Makoto Fujimura | Writings on Art and Faith

Visual Theology

Makoto Fujimura — 2012-04-10T18:33:01+00:00

On Visual Theology

Not much has been written on visual theology. As this video shows I spent the last two and a half years on a commission to illumine the Four Holy Gospels for the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. Lane Dennis, the founder of Crossway publishing who commissioned me, told me that there has not been a commission given to a single artist to illumine the four Gospels for over 400 years. At first I could not believe this to be true, so I did my own research and found that he was quite right. So not only there is not much written on visual theology, any effort to bring together visual imagery and scriptures is scant as well.

I was brought up bi-culturally, born in Boston, and spending much of my grade school years in Kamakura, Japan. Then my family moved back to US. As an American citizen, I received a Japanese governmental scholarship to study as a National Scholar in the ancient art form of Nihonga, a method that harkens back to 11th century. I was chosen to be part of a long standing lineage of Nihonga masters, and spent six and a half years studying in Tokyo. My works combine my early influences of Abstract Expressionist era painters like Arshile Gorky, de Kooning, or Rothko. It should be noted here that in the Japanese tradition, the merging of images are words are assumed and immense part of their tradition; their language itself is visual, a merging of both Chinese visual ideograms and lyrical phonetic alphabets.

Arshile Gorky

Willem de Kooning

Mark Rothko

Many have pointed out that we are now in a visual age; with the advent of technology, the way we communicate has become visually dominant. The National Endowment for the Arts Reading at Risk studies show that there is a steep decline in reading interest at all ages. We are inundated with images through advertisements, video games and movies. The media saturated world feeds us pop images and easy sound bytes constantly. Some warn that this is a degenerative trend, as images may overwhelm the Word. Though I agree with the observed symptoms of demise, I do not think the Word can be overwhelmed. Rather than responding with fear only, I see an opportunity.

When I recently exhibited at MOBIA (Museum of Biblical Art in New York City's Columbus Circle), my works were displayed in the background to the history of the Bible during these four hundred years. They began with the illumined manuscript of 12th century, then ended with some contemporary versions of printed Bibles. Visual imagery simply decreases in these four hundred years, to the extent that a visual exhibit, as opposed to a historical exhibit, of these four hundred years is simply impossible. My works fell into this great gap, or maybe a rabbit hole, and I was forced to create a new category of what an exhibit of this kind can do.

Exhibition of the Four Holy Gospels paintings at MOBIA alongside historical printings of the King James Bible

When I walk into many churches in America as a visual artist, I keep spiraling down the rabbit hole. There are many admirable qualities to the churches in America, but beauty, especially in visual arenas, is not one of them. We assume that the reason is that we live in a pragmatic world in which everything is measured by so called utility and function. I note "so called" here, because when one considers both utility and function, you should find beauty there, but in America, this is not assumed. The design of now defunct Concorde airplanes, to thriving Apple computers assume both function and utility, but they do it in an efficient, beautiful way. Beauty accompanies function if you really think about it. I can even make a case that something that is ugly is wasteful, as it is not streamlined and does not think of the experience at the user end.

Yet beauty is an afterthought in our everyday lives and in the decision making process of board rooms around the country. Beauty is an afterthought in most elder's meetings and leadership gatherings in parachurch ministries. Likewise, the arts suffer along side beauty, and are orphaned in America.

I find this odd inconsistency in this country, because you do have amazing art that the world thirsts for; like Jazz and Modern Dance. When you travel around Europe or Japan, these Jazz musicians and Modern Dancers are revered to an extent that you might be tempted to say that they are "worshipped." They are treated to five star hotels and people line up to hear them play and see them dance. But when they come home, they have trouble paying their bills. And we think that when we have an opportunity to exhibit the best of America, like in a Superbowl half time show, the only way to do it is to bring Hollywood and Janet Jackson to the stage (here her "wardrobe malfunction" was broadcast in China, for the first time in history, as a proper introduction to American culture).

Pragmatism is seen to dominate the bottom-line decisions in board rooms, Capital Hill, and church leadership meetings. We cut things that are "extra," "nice-to-have-if-you-have-extra-money" categories. So a typical budget meetings go like this. We first put the consideration of beauty as a category, so we create an "arts ministry," or "National Endowment for the Arts," or "local committee for the beautification of Holland, Michigan." We place people who care about these things on these committees. I've been on all of these leadership meetings, except for the "local committee for the beautification of Holland, Michigan." The greater powers to be invite you to present your case to the budget committees; and usually, at the end of the day, they either run out of time or money to allocate. "So sorry," they say, "what you are doing is important, but we just can't afford beauty right now."

Coming out of these pragmatic meeting, feeling utterly depressed, I often feel like a mouse; Fredrick the Mouse to be exact. Fredrick understood beauty when no other mouse, busy with pragmatic work, would. But in the dreary, dark, austerity-measures stricken winters, Fredrick provides the other mice with thoughts of beauty. So undaunted by the pragmatists, I decided to focus on what I call Fredrick the Mouse ministry. I speak beauty into people's lives as I am told that what I do just does not make it to the top of their agendas. I ask them about their children, whose lives exhibit a kind of hunger for beauty and justice. Usually, the person did experience the arts, in the days when the arts were taught in the public schools, when we memorized Shakespeare, or practiced classical music. I met Senators who love Jazz, or Alan Greenspan, who is a jazz musician, or Condi Rice who is an accomplished concert level pianist. I try to remind them to keep that beauty alive in their lives; because in a certain winter days, it may just be the only thing that will keep us alive.

Frederick the Mouse by Leo Lionni

Today, I am speaking to you about Visual Theology, but I have begun with broader concerns, because everything that happens in society is reflected in the church. Jamie A. K. Smith is correct that we are baptized into the secular liturgy of our time. I would push further, and say that this is more than secular vs. sacred liturgy battling back and forth of our minds and imaginations. It is about Life vs. Death. It is about the Life we can live generatively verses commerce driven, celebrity crazed frenzy. When we encounter bodies of casualties like Whitney Houston, or Amy Winehouse, we wonder what struck us. And yet, we do not realize that we have been worshipping the wrong idols all along, and all of us are capable of such misplaced devotions, misaligned liturgies. It's not so much of excluding ourselves from the secular liturgies, but to repent that we have not understood what is a beautiful liturgy, or to discover, for the first time, that gifts and stillness was there all along behind the voices of the casualties of culture wars and flash bulbs going off. It's time to rediscover why and from whom the Greatest Gift of All has come from. But it's more complex than to diagnose and speculate on what went wrong, when really, Houston and Winehouse are just the tip of the iceberg.

There is not much difference between so called "secular" decisions made in the board rooms of America and "sacred" decisions of church session meetings of elders. The church has adopted the corporate model of running churches like businesses. Bill Dyrness is correct when he notes that many of the society's problems starts within the church; so if we find ourselves divided into blue and red states, or divided into races, we can put a mirror to ourselves in the church. Is it possible that we are not a beautiful country, because our worship is not beautiful? Is it possible that we are divided because the churches are divided? So visual theology, and our consideration of beauty, is more than a surface problem that require a cosmetic solution. If we do live in a visual culture, then lack of beauty leads to a dehumanized state of our entire culture; and, I might add, poverty of our theology.

As a Calvinist, I have inherited a certain way of seeing theology and the world. So you might be surprised that I am even speaking of visual theology as a Calvinist. You might even accuse me that what I am saying is too radical of a notion to be considered, that such a thought on visual theology challenges how Reformed thinkers have always thought about the dangers of visual elements for...let's say 400 years. To that, I say, blame Lane Dennis of Crossway to have commissioned me to spend two years thinking about such things as an artist. No, let's not blame him, let's blame the Four Holy Gospels, and what we call the "Good News." As I spent the last two and a half years journeying with this commission, and subsequent exhibits, I am convinced that there is such a thing as a visual theology, and that it matters.

You see, if it was just about artists getting their due, or Jazz musicians getting to pay their rent, or Modern dancers who can sustain their careers without having to pay out of pocket to rehearse, this talk can remain in the category of an arts advocacy, for the need for art in society; but I have become convinced that this was not primarily about the arts. It's about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

So let me go to the Gospel pages, to begin a dialogue. The visual theology I am going to share with you is really small steps toward a development of visual theology. I am taking baby steps. I realized when I began the project that there is no developed visual language that I can rely on, to build upon in recent times. So I had to borrow from elements of the "stones crying out," and borrow from the visual language of Mark Rothko, from William Blake as well as 16th century Japanese scrolls.

William Blake

Take this page as an example:

Matthew 19

You notice there are lines here; and might wonder why there are lines in a passages that speaks of Pharisees arguing with Jesus. When I was beginning my training in Nihonga, one of the disciplines I had to learn was to draw thousands of lines for six months. They gave me many types of brushes, many types of paper and many types of sumi ink. After a while, I learned how to mix mineral pigments with hide glue, so I began to pour colors into wet lines. I learned that depending on the weather, the moisture level, the temperature, the type of water used, the same lines drawn with the same materials did not look the same. This type of tacit knowledge one cannot learn by reading about it on the internet. One has to do due diligence to fail many times, and learn by doing. After drawing the lines, I was asked to copy ancient scrolls, and I learned that these 13th century artists understood these lines and mastered them. I could, so many centuries later, could "read" these lines and commune with the creators of these art works.

