A world of stories (Sunday Reflections for March 28, 2010)

I vacationed this week in Santa Fe NM and one of its greatest assets is its 100+ art galleries. It is said to be the third largest art market in the country, after New York and LA. This time I was fortunate to be in a gallery when an artist whose work I had come to especially admire was paying a visit and we had a short conversation.

Richard Potter works in a technique called encaustic. Encaustic originated with ancient Greek ship builders who used heated wax to seal the hulls of their boats. Sometimes they added colored pigments to the wax for decoration and this eventually led to a new painting technique. Examples survive from the 2nd c. AD but its use goes back much earlier.

After languishing, the technique was rediscovered in the 20th c. and has become especially popular in the past twenty years. Today encaustic painting often includes collage. Layers of wax are used to hold almost anything to the board or canvas. Looking closely at Potter’s works you will see blades of grass, flower petals, string, paper and other items found around his rural studio location.

Looking at his newer works I also noticed small bits of printed text and music and I mentioned that to him. Potter laughed and said he’s always looking for ways to include Beethoven. He also named other composers and authors that he likes and then made an interesting observation. I include these things because we are losing our stories, he said—the myths, tales, and heroes which give culture its character and identity. On the gallery web site he says his painting “is a way of keeping our story alive, what I call the continuity of parables.”

Potter is one of many who are increasingly alarmed at our loss of common shared stories. This has been identified as one of the primary characteristics of postmodernism. It is one consequence of the mixing of peoples and cultures brought about by modern transportation and communication. Not only are new ideas, stories and traditions introduced when people move physically. Modern mass media does the same via television, movies, books, music, and the internet.

As just one recent example, rap music which originated in the American Black ghetto can now be found in poor urban areas on every continent. That rap has become a universal language for impoverished and oppressed young people around the globe may well be a good thing. It is obviously filling a need and may prove to have surprising power.

The question Potter and others are asking, however, is (to use his example) what happens to Beethoven? As our planet becomes increasingly homogenized, what happens to its individual cultural traditions, to their unique artists, prophets, heroes and thinkers, to the countless millions of stories which give each culture and its members their identity?

Recently samples of American high school seniors were shown to do poorly on the history and government test given to those applying for US citizenship. Other surveys have shown that most of those who identify themselves as conservative evangelicals or fundamentalists have very poor knowledge of the content of the Bible they claim to believe so seriously, often little better than the average public. I discovered early in my confirmation teaching career that most of my students couldn’t distinguish between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. They both occupied in their minds some vague and shadowy entity called “the past.” Meanwhile the Texas State Board of Education has decided that Thomas Jefferson will now be viewed as only a bit player in the country’s founding because it disapproves of his deism and promotion of separation of church and state.

This week I also visited Bandelier National Monument. This national park includes the village ruins of Ancestral Pueblo People who inhabited this valley from roughly 1150-1550, abandoned before European colonists ever knew of its existence. Santa Fe itself is celebrating the 400th anniversary of its founding and establishment as capital of the province of New Spain in 1610, even while recognizing its earlier settlement by thousands of Pueblo People. Yet most of us know little or nothing of these stories, remembering only Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth Rock (1620) when thinking of America’s first settlers.

Conflicting stories and resulting confusion is nothing new. In the past, it was the “winners” who decided which stories would be remembered and which forgotten. Now we are more accepting of other cultures, past and present, but are uncertain what to do with all of them. Often we get lost in endless arguments about which stores are “true” or right when we feel the stories we cherish are somehow under threat, especially when political or religious competition intensifies.

This coming week in the church calendar, Holy Week, is all about stories. Again the modern question will arise: Are these stories “true”? It may well be, as many scholars now say, that few of the events described actually happened. In some ways this can hardly be a surprise given how different are each of the four gospel accounts of that week. But is that where the “truth” of these stories is even found?

We don’t remember stories just because they happened (our poor brains would be overwhelmed). We only remember stories that give our lives meaning and identity. This is why taking away others’ stories is so devastating and why forgetting or losing our own stories leads to our feeling purposeless and directionless. Stories tell us where we have come from, what was important to our forbears, and gives us a compass to find new direction.

In this confusing time of intermixing cultures, we need to hang on to our history and traditions but do so with a looser grip. We can both celebrate our stories and at the same time recognize that they are not everyone’s stories, nor do they need to be. The stories of the world’s peoples are not in competition. We do not have to promote ours as true and everyone else’s as false. Indeed much of the tension in the world today is the result of people fearing their culture and values are being replaced by someone else’s. Their fear and anger are understandable.

We are entering a period of history unlike any other. Yet to go forward we must retain a connection with where we have come from. Our ultimate goal will be to achieve what Richard Potter calls a “continuity of parables.” Each nationality and culture will contribute their individual stories to a larger global tale, like the streams joining to make a great river. Leaving no one out, we will all add to this the most amazing of stories, that of human civilization itself.

