If you live in the Baltimore-Washington area, I hope I’ll see you at one or all of the Eliot Society events this fall! For “Heaven in a Nightclub” on October 26, we’re bringing in jazz pianist Bill Edgar from Philly to give a combo concert-lecture highlighting the spiritual roots of African American music. “The Art of Feasting” will kick off our Living Room Series on November 8, as Heidi Stevens, who teaches art at a local K-12 classical Christian school, will guide us in looking most especially at food table still life paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. On December 13, we’ll gather together again for more food and drinks and to collectively read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in character. Reserve your spots at https://eliotsociety.org/!
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CONFERENCE: The 2019 Madeleine L’Engle Conference: Walking on Water: I just caught wind of this great opportunity taking place November 15–16 at All Angels’ Church in New York City, where L’Engle was a member. “In celebration of Madeleine L’Engle’s centenary year, this inaugural conference brings together a diverse group of artists and seekers to explore, challenge, and deepen our creative lives. . . . The conference has a combination of keynote addresses, panel discussions, and workshops that will be of interest to people across faith traditions who are interested how faith and art inform each other. There will also be sessions on the works and influence of Madeleine L’Engle, and opportunities for alumni of her workshops to reunite and share stories.”
LECTURE: “Defining the New” by Roger Lowther: In this sixteen-minute talk from the Community Arts Tokyo International Arts Festival in June [previously], Roger Lowther draws out the festival’s theme of “All Things New” through piano music—namely, Bach’s Prelude in C Major and Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude. Both start out prettily, move through a section of dissonance, and then find a new and richer beginning on the other side. “In this world full of sadness,” says Lowther, “we can find a new beginning.” He tells the story of a church piano in Kamaishi City that took on water in the March 11, 2011, tsunami. Rather than throw it out as beyond repair, the church spent much time, effort, and money fixing it up, even though it would have been much easier to just buy a new one. In doing so, they demonstrated the gospel hope of “all things made new.”
Lowther and his wife, Abi, are the directors of the MAKE Collective, “a network of artists [under Mission to the World] who, like Bezalel, have been called by name, by God, and have been filled with the Spirit of God in wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and all kinds of craftsmanship (Exodus 31:2-3). They have embraced their gifts and accepted their unique opportunity and responsibility that the holistic, prophetic, and pastoral expression of those gifts affords in their participation in the evangelical/cultural mandate—God’s reconciliation of all things to Himself, in the context of global church planting movements.” Their values include listening, questioning, experimenting, challenging, generosity, transparency, inclusion, and excellence.
I had lunch with the founder of MAKE, Berenice Rarig [previously], last year and am always encouraged by the thoughtful content of the organization’s bimonthly e-newsletter—some of which can be viewed on their new website, https://themakecollective.org/. Their September newsletter pointed me to a new video of five missionary artists, including the Lowthers, discussing art as community building, as storytelling, and as therapy, as well as beauty in brokenness:
PLAYLIST: Philip Majorins of Liturgy Letter curated an excellent playlist of various settings and performances of the Lord’s Prayer by artists ranging from jazz greats Duke Ellington and Vince Guaraldi to gospelers Aretha Franklin and the Staples Singers to contemporary folk rockers Sandra McCracken and Gungor to Serbian Orthodox singer Divna Ljubojević and even the Byzantine darkwave band Anastasis. And more!
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CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN: Earlier this year I participated in the Art Stations of the Cross pilgrimage/exhibition in Amsterdam. One of the stops was Mozes en Aäronkerk, which housed Masha Trebukova’s Anywhere, Anytime. This series of paintings on glossy magazine pages raises awareness of human suffering around the globe, providing visual prompts for prayer and action. The artist is seeking to reproduce the images in a standard print-book format for mass production, and she needs help funding the project. Donate at https://www.voordekunst.nl/projecten/9400-anywhere-anytime.
Ephraim Moshe Lilien (Austrian, 1874–1925), On the Rivers of Babylon, 1910. Etching and aquatint, 28 × 55 cm.
By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!