In this passage, Jesus is persuading those who have their religiosity figured out that the law is only the basis of God's relationship with us. The laws seemed to me just like the basic lines. plain and rigid to some. Yet Jesus came to fulfill the law, and not to abolish it. So I decided to create a symbolic way of depicting the tension between the Pharisees and Jesus, by drawing these lines. But at the same time, I wanted to represent Jesus' fulfillment of the law, so I poured gold and vermillion into the lines while they were wet. The gold (mixed powder with hide glue) and vermillion (also a finely ground pigment) spreads within the lines as Jesus filled the laws with divinity and his sacrificial blood.

If theology is a way to illumine how God is to be understood, then visual theology is illumination of the Biblical words as expressed by God. Do the images reveal what words cannot? The Word of God is generative, and gives birth to faith. Illuminations, then, should do the same. I am not arguing here to replace or compete with the Word of God at all. One can have the Word of Life at the center of the discussion, and the role of visual design as the lens to see through. The Word of Life gives birth to sensory experiences and intuitive, tacit knowledge.

What I am doing here are akin to what Jeremy Begbie does in Theology Through Music efforts at Duke and Cambridge Universities. Jeremy uses music as a theological base to argue for Gospel centered theology. The rabbit hole I fell into has to do something similar to do with visual theology. Though definitely, I am far behind his efforts in coming up with a cohesive system, and developed understanding. Music and theology share overlaps, and usually the church is far more developed in use of music than the visual arts. Jeremy and I are good friends and we are embarking on a project together right now. I am grateful for his efforts as what he has done so brilliantly in the field of music, and his overall effort for creating a framework for Theology Through the Arts, critical for our discussions here.

Why Theology Through the Arts, and not Theology of the Arts or Theology about the Arts? Jeremy positions theology in a phenomenological sense, to affirm the sensory knowledge base, rather than information, rational base only. There is "play" involved in music, and that alone contributes to much of what is not usually discussed in theology.

Luke 18

This plate shows Luke 18, and it is another page in which I used the lines to depict Jesus' having a tense discussion with the Pharisees. But accidentally, I made a mistake in the top of these pages, and dripped paint. So I endeavored to start over. But then I noticed what this passage was all about, how it ends. Jesus notices that children were trying to get to him, and the disciples trying to keep them at bay, he then invites the children: "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the Kingdom of God."

One thing that children know how to do well is to play, to be messy; beauty intrudes in such simple, innocent ways. My little mess here, and hopefully a mess that reveal theology that is incarnated in paint, followed. As I followed the Spirit into the beautiful mess, a firework of explosive Gospel took place in front of me, in ways only possible with lines and splash that I knew well. I was God's child resting in the lap of a Savior. And He is whispering in my ears that I am not just a child of God, but that I was God's designated prince, that I will inherit all things, so I need to do my best to act like one, to display his Riches that His Heirs possess. We need to indeed reflect the glory, as the princes and princesses of God. We need to extravagantly do so with an abundance of beauty and joy.

Visual theology happens, when we are engaged with scriptures, with fulness of our imaginations. (Visual Theology is Art in Action: it is Art in Action being energized by the Holy Spirit.) It could happen on ordinary Sunday mornings, as shown through these extraordinary sketches by John Hendrix, an illustrator friend. When I Tweeted that I will be speaking on this topic, and asked "Visual Theology - does it exist?" John tweeted back that "That's what I do every Sunday morning!" Visual Theology happened when a group of special education students came into my exhibit of the Four Holy Gospels at Azusa Pacific University; they just went through the historic section of the four hundred years of the KIng James exhibit and were guided into the gallery where my paintings hung. They were quite confused with the discrepancy between the two exhibits - they just could not see the connection. Then the teacher showed them Crossway's the Four Holy Gospel with the colorful images they were seeing. "It was as if life came back into their faces, full of delight...one student asked 'wow, it's ok to draw right in the Bible?' And the teacher said, 'Yes.'" I wonder what would happen if we designed our church bulletins with large margins to encourage such doodling, and made available color pencils and markers. What would happen if we did invite children into our theology, to dance, to improvise, to play and to draw beautifully? You see, it does have to do with the Gospel, in our true identity as the heirs of Christ, as princes and princess of the Great King. The Feast is to come, the Wedding is about to start.

A wedding is planned: and it will require all of our senses, and all of the arts. What wedding have you attended that did not include all of the arts: dance, poetry, design, fashion, culinary crafts? By advocating for the arts, we are planning for the Cosmic Wedding to come. Christians are Wedding Planners. The nard, the precious perfume of Mary spreads with its extravagant, sacrificial aroma to anoint the Bridegroom. "She has done a beautiful things to me," Jesus commended Mary's act. "Whenever the Gospel is told, what she has done will also be told." (Mark 15) May that be true of us.

Yours,

Makoto Fujimura

A Letter to Occupy Wall Street Movement

Makoto Fujimura — 2011-12-03T15:20:43+00:00

Dear Refraction readers:

During time spent with my family over Thanksgiving, I had an engaged conversation with my second son C.J. about the current Occupy Wall Street movement. As I've been writing a "Letter to" series on my website, I decided to add this letter to the collection.

A Letter to the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Dear OWS,

As an artist, I have a love/hate relationship with movements. No artist desires to get lost in a movement, but all artists know they need to be a part of one. Although I founded International Arts Movement over 20 years ago, to help people create in love and fight against the broken art system (and their "movements" of greed), I always felt that I did not bring it into being, but instead that a greater Movement (one that existed from the beginning of time) found me. Perhaps we have that in common. I've since spent many years trying to learn what a true movement ought to be. You are a true movement, OWS, fragile and full of unanswered questions; I want to encourage and implore you to stay fragile and full of unanswered questions.

In your cries against corporate greed and broken governmental systems, your longing for agrarian ethics and your desire to honor the environment, I hear an echo from a writer I have long admired, Wendell Berry. There's much to be learned from this prophet of land ethics and agrarian vision. Here's a quote from his book The Art of the Common Place:

We can understand a great deal of our history - from Cortes' destruction of Tenochtitlan in 1521 to the bulldozer attack on the coalfields four-and-a-half centuries later - by thinking of ourselves as divided into conquerors and victims. In order to understand our own time and predicament and the work that is to be done, we would do well to shift the terms and say that we are divided between exploitation and nurture.

Wendell Berry has been writing for over 50 years on the very themes you are protesting about, developing his view on this division "between exploitation and nurture." You are fighting against exploitation. The systems at large are dehumanized, sometimes even designed to exploit. Yet every movement eventually gains a gravitational force to exploit in return, despite the good intentions of its founders. It is a temptation to institutionalize and be dependent on power holders. We need to remember that every political system, every "greedy" corporation, first began as someone's local vision. The moment we institutionalize, the local movement dies a slow death as it consumes the very resources we are trying to release.

We need to stay humble, stay compact and nimble, to intentionally re-release resources for the greater good. Wendell Berry implores us to "think small" and that requires love. We need to stay small to move into the "nurture" sphere. Love requires a greater sacrifice and ample time. Movements need not to seek immediate gratification but instead to ask a question that will last 500-years; to seek a deeper way of life that affects multiple generations. At the same time, I have come to believe that a true movement cannot be fully planned but should be like spontaneous jazz, always improvising to respond to the now while keeping hope alive for the future. Movements are a miracle of life, a historical threshold.

The value of your movement is in spontaneity, diversity, and flexibility. Do not let extreme ideologies hijack your movement. Do not let the media define who you are. Avoid every temptation to name a spokesperson or a leader, no matter how charismatic that person is. Keep pressing into raising questions more than giving answers. Be generous, mysterious, and enigmatic. A movement is organic and generative, and your passion must be carried into the conversation for the next generation, from Wall Street to dining room table discussions. Above all, do all things out of love.

Out of diversity will come many fresh, renewed perspectives. We have a chance to bring together conservatives and liberals as thoughtful witnesses of protest to the present dangers of our broken economic system and governance. I pray your vision will be sustained in the days to come, so that our culture can move from exploitation to nurture for generations to come.

Yours,

Makoto Fujimura

“Ground Zero” and the “American Dream”

Makoto Fujimura — 2011-08-22T14:06:40+00:00

Available at Amazon

This essay was originally written for Traces Magazine, associated with Crossroads Cultural Center

Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. Elie Wiesel

Background:

On 9/11/2001, one of the engines from the hijacked planes landed in our street, almost killing a pedestrian. For the past ten years, I have become, with my wife and three children, a “Ground Zero” resident. All of our three children attended public schools surrounding the towers. We were, like the pedestrian, spared.

We were allowed to return to our loft, after being exiled for two months, for Thanksgiving of 2001. The stubborn fire that persisted throughout that time at Ground Zero finally went out around Christmas, and our children were able to return to their school building in February of 2002. By that time, Ground Zero was no longer Ground Zero.

No longer a raw, devastating and severe reality, Ground Zero had quickly became sanitized. Cheap trinkets were sold and American flags were waved for all sorts of ideologies. Tourists flocked to the site after the Canal Street entrance was opened. It became the flash point for demonstrations from wars to Islam to American destiny.

Has the concept of the “American Dream” changed since the events of September 11, 2011?