Vision of artists (Sunday Reflections for August 9, 2009

Many in the church (especially clergy) aren’t happy with the growing numbers who claim interest in spirituality but little or no interest in organized religion. Regardless of the spiritual quality of contemporary Christianity, one thing the “spiritual, not religious” folks are aware of is the possibility for genuine spiritual experience outside traditional religious venues.

This is not a new or particularly radical idea. The Bible itself testifies to the fact that before our ancestors ever built a shrine or temple they experienced God and sacredness in the natural world. Forces of nature were often identified with God or the gods as were specific places, such as mountains and rivers. The most common place, of course, was the sky or “the heavens.”

Religious or not, most people have experienced wonder and awe when encountering nature in its mystery, size, power or beauty. That’s why it’s been said no one can be an atheist who’s been to the Grand Canyon. Others might say the same about seeing the birth of a baby.

Last week, in writing about my vacation, I noted that the confluence of natural beauty and artistic talent in Santa Fe was not a coincidence. It isn’t so much that the area provides lots of “pretty things” to inspire artists to draw, paint, sculpt or photograph, although there is that. Rather, I think there is something about the “purity” of the desert landscape which encourages you to focus and clarify. In addition to the special light quality of the thin, dry mountain air, the lack of distractions makes individual objects stand out. Without the blur and confusion of excess noise, movement, shapes and colors, you are more naturally inclined to concentrate on an individual plant, animal, mountain or cloud. Over time, you become more adept at really seeing the world around you.

A common element of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets is that they so often frame their criticism as people’s inability to use their senses. Israel’s leaders are repeatedly accused of being metaphorically deaf and blind. “You see but you don’t see; you hear but you don’t hear.” Many of Jesus’ healings enable “the blind to see and the deaf to hear.” Given his teaching, these stories obviously are about more than the need to repair physical impairments. Similarly, when we make a new discovery or come to some new awareness, we often give such experiences a sensory dimension. “I hear what you’re saying. I had never seen it that way before.”

Strolling through Santa Fe’s art galleries on this visit, I was struck for the first time by their spiritual and even religious qualities. You enter them feeling like you are walking into a kind of shrine or holy place. The spaces are normally very quiet. Inside, of course, the art objects take central place and you move from one to another “experiencing” them like icons. Your attitude isn’t that of worship but rather more like anticipation and sometimes awe.

The art works speak to you, open your eyes—or not. There is no guarantee. Every piece is different, every artist is different, and every viewer is different. But from time to time, there is real communication or communion even—between you and the artist, between you and the world the artist has opened up and revealed in a new way.

In Western history, the arts received a dramatic boost from the church in the Middle Ages, especially with the building of the great cathedrals. In addition to their spectacular architecture (an art form itself), these buildings were filled with stained glass, sculpture, mosaics and paintings. Most of this work, of course, represented religious figures and stories. In looking at a saint or biblical character, however, you knew you weren’t seeing a “real” person. Most of them were long dead and no one knew what they actually looked like. It was up to the artist’s imagination to create their appearance. They were “idealized.” That wasn’t John the Baptist in that picture; it was the artist’s “idea” of John the Baptist.

With the Renaissance this changed, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the world changed, also. For reasons that still aren’t fully understood, artists became interested in real people and in how those real people actually looked. That wasn’t just an idea of “woman” in that picture; that was the artist’s next-door neighbor. And that wasn’t just “Hair” on her head; that was how that particular woman’s hair really looked.

Suddenly artists were seeing things nobody had noticed before, and through their art causing everyone one else to see the world differently, as well. With these new modern eyes, many people began asking new questions about this world that was being rediscovered. Scientists soon followed artists in looking with a new and deep intensity (and sometimes they were both, as with Leonardo da Vinci).

What about those saints? Artists kept painting them but often they, too, became “real” people. Artists began using actual persons as models for their work. Now, Mary looked like the artist’s next-door neighbor—or for political reasons, the duke’s wife, or for the sake of comedy and social commentary, the archbishop’s mistress. Not coincidentally, it was at this time that the arts began separating from the church and finding a more independent existence.

Even apart from its religious patrons, art has remained a sacred endeavor. While the medieval church found holiness primarily in ideas (theology, laws, stories, God), art since the Renaissance has looked for and revealed the sacredness of real life and of this world. Medieval religion (which is still alive and well in many places) doesn’t much like that. Ultimately it sees this world as something to be escaped. Modern art, however, while certainly not denying life’s pain and ugliness, nonetheless asserts that existence here and now has genuine value.

In doing so art certainly is not without biblical support. It reminds us of God’s own verdict on his creation in Genesis 1, when “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” And one thing that stands out so strikingly about Jesus in the gospels are the repeated instances of his taking notice of individual and usually insignificant people—often to the consternation of both his opponents and his own disciples. Jesus shows the value not only of people in general but of this person and that person—of Peter and Jairus and Zaccheus and Mary Magdalene.

