Somehow the more maudlin honesty about longing, with the cooler air (though Atlanta has been uncharacteristically warm this December) and the bare trees invites me to a place of peace and deep beauty more than any other of the year. Not to be confused with the 25 day calendar countdown complete with daily chocolates, the four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmastide originates in the Hebrew lament and apocalyptic traditions. The prophets and prophetesses of the Jewish people anticipated a day when their suffering would be reversed and when God would usher in an age of freedom, Sabbath, and reconciliation (check out Isaiah 27.6-28.13, or Handle’s Messiah). Walter Brueggemann writes, “It is for good reason that prophetic imaging is characteristically done in daring metaphor, surprising rhetoric, and scandalous utterance, for to do less is to fall back into conventional distortions of reality.” (Brueggemann, NYAPC, August 2006) Music has been a vehicle for that metaphor for centuries and folks like Bob Dylan and Curtis Mayfield brought it into the fore of pop music. Christmas season in the west is filled with the kind of longing aesthetic, just check out the #sadchristmas hashtag.

In years past songs like Tom Wait’s Jesus Gonna Be Here, Joni Mitchell’s  River, or U2′s Wake Up Dead Man have been strong Advent soundtracks, but the two songs this year that particularly captured this feeling for me were Rory Cooney’s Canticle of the Turning, and Paul Simmon’s Getting Ready For Christmas Day .

My main-liner colleagues love the Canticle of the Turning written by Rory Cooney in 1990 (a GIA Pub). Cooney ties a Celtic vibe with the song of liberation starting from Mary’s Magnificat to Hannah’s prayer in the temple, and Miriam’s dance after the escape through the parted Red Sea (here’s his version). Usually these women’s words are absorbed in the story but Cooney helps bring this theme of God’s messianic shift to the fore. One verse goes:

From the halls of power to the fortress tower,
not a stone will be left on stone.
Let the king beware for your justice tears
ev’ry tyrant from his throne.
The hungry poor shall weep no more,
for the food they can never earn;

In the last verse he roots the fulfilling Messianic work of Christmas in a creation theology:

This saving word that our forebears heard
is the promise which holds us bound,
‘Til the spear and rod can be crushed by God,
who is turning the world around.

I have to admit, I was sorta hard on this song in seminary because it was always rendered with the aesthetic of a PBS special of The River Dance when sung to organ in straight 4/4. And it was a token song for youth-pastors-turned-MDiv students with djembes wearing indigenous shirts from past mission trips. But last year I heard Emmaus Way do it and then this year I was able to arrange it with the band at City Church Eastside and we landed in a more Joplin/Zepplin feel (or Blitzen Trapper for folks following current indie music) which is admittedly my own subcultural equivalent of indigenous shirts from mission trips. Anyways, the song’s revolutionary tone and poetry came to life for me in this new setting. We began to joke that is was a song for 99%, but its probably more a song for the 2/3rds world (who’s indigenous shirts are worn by ex-youth pastors).

This is all to say that songs, when deconstructed and rewritten by folks in your congregation can capture the imaginations of your community in ways that songs that with a educated “global” feel may actually keep at arms lengths. But I’ll confess its hard to seperate my own subjective aesthetic from my argument, perhaps you’d have some better perspective to offer…

Someone who’s appropriation of global and indegenous sounds has always felt more intergrative is Paul Simmon. A second song that has been working on me this Advent is from his most recent album, So Beautiful So What. The album deserves a post of its own because of his masterful poetry, clever delivery and outstanding folk/rock sensibility. But the first song on the album, Getting Ready for Christmas Day, is the one I’d love to share. The guitars are panned with a reverb going back and forth similar to T-Bone Burnet’s production of the Krauss/Plant album, Raising Sand. Beneath the percussive guitars and drums you first single out the sounds of what could be party conversation but then you realize its a black church with the preacher and congregation in that unmistakable call and response. The cadence of his words are magical and makes me wonder if Simon wrote the song to fit with the sermon (but I’ll bet the sermon was mixed to fit the song). The minister, Rev. J.M.Gates, was an Atlantan activist, Christian preacher, and gospel singer from the early 20th century and a pioneer of the new media of his time (its estimated that 25% of all sermons commercially released before ’43 were his ). The sermon sampled in the song comes from shortly after the second world war. On Simon’s web site he posts Gates’ lyrics with his and it makes for a call and response of its own centered in the longing of Advent. Mike tweeted today that a conversation between a contemporary working class person hustling to live up to the acquisitive expectations of capitalism and an apocalyptic sermon about the brevity of life. Notice the interplay:

Paul Simon:
From early in November to the last week of December
I got money matters weighing me down
Oh the music may be merry, but it’s only temporary
I know Santa Claus is coming to town
In the days I work my day job, in the nights I work my night
But it all comes down to working man’s pay
Getting ready, I’m getting ready, ready for Christmas Day

Reverend Gates :
Getting ready for Christmas Day
And let me tell you, namely, the undertaker, he’s getting ready for your body
Not only that, the jailer he’s getting ready for you
Christmas day. Hmm? And not only the jailer, but the lawyer, the police force
Now getting ready for Christmas day, and I want you to bear it in mind

Paul Simon:
I got a nephew in Iraq it’s his third time back
But it’s ending up the way it began
With the luck of a beginner he’ll be eating turkey dinner
On some mountain top in Pakistan
Getting ready, oh we’re getting ready
For the power and the glory and the story of the
Christmas day

Reverend Gates:
Getting ready, for Christmas day.
Done made it up in your mind that I’m going, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago.
I’m going, on a trip, getting ready, for Christmas day.
But when Christmas come, nobody knows where you’ll be.
You might ask me.
I may be layin’ in some lonesome grave, getting ready, for Christmas day

Paul Simon:
Getting ready oh we’re getting ready
For the power and the glory and the story of the
Christmas day
Yes we’re getting ready

Reverend Gates:
Getting ready, ready for your prayers,
“I’m going and see my relatives in a distant land.”

Pail Simon:
Getting ready, getting ready for Christmas day
If I could tell my Mom and Dad that the things we never had
Never mattered we were always okay
Getting ready, oh ready for Christmas day
Getting ready oh we’re getting ready
For the power and the glory and the story of the
Christmas day

What songs bring Advent home for you?  Will you miss this season as much as me?

“The Invisible Seen”
—St. Athanasios (c. 298-373, trans by Scott Cairns)

When our dull wits had so declined
as to set us mid the squalor of the merely
sensible creation, the Very God consented
to become a body of His own, that He
as one among us might gather our dim senses
to Himself, and manifest through such
incommensurate occasion that He
is not simply man, but also God,
the Word and Wisdom of the One.

Thereafter, He remained His body, and thus
allowed Himself to be observed.
his becoming joined to us performed
two appalling works in our behalf:
He banished death from these
our tender frames, and made of them
something new and (take note here) renewing.

“Nativity”
—John O’Donohue (1956-2008)

No man reaches where the moon touches a woman.
Even the moon leaves her when she opens
Deeper into the ripple in her womb
That encircles dark, to become flesh and bone.

Someone is coming ashore inside her,
A face deciphers itself from water,
And she curves around the gathering wave,
Opening to offer the life it craves.

In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,
She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.
A red wire of pain feeds through every vein,
Until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.
Outside each other now, she sees him first,
Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.

For seven years Church as Art has worked with mainline and emergent congregations to get pastors, lay leaders, and artists onto the same page as they design worship and other church programming.  Designed at first by Rev. Troy Bronsink to bring the emergent-missional conversation to midsized Presbyterian congregations, Church as Art’s collaborative process has grown to include small congregations, non-denominational groups, and middle-governing bodies. Now Joshua Case (of The Nick and Josh Podcast) joins Bronsink to bring depth of insight and experience in the fields of outreach project management, social media, non-violent communication, student ministries, and emergence from within the Episcopalian tradition.

Worship Design Webinar:  What is Emerging Worship?

July 27 @ 7PM (EST) hosted the by Center For Progressive Renewal.  Sign up here.