The American Dream: a term coined by historian James Truslow Adams in 1931, meaning "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." Each generation, until recently, passed on a higher expectation for the next generation to follow. I suspect each journey toward the American Dream is also a re-fictioning, or at least a re-telling, of personal narratives. Just as Ground Zero became co-opted, the American Dream can very quickly be short-changed into sheer materialism. Whatever the “American Dream” can mean, it is true that each generation may have its own version. Today, the “American Dream” can be liquid, and certainly elusive, but the incarnation of these ideals can morph and still fit the original definition.

What did 9/11 end, and what did it begin? 9/11 exposed the assumptions behind terms like “Ground Zero” or “American Dream.” For that we need to be grateful. For me, the past decade was an opportunity to think through the consequences of these assumptions. These two terms can be connected in such a reflection.

Theologically, the whole of earth is “Ground Zero.” We live in the fallen world in which every good, true and beautiful reality is quickly idolized to something selfish, greedy and destructive. Christ came to redeem this path to self-destruction by taking on all of our “pride of the flesh” on the Cross. Christ is the God of Ground Zero.

“Ground Zero,” in Christ, can also mean a cancellation point, a new beginning where we can stand on the ashes of the Wasteland we see and still seek renewal and “genesis moments.”

“American Dream” can be a collection of such “genesis moments.” The American Dream does not have to be merely a calculus of how many material possessions we can accumulate; it can be a measurement of happiness based on creative and relational capital. Rather than the blind drive to advance into all the areas of this fragile earth, we can envision to care for her, as Creation Care advocates have noted. Rather than making Darwinian decisions on “limited resources,” we can endeavor to believe that God’s resources, especially the creative and relational capitals, are infinite. Creativity based on love can create a capital of generosity, feeding the world with fresh opportunities rather than fostering competition. Caring for culture (or Culture Care) at large, just as we have began to do for our environment, is a noble goal for the next generation. This does not have to be a socialistic vision, by the way, which is based on limited resources, but can be based on the abundant optimism of what “America” represents. In other words, the “American Dream” does not have to be all about the houses and boats we own, but it can be about the celebration of the prudential and humble steps to steward the infinite Grace that God pours into us. It can become truly about the dreams of an individual, just as Adams defined the term the “American Dream,” to see possibilities even as we grieve, standing on the ashes of Ground Zero, and as we endeavor to pass on hope to future generations.

This will require faith. And one does not even need to be an American to be part of that dream. The American Dream is no longer bound by geography, what passport we own, or what political parties we belong to. A Dream is always meant to be open-sourced, imparted as a gift to those who dare to take on the challenge. Yes, America is a place, a locality. As such, America can be a ferment of experimentation: a place where new ideas can be tried out, tested in the microcosm of that locality, and shared. It can be a nexus of the creative and communal movement of dreamers, gathered to steward the future of the world.

Now, of course, the immediate suspicion will challenge such an optimistic view. The world, certainly, does not operate out of generosity, but individual preservation and even greed. Capitalism depends on this drive. From the faith communities of churches, I can hear dissent as well. Are we meant to be triumphant over the city of men on this side of eternity? And if we are, are we not simply able to push back the darkness for a limited time before corruption sets within us? Are we not simply trying our best to be a force of resistance to the evils of our days until Christ returns? All of these positions are valid. Yet, I submit here a radical thought rising from the ashes of 9/11 and the subsequent financial crisis on Wall Street: capitalism based on only greed is not sustainable, and faith without audacity cannot survive in our extreme climate of pluralism.

Like Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi, we can begin our journey with a position of humility, and radical, audacious faith. We can journey on the winding path upward, praying with the birds’ trills calling each other through the tree branches of pluralism. A community that depends on material capital will only grow with the territorial battles. A community that depends on creative faith and communal vision will thrive even if the whole system of the world, or even the corrupt church of St. Francis’ times, is set against it. Even the financial, political and military “gates of hell” shall not prevail against it.

See Refractions: A Journey of Art, Faith and Humanity, for more essays on our post 9/11 journey

Refractions 36: “The Hyphen of the Sea” - A Journey with Emily Dickinson (Part 1)

Makoto Fujimura — 2011-05-25T16:46:23+00:00

"Lilies - A Study" 12"x12" Mineral Pigments, Oyster Shell on Kumohada

Her homestead appeared on the left, on the genteel slope downhill from Amherst's main street. The brick Federal Revival style house, painted a light ochre with deep mossy green shutters, stands dignified, but if it was not marked as a museum, we would have walked right past it. Standing in the bright rays of the August sun, I tried to imagine the days when Samuel Fowler Dickinson, Emily's grandfather and a founder of Amherst College, built the house. Later, his granddaughter, who called herself a "belle of Amherst", labored in the gardens with Irish workers. Hidden behind trees is Evergreens, the home of Emily's older brother Austin and his wife Susan, who hosted many luminaries of their time including Ralph Waldo Emerson.

That summer, I had been working almost non-stop and semi-sequestered to finish the illumination of the Four Holy Gospels Project. In the face of the impending deadline, my family and I still chose to make our annual vacation up north, and, this year we decided to stop by the Emily Dickinson Homestead. It was, most likely, the last trip we would take before our children headed off to college. With images of illuminations dancing about in my mind, I convinced my teens that Emily Dickinson is worth learning more about, whose writings, I reasoned, seem to me as much illuminations as poetry.

Inside the "museum," which is really a home turned into an archive of Emily Dickinson's life, we were invited to take a tour. Our guide Ms. Hawthorne (she was, in fact, distantly related to Nathaniel) started by reciting one of Emily Dickinson's poems. My two teens later told me that they rolled their eyes when she started, but by the end they found themselves intrigued. Ms. Hawthorne rather skillfully guided us through the house, telling many stories and reciting more poems. She also provided a look into the very spare, small, upstairs bedroom of Emily Dickinson, where her tiny square desk - only seventeen and a half inches across - still sat.

Emily Dickinson, a diminutive "chestnut haired" girl with amber eyes the color of "Sherry in the Glass," stands quite unique in literary history. While in her lifetime she was often compared to both a porcupine and a ghost, she has since fascinated many as the "reclusive" poet of Amherst and her poems have engendered thousands of academic papers and a remarkable array of books from scholarly to botanical. And yet, when she died in 1886 at the age of 55, she was not known as a poet, but as a gardener, and a baker. Her lineage was well known; a granddaughter of Samuel Fowler Dickinson, and the daughter of Edward Dickinson, a successful lawyer, the Amherst College Treasurer and a one-term member of the House of Representatives. People remembered her for the flowers and baked goods that she sent to ill friends with a poem, though it seems her flowers and her gingerbread were more appreciated.

She started out with a minority of female students allowed to attend Amherst Academy (which became Amherst College) and later Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College.) At Amherst Academy she studied "mental philosophy, Geology, Latin and Botany", was introduced Darwinian concepts, and wrestled with her faith. Mary Lyons, the founder of Mount Holyoke Seminary, regularly divided her students into three categories: 1) Committed followers of Christ ("Christians"), 2) Seeking to become a Christian ("Hopers"), and 3) Those without hope ("No-Hopers). Lyons placed Emily in the third category. Despite the waves of revivalism sweeping Amherst, in which Dickinson's family members and friends found conversion, she refused to participate. Emily wrote to her friend Jane Humphrey:

Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered,
even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am
standing alone in rebellion.

That "rebellion" may have been awakened early, by the sudden death of Emily's thirteen year old friend Sophia Holland; an event that affected her so deeply that she fell ill and had to take time off from school. She was then an exceptionally private but articulate young girl, whose early childhood letters demonstrate her enthusiasm for learning and writing through witty and verbose, run-on sentences. Reading her life's letters is an ongoing encounter with death and one sees her run-on sentences replaced by many dashes. Each death drew Emily Dickinson toward deep, lifelong lament and isolation. Although each death encountered could have been an opportunity to exercise the Puritan teaching of seeking the eternal, Dickinson felt each loss so keenly that she began instead to deeply question God's goodness. As she matured in her rejection of Calvinistic theology, her satirical language would only sharpen.

Emily Dickinson traveled fairly often as a young girl, but later in her life, she rarely left her home. She was never a "recluse," however. It is more likely that she suffered from some type of illness, likely a mild form of epilepsy. She eventually exiled herself from marriage and social functions, choosing instead to live on the margins and, later in her life, care for her ill mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson. When her father died suddenly before her mother, an event of severe consequence to her psyche, she could not bear to attend the funeral and never, as far as the records show, even visited the grave site.

Unbeknownst to even her family, Emily Dickinson composed over 1800 poems over the span of six years - often late at night or during the early morning hours - on her small cherry wood desk. This generative period fell between 1858 and 1864, a time during which the Civil War escalated and her father, a Congressman, involved himself in the Union cause. Emily physically amassed her writings, creating what is now called her "fascicles," by binding them by hand into bundles of poems. She then placed them in a small chest beneath her bed, where, after her death, they were discovered by her sister Lavinia. There were no notes attached and she left no instructions.

Emily Dickinson was, by all accounts, a first-rate gardener. She could even be called a botanist - an interest prompted by her studies at Amherst Academy and further developed through the cultivation of her garden. Hearing of the extraordinary biodiversity within the Dickinsons' garden, even Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape designer of Central Park, paid a visit to the homestead (although the garden he heard of was the Evergreens - Emily's brother's next door property - so it's unlikely Olmsted ever knew of Emily Dickinson's labor). Wanting to encourage her botanical interests, perhaps more than her interest in poems, Emily's father created a conservatory, or what Emily called "the garden off the dining room" (L 279).