—Psalm 137
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SONG: “Rivers of Babylon” | Words and music by Brent Dowe and Trevor McNaughton of The Melodians, 1970 | Covered by Linda Ronstadt, on Hasten Down the Wind (1976)
In Psalm 137, a communal lament, Israel remembers with sadness the Babylonian captivity and, in the infamous final line (v. 9), wishes violence against her captors’ children. The Kingston, Jamaica–based reggae group The Melodians set Psalm 137:1–4, along with Psalm 19:14, to music in 1970 as “Rivers of Babylon.” (Unsurprisingly, the controversial imprecation is excluded.) The song became a sort of anthem for Rastafarianism, an Afrocentric religious movement that laments the exile of Africans to the West Indies and the Americas—“Babylon”—through slavery and expresses longing for the homeland, Africa, “Zion.” Boney M.’s 1978 disco cover popularized the song in Europe. I’m not a fan of this famous rendition, because the bright, bouncy style doesn’t fit the tone of the lyrics. In fact, I even prefer Linda Ronstadt’s California folk cover to the original Melodians recording. She sings it a cappella with Andrew Gold and Kenny Edwards:
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The etching above is by Ephraim Moshe (Moses) Lilien, an Austro-Hungarian art nouveau illustrator and a member of the Zionist movement. He helped found the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem. Click here to see other religious-themed prints by the artist.
I first encountered this image in a challenging blog post by theologian W. David O. Taylor, who, addressing the oft-expunged vindictive sentiments of Psalm 137’s third stanza and citing Miroslav Volf, claims that our rage belongs before God liturgically. Taylor has contributed a very fine trio of visual commentaries on Psalm 137 to the Visual Commentary on Scripture project, where he discusses an English Romanesque manuscript illumination, a mosaic by Marc Chagall, and an Abu Ghraib prison series triptych by Fernando Botero in light of the psalm.
This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.
To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for Proper 22, cycle C, click here.
“Lazarus and Dives,” fol. 78r from the Codex Aureus of Echternach, ca. 1035–40. German National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany.
There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.” But Abraham said, “Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.” And he said, “Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.” But Abraham said, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.” And he said, “No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”
The illuminated manuscript page above tells visually, in three sequential strips, the parable of the rich man (“Dives”) and Lazarus. (The personal name Dives is not given in the scripture text but is traditionally used as shorthand for the rich man, as dives is Latin for “rich.”) The top register shows Lazarus, a sick homeless man, dying at Dives’s door; the middle, Lazarus’s soul being carried off to paradise by two angels and seated in Abraham’s bosom; and the bottom, Dives’s soul being carried off to hell by two devils and tortured.
This is one of four full-page miniatures that preface the Gospel of Luke in the Codex Aureus (“Golden Book”) of Echternach, a Vulgate edition of the four Gospels produced at the Benedictine Abbey of Echternach in Luxembourg in the eleventh century shortly after the Ottonian dynasty came to an end. It is a preeminent example of the Ottonian style.
This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.
To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for Proper 21, cycle C, click here.
Last weekend I was in Atlanta giving a talk on art and theology at North Decatur Presbyterian Church as part of the church’s “God’s Creative Story” program, enabled by a Vital Worship Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. One of the attendees, Ross Boone (aka Raw Spoon), a local artist, took “sketch notes” of the talk, which I am so delighted by! I am posting them here with his permission. He does a lot of faith-inspired digital illustration, often in partnership with churches; you should definitely check him out.
For “Seeing the Story: Visual Art for the Liturgical Year,” I used fifteen artworks, a mix of historical and contemporary, to chart a way through the church calendar, showing how art opens us up to the beauty of God’s story and helps us to see ourselves as participants in that story.
I really enjoyed getting to meet and worship with the folks at NDPC, and to continue the art conversation with them over the weekend. There was lots of engagement, which was really encouraging. Ellen Gadberry showed me some of the projects made by the liturgical art group she leads at the church. Many involved repurposed bulletins, which I love! One that’s currently in progress picks up on the lozenge shape present in the church’s architectural design, drawing on its symbolic use in Celtic art. Ellen also brought me to the High Museum of Art to see the new Romare Bearden exhibition and, at my request, the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, where three new exhibitions, curated from the museum’s wonderful permanent collection, opened Sunday afternoon. (The museum was closed when we were there on Friday, as the art and signage were still being hung, but the curator graciously let us in for an unofficial preview!)
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CALL FOR RESEARCH PROPOSALS: Through its new Art Seeking Understanding initiative, the Templeton Religion Trust anticipates granting $12 million in funding over the next five years to research projects that connect art and spirituality. In particular: “Is there an empirically demonstrable connection between art and understanding? And if so, what distinctive cognitive value does engagement with the arts (production and/or consumption) generate? Under what conditions and in what ways does participation in artistic activities encourage or stimulate spiritual understanding, insight, or growth (meaning- or sense-making)?
“We’re bringing together writers, poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, filmmakers – artists of all kinds – as well as art historians and musicologists with philosophers, theologians, and scientists from a variety of sub-disciplines within the psychological, cognitive, and social sciences to conceive and design empirical and statistical studies of the cognitive significance of the arts with respect to spiritual realities and the discovery of new spiritual information.”