Emerging worship engages communities in the art of everyday life. Whether you are asked to start an alternative worship service, are exploring complimentary elements to deepen your existing worship offerings, or starting worship for a new church plant, you need to start with “How does worship connect to what we believe about church?” Of course, you also need on-ramp methods to get started right away: tips for how to find and train musicians, artists and poets; how to design the time and place; and maybe even some survival strategies for addressing the resistance you may encounter from within your congregation. We’ll hit those, too. “Emerging Worship,” led by Troy  and Joshua is about communities anticipating the dreams of God together by playfully sharing and trading narratives and rituals as prayer.

About Troy

Troy Bronsink is an artist and a pastor seeking the way of Jesus. He and his wife and daughter, live in the Capitol View area of inner-city Atlanta, he is the Abbot of Neighbor’s Abbey, an holistic monastic community. Their family has been passionate about community development, education, and creativity for years. In integrating these Troy has become a contributor in the emerging church conversation. He is a singer-songwriter with 15 years of experience ranging from youth ministery to worship director to senior pastor, and in both the mainline and para-church field. Troy has an MDiv from of Columbia Theological Seminary, is an ordained Presbyterian minister, serving on the Greater Atlanta Presbytery’s Emerging Church Committee, founder of the Atlanta Emergent Cohort,  and board member of Emergent Village. He is a contributing author to the 2007 Baker Emersion release, An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, and author of the forthcoming 2011 Paraclete Press book, Getting Drawn In.

About Josh

Joshua Case is a blogger, podcaster, and activist. Josh and his wife live in Decatur, Georgia where he is in his final year of study at the Candler School of Theology. Josh is an Episcopalian, co-facilitator of the Atlanta Emergent cohort, and has blogged and podcasted on matters related to Christianity in the emerging culture for over 10 years. Before moving to Atlanta, Joshua worked for six years in Geneva Switzerland where he served as the executive director for an international, interfaith youth work and ministry organization.

wicks
-Church of St. Andrew, Christmas, 2006

1.
Until pews are dandelions
–sprig leggy levers–
catapulting young minds into kingdomcome;
sweeping elderminds like dreamseeds of evervision.

Until songs take wing
stretching strong like the arrows of migrating Juncos
lending lift, everloft, and standard.
Tail feathers slicing
tomorrow unto tomorrow.

Until prayers shovelset us into the red Georgia clay
sinking our toes like the magnolia’s roots
breaking open bone-earth’s chapped tongue
making our hope particular and rooty
tangling us here, now, to daily bread

2.
Until our aviary,
a loose canopy tabernacling for us,
meets the winds of intrastators
and price-per-acre
and towers catch-and-releasing invisible information;
until the long carving frenchdrains spoon away at its stature
(walk humbly with your God)
until the pieces of our umbrella
–the very stones and mortar of this sanctuary–
must join their sister elements
that groan and clap to the song that sang  us all into

existence.

3.
Until then,
inhale;
receive Spirit here.
Spirit who practices this all like Moshe’s bush on Horeb
who sings that song to which our ears belong.
Take the cup,
raise her,
exhale the gratitude of
carbon dioxide and moisturedrip for the forest,
lick your lips and dig your teeth in
to heaven’s sweet ‘what-is-it.’

4.
Today is a Tuesday,
December’s light is late as usual.
Slipping past the commute
into this morning’s eye,
I sit in my study,
a place of words, walls, and a solid oak desk that all precede me
and I watch this candle devour the cold room
and flicker
hotter than any coal placed on my lips.
And I remember,

we are already lit. Burning
but not consumed.
Set to flight.
Racing but not exhausted.
And this building already sings
and breathes
and joins creation.
And the dead are raised in Christ,
worship already working,

and the old and the future are part of today’s
firelight.