A good gardener knows that a good bulb, properly planted, will eventually break ground, and appear to the world when the time is ripe. Emily Dickinson "buried" her poems beneath her body as she lay dying. They were planted beneath her as both a depository of her future grace and as her "letters to the world." Given now that the soil of culture is stained with bloodshed, atrocities and de-humanization, it seems that her good bulbs were not only resilient, but tenaciously made for such a time as ours, waiting to blossom in our wretched days.

Even then as the Second Great Awakening spread to Amherst and beyond, and as the country saw the dark specters of bloodshed of the Civil War approach, Dickinson only became more prolific in her letter and poem writing. Perhaps her writing began in rebellion and avowed independence, but surely they did not end there. She was a generous, refractive poet who took her deep wrestling of doubt and faith, of death and gardens, into a deep, theological realm, stitching them together in acute but lyrical expressions with formidable intensity. Her liquid, nimble words spread scent of mystery into our fear-stricken days. Her incandescent words are a needed gift to us, given by a thoughtful, but private, neighbor of botanical renown, taking root deeply in our "Ground Zero" ashes.

In 1879, she wrote a poem called The Humming-bird:

#1463 *

The Humming-bird

A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head, -
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning's ride.

This playful poem is an illumination. The mention of emerald and cochineal burgundy dye extracted from a little Indian beetle, a dye that I use in my work, only reinforces the pictorial quality of her poems. Her mention of Tunis, a North African city, connotes exotic adventure within a place where splendors of the past are hidden and revealed. Because she spent her life in Amherst, Tunis serves more as a mental than physical location. Her references to foreign cities are comparable to van Gogh's perceptions of "Japan"--a foreign place of paradise inaccessible to the artist. The "route of evanescence" of a hummingbird lends such exotic splendor to a mail carrier's ordinary "morning ride." This is a good example of how the very structure of Dickinson's writings seem to visually echo what she saw and observed in nature-- the iambic rhythm of these verses, the slant rhymes (wheel/cochineal, head/ride) alternating between verses, and the alliterations (resonance/rush, tumbled/Tunis) weaving in and out of her poems, just like a hummingbird seeking nectar.

The slant rhymes and alliterations are delicately layered, acting as visual devises because they are not full rhymes. We are forced to examine the words visually and see the echos rather than settle on sounds perfectly rhymed. The reader can sense the poet's childlike, playful exuberance she feels when she sees the tiny dash of a bird and its many sudden pauses. The fantastical allusion of "mail from Tunis" suggests a sense of anticipation, as if the bird is a letter from an unexpected source, even from a foreign country. Emily herself is the "blossom of the bush", "[adjusting] its tumbled head" in anticipation. The poem is a painting, with many layers and colors of overlapping sounds, images, and meaning.

Emily Dickinson acutely observed a singular, momentary event, only seconds long, and she expanded the glimpse of that micro experience into a vast adventure. This is the nature of the poetic gift--the poet takes a quick glance, a moment most of us would not even see, and expands it to a cosmic level of significance. Dickinson's ability to see the divine in nature is reminiscent of St. Francis. There is a certain Eucharistic reality to her words, or at least a longing toward that transport of the spirit into matter, a humble but profound mystery. Thus, it is not surprising that she might focus, or obsess, over a verse of scripture such as "consider the lilies" and consistently let that verse anchor her life and poems.

The first chapter of this series of Refractions online will focus on Emily Dickinson's reading of Matthew six, in which Jesus addresses "consider the lilies."

William Blake, a poet and engraver who lived a half century before Dickinson, wrote:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wildflower
Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour

Emily Dickinson saw "a Heaven in a Wildflower," and seemed even from childhood to have the capacity to "hold infinity in the palm of [her] hand." Her writings provoke in us an attentiveness, even obsessiveness, to the "minute particulars" of Reality. But then, as we pursue her words, we are drawn into a deeper mystery, a labyrinth beneath the particularity of her creation.

If her poems are illuminations, then the deeper question one can ask is, "What was she illumining." Was it the Bible? My answer is "Yes - No - Yes." Emily Dickinson did not exhibit a conventional faith that would count her as a follower of Jesus. Yet every poem, either directly or indirectly, whether by affirming or denying, alludes to her identity as a daughter of Calvinist Amherst. Her liquid faith took her to a liminal arena, an in-between space between faith and doubt, art and science, poetry and life. For such a liminal journey, the most significant symbol is the dash - ; the dash between words, in this case, between "yes," "no" and at the end of her life a definitive "Yes." Dashes became Dickinson's most idiosyncratic poetic device as she matured as a poet. Even the letters she wrote at the end of her life are full of these interruptions and connectors. Just like the humming-bird that weaved in and out of her gardens, following her dashes into the unknown, let us move into the liminal edge of the indelible, illumined words of Emily Dickinson.

*from Thomas H. Johnson's Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Thank you to Dr. Roger Lundin, the author of Emily Dickinson: the Art of Belief for serving as an invaluable advisor to this series of essays

Belhaven University Commencement Address

Makoto Fujimura — 2011-05-02T13:15:46+00:00

"Fire and Rose are One" Collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Mineral Pigments on Kumohada 89x66"

The Aroma of the New

I am grateful to be given this honor: an honor that is symbolic of the commitment to the arts that Belhaven University, Dr. Roger Parrot, and your Board of Directors have made. You are making a statement; that the arts are fundamental to the core of higher education. The arts are not a peripheral luxury for the elite few, but a central necessity, how a civilization is to be deﬁned, and how our humanity is to be restored. The arts, like the spring flowers all about Belhaven this day, bring the aroma of the New.

I have just returned from Japan where I saw ﬁrst hand the enormous devastation from 3/11—the massive earthquake, the Tsunami, and the ongoing nuclear disaster. I visited the small ﬁshing village of Ishinomaki in northern Japan, a beautiful coastal town swept away by a series of tsunamis, one of which reached 30 meters high. My friend Emiko, who grew up in Ishinomaki, now ﬁnds her home and her parentsʼ business gone, though they themselves were spared having been in Tokyo at the time. The aroma—the stench—of death ﬁlled the air as I walked about the region. I saw rice ﬁelds inundated with salt water, ﬁshing vessels in the middle of streets, trucks still ﬂoating in the rivers. After a month, volunteers with masks and orange overalls are still helping residents salvage what they can, helping one house at a time.

One 17-year-old, whose parents and her grandparents were swept away by the Tsunami, returned home to ﬁnd nothing there worth salvaging, came to the House of Prayer while I was visiting. It was place where a team of missionaries had been giving out basic necessities and they had just set up shower stalls. This met a supreme need for the tsunami-stricken Japanese whose culture celebrates, and needs, cleanliness. I could not imagine what she felt as the hot water washed over her for the ﬁrst time in a month. I wondered if she could feel the waters at all, or what the waters signiﬁed to her.

As I was driven back to Tokyo, we went through Fukushima prefecture, staying far west, away from the dark shadow of the nuclear power plant as much as the road would allow. The Zao mountain range appeared beyond the clouds, with cherry blossoms in full bloom, enchanting the villages tucked away in the crevices between the mountains. It was hard to see scenes of such beauty—of the trunks of the trees, the wet-darkened barks. The disaster was freshly etched in my mind—thousands were still unaccounted for. My heart felt numb and the beauty I now saw seemed cruel.

“April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.”

So begins The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, which he wrote in 1922. April is indeed cruel with the lilacs, or right now in Japan, the cherry blossoms at the highest realm of beauty, invading the “memory and desire” of our war- and tsunami-ravaged heart. We are awakened to horrors and terrors, but Nature does not wait until we stop grieving. It moves on, as does the world, without empathy or knowledge of what really happened. My visit to Japan echoed the lament that Eliot spoke of, where beauty and trauma are forced to dwell together.

Today, you begin a new journey, and for you it is a bright April, full of hope. But we must also remember that for many April has been the “cruellest month.” We must learn to engage with such intractable realities—to engage our creativity within the harsh confines of our broken world and the wide spaces of creating the “world that ought to be.”

My paintings have become a lament of sorts over the years, weaving in and out of our Ground Zero conditions into “The Still Point of the Turning world.” I use the traditional Japanese materials of Nihonga to paint with—pulverized pigments, gold, silver, and platinum. These materials themselves have to be pulverized and pounded to become beautiful. It seems that the reﬁner’s ﬁre continues to burn, and we have no choice but to go through the process. And in such a journey, every ideology is tested and found wanting. Our faith in God, too, is tested

Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist, noted that we live in a Liquid Modern time. Post-modernity, he notes, is not solid, but liquid, and constantly shifting. The old allegiances to solidity that we assumed in modernity, are now replaced by uncertainty. Our foundations are shifting under us. We have seen in recent times the solidity of our economic system collapse in front of our eyes. We are now facing new questions in the security behind the use of nuclear power facilities. We are ﬁnding that in every sphere—in the arts and sciences, business and politics—there has also been a tsunami of sorts. Paradigm shifts are taking place. How many times have we heard the word “unprecedented” in news headlines today? Bauman writes:

It would be imprudent to deny, or even to play down, the profound change which the advent of ‘fluid modernity’ has brought to the human condition. The remoteness and unreachability of systemic structure, coupled with the unstructured, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics, change that condition in a radical way and call for a rethinking of old concepts that used to frame its narratives. Like zombies, such concepts are today simultaneously dead and alive. The practical question is whether their resurrection, albeit in a new shape or incarnation, is feasible; or - if it is not - how to arrange for their decent and effective burial.