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POETRY BOOK CONTEST: Paraclete Press invites poets to submit a book-length (unpublished) manuscript for consideration of the inaugural Paraclete Poetry Prize, with a deadline of January 30, 2020. Two winners will be selected by a three-judge panel and announced April 1, 2020. Both prizes involve cash and book publication. Paraclete, the publishing arm of the Community of Jesus, publishes some of today’s best spiritual poets, including Scott Cairns, Paul Mariani, Jeanne Murray Walker, Luci Shaw, and Tania Runyan.
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ALBUM FOR IMMIGRANT CHILDREN:Somos Ovejas del Señorby Alabanzaré: Jared Weatherholtz is the director of a South City Church Hispanic ministry called Refugio, through which he teaches the Bible, develops worship resources, invests in relationship, and helps immigrants navigate life in St. Louis. He said US immigration policy has been taking a toll on the community he serves, especially its children, who fear going to school not only because of the bullying they encounter (“Go back to where you came from!”) but also because they could come home to no parents (detained by ICE).
As “a way to care for [the kids] and show them God’s goodness and promises to them through music,” Weatherholtz wrote the song “Somos Ovejas del Señor” (We Are the Sheep of the Lord), based on Psalm 23. The kids really took to it, and it became the seed for an entire album, recorded last year in Mexico City under the moniker Alabanzaré (“I Will Praise”). To learn more about the inspiration behind and making of the album, watch the half-hour documentary below. For English subtitles, click the “CC” button on the video player.
“I want immigrants and children of immigrants to hear and to know that they are important, that they have worth in this life, that they bear the image of God,” Weatherholtz said. “God is present, taking care of them.”
The album gives children a language of prayer and praise that they can sing amid their present circumstances. The opening track, “Espíritu Santo, Compañero Fiel,” celebrates the Holy Spirit as a faithful companion in good times and bad, accompanying us at school, when we play, and when we sleep. In “Como Niños,” Jesus invites boys and girls to “come closer,” tells them they’re small in size but big in faith—they’re wise and revolutionary. “Necesito Tu Ayuda, Oh Dios” is a prayer for protection, beginning “I need your help, oh God / Great sorrows I bring today / I feel sad and I don’t know what to do / Come to me soon, Protector.”
ARTICLE: “The Hidden Life of a Forgotten Sixteenth-Century Female Poet” by Jamie Quatro, New Yorker: Quatro writes about her distant relative Anne Vaughan Lock, a poet, translator, Calvinist religious figure, and, significantly, the first writer to publish a sonnet sequence in English. A gloss of Psalm 51, Lock’s “A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner” comprises twenty-six poems, published in 1560, thirty-one years before Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella” (long held to be the world’s first English sonnet sequence). “Lock’s cardinal place in the history of the sonnet cycle may not be news to scholars. But for me—a poetry-loving, feminist, conflicted Protestant English-Ph.D. dropout—it was an endorphin-surge of a discovery.” [HT: ImageUpdate]
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DANCE: Last month I posted a dance number from my favorite television dance show, So You Think You Can Dance, and now I’m going to post another one—from September 2’s episode. Choreographed by Talia Favia, “Amen” is danced by Ezra Sosa, Gino Cosculluela, and Bailey Muñoz to a song by Amber Run. It’s not a religious song, but it does use the language of prayer (and is performed with a choir), which the choreography and set design highlight. The speaker of the song is presumably talking to his recently deceased lover, trying to come to terms with his grief, to accept the painful loss. An anguished “Amen”—“Let it be”—repeats throughout. The dance routine expresses rage in the face of death and the struggle to submit to what is. It’s a phenomenal performance by these three young men.
Joseph Hirsch (American, 1910–1981), Lynch Family, 1946. Oil on canvas, 35 × 33 in. (88.9 × 83.8 cm). Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. [zoom in]
My joy is gone; grief is upon me;
my heart is sick within me.
Behold, the cry of the daughter of my people
from the length and breadth of the land:
“Is the Lord not in Zion?
Is her King not in her?”
. . .
“The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
and we are not saved.”
For the wound of the daughter of my people is my heart wounded;
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold on me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of the daughter of my people
not been restored?
—Jeremiah 8:18–22
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SONG: “There Is a Balm in Gilead” | Negro spiritual | Arranged and performed by Archie Shepp (tenor sax), feat. Jeanne Lee, on Blasé (1969, reissued 2009)
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In this coming Sunday’s lectionary reading from the Prophets, Jeremiah grieves over the suffering of his people. “Is there no balm in Gilead?” he cries. Gilead was a region in ancient Palestine, east of the Jordan River. Now it is known primarily as the fictional locale of two famous contemporary novels, but back then it was known for the soothing, aromatic plant resins produced there, which were used medicinally. In Israel’s desolation, though, they could feel no balm—not even in the place where it was said to abound.