We’re preparing our house and family life for our second kid, due September 28. I’m cultivating the early years of Neighbors Abbey‘s work in SW Atlanta and the emerging church planting that is a part of it.  Joshua Case and I have been teaming up on some Church as Art emerging worship coaching projects for this fall. I’m still working with the Village Counsel of Emergent Village as we live into our being a Village green. And I’m in the middle of curating worship for Clayfire, writing a chapter for an upcoming festschrift by Ryan Bolger about hyphenated emerging projects, curating music for City Church Eastside, and writing my first full length book for Paraclete Press about the intersection the Aesthetics and God’s Mission. This book (provisionally titled, “Getting Drawn In”) is about the creative nature of God’s mission, and our own awakening to God’s calling as we step into creative and intentional lives. In researching all this I came across an old book of poems called The Singer by Calvin Miller referred or given to me by my friend Ty Saltsgiver in the 90s. In it I found this chapter XII entitled”In hell there is no music—an agonizing night that never ends as songless as a shattered violin”:

“Sing the Hillside Song” they cried.
There were so many of them. He
wasn’t even sure he could be
heard above the din of all their
voices. He walked among them
and looked them over. In his
mind he knew that the Father’s Spirit
wanted each of them to learn
his song.

Someone in the sprawling crowd
stood and handed him a lyre.
“Sing for us please Singer—the
Hillside Song!”

“Yes, yes,” they called, “the Hillside Song”

He looked down at the lyre and
held it close. He turned each
thumb-set till the string knew
how to sound, then he began:

“Blessed are the musical,” he
said, “for their’s shall be
never-ending song.”

“Blessed are those who know the
difference between their loving
and their lusting, for they shall
be pure in heart and understand
the reason.”

“Blessed are those who die for
reasons that are real, for they
themselves are real.”

“Blessed are all those who yet
can sing when all the theater
is empty annd the orchestra is gone.”

“Blessed is the man who stands
before the cruelest king and
only fears his God.”

“Blessed is the mighty king who
sits behind the weakest man and
thinks of all their similarities.”

“Earthmaker is love. He has send
his only Troubadour to close
the Canyon of the Damned.”

Then they broke his song and cried
one with one voice, “Tell us
Singer, have you any hope for us?
can we be saved?”

“You may if you will sing Earth-
makers’s Song!”

“Is there another way to cheat
the Canyon of the Damned?”

“None but the Song!”

The beauty of Miller’s language here, to me, is that there is a song that wants to be played. There is a way out of loneliness and despair, that comes with willfully listening to the song within…  And that you can’t short cut that listening pathway with some kind of formula or group membership.  We have to keep listening, and singing.

Good Friday can start to feel like a civil war reenactment once death has lost its sting.  So what, then, do a resurrection people have left to discover on Good Friday?  How does the holy-day serve liturgically to “shape” us as followers in the Jesus Way?  To answer that I want to start by throwing out ways that Good Friday might misshape us, and some guesses as to why.

So, if you grew up in a popular American Christian experience like mine, Good Friday was a time to recall the miracle of the Romans Road, when the cross was laid over the pit of hell (complete with hazard cones warning drivers to beware of impending doom) delivering to safety those individuals who would accept the torture of Christ in a representative capacity for their own cosmic debt.

And if you’ve been on a similar journey as mine since, you’ve perhaps grown a bit cynical about that thoroughfare constructed 19 centuries after the fact out of 5 sentences of a 20 page letter to the Romans as well as its complimentary campaign reducing Jesus’ Good-Friday event to a rescue mission to hack into the Matrix and change God’s rules- a mission that God would have sent Jesus to do for me if, even if I were one and only human on the earth (and yes, I’m proud to say that the “I” here is me, the guy writing this post, and not necessarily you- at least that’s how I remember the shtick going).

And if you were living and breathing 7 years ago you had to have heard of or seen Gibson’s Passion of Christ.  If it did its job, you might have gotten even more eeby-geeby about the gore and agony that Holy Week culminating in Good Friday represents.   And perhaps you shake your head, like me, at those friends who watch it year after year hoping to shame the sin away by “identifying with the pain” of our savior, or hoping to leverage the cinematic shock-and-awe to drill a deeper well toward even deeper gratitude than the year before.  But death-movies like Gibson’s have lost their sting to me.

So instead of blogging through biblical, theological or historical evidence that could either make you feel more self-confident, or could lead you to throw up your hands dismissing my argument as unfounded, I want to ask you to do a little exercise.  It is a directed meditation that will require 10 minutes of your dedicated attention.  Whether you’re reading this on your Driod or iPhone or laptop, or even if your secretary prints out RSS feeds from Josh’s blog and lays it on your desk next to your morning coffee, I need you to stop for a sec and get a blank sheet of paper.