Because of this uncertainty, the insecurity and lack of safety in liquid modern times, we will have to confront increased cynicism and despair. The path of despair is what I am afraid many Japanese will choose in the next years. To give up hope, imbibe despair, and choose to end their lives. If we do not teach our children and ourselves what we imagine and hope for, if we do not seek to define that elusive “world that ought to be,” then the culture of cynicism will define it for us. We are awash in apathy and terror. Thus to create in those waters, we must have more than an optimist’s escapism. Today, to create is to hope. To create is to live.

True Art does not chase after novelty—it is a sensory quest toward the New order of what God is creating, toward fully realized humanity. Using our senses, Art poses deeper questions, rather than giving easy answers. To be truly human in a liquid reality, we must re-define what the culture of fear and cynicism deems as the “world that ought to be.” "The World that Ought" to be is not an utopia; it is instead created out of sacrificial love. To love is to quest for the “World that Ought to Be.” Love is enduring and love uses all of our senses. Love is generative, and will create the stage for the New to appear. The role of the artist in a liquid reality is to awaken all of our senses through creativity and love.

Mary of Bethany, the quintessential artist, brought the extravagant nard to anoint Jesus in John 11, transgressing against the cultural norms of the day. The wedding perfume she poured upon Jesus was the only earthly possession Jesus took to the Cross. That aroma anticipated what is to come. A sacrifice of love co-mingled with the aroma of the New. Aroma created a liquid reality that transcended the chaos of the darkest day of Jesus' journey. The aroma anticipated a Wedding; a royal, cosmic wedding.

The best of the arts, then, probe through our senses to the “memory and desire,” hovering between life and death, despair and hope. And yet, the best of the arts also point to, or even re-deﬁne, the World to come, causing us to rise up, like Lazarus, from the dark tomb of cynicism and despair.

My wife and I recently went to see a production of Our Town by Thornton Wilder at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York City. David Cromer, the founder of the theatre, played the narrator role magniﬁcently. On the spare, dark stage, the famed story of a small New England town was brought to life. One scene in particular stood out to me. It was when young Emily, who died giving birth, is caught somewhere between life and death, ﬁghting to recover her memory. She is given the opportunity to move back in time to her 12^th birthday.

At this point, the stark colors of the small stage begin to change. And faintly, we in the audience begin to detect an aroma. At ﬁrst, we think that it is a nearby restaurant cooking their dinner for customers. But the aroma of bacon and eggs continues to ﬁll the theatre. The producers had a surprise in store for us. The entire back stage opens up to reveal yet another stage, ﬁlled with color and light. Real bacon and real eggs are being cooked by Emily’s mother. Emily’s memory, though fading away, is depicted as more real than the “reality” of the main stage, or even of the gravesite in which the other characters stoically sit. Before Emily returns from her vision to die, she is given, perhaps for the ﬁrst time, a full experience of Reality—fully engaging our senses in the process.

What if there is a Reality behind the reality we know? What if there is a Stage behind the stage of our life? What if our “memory and desire” points to a greater Reality? What if Emily’s liminal state can be reversed from Death to Life, at least in the audience’s experience? The smell of the bacon is REAL, and poses powerful questions about the nature of reality, and the nature of art.

Of course, the effect on the audience is that we witness Emily’s memories fading away, and we are made to feel the coldness of the earth. She settles comfortably into the graveyard with the others, losing herself in the process. This is a lament of what is lost, what is being washed away. It’s a comment on the modern condition—that even before death, we are sense-less, only half alive.

For Emily, the memory fades. But for the audience, her memory has become a new reality, full of the aroma of the New. That is the power of the arts. The arts can remain a fresh experience, even though the memory and desire fade.

In our liquid time, art needs to become the aroma of bacon and eggs. It is not the art of the novel, but the art of the familiar that awakens our memory of the core essence of our lives, to the morning of our twelfth birthdays. With all solid notions being washed away, as new fears of our days creep into our consciousness, we must insist on reminding people that there is a Stage behind the stage, a Reality behind the reality. But instead of reminding people of the cold earth, we need to awaken the deposit of what is to come. There is a banquet waiting for us beyond the veil. If all is in ﬂux, our task is to touch the fragile earth with the promise of heaven. Create the “still point of the turning world” in the eye of the storm of life. The Gospel of Jesus makes this possible.

Think of John 21. Here Jesus, in his post-resurrection glory, is cooking breakfast on the beach, and he invites his disciples to partake. Think of the ﬁsh he is cooking. Where did he get this ﬁsh? Did he simply create the ﬁsh at will? Or cause it to jump into his ﬁre? And he is eating in his post-resurrection body. So was the ﬁsh resurrected as well? The aroma invites his incredulous disciples to partake, not only in a conversation with the resurrected Savior, but in a meal—a post-resurrection meal. The new Kingdom arrives with an aroma, the aroma of the New.

What the producers of Our Town touched, perhaps unconsciously, was a chord of realization, a hunger, that points to what is to come. The world may call this The World that Ought to Be; C.S. Lewis called it Sehnsucht(pronounced [ˈzeːnzʊxt]), a German word that can be translated as “a longing.”

He stated in his essay “The Weight of Glory”:

For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

I am going to go a bit further than Lewis here. I am convinced that art and music, while not the Thing itself, contain the aroma, the actual aroma, of the New. Artists, whether cognizant of Christ or not, detect this aroma. Bacon and eggs point to that reality. Therefore, you, graduates of Belhaven, have already tasted the aroma of the New. When you dance, when you play your violin, when you draw, what you see, and hear and smell and touch, it all invites you into the aroma of the New. The two worlds, the old and the New, are connected in the arts. Typically, we stop to think about such “idealistic” enchantment and say dismiss it by saying something like, “Well that performance was glorious...but we must now return to reality and do something useful with our lives.” (Or to say, as a performer, seeking some sort of an Utopia, “Oh, we could have done that better.”) Pragmatism will revert us, like Emily in Our Town, back to cold earth and deadened senses.

The World that Ought to be is that which is already imbedded in our senses. God’s hand touches us, even through the cold earth of death and despair, even though we are being washed away in the sea of Liquid Modernity. The Gospel is an aroma, the aroma of the New. And the aroma will reach us, even in the darkest despair.

Tolkien knew of such a world:

"The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater." - Haldir of Lothlorien

Love, my friends, is today mingled with grief. And yet love grows greater. Create in and through that love. Calm the seas of your anxiety and infuse new life deep into the poisoned wells of culture.

“There are many dark places but still there is much that is fair.”

Come and dance, play and paint upon your Ground Zero ashes. That is how we must now love the world. Step into the receding (cultural) waters ﬁlled with poison, but do it with faith. Then the stench of death will be replaced by the aroma of the New. The Stage behind the stage will open up, and instead of being forced to surrender to the cold earth, we will dance upon the waters, hear new sounds, and create new colors.

*Fuller, more developed, version of this address will be published in Books and Culture in the summer.

Belhaven University to Honor Makoto Fujimura

Makoto Fujimura — 2011-04-14T00:19:12+00:00

Makoto Fujimura will deliver the commencement address to the class of
2011 at Belhaven University's Jackson, MS campus on April 30th. At
this time he will also be presented with an Honorary Doctorate in
recognition of his artistic career, as well as his contributions to
leadership in the Arts.

Belhaven University is a Christian liberal arts university with six
campuses across the South Eastern United States. Belhaven is also
distinguished as one of only 30 colleges in the U.S. offering degrees
in all four areas of the Arts: Music, Theatre, Dance, and Visual Arts.

Find out more at http://www.belhaven.edu/

“Withoutside”: Transgressing in Love

Makoto Fujimura — 2010-12-09T15:28:56+00:00

Originally written for Image Journal: Twentieth Anniversary Issue, Issue 60

In 1992, Jeffery Deitch, an influential Soho Gallery owner, curated an exhibit called “Post-Human.” In the catalogue he wrote:

What we do know is that we will soon be forced by technological advances to develop a new morality. We will need to build a new moral structure that will give people a framework of how to deal with the enormous choices they will have to make in terms of genetic alteration and computerized brain enhancement. We will have to face decisions not only about what looks good, but what IS good or is bad about the restructuring of the mind and body. The limits of life will no longer be something that can be taken for granted. We will have to create a new moral vision to cope with them. In the future, artists may no longer be involved in just redefining art. In the post-human future artists may also be involved in redefining life. Jeffery Deitch, Post-Human catalogue. http://www.artic.edu/~pcarroll/PostHuman.html)

We need to consider what it means to be “fully human” from the context of Jeffery Deitch’s provocative and alert observation. An artists’ role, if Deitch is correct, has radically shifted from “redefining art” to “redefining life.” Thus, the arts must begin to synthesize with ethics, the sciences and philosophy; artists are confronted with both the terrors of that reality and the responsibility of that calling.

This call will require a paradigm shift in how we think about our arts, and as we face the Chimera that future will bring us, I fear we are not equipped for the complexity and explosive realities. But it is, as Deitch reminds us, a road we have embarked on already, with a point of no return.