The anonymous writer(s) of the slave song featured above knew communal suffering well. He or she taps into Jeremiah’s poetic grief, extracting the “balm in Gilead” expression but bending it toward hope. There is a balm, the song attests, albeit wearily, through tears. And this balm makes the wounded whole. Archie Shepp’s soulful arrangement, with vocals by Jeanne Lee, express that woundedness and yearning for deliverance so poignantly.
As a visual point of focus, I’ve chosen Joseph Hirsch’s Lynch Family, a forward extension of the history of African American oppression. The gallery label for the painting reads,
Joseph Hirsch painted Lynch Family as a response to racial disturbances in the South in 1946. That year the number of lynchings rose from an all-time low in January to a fevered pitch by August. Citizens across the country urged President Truman and Congress to end the horrors. To capture the tragedy of Lynch Family, Hirsch presented a mother with her baby, presumably survivors of a lynching victim, in abstracted surroundings. The painting focuses on the mother’s intense yet restrained hold on her defiant child while she turns to hide her anguish. The blue background floats around the figures. It both highlights their pain and contrasts with the sheer beauty of Hirsch’s painterly technique.
Though painted in the 1940s, this work bears strong relevance for today. The figures could be any black mother and child left to grieve the loss of husband and father—to prison, or to death by shooting, choking, or other form of brutality.
This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.
To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for Proper 20, cycle C, click here.
Chinese scroll painting of the Good Shepherd, 1966. Collection of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’”
—Luke 15:4–6
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SONG: “The Lost Lamb” by Abigail Washburn and Jingli Jurca | Performed by Abigail Washburn, on Song of the Traveling Daughter (2005)
Zai na yaoyuan de guxiang Wo shiluo liao yi ge gulao de meng Yi ge youshang de meng Zai na yangyu wo de defang
Wo fenbian buliao muse he chenguang Wo yanjuanliao chenmo he sixiang Feng nanchui you zhuanxiang beifang Jianghe ben hai, hai que bu zhang
Wo xin manliao choucheng Yu lai you shi qing bu jiuchang Fuzu tianbuman linghun de kewang Zhihui dangbukai yongsheng de shuangjiang
Wo Wo shi Yi zhi Mitu de gaoyang
Shei neng ying wo zouchu mimang Nar you wo chongsheng de xiwang Oh, muyangren ah Ni zai hefang?
In that far distant land I call home
I lost the ancient dream
A sorrowful dream
In that place that raised me
I cannot discern the growing shadows of dusk
And the first faint rays of the morning sun
I’ve wearied in the silence and searching
Wind blows south and turns again north
River flows to the sea, yet the sea does not rise
My heart is filled with melancholy
The rains come, clear skies will follow soon
Even fortune and good blessings
Cannot quench the soul’s thirst
Wisdom cannot relieve us our eternal lot
I am a lost lamb
Who will lead me from this haze?
What will bring me hope again?
Oh shepherd
Where are you? [source]
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Before Abigail Washburn (previously featured here) became one of America’s most acclaimed folk musicians, she was a college student majoring in East Asian studies and Mandarin, traveling intermittently to China and ready to pursue a degree in international law at Beijing University. But before her planned departure, she heard at a party one night a recording of Doc Watson singing “Shady Grove,” and she instantly fell in love with American bluegrass music. She bought herself a banjo and traveled Appalachia, learning the instrument and developing a repertoire. Her skill and enthusiasm soon landed her at a recording studio in Nashville, the city where she now lives with her husband, Béla Fleck.
Although Washburn decided not to pursue a law career in Beijing, her love of Chinese language and culture has continued. In 2011 she embarked on a Silk Road Tour, where she collaborated with Chinese musicians at each stop along the way. That year also marks the founding of The Wu-Force, a self-described “kung fu-Appalachian avant-garde folk-rock” trio consisting of Washburn, guzheng (Chinese zither) virtuoso Wu Fei, and multi-instrumentalist Kai Welch. As her website says, “her efforts to share US music in China and Chinese music in the US exist within a hope that cultural understanding and the communal experience of beauty and sound rooted in tradition will lead the way to a richer existence.” Learn more by watching her 2012 TED talk, “Building US-China Relations . . . by Banjo,” or by listening to her (and Fleck’s) 2015 interview with Krista Tippett, “Truth, Beauty, Banjo.”