SPOILER- don’t read ahead, trust your cells to the process and give yourself 10 minutes (9½  now) to go through this exercise.  This means you too, my old friend who is scanning this because you’ve just got a minute. Go ahead and get the paper… I’ll wait:

1. Okay, now take your piece of paper and fold it in half twice to make four equal quadrants.  No need to draw any lines, the two creases should suffice.
2. Turn it horizontally and write in the bottom right quadrant the names of people and organizations that fit the following categories:
   • People you are against
   • People who have hurt members of your family and those you love
   • People who hurt you when you were young
   • Groups that insult you or your friends or your religious practice
   • Countries that mean harm to yours
   • Political parties that sabotage what you see as right and just
   • Pundits and media moguls who profit from demonizing you and people you value
   • Companies, technologies, superstars, industries, ideologies, and leaders with power who misuse their power to devour others.
   • That neighbor that you just can’t stand
3. Now on the bottom left write the names of people and groups that you self identify with:
   • Your family members
   • Those who enjoy living, shopping, eating, and working in the same places as you
   • Those who you help to get elected
   • Non profits and special interest groups you donate time or money to
   • Those who you’d take into your house when they need help.
   • Those who have given you favors, breaks, and gifted you with opportunities to progress in life.
   • Those who subscribe to and/or share your religious group’s gathering habits, styles, ideas, and language.
4. Now draw a horizontal line along the horizontal crease above the two groups.

The gospels give us a window into three years spent by Jesus re-imagining a place over that horizon in which the divisions below the horizon no longer exist.  He saw a kingdom where those who were cursed would be blessed.  He saw a world where the oppressed would carry the oppressor’s pack an extra mile.  A future where it would be possible to love your enemies, or even that forgiving others’ their trespasses would be a part of ushering in such a forgiving future. He saw a faith that would reunite the religious and irreligious.  Jesus’ mission to “proclaim freedom to the prisoner, and good news to the poor” would affect the prison guards and the wealthy as well.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Jesus did not say every behavior, group, or ethical decision was “relative” or that grace abounded such that injustice or self-sabotage would be free from consequences. Jesus said he’d bring a sword between parent and child.  He knew that his cruciform presence, his servant leadership would exacerbate divisions.  That either side would have to fall like a seed into the ground and die to be born anew with eyes for that other horizon.

He challenged those entrusted with power to measure out consequences for injustice and self-sabotage. And this challenge would wear out those authorities (imperial and religious, as well as the public power of social media who would cry “crucify him”) until they resorted to the last resort–violent death.

5. Now, draw a cross below the horizon, between the two sides somewhere along the vertical crease (of course I have ideas for what you could draw above the horizon, but this is a Good Friday blog not an Easter Sunday one).

Here’s my beef with the Romans Road, it trains our imagination to think of ourselves first.  And when that is our primary metaphor it can pervert the power of Good Friday into a therapeutic form of asceticism. Instead of imaging this Good Friday, that it’s all about a back room deal to get you and those in your group on the bridge over troubled waters, image that the divisions of your everyday life are made physical, demonstrated in the crudest most humiliating of forms.  The cross and the torture devises of empire belong below the horizon line of the promised future. What changes the crucifixion’s cruel macabre character is Jesus’ vision for what lay beyond it’s horizon.  Empire and death are made a laughing stock on the resurrection side of that horizon. Join Christ on the road to Calvary by laying down your arms, your defenses, your revenge, your bounded sets, by daring what C.S. Lewis liked to call the “deeper magic” to happen.

No doubt, death is real.  We feel it to our bones and it is serious stuff.  But Good Friday’s glory does not come from death’s gravity. Good Friday is Good because it is the masterful cosmic foreshadowing of the prevailing community of forgiveness. The vision of the Crucified one, on Friday of Holy week, is good news to everything on this side of the horizon, it is proof that God would not want any single one to be left out of the story.  ‘Even if you or I would dream it otherwise.