We cannot begin to “redefine life” without invoking the questions of the Creator and creation. We must begin with the ontological quest of the Creator’s role in speaking life into existence, and the sustaining power of creation. And the arts did not fully reject this ontology until recently, because up to the end of the 20^th century, we could rest on the memory of the Judeo Christian heritage. Now as the memory is fading, we may need a radical strategy.

Contemporary art has sought to expand the borders of expression, claiming unlimited expansion for the sake of freedom of expression, often using shock as a means to draw attention to herself, and blatantly challenging boundary making. In a recent catalogue accompanying the Guggenheim exhibit of Matthew Barney, curator Nancy Spector notes how Barney intends, in his installations, to blur the distinctions created in Genesis passages one by one. She acknowledges, in the catalogue essay, for the artist to “contest the laws of differentiation is thus to challenge the very word of God.”[1]

Freedom of expression, then, became an overriding goal, and any boundary making, especially to respect the Genesis distinctions or any other Biblical categories would be seen as anti-freedom, and anti-art. But I contend that such an approach has impoverished the artistic language of our day, rather than enriched it. We have shrunk into ideological knots, full of surfeit trickery, rather than true exploration of expressive borders. And as a result, we have dehumanized ourselves in our obsessive focus on self-expression.

What if we considered limitations as the beginning of our creative acts, to see the boundaries of life (and death) as the starting point of our discussion? If we are to honor such a reality, then, paradoxically, we may see beyond them. Limitations can be a catalyst to find freedom. That is what the Incarnation of Christ teaches us. Jesus
“Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing.” (Phil. 2:6,7) By humbling Himself, he lifted all of us broken human beings with Him. Following Christ is also to recognize and honor the limits and boundaries of being human; less is more.

In William Blake’s Jerusalem, he coined the word “Withoutside.” We vacillate between needing the boundaries of “with/outside” and needing the freedom of “without/side.” As we do, perhaps it is possible to expand the borders of art in both ends of the spectrum of human potential and brokenness. But our call at first is to deal with the excess of our past, to turn towards humble, normative human acts. Then, paradoxically, we must also seek excellence, to reach for the stars of artistic promise, to seek generative solution to cure the impoverishment of the language of art.

The first part of this journey, “with/outside,” will involve a willingness to volunteer restrictions on choice, such as honoring traditions and communities, to allow for the roots of our expressions take deeply in the soil of culture. We may need to pause and give birth (perhaps literally) in order to be human now. Even raising children, and other such self-discipline of not making art can be the “art form” of our new century. This could be the most transgressive art of our times. For if our starting point is no longer in our capacity to make (an Aristotelian definition of art), but also in our capacity to destroy (as in the Manhattan project), our Ground Zero lives should begin anew with the basics. In such a time as this, our songs may sound more like lamentation than celebration. In facing the sinister, active forces at work in culture, our strategy may seem invisible to the powerful, and powerless as a newborn, our focus localized to the minute particulars of our daily lives. And at such times, rebellion may look like ordinary human activities simply done in faith. We are, after all, attempting to draw life unto death by scratching our lines in the ashes of ground zeros all around us. Perhaps we need to start with loving each other.

The contaminated ashes of Ground Zero do threaten our imaginative journeys, threatening to sap us of hope for that future, and fill us with revenge and fear. The prophet Jeremiah knew that in such exilic times of uncertainty, he can still proclaim with deep, resounding hope:

…my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:20-23)

So can we. Let the truth, though, dwell deeply in us that in order for this hope to reign some Other must be “pierced” first. And this Other became the “laughing stock of all my people” and become filled with “bitter herbs.” (Lamentations 13-15) Jesus, the Other of our souls, is the only one who can draw mystery into the ashes of our lament and breathe life into our dry bones. Jesus is the only true Artist and true Human yet.

On the other hand, the second part of the “without/side” journey requires passionate and compassionate breaking of boundaries, like the extravagant aroma of Mary’s nard poured upon Jesus. Christ raised her brother Lazarus from the grave. The resurrection Life touched her, and she had to respond. She rushed to bring the expensive bottle of nard that she, and her family, had probably saved for her own wedding. She was not supposed to come into a room full of male disciples. But she did. She intuited that the costly suffering would await her Lord, and thus had to anoint the future King. She, fearfully and wonderfully, broke the jar in thanksgiving. What she could not have expected was Christ’s response. The impermanent gesture would become part of an imperishable story. Christ commends her act to the disgruntled disciples: “Leave her alone…Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” (Mark 14:6, 9)Our effort to convey the gospel, too, must be filled with the same type of beautiful devotional transgression. Mary’s intuition, triggered by her brother’s temporary resurrection, anticipated the cross, but also opened a new chapter of creativity in a post-resurrection reality.

Bishop N.T Wright calls this reality of post-resurrection “Life after Life after Death.” We are to bank on the future, storing our treasures in Heaven. But that is only the beginning. Heaven comes then to fill the earth, transforming the old earth into the New Earth. In describing “Life after Life after Death,” Wright notes that God will use our earthly effort, done in faith, as a conduit for that transformation to come. In this post-resurrection reality, apparently, we can learn to create backwards, not out of our wretched humanity, but out of our full humanity to come.

We create from the outside in, with/outside and without/side. Instead of focusing on self-expression as our culture teaches us, we allow God’s Life, both here and not yet, to invade ours, to mold our expressive hearts, so that we can be released from the bondage of decay (Romans 8). Our future humanity can flow through our art now. Celebrity culture will tempt us to be the center of our creative acts. But the center shall be “the still point of the turning world.” (T.S. Eliot) where true creativity is to be birthed, unleashing the future grace into the eye of the storm. This takes the shedding of egos, but then, with prayer, God will quietly impregnate our imagination as the storm rages all around us.

That child of “withoutside” could only be conceived in the ashes of Post-Humanity-- that is our lot. We are princes and princesses born in the pit of Ground Zero. But we are heirs nevertheless (Romans 8) waiting to be revealed. Every fairytale points to it. A celebration is coming.

So rather than “redefining life,” as Deitch would have it, we let the Life (after Life after Death) define us. In our studios, in our rehearsal halls, in our libraries, and research facilities, we wrestle with the Chimera waiting to be named in our new century. We need to remind each other that we are co-heirs with Christ, and have been given author-ity to write and create our future Reality into being, thereby ruling over the new creation. If the world transgressed in “selfism”[2] to create the monster, then we need to transgress in love to tame it. We are embarking on a generational journey that requires more than our singular, individual success. What we built in faith upon the old earth, like the Sacramental wine and bread, should be familiar but extraordinary. We need to live our lives artfully, and create our art humanly. Our sacrifice to anoint the great Artist will be remembered and the aroma spread in the New Earth. Artists are the stewards of the old earth, but the imaginative conduit of the New. And we do not need to even make art to be part of that glorious picture.

[1] The Cremaster Cycle, Matthew Barney, Page 23 (Guggenheim)

[2] Paul Vitz

A Letter to Young Artists

Makoto Fujimura — 2010-11-01T15:10:39+00:00

Crossway Matthew 14 (6x6"), Mineral Pigments on Kumohada

Dear Young Artist:

Remember your first love—how much you enjoyed creating as a child. If you ever lose that sense of joy, you will need to reflect on why you lost that spark. Of course, the craft of expression takes much “dying to self” and much discipline. A discipline of any form takes perseverance. But when we are going through a period of training, we must remember the reason for our training. Our journey needs to have a specific direction. Our direction need not be toward being successful and being famous. We need to start from your first love; what we cherish, what we are, and what we value. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

C. S. Lewis writes about what the Bible calls the “Good News”: “God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature” (Mere Christianity, p. 167). The message of Jesus has been distorted in recent times in culture. The gospel of Jesus is not a message that we can be trained to run faster and jump higher in a race of moralism. The historic work of Jesus is still relevant in the Twenty-First Century because, despite the advancement in technology and communication, the distance between us is greater, and the bloodshed of hatred continues to spill, spreading our “Ground Zero” conditions all over the world. We cannot possibly meet God’s standard of righteousness and goodness. We do not love each other. We cannot even keep our own promises, let alone God’s commands. St. Paul reflects on his own efforts of trying to meet God’s standard and confesses: “What a wretched man I am!” (Romans 7:24) And he emphatically states, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Jesus’ love for us can only be received as a gift. Only when we rest upon himas a gift,does he give us wings, to hover between heaven and earth. These wings are gifts of grace, aligned to the original intention for our being. Our journey will begin in a Garden and end in a City. We are headed toward the City of God, a reconciled city, humanity, nature and God.

Since I do not assume you to be necessarily religious, let me call this state of flight “future grace.” When we focus on future grace, then our current reality of frustration becomes an opportunity, not a set back. We will, no doubt, battle with our pride, our ego, in doing so. We have been taught to be self-sufficient, that the ego is the only source of creativity. Lewis’ suggestion is that there is a greater source outside of ourselves to create from. There will be a quiet joy even within that wrestling. In that world to come, you are already famous and successful. You just can’t hear the sounds of accolades yet. You already know that the creative journey is not an easy one. Lewis continues in the same passage, “But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so…The lumps on the shoulders…may even give it an awkward appearance.”