“The Lost Lamb” is one of several songs that Washburn co-wrote with her friend Jingli Jurca, a poet from Beijing. Washburn says it was inspired by one of the Chinese students she was teaching English to in Vermont in the early 2000s. He had come to the States to earn money to send back home, but four years later he received a letter from his wife saying that she and their daughter were going to start a new life without him. This mournful ballad gives expression to his feeling of exile, of rootlessness, of being far from home and unable to return to what was once a place of joy and connection.
The first time I heard this song, I was incredibly moved. Having no knowledge of Mandarin or the context of the song’s composition, I looked up a translation, finding that the lyrics have a beautiful resonance, whether intentional or not, with Jesus’s parable of the lost sheep, where he likens himself to a good shepherd who seeks out and restores those of his flock who have wandered off. I hear it as very psalmic, a grasping after God through pain. It’s hard to tell dusk from dawn, the speaker says. My soul thirsts. It ends, “Oh Shepherd, where are you?” Shepherd, who promises to lead us through dark valleys and bring us to still waters. The speaker is readily confessing that he’s lost; “come find me” is essentially what he pleads.
In the spirit of the biblical psalmists, the speaker appears to take God to task, questioning whether he will show up as he said he would. “Who will lead me from this haze? / What will bring me hope again?” It’s an earnest reaching, through tears and uncertainty, for something stable that he or she once knew.
Whether you want to interpret the song as lamenting a felt distance from one’s home country or culture or family or faith, it rings so true, so beautiful.
I’ve paired it with a visual artwork and scripture reading that fulfill its longing, showing a being found.
This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.
To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for Proper 19, cycle C, click here.
Alejandro Maestre Gasteazi (Spanish, 1979–), Untitled, 2010. Printed ink on cotton paper, 40 × 40 cm. Edition of 20.Alejandro Maestre Gasteazi (Spanish, 1979–), Untitled, 2010. Printed ink on cotton paper, 40 × 40 cm. Edition of 20.Alejandro Maestre Gasteazi (Spanish, 1979–), Untitled, 2010. Printed ink on cotton paper, 40 × 40 cm. Edition of 20.
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.
Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”
—Jeremiah 18:1–6
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SONG: “Have Thine Own Way, Lord” | Words by Adelaide A. Pollard, 1906 | Music by George C. Stebbins, 1907 | Performed by Johnny Cash, 1973, and released on Bootleg, Vol. I: Personal File, 2006
Update, July 25, 2021: Orlando Palmer, aka IAMSON, has just posted an Instagram video of himself singing the first verse of “Have Thine Own Way, Lord.” So beautiful:
It is not you who shapes God, it is God who shapes you.
If then you are the work of God, await the hand of the artist
Who does all things in due season.
Offer God your heart, soft and tractable,
And keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you.
Let your clay be moist,
Lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of God’s fingers.
The three photographs above by Alejandro Maestre Gasteazi are from a cycle of twenty portraits of the artist’s friend Julián Cánovas-Yañez, which show his mud-lathered form gradually taking shape—an effect achieved, in part, in digital postprocessing. Credit goes to Philip Chircop for first pairing these photographs with this quote by the second-century Greek bishop Irenaeus.
This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.
To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for Proper 18, cycle C, click here.
After nudges from several readers, I’ve decided to join Instagram! Follow me @art_and_theology. I’m still trying to settle on how I’d like to use the platform, but in the meantime, I’ve been sharing photos I’ve taken on visits to art museums and spaces that house sacred art. (And in case you don’t already know, Art & Theology is also on Facebook and Twitter.)
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DANCE: “Sign of the Times,” choreographed by Travis Wall: Premiering August 19, 2019, on Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance (season 16, episode 11), this contemporary dance piece is choreographer Travis Wall’s response to the gun violence epidemic in America. It’s a communal lament through movement, really—an expression of fear, sadness, pain, anger, frustration, and defiance. It is performed by this season’s “top ten”: Benjamin Castro, Gino Cosculluela, Eddie Hoyt, Madison Jordan, Anna Linstruth, Bailey Muñoz, Sophie Pittman, Mariah Russell, Ezra Sosa, and Stephanie Sosa.
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FEATURED POET: Marjorie Maddox: The latest installment of Abbey of the Arts’ Featured Poet series is, as usual, wonderful! I’ve read some of Maddox’s poems in magazines and anthologies but haven’t yet gotten my hands on one of her collections. This feature has incentivized me to request a copy of Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation through my local library.