Do you recall that curtain ripping in the Holy of Holies at the strike of 3pm?  Paul would later write that the dividing wall between people is also removed (Eph 2.13-16). So, what shall separate us from the fellowship forming love of God in Christ Jesus? Nothing!  There is no longer Covenanters or pagans, no longer male and female, no longer enslaved or free citizen… all things are made new.  Even that old foe, death, no longer has its stinging capacity to separate us.  The empty cross proves that corporeal threat is impotent in the face of God’s love, and the empty tomb proves that sacrificial death is empty too.  Jesus was betting on that! Good Friday is the inhaling of the deeper magic.  On Good Friday, we are invited to join Christ in letting-go of the demand we hold on others and in letting-come the power to forgive, heal, reconcile and belong within a New Creation.

Have a Good Friday!

I’m excited to be collaborating with Paul Soupiset, Tim Snyder, and Makeesha Fisher, among others, on this long awaited project. I will be editor of visual and performing arts.

HERE’S THE SCOOP…

GENERATE Magazine has been an open, collaborative project in the works for more than six years now. And after many casual conversations — and the 2009 convening of an editorial team — we are ready and eager to involve you, the larger community, in helping realize this dream with us.

The seeds for GENERATE Magazine were sown sitting around a fountain in San Diego in 2004 — a few writers, poets, artists and designers explored and dreamed about launching a print publication that would embody the ethos and tell the stories of the growing, generative conversation that some have called the emerging church conversation.

Again at the 2007 Emergent Gathering, another planning group was convened to discuss logistics, bring some leadership to the dream, and get things rolling. GENERATE Magazine is the fruit of many months of their planning.

VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS?

Art provides resistance and lift to what the Spirit of New Creation is generating. The beauty that artisans fashion, sing, and perform can testify to what is possible and evoke imagination for what is yet to come. We are drawn to paintings and songs that put us “in play.” GENERATE aims to fashion a synthesis of such works of art, and to celebrate the lives of their creators, in order to put our readers in play as well.

WHY GENERATE?

GENERATE exists as a forum to retell the stories of the grassroots communities and individuals who are finding emergent and alternative means to follow God in the Way of Jesus. We hope to create an artifact of this historical conversation. These stories will be transmitted through narrative, works of visual art, documented performances, verse, fiction, non-fiction, essays, and interviews.

We/you are the conversation; our art, our lives, our hopes and failures all meet up with God’s approaching dreams for creation. We converse and in doing so spread the news that we are not alone — that joy is found in our generative friendship.

GENERATE Magazine is a grassroots-organized, independent publication affiliated as a friend of Emergent Village, but not affiliated with any publishing house. We are currently exploring ways to distribute GENERATE Magazine via the Emergent Village Cohorts and wider friendships. More on that in the days to come.

I hope this gets your wheals turning!

Imagine the chaos that ensued when, this sect of Jews following ‘Yashua’ (Jesus, literally the same name as Joshua, meaning Saving One), waited the designated 50 days after Passover and were then interrupted by synchronicity of multiple language, sharing, and neighboring. ‘All because the Spirit inspired them. Pentecost was not planned, programmed, or strategic on the part of the community of Jesus… Pentecost is the name we place on the happening that occurred amidst a Jewish holiday of Shavuot- marking the giving of the Torah (10 commandments and the rest of Jewish Law) to Moses, and book-ending the two main harvests of their early agrarian culture (barley after Passover and wheat 50 days later). Pentecost interrupted that community with new Laws and new cycles. And the Spirit of Jesus accomplished this interruption by re-introducing a multi-culturallism (that was already around them, but had grown flat and unacknowledged) and agnecy (shared responsibility in making, crafting, doing, speaking). It put everyone, across their differences, in play.