Have you ever felt awkward, and felt the “lumps”? If you are an artist, perhaps you began your journey realizing that you are different from others. We have gotten used to having these “lumps” and accepted the fact that to the world the “lumps” looks strange and unnatural. Your teachers and your friends may not fully understand your intuition to try to fly with your winged “lumps.” What started out, at first, as trying to be yourself, may have become an effort to shield and protect your true identity from the world. Perhaps rebellion became the only path you could journey on. Your “lumps” became a defense mechanism, or even a weapon.

What if Lewis is right, and you are destined to “fly”? What if our awkwardness, and our uniqueness points to the potential of the person we are meant to become? In order to learn to fly, you need to be patient, and ready to experience many failures; we need an environment where we can fail often, but you also need opportunities to peer into the wonders and mysteries of the vista of the world to come. Since many, including those in the institutions of the schools or churches, will not understand, you may have to create “fellowship” yourself. Do not be surprised by their rejections.

In Mark chapter 14, there is a story of a woman who broke all the social rules to get to Jesus, in a small room full of his male disciples. Mary brought a jar she had been saving for her wedding, and we are told that the jar of nard cost a person’s annual wages. When Mary barged in, broke the jar and poured her expensive perfumed oil upon Jesus’ feet, Judas and the other disciples responded, “What a waste!” In the same way the world may see what you do and see what you are doing as wasteful extravagance. The male disciples were shocked because what she did was not only extravagant, but sexual. The only time that aroma of perfume wafts into the air is on wedding nights! But Jesus said to all: “Leave her alone… Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me… I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (Mark 14:6, 9). What a commendation! Jesus, the ultimate Artist, recognized Mary as an artist, transgressing in love*.

Strict moralism has never produced great art. Like Mary’s expensive oil, our expression flows out as a response to grace in our lives. Even if you are not cognizant of a grace reality, you can still create in the possibility of future grace. That takes faith to do, but if you can do that, you will be joining so many artists of the past who wrestled deeply with faith, doubt, poverty, rejection, longing and yet chose to create. Know that the author of creativity longs for you to barge in, break open the gift you have been saving; he will not only receive you, he can bring you purpose behind the battle, and rebuke those who reject you. Mary’s oil was the only thing Jesus wore to the cross. He was stripped of everything else, but art can sometimes endure even torture. A friend of mine said that in the aroma of Christ, Mary’s oil mixed with Christ’s blood and sweat, there are da Vincis and Bachs floating about. He will bring your art, music and dance to the darkness of death, and into the resurrection of the third day.

So endeavor to create generatively. Don’t be a critic when you create. You can look at your work later and discern what is good. Your growth as an artist is not in being able to impress others, or even God.

Growth comes by understanding how limited you are. Learning to use your wings means learning the discipline as a means to grace. Give yourself boundaries and goals; start with small things, like having a small table dedicated to your poems. Emily Dickinson wrote her poems on a small 18 inch by 18 inch desk in her room in Amherst. Do not put anything other than your poems, though, on that area. Guard against the world invading your boundaries. Learning to paint, play the piano, or dance has much to do with keeping your self-set boundaries, otherwise you will not own your craft. We are each given unique wings with unique particulars of how to use our wings; no one else can fly for you. You have to jump off the edge, and spread your wings.

Pray. Even if you do not regard yourself as religious, pray. As Simone Weil wrote, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Artists know instinctively the artistry behind the prayer of the faithful. Pray that our imagination be “baptized” by this future grace. Pray through your materials. Go into galleries and museums and pray so that you can learn to “see.” Listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Charlie “Bird” Parker’s Burnin’ Bird and pray that you can “hear” the music behind the music. Go see Our Town and Othello, and pray that you can experience the drama pulsing through our lives. May your work become a prayer, an offering.

Saint Paul wrote: “creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (Romans 8:19). The whole realm of nature waits for our arrival onto the stage of life. God “frustrates” creation so that the very groaning of life produces expression by children of God. In the theater of life, we see in the darkness and suffering all around us a world that beckons for our arrival. Our creative endeavors are mandated to begin with that understanding of suffering and darkness. Art helps us to confront darkness head-on. For that reason, you must not cease to create, even in the darkest of hours; by creating, you can participate in announcing that great arrival. You can also help your community to articulate their suffering, with a deeper call for community.

Further, by “showing up” on the stage, what we announce to the world may be a key to unlocking someone else’s story. The Good Book tells us that we are loved. Because of that love, which exceeds our own love, we can move out to take risks in creativity. Love is the ultimate fruit of the Spirit and our total dependence on the true source of creativity will nurture love. Art, ultimately, is expression of that love. Therefore we cannot create but by sacrificial love. We need to redefine art and its effectiveness by how it helps us to love one another sacrificially. Fear and terror, in any form, will destroy creativity and people. Fear and terror will twist our creativity to expand our “Ground Zeros.” Even when we cannot paint or write, love is available to us a creative resource to share with others. Stand on the ashes of your “Ground Zero”; look up and create in love and hope.

Lastly, remember you are not alone. A soliloquy can become a symphony of soliloquies. I look forward to hearing many voices joining, , through the echoes of time, when future grace becomes reality, when mourning is transformed into dancing. Live generatively, taking today’s challenges head on, spreading your wings at the precipice of your Ground Zero, daring to leap into the miraculous.

Essay originally written for Michael Card’s Scribbling in the Sand: modified October, 2010

*see notes on Martin Luther's "Sin Boldly" comment. "Transgression" can be a confusing word, since it is tied to Christian notion of sin, but I am using it in a provocative manner, as part of cultural reality today. Also, to me, it can also mean "coloring outside the lines," which is one of the transgressive gift of an artist.

The Beautiful Tears

Makoto Fujimura — 2010-10-11T18:32:49+00:00

Makoto Fujimura, "Net for Eternity" Digital Lithography by Corridor Press

Published in September, 2010 Tabletalk magazine.

In John 11, Jesus weeps. His tears, shed in response to Lazarus’ death and Mary and Martha’s grief, are full of embodied truth, beauty, and goodness.

Why did Jesus weep? He delayed coming to Bethany “so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4), and, when He arrived, informed Martha that He is “the resurrection and the life” (v. 25). If He came to Bethany to show His power, the fact that He is indeed the Messiah with the power to resurrect the dead, why did He not simply wave His “magic wand” to “solve the problem” of the death and illness of Lazarus? There would have been an immediate celebration, and all the tears would have been unnecessary. Tears are useless, even wasteful, if you possess the power to cause miracles. Instead, He made Himself vulnerable, stopped to feel the sting of death, to identify with frail humanity, who struggled to know hope.

Through those tears, Jesus pronounced, “Lazarus, come out!” (v. 43). A deep emotive response prepared the way for a resurrection moment. Lazarus came stumbling out of the grave, and many began to believe in Jesus. The authorities then sought to kill Lazarus, and Jesus continued His path toward the cross.

Jesus’ tears transformed Mary’s view of her Lord. Soaking the hardened ground of Bethany, Jesus’ tears commingled with hers. Jesus was not only a Savior but proved to be an intimate friend; the glory of God shone through such a deep friendship with the Son of Man. John took note.

Beauty, to the Japanese of old, held together the ephemeral with the sacred. Cherry blossoms are most beautiful as they fall, and that experience of appreciation lead the Japanese to consider their mortality. Hakanai bi (ephemeral beauty) denotes sadness, and yet in the awareness of the pathos of life, the Japanese found profound beauty. Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata quotes from Japanese post-war writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s suicide notes: “But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity” (Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself, p. 63).

Kawabata, too, committed suicide a few years later. For the Japanese, the sense of beauty is deeply tragic, tied to the inevitability of death.

Jesus’ tears were also ephemeral and beautiful. His tears remain with us as an enduring reminder of the Savior who weeps. Rather than to despair, though, Jesus’ tears lead the way to the greatest hope of the resurrection. Rather than suicide, Jesus’ tears lead to abundant life.

Later, Mary responded by running to Jesus with her most important possession. She barged into a closed room of disciples, crushing open her alabaster jar of nard, worth a year’s wages, that she was to keep for her wedding. She intuited in Jesus’ tears that every miracle of Jesus drew Him a step closer to His sacrificial death. She had to respond with a direct, intuitive, but also intentional, act of devotion.

While the disciples (notably Judas) grumbled, Jesus commended her, saying, “She has done a beautiful thing to me…. She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (Mark 14:6–9, NIV).

Jesus’ tears led to Mary’s act of sacrifice, of nard being spread in a closed room in Bethany, where a transgression by a woman opened up a new paradigm the aroma of Christ, of the reality of the gospel breathing into our broken world, filling the cracks of suffering. When Jesus hung on the cross, the only earthly possession Jesus wore was Mary’s nard.

Art, like Jesus’ tears and Mary’s nard, spreads in our lives, providing useless beauty for those willing to ponder. Many consider the arts to be the “extra” of our lives, an embellishment that is mere leisure. Yet how many hours of sacrifice go into being able to play a sonata by Chopin? Or a dancer’s flight on stage at the Lincoln Center? What many consider extra, and even wasteful, may come to define our humanity. That evening at Bethany, in that aroma that Mary spilled, there were Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings and Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas floating in the air as well (thanks to James Elaine, curator and artist, for this observation). Every act of creativity is, directly or indirectly, an intuitive response to offer to God what He has given to us. We twist this intuition and may create something transgressive and injurious, but this creative impulse originates from the Creator. Jesus wept.