“The work of poetry,” Maddox writes, is “empathy and epiphany. The process of writing and reading allows us to better understand this world and the next. Poetry connects the local and universal, the mundane and the miraculous. It gives us those ears to hear and eyes to see that we might, then, head back into the turning world sustained, nourished, and willing to learn more. And will this not lead us to the Sacred? Yes, I say. Yes.”
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ESSAY: “Acts of Attention: On Poetry and Spirituality” by Robert Cording: I really enjoyed this essay from Image journal about the importance of attending to the world. “Attention is simply a loving look at what is,” writes Cording, a poet and birdwatcher. He discusses seeing not as a physiological act but as perceiving the fullness that exists in each moment. “Seeing is impossible without love or reverence,” he says. Along the way he engages with Marie Howe, Aristotle, Emerson and Thoreau, Tolstoy, Ruskin, Heidegger, Hopkins, Czesław Miłosz, and Marilynne Robinson. He also walks us through three poems: Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” Wallace Stevens’s “Man on the Dump,” and Seamus Heaney’s “The Pitchfork.” So much goodness here!
If you enjoyed this essay as much as I did, be sure to also check out “Cloud Shapes and Oak Trees,” also by Cording, from 2017.
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EXHIBITION: Abraham: Out of One, Many, curated by Rev. Paul-Gordon Chandler of Caravan: Caravan is an international nonprofit that uses the arts to build sustainable peace around the world. “Our peacebuilding work is based on the belief that the arts can serve as one of the most effective mediums to enhance understanding, bring about respect, enable sharing, and facilitate friendship between diverse peoples, cultures and faiths.”
Caravan’s current exhibition is built around Abraham, a key ancestral figure shared by the world’s three major monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Caravan commissioned three Middle Eastern artists, one from each of these faith traditions, to each create five paintings on these subjects: Living as a Pilgrim, Welcoming the Stranger, Sacrificial Love, The Compassionate, and A Friend of God. The exhibition of resulting works opened May 3 at St. Paul’s Within the Walls in Rome. From there it has traveled to Paris and Edinburgh and, starting September 8, will be in the States, touring through 2021 with stops in Boston, Atlanta, Houston, Washington, DC, Chicago, and more (see schedule). There’s an excellent digital catalog available, which contains full-color reproductions and descriptions of all fifteen paintings.
Sinan Hussein (Iraqi, 1977–), Living as a Pilgrim, 2019. Mixed media on canvas, 45 × 60 cm. Part of the “Abraham: Out of One, Many” exhibition organized by Caravan.Qais Al Sindy (Iraqi, 1967–), Welcoming the Stranger, 2019. Oil and collage on canvas, 60 × 45 cm. Part of the “Abraham: Out of One, Many” exhibition organized by Caravan.
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MUSICAL: In the Green by Grace McLean:Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT3 produces shows by new playwrights, directors, and designers, and for this summer, they commissioned a musical about the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen. (It finished its run on August 4, so I’m late in publicizing it—sorry!) A Benedictine nun and later abbess, Hildegard was also a composer, poet, dramatist, theologian, botanist, and healer—a true polymath. In the Green focuses on her relationship with her mentor, Jutta, just six years her senior.
Here’s Grace McLean, the show’s lyricist, composer, playwright, and player of Jutta, performing “Eve” (which uses looping technology!), followed by a short conversation between her and one of the other cast members. [HT: Still Life]
While looking online and on Spotify for the best available recording of this classic, I decided on the a cappella rendition by Zero8, a Stockholm-based male choir. But my favorite solo rendition is, ironically, from this year’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Season One (Original Television Soundtrack). Though I don’t endorse the show, Jaz Sinclair’s vocal performance in episode 8 is gorgeous. (Her character sings the hymn during a funeral scene.) I also came across a retuned version by Sara Groves from her 2013 album The Collection, which is quite lovely, though I remain attached to the original tune.
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The “embrace of peace” in the title of the above George Tooker painting refers to a liturgical element in many Christian worship services in which congregants bless one another in the name of Christ. Depending on the church culture, this can be done with a handshake, a hug, or in some cultures, a kiss. The ritual is commonly referred to as the “passing of the peace” and, more than a mere greeting, is a significant gesture of reconciliation, unity, and love. Here’s a variation by Tooker on the same theme:
George Tooker (American, 1920–2011), An Embrace of Peace, 1986. Egg tempera on gesso panel, 16 × 26 in.
This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.
To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for Proper 17, cycle C, click here.
Here I’d like to share some of the art that was created at and/or on display at the conference. This is just a small snippet.