Kelley showed me this video last week, about Amy Krouse and the community she was joined by, and I was blown away. The DIY/indie craft world is filled with innovators who “make stuff.” And this story of Amy is what i imagine the feeling of Pentecost being as opposed to “the greatest church service ever” which is how I traditionally grew up imagining Pentecost. It’s a great metaphor to replace the flattened idea of church. Every one was “in play” at the church’s first Pentecost. People were around because of their media-socio-cultural practices (Jewish pilgrimages were made to Jerusalem 50 days after passover). They were a heterogeneous mix, not the same subculture. And a new “thing” emerged. The Jesus story became a story of a people at Pentecost- it was a “beckoning of the lovely.”

I’ll be speaking in October at an Atlanta event organized by Progressive Christian Cooperative, called The Beloved Community: From Formation to Action. I met Kimberly, the inventor behind this, through the Emergent Cohort and have begun to learn from her passion to bring innovative practice of spiritual formation into the human right advocacy circles as well as advocacy into spiritual formation circles. So, though the event is in October our conversations this summer and my talk are simmering on one of my back burners along with what I’ve been reading by Wolfe.

In Wolfe’s article “Silence Cunning and Exile” (quoting James Joyce) I was stuck by the fellowship between beauty and suffering. Almost in a vin diagram sense, these two vivid themes, beauty and suffering, overlap in the costs to access them and the effect the evoke. They have an admission and an affect. They both beg a question that is never answered until the spirit/body s t o p s and in silence hears/feels/knows LOVE. Eyes to see and ears to hear…

And so beauty and suffering, the teleological signpost of the artists and the prophet, are met in silence. These are not “the ends” they are the signs. But signs are how we see, they are the things that compel us when we see through glass dimly, when we only have a lamp for our feet and light on our path, while death valley’s shadows remain. No activist can afford to stay plugged in at every movement to her iPhone, and the ticker at the bottom of CNN, and the moving messages of injustice and need outside the MARTA window. No artist can afford to stay transfixed as a doer, maker, striver. Artists and activists both require love. Their trades, sans love, will CLANG worse than a bad drum track. The access to an inner rhythm, to beauty that does not tare you away from humanity in endless pursuit of nirvana, to a righteousness that rolls down mountains in liquid inevitability–the access to this ineffability requires us to s t o p and listen to…

It is in silence that we hear our belovedness. And silence, like white space, is also a place, it is the spacial environment where our imaginations are taught/shapes/formed. Silence, though, is not a commodity to be traded. Like manna it will turn to worms should you return to it apart from an open receptive posture (maybe this is why acquisitiveness, self-aggrandizement, or scarcity rarely characterize true artists and activists). Artists and activists are shapers, whether pragmatic or romantic, we move real things into new places and lop off the corner of one thing fastening something to its other side until a new thing emerges. We are shapers, and it is in silence the we let go of our brother’s heel, and unbuckle our holster, and lay down our birth-rite as shaper… and we climb up onto the easel, the wheel, into the kiln, and place our necks under the callused fingers to be shaped by…

Love.

Here are a few of Wolfe’s lines and citations that have shaped me today…

There is nothing behind [silence] to which it can be related, except the Creator Himself (sic.) -Max Pickard, The World of Silence.

Out of silence emerges the creative act, both in the ‘sub-creation’ of the artist and in the creation of God. but there is also a sense in which the created artifact itself is something set into silence…

The space that Christ gives us to respond to him is similar to the space the the artist must give to us to respond to his or her work…

The art that emerges out of silence–the art the experiences human life and our fallen world as a place of exile–forces us to ask the question “why.” -Gregory Wolfe

There can be no answer to the ‘Why?’ of the afflicted… The only things the compel us tot ask the question are affliction, and also beauty; for the beautiful gives us such a vivid sence of the presence of something good that we love for purpose there, without even finding one. Like affliction, beauty compels us to ask: Why? Why is this thing beautiful? But rare are those who are capable of asking this question for as long as a few hours at a time…

He who is capable not only of crying out but also of listening will hear the answer. Silence it the answer.

The speech of created beings is with sounds. The word of God is silence. God’s secret word of love can be nothing else but silence. Christ is the silence of God.” -Simone Weil

The Beloved Community is the nexus of action and formation. We are formed in the silent act love. And we act as ones (in)formed into lovers. This mutuality between God and creation begats mutuality between humanity in our creative ventures, in response to both beauty and suffering.