd replace the cross image with the word "God".  This might serve as a straightforward description of the common goal of all the world’s great religions. We are most human, most divine, and most fulfilled when we empty ourselves of our selves and let God be at our center, overwhelming us with awe and compassion.

There are more spiritual awes than four, I’m sure.  But perhaps these are enough to get us started on the path to discovering the rest of them!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dangling in a Dream

They’re worth the trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, just by themselves.  In a dark corner of the building, they glow in their glass tanks, lit from below, like altar-pieces illuminated by candles in a dim cathedral.  They pulse wisps of translucent flesh around gulps of invisible food, and wave delicate tendrils to the slow beat of strange, silent music.

The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary extends all the way up to the Marin coast. Its title contains a word we ordinarily associate with religion, and for good reason. The jellies (formerly known as jellyfish) floating in this sanctuary are enough to inspire worship of the transcendent. They are the unheard heartbeats of the sea.  They drift in the depths, on seemingly aimless trajectories. Perhaps all of us in the aquarium were so transfixed by them because they also dangle in our dreams, hovering in the inner sanctuary of our souls.

They make me wonder.  When I climb to the top of the Marin Headlands and look over the surface of the ocean, I know they are there, but I see nothing of them.  Just as when I gaze transfixed at the jellies in the tanks, but see nothing of the process by which I contemplate them. Billions of neurons oscillate in my brain, but I can’t directly detect them.  Their tendrils reach out to each other in a tangle that I cannot view as they enable me to think these thoughts. In that salty sea between my ears, strange things pulse.  Who, least of all myself, knows what I’ll think – or write – next?

That which caused my jaw to drop in front of the jelly tanks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, that which boggles me when I think about how I think, is that to which Meister Eckhard, the 14th century German mystical priest, referred when he said:  "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me."  Considering jellies and the neurons that consider them, I am ushered into a prayerful state of self-reflective consciousness. 

"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own..." (St. Paul, I Corinthians 6: 19)  Through our worshipful awe, whether at a church, a temple, or an aquarium, God knows God.  Our wonderment is the dark sanctuary in which the divine becomes ecstatically aware of itself.

 

Jesus as Woman

One of the readers of my weekly “Musings” blog, Karen Whitehill, is an artist who created a series of collages in which she superimposes the faces and bodies of famous actresses from mid-twentieth-century movie posters onto familiar images of Jesus.  Each of these well-known paintings is focused on a woman who is feeding the five thousand, standing before Pilate, or preaching to the disciples. “My idea was to create a feminist vision of Christ, while acknowledging that if Jesus were a woman, her story would be quite different,” she says.  (Have a look at her remarkable work at www.klwcollages.com .)

The images she creates are sometimes funny, sometimes alluring, sometimes disturbing, and always challenging to one’s assumptions about the identity of Jesus.  Our knowledge of the historical Jesus, rather than just the Jesus of tradition, is very sketchy.  So there is a way in which Karen’s female images of Christ are only a little more far-fetched than the traditional ones.  And in some significant ways, her images invite us into deeper dimensions of Christian spirituality.

There’s a lot right about depicting Grace Kelly as the Christ of the Transfiguration. The story is about how Jesus appeared on top of a mountain, surrounded by glory, before his disciples, who wanted him to stay there and wanted to build a structure around him for worship.  But he came down the mountain and got back to practical ministry work instead.  His life was about down-to-earth service, not floating in the sky with rays of light behind him.  Grace Kelley was a common person who became the princess of Monaco, living a charmed life, but then, like Jesus, died at a relatively young age.  She represents well the tension we all must negotiate between what is ideal and what is real, the necessity for integrating the spiritual with the physical.  In our culture today, the female body is practically worshipped on the covers of magazines and in the media.  We've done to women what Jesus would not let his disciples do to himself:  objectify them in an unreal, idealized form.

Who wouldn’t want their kids to be blessed personally by an Ingrid Bergman Jesus, as he did when he told his disciples not to hinder the children from coming to him?  I don’t know if she ever lightened the door of a church, but she would have been a Sunday School teacher that a kid could never forget.  This picture reminds us that our own child-like faith in divine love can admit us into the kingdom of heaven that surrounds us all the time. 

And think how much more information a Loretta Young Jesus might have extracted from the woman at the well!  The male Jesus only skimmed the surface of the Samaritan woman's story.

Might we well expect a Lana Turner Jesus to transform water into wine by casting a sidelong glance and a suggestive gesture at the urns?  Isn’t this image, and the gospel story of the miracle at the wedding itself, a good symbol for the deepest power of sexuality to change the commonplace into the divine, to draw out the soul through the body, to find ecstasy in the everyday? 

And isn’t the young Judy Garland Jesus, with the braids and the earnest expression she wore when engaging with the Wizard of Oz, Glenda the Good, and the Wicked Witch, an apt image to represent the pre-teen Christ when he was conversing with the squabbling rabbis in the temple in Jerusalem?  She evokes the perennial struggle of young people to reconcile the wisdom and the foolishness of their elders.

I’m sure Karen is right that if Jesus had been a woman, the gospel story would have been different.   Yet her use of women’s images for the Christ has the paradoxical effect of exposing fresh layers of meaning that can be found in the stories of the male Jesus as we read them in the Bible.  In any case, imagining Jesus as a woman helps to reveal the divine Self that waits to be discovered within us all.