When I first crossed his path Thursday evening, printmaker and draftsman Steve Prince had unfurled a large sheet of paper across the wall of the George K. Brushaber Commons and was drawing in charcoal and graphite. A label taped up beside it gave the title: Prayer Works.
After Prince established the framework of three women quilting, he invited passersby to choose a quilt patch and fill it in with a pastel design of their own. (Though it was very much a low-pressure, “come one, come all” invitation, my self-consciousness, and my not being an artist, prevented me from making my mark. Something I need to get over . . .) It was fun to watch the work evolve over the weekend.
When I left on Sunday, this is what it looked like:
Steve A. Prince and friends, Prayer Works, 2019. A collaborative drawing completed at the 2019 CIVA conference at Bethel University, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Though he has an independent studio practice, Prince is especially passionate about facilitating community art projects—for example, Urban Stations of the Cross (2016), a collaboration between himself and participating members of Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, resulting in fourteen linocuts installed along the walls of the sanctuary. Or the Urban Garden project that capped off Prince’s residency at SUNY Geneseo this January and February. He’s also done a lot of work with grade schools and is great with working with people of all ages.
Prince had a work up for auction at the CIVA conference: a 2017 lithograph titled Salt of the Earth, based on a seminal moment in US civil rights history. On February 1, 1960, four African American college students sat down at a lunch counter at F. W. Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. When they were refused service and told to leave, they remained in their seats—an act of nonviolent resistance that ignited a youth-led movement of sit-ins all across the South, challenging racial inequality.
Steve A. Prince (American, 1968–), Salt of the Earth, 2017. Lithograph, edition of 40, 27 × 37 in.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.
—Matthew 5:9–13
In Prince’s lithograph, protesters Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil are portrayed as peaceful warriors, wearing badges that read “AOG”—Agent of God, as I once heard Prince explain. (This acronym is found in several of his works.) As they are reviled and persecuted, they remain steadfast and do not retaliate, representing the Christ who likewise was persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
Christ’s Spirit, symbolized by a dove, is resting on the counter. Around him are what look to be mini-tombstones, bearing inscriptions like “Love,” “Free,” “Truth.” These are all values associated with the Spirit (Rom 5:5 and 2 Tim 1:7; 2 Cor 3:17; Jn 15: 26) and also ones for which African American activists fought and died. You’ll notice that the cross-topped “tombstone” bears a chi (X) for Christ.
Social justice is a key theme in Prince’s oeuvre, including the large linocut of his that I bought at a CIVA auction several years ago.
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Another artwork at the CIVA conference that invited participation was Tim Lowly’s Without Moving (after Guy Chase). A multiyear project begun in 2009, it’s a portrait of the artist’s daughter Temma, who was born with severe disabilities, surrounded by a field of hundreds of thousands of tiny black dots. These dots, applied meticulously with a paintbrush by Lowly and other participants over the years, signify the contemplative presence of others surrounding Temma, enfolding her. One woman I talked to said her favorite part of the conference was having the honor to participate in this important work; she said it felt very intimate and connective, and like a form of prayer. Learn more and see more photos at the CIVA blog and the artist’s website. After the conference, Lowly declared the painting complete.
Tim Lowly (American, 1958–), Without Moving (after Guy Chase), 2009–19. Acrylic on panel, 75 × 120 in. [click here for a stunning detail shot!]Because I had a few hours to kill before my Sunday evening flight, I spent the afternoon at the Minneapolis Institute of Art—and discovered that the museum has a Lowly painting in its collection! Titled At 25, it, too, was collaborative. The gallery label reads, “At 25 is a collaborative work commemorating Tim Lowly’s daughter Temma’s 25th birthday. She has been the subject of his work since birth, and he has explored his relationship to her as father and caregiver as Temma was born with severe physical disabilities. Lowly considers Temma a creative collaborator in his work and invited friends to contribute to this icon to her life.” (Those friends include Makoto Fujimura, Tim Hawkinson, Bruce Herman, Catherine Prescott, and others.)
Tim Lowly (American, 1958–), At 25 (front), 2010. Acrylic, gold leaf, foil, gold pigment and glitter on wood, 29 1/2 × 23 1/2 × 2 1/4 in. (74.93 × 59.69 × 5.72 cm) (without base). Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Lowly writes, “The piece is composed of 25 sections, each of which is painted by one or two artists from around the world. For the ‘portrait’ side of the image I provided the participants with a section of a photograph corresponding to the piece they were given. I also gave them black-and-white matte acrylic (the paint I usually use) and asked them to render the photograph as stylistically neutrally as possible. For an artist to set aside their ‘style’ is a significant gesture, and as such I am very grateful for how willingly and sincerely the participants took on this part of the project. For the back side of the work the directive was much more open: ‘make it gold.’ As anticipated, the result of the back was very eclectic and (friendship) quilt-like.”