Artists, of course, have their own ideas about the world and they share them through their work. Those ideas, however, are based upon their experiences of the world and of the people they encounter. These things, too, the artist says, are holy, sacred and must be valued. In the silence of a gallery and in the silence of the desert, somehow that becomes easier to see.

"Come away to a deserted place" (Sunday Reflections for August 2, 2009)

I am back after a truly restful week in what has become one of my favorite places: Santa Fe, New Mexico. Santa Fe, despite being the state capital, is basically a big small town. Arriving here you automatically lose the intensity of city congestion but it takes a day or two to get in its groove. No one is in a hurry so you either adjust or become endlessly frustrated. I don’t think I ever heard a car horn. The mixed language slogan on a t-shirt I saw summarizes the local philosophy: carpe mañana, “seize tomorrow.”

The “real world” indeed felt far away and suddenly much less important. I looked at a newspaper once. When (out of habit) I started scanning the news online it felt like a cloud had come over me. I usually switched quickly to either looking up new restaurants to go to or just closed the window and started playing solitaire.

Two things here put “world events” in a very different perspective: the area’s stunning natural beauty and the unparalleled density of artistic talent. You can’t help but be amazed by the shapes and colors of northern New Mexico’s high desert and mountains. And it is these which have drawn artists here for over a century, resulting in Santa Fe having the 2nd or 3rd (depending who you read) largest art market in the country with over 200 galleries to wander through.

Experiencing the Santa Fe area’s boundless natural beauty and deep reservoir of human talent, the latest political tempest in Washington can’t help but seem like an enormous waste of time and energy. Places like this force you to reexamine both your own priorities and those the world tries to dictate to us.

In a place like Santa Fe it seems so obvious that we are made to enjoy the beauty of creation and be inspired to contribute to that beauty however we can. Yet in practice we do so little of the former and so often end up doing the opposite of the latter. With so much beauty around us, why is there so much ugliness in our lives and in our relationships and in our communities?

One of the surprising ways I have come to appreciate the Southwest’s landscape and the culture of its native Indian population has been through the mystery novels of Tony Hillerman. Hillerman (who died last October at age 83) wrote eighteen books set in and around the Navajo Reservation and Four Corners region. The protagonists of his stories are Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and his protégé, Sergeant Jim Chee. A prominent theme of each of Hillermann’s books is the struggle of both men to integrate their lives as Navajo and as members of the predominant white culture.

Though a belagaana (white man), the Navajo honored Hillerman with their “Special Friends of the Dineh (People) Award” for his sensitive and accurate portrayal of contemporary Navajo culture. For Hillerman, telling the story of the Indians was as important as the plot of any of his books. His stories portray both the vast beauty of the desert Southwest and the deep and life-sustaining connection between that world and the lives of Indian people.

The over-arching theme of Hillerman’s portrayal of Navajo culture is that of the need to be in “harmony” with the world. For these Navajo policemen, as important as solving the various crimes in the stories is the restoration of the hozro/harmony that is disrupted by the acts of violence they are investigating. When a person lives in such harmony, they are said to be “walking in the way of beauty.” The New York Times article about Hillerman upon his death gave this quote:

“Everything is connected,” Jim Chee reflects in “Ghostway” (1984). “The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.”

The types of things which can disrupt one’s harmony are, of course, endless. Hillerman spends much time in his books describing the many ceremonies and rituals the Navajo use to restore harmony. He does so out of recognition of how unharmonious is much of Western culture and that the Navajo have an important lesson to teach that surrounding and dominating world.

Our need for harmony, balance, and even beauty is gradually becoming recognized and accepted. They are concepts that appear increasingly in our understanding of physical and emotional health, interpersonal relations, economics, politics, and preserving the environment. For as long as people have lived in towns and cities, we have instinctively recognized the restorative and healing power of time spent in more natural environments of forests, lakes, and mountains. How appropriate that we often call our holidays and vacations times of re-creation.

A couple weeks ago in the Gospel we heard Jesus reflect this everyday yet often forgotten wisdom. To the busy disciples he says, "‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure.” Such rest, however, is much more than recuperation from exhaustion, though that is often what we reduce it to. To restore our own essential harmony, it must be a time of grounding, centering, reestablishing balance, and yes, rediscovering beauty, in ourselves and in the world around us.

Around the beginning of the third century, as persecution grew and the decadence of many Roman cities increased, Christians began moving out to the desert and establishing monastic communities. Some of these exist yet today. In addition to the few who chose this as a life, many more found them as temporary places for refuge and retreat, opportunities to rediscover one’s life purpose and find one’s bearings.

The desert can be harsh and it’s foolish and potentially disastrous to enter it unprepared. But time spent in its barrenness also provides a unique opportunity to regain moral and spiritual clarity. We all know how our over stimulated environments can keep us even from hearing our own thoughts. How unsurprising that our lives spin out of control.

Deserts can be simulated in many places, even the corner of a room. What’s important is that in retreat and recreation, we can screen out the noise and commotion, and in silence and purity find the beauty that is both around and within us.