Judas was livid at Mary’s act, and argued that the nard could have been sold and the money given to the poor (Mark 14:5). Pragmatism, legalism, and greed cannot comprehend the power of ephemeral beauty. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness; the opposite of beauty is legalism. Legalism is hard determinism that slowly strangles the soul. Legalism injures by giving pragmatic answers to our suffering. Legalism takes away life by forbidding the nard to be spilled onto our feet. Artists, like Mary, can intuitively give generatively and break open the oppression. Often, in the church and in the world, pragmatism and legalism stand in the way.

Artists need Jesus’ tears to create. They need to relate to Jesus’ tears.

Artists know the poor, and they do not need to be told by a legalist to give to the poor. Jesus knows that those who truly give cheerfully are merely responding to an extravagant God. What we deem to be extravagant and wasteful, Jesus calls the most necessary. The problem is not that we do not respond extravagantly to the poor; the problem is that we do not believe in an extravagant God.

To me, all art resonates from the aroma of Christ, hung on the cross. Art seeps out like Mary’s nard onto a floor that is supposed to be “clean”; such art reveals what is truly beautiful (Mary’s act) and what is truly injurious (Judas’ act) at the same time. Artists, like Kawabata, are also vulnerable to despair. Legalism and despair are both tools at the disposal of the Devil: suicide meets both at the end of their paths.

I spend my time in my studio pouring water onto the surface of my paintings and mixing mineral pigments into them. I pursue grace by the very act of painting. The materials I use are extravagant, expensive. Gold, platinum, silver, hand-lifted paper and silk, and one-hundredyear- old sumi ink all become materials that build up the layers of the surface of my works. I remind myself to be like Mary. I remind myself of Jesus’ tears.

Christ is the great Artist. Maybe what He saw in Mary was a little artist, emulating and mirroring His great sacrifice.

Mary transgressed cultural norms in this act of love, trembling in thanksgiving, knowing that the King must be anointed. In one act, she broke open the mystery of the moment. Her nard spread and its aroma filled that room. It was an ephemeral act, one that she did not think of as “art.” I am sure she herself was surprised by Jesus’ words that her act would be remembered, that she would leave a lasting legacy.

Jesus told the disciples that what Mary had done would be proclaimed “whenever the gospel is told.” Perhaps we need to ponder the logical consequence to this extraordinary affirmation: Is our work for the gospel saturated with the aroma of Mary’s nard? What is our beautiful, extravagant offering that exposes Judas, an offering prepared for the cosmic wedding to come?

What we deemed a waste, Jesus called the most necessary. Jesus wept.

A Letter to North American Churches

Makoto Fujimura — 2010-10-10T07:05:14+00:00

This was delivered at the Eighth Letter Conference for the Epiphaneia group in Toronto. The presenters were asked to write a letter to the churches of North America in the style of the Revelation letters in the New Testament. The full version will be published in their anthology in 2011.

I speak to you as an artist.¹

Our relationship with you has not been easy. Artists are often misfits, dwelling in the margins of your communities. They are often seen in the back pew, if they come to church at all, wearing black. Maybe they look menacing to you.

But many of us, actually, sit in the front. We volunteer, and are first to be with the poor. You just don’t notice us. Some of us are even up in front preaching—you call us pastors, but we consider ourselves artists of the Word. Some of us are crusading against the wrongs of the world. We can get the attention of the “kings” of this world because our songs are so popular.

But, we artists are often exiled twice: once by the church, and then, because of our faith, by the world.

Our exile by you started a long time ago. In the late 18th century, you began to believe that we needed rational categories to try to protect “faith” from “reason.” Reason began to win the battle in this false dichotomy and the mystery of our being and the miraculous presence of God behind the visible were put under suspicion. Ironically, this division fragmented the Body of Christ and gave “secularism” her power.²

In the resulting arena of the rational, the artist’s task to fuse invisible reality with concrete reality also came under suspicion. An artist knows that what you can see and observe is only the beginning of our journey to discover the world. But you wanted proof instead of mystery, justification rather than beauty. Therefore you exiled artists to the margins of worship, while the secular world you helped to create championed us and gave us, ironically, a priestly role.

“Secular” powers took over the institutions created by the church’s retreat from culture creation—they ask us to be gods in their museums, concert halls, and academic arena. In turn, you erected walls to shield you and your children from these “dark forces.” Dear churches, did you forget that our Father in heaven owns all of the earth? You might have given the power of creativity back to Egypt and acquiesced to your captor Babylon, but the true and living God still owns all the powerful institutions as well as the hearts of critics and curators.

Artists still have an instinct for worship. But instead of placing quality artists at the core of your worship, you force us to operate as extras, as in “if-we-can-afford-it-good-but-otherwise-please-volunteer.” So now they must worship in the temples of the “unknown gods” of our time —the sterile, minimalist boxes called galleries. Rather than giving devotion, they had to become celebrity merchants, selling their goods.

Instead of offering themselves to the Giver of gifts, they had to become purveyors of a commodity.

Artists have insight into the invisible qualities of Reality, but you have forced them to serve only the visible, the utilitarian, and the pragmatic.

Artists have skill and power that dictators are either afraid of or want to use, and you, the church, unwisely neglected them. The first people known to be filled with the Holy Spirit were not priests, kings, or generals but artists named Bazelel and Oholiab—it was they who built Moses’ Tabernacle. Even the Babylonian kings wanted God’s artists after they conquered Israel, so they brought the artists to their land first.

God Himself was, is, and always shall be an artist and he speaks through prophets and poets. The Bible begins with Creation and ends with a New Creation. Everywhere in between God has chosen broken vessels, his creative creatures, to create in love. What would he say about you exiling his artists? Perhaps something like this:

I AM an artist.

A painter does not merely reproduce what is thought to be seen by the eye. An artist’s task is to train the eye first to truly see and to disregard previously imposed categories—those easy preconceived notions that lure us to think we are seeing when we are merely looking. An artist’s task is to see through the eye into the eternal, into the invisible.

A musician’s task is to hear, to listen to the sounds of the world. Bach, created out of the fabric of faithfulness to his community and to his church. He created through generational wisdom. He heard the echoes of the music of the spheres and sought to synthesize what he heard.

Do you not see what I see in a dancer’s leap? It can never be repeated, even in eternity. Yet, eternity’s echoes ring throughout the body, and I dance with them. Precisely because that act is ephemeral, I make them permanent.

A poet’s task is to reveal through her intuition the knowledge of reality and an emotional state that is at once mysterious but made accessible through her word.

One of your exiled poets wrote in 1864:

Love - is anterior to Life -

Posterior - to Death -

Initial of Creation, and

The Exponent of Earth -

(#917)

Who is this love? Who is “anterior to Life,” and “posterior to death”? “Initial of Creation, and the Exponent of Earth”?

This poet, as a teenager, was told by your leaders in a seminary in Amherst that she was one of “No Hopers,” that she had “no hope to be saved.” We know from these poems that Emily always desired to know her Creator. I do not celebrate waywardness, but I am here to seek the lost. I will leave ninety-nine church members to seek the one lost poet.

One of your exiled painters, who lived in Arles, France, created a work called “The Starry Night” in 1889. In the middle of the painting, a Dutch Reformed Church (that does not belong in Arles) holds the visual balance. Vincent grew up in the church. He even wanted to be an evangelist. But notice that the church is the only building in the painting that doesn’t have light shining inside. He’s trying to tell you through this visual parable that though the church still holds these disparate matters of the Spirit and Nature together in the world, the Spirit has left the church and went swirling into Nature and the Cosmos.

When you exiled them, the Vincents and Emilys of the world, you exiled Me.

My artists: Create for Me. Improvise with the Spirit. Create through the Medium who binds all things together, and then you will begin to hear sounds of “the world that ought to be.” Surely, there will be birth pangs right up to that time. There will be more “Ground Zeros” created by destructive minds, twisting creative impulses into diabolical powers. Undo what they have done. Stand upon those ashes all around us , and open your hearts. Look up to create in Love.

You the Body of Christ must become as one and.love one another. Love is creative. Love is generative. Be diligent in the work of bringing unity in the diversity of the Body. Art is unifying, bringing together diverse voices, instruments, and colors for the magnificence of the whole. You are all God’s masterpieces, a tapestry of diversity, created in Christ Jesus to birth more masterpieces.

Finally, you artists of the far country, you are starving though you have much. The corrupt world has given you celebrity and the ephemeral treasures of the earth. Return to your first love. Come home. Creativity is a gift. Don’t make it to be other than that, or you will be crushed by it. And don’t try to numb the pain you feel inside by drinking anything other than the Holy Spirit. The thirst you have, the longing that flows out of your own creativity, can only be met with the pure drink of the Holy Spirit.

There are also some of you in the far country who have removed pleasure from your life for the sake of “pure expression.” Don’t think that just because you have forfeited the whole world that you have gained your souls. Return to your first love and be filled with my Passion. You used to explore the colorful margins, finding exhilaration in sound, movement, and rhymes of words. Come home and join me in preparing for the Feast to come.

Dear churches of North America, do you not know that we are planning a wedding feast? Have you forgotten that? You are wedding planners! What wedding would lack music, art, poetry, dance, or delectable foods? We need the best artists, poets, dancers, musicians, and architects to prepare for the Feast of grace when you will dance, sing, paint, and create with the living God.

Dance with us, Churches of North America. Join in the celebration of tasting what is to come and move to the enduring echoes of the ephemeral and the mysterious.