I didn’t get a photo of the reverse side, but you can view it here.
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Above I mentioned an auction. There were many fine lots. I bid on Sandra Bowden’s Law and Gospel collograph but didn’t win.
Sandra Bowden (American, 1943–), Law and Gospel. Collograph mixed media, 18 × 27 in.
The artist’s description reads, “With one additional horizontal cut, the tablets of the Law become four quadrants, suggesting a cross. Jesus said he came to fulfill the Law. When we have finished an item on our list of things to be done, we put a line through it, marking it done. This is what I was thinking as I took the Law, marked it done, with a horizontal line, only to see a cross appear.” Bowden created the textured surfaces by layering gold leafing on the Hebrew text collagraph print, then adding colored iridescent Cray-Pas to the raised areas.
Wayne Roosa’s Tract also caught my eye—an eraser print that quotes Giotto’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ. It belongs to his “Ideas of Order” series of rubber stamp images, which, as he says, “use iconic elements from newspapers and art history, combined and recombined, to suggest symbolic/narrative meaning for our culture’s various structures of order. Here, the microphone, surrogate for figures in power, privilege, or influence, rises out of a trap door abyss, while three angels (from Giotto’s Arena Chapel) grieve over the state of ‘truth’ and discourse.”
Wayne Roosa, Tract, 2009. Eraser print, 11 × 8 1/2 in.
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While I was at Bethel, there was a CIVA-sponsored exhibition in the Olson Gallery, The Beautiful, which ran from April 23 to June 16. (This was in addition to a juried show and a walk-in show put together specially for the conference.)
Here are a few notable artworks from The Beautiful:
Lauren Tilden (American, 1981–), Wind on Her Face, 2017. Oil on panel, 18 × 24 in.Grace Carol Bomer (American, 1948–), Red Sea Crossing, 2018. Oil, wax, and gold leaf on canvas, 30 × 30 in.Jennie Kimbrough, Untitled 14 (Daniel 3:7–30), 2016. Acrylic and thread on paper, 8 × 5 in.
I learned about Jennie Kimbrough’s “And the Word Was God” series, in which she uses pages from a 1920s German Bible, purchased at a flea market, not only as inspiration but also as her substrate, painting and stitching atop them as a devotional response to the text. Untitled 14 (Daniel 3:7–30) shows the three youths in the fiery furnace, with a fourth figure mysteriously present among them.
Screen cap from artist Jennie Kimbrough’s website, showing a sampling of works from her “And the Word Was God” series
I also spent time at the video installation Belgium / Minnesota (for Henry) by Michelle Westmark Wingard. Shot over a four-hour period and then time-lapsed, it shows the movement of sunlight through a window and across the wall as the day progresses. The decal on the window is the horizon line she extracted from a photograph of a Belgian field, where her grandfather’s plane crashed during World War II; placed over the existing horizon line, it creates an interesting interplay. The artist said she intends the video as “a study of contrasts: light/dark, real/imagined, manicured landscape/wild natural landscape, static/ever-changing” and “a visual dialog about landscape, longing, and the passing of time.”
I love how this piece takes something as ordinary as sunlight and invites us to really notice it, to receive it as something more than a mere commonplace—as a wonder, or even a grace.
Artists are great at noticing beauty that others of us would simply pass by. The day I arrived at the conference, I was walking with my roommate to the dorms when suddenly she stopped in the road with wide eyes and open mouth. I assumed she was reacting to the herd of goats in the near distance, fenced off behind a small chapel—an unexpected and amusing feature of a college campus. (They were brought in last year, I later learned, to help manage an invasive plant species, buckthorn.) But it turns out she was responding to the way the sun’s rays were falling through a tree. “Isn’t this beautiful?” she kept saying, approaching for a closer look and pausing to take it in. She snapped multiple pictures from different angles so that she could paint it later. And here I was, only noticing the goats! Until this new artist friend of mine redirected my attention to something more subtle but equally as delightful.
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The Are We There Yet CIVA conference this summer was so rewarding, and these three blog posts, built as they are around works of art, don’t encapsulate the full experience. But they provide a taste of what you might expect to encounter were you to attend a biennial conference in the future.
I’d encourage you to listen to the fifteen-minute interviews conducted at the conference by Libby John of the podcast Art & Faith Conversations. She talks not only to artists but to an arts administrator and an art book publisher, all CIVA members:
Art & Theology 