Art and Christianity

I went to church today - after a fashion. I went to the de Young and to California Academy of Sciences with a friend of mine. We went to see a Modern Art collection on loan from the National Museum and to see the Skulls exhibit. I get to call it church because I especially wanted to see Barnett Newman's Sations of the Cross: Lema Sabbachthani; inspired by this piece I say in Napa.

A couple months ago, I went to the di Rosa museum up in Napa and saw Paul Kos' Chartres Blue installation.

http://www.paulkos.net/Paul_Kos/Artwork_Installation_Chartres_Bleu.html

In brief, this is a lot of TV screens depicting a window in the Chartres Cathedral over the course of a day - but in 12 minutes. It has small pews, is incredibly tiny and dark, just the monitors and some emergency lights near the exits, and a stunning meditation piece. I'd have spent far more time there, but was in a guided tour and wasn't allowed to linger.

The entrance, to this piece, created for this, the permanent installation, was a stations of the cross - and was so overwhelming. And impossible to get picture of, but this is one. It's just Roman Numerals, 10 feet tall, one after the other. Crammed into this walkthrough, you could never do the huddled mass that happens in most churches, circling the pews. You just stand there and it presses down from all sides, with the sound of dripping water, and the only place to go is into this stained glass wall, that you can't tell is flickering until you stop to rest from the overwhelming Romans.

http://www.paulkos.net/Paul_Kos/Artwork_Installation_Chartres_Bleu,Tunnel_Chapel_2.html


So, today, I went to see Newman's Stations of the Cross. This is what a more articulate person than me says about his work.

Newman began working on the fourteen paintings in this series shortly after his first heart attack.  He didn't have a name for them when he began, and only gave them their name after having completed the first four.  After naming them, he decided to add the remaining 11 paintings (a 15th painting has a different name--Be Two--but is treated as part of the series).  He wrote about how he realized, while working on the fourth painting, that the paintings were having a profound emotional impact on him; it was that emotional impact which gave him the name for the series.  In other words, he did not search for iconographic meaning; nor did he try to create it.  In fact, as he worked, he treated each painting as a distinct, independent painting at the same time that he conceptualized it as part of the series.  Because of this ontology, it is difficult to say when Newman decided to make a series in order to limit the parameters of choice, to have to work within a predetermined framework.  There are restrictions in the series--of color and scale--and these restrictions are experienced in a much fuller fashion by seeing 15 paintings than they might have been experienced or even noticed in one or two paintings. 
If, as Harold Rosenberg has suggested, Newman's "mission" or passion was the destruction and transformation of self, then in the Stations of the Cross he has applied this goal to what had become his signature style.  Conversely, if Newman's Stations is about the Holocaust, than the viewer's experience of this series is one in which the viewer, placed in this position of moving from one painting to the next and visually responding to the restrictions and differences, actively participates in the act of memory and loss, or the memorialization of the Holocaust. 
http://www.radford.edu/~rbarris/art428/newman's%20sublime.html

And here is an example of the series. Although, like nearly all the art I go see, the pictures are nearly meaningless in their ability to convey intensity as intended outside their medium. Modern art didn't make sense to me when I was only looking at it in books or on computer screens - so much of it is embodied in the medium itself that you need the thing - the cavnas and the paint and the light - in order for it to make sense.

First Station - http://www.radford.edu/~rbarris/art428/newman's%20sublime.html

You can look for images online - but if you are in San Francisco for awhile, or live near the National Museum of Art - where it usually lives - I suggest you check it out for yourself. This canvas is 5x6.5 feet - they feel big like standing in front of a person. And they tell a tale, but not without the context of the others - at least for me. The tale is told differently taking them in one by one or if you just walk past them one after the other.

So, what I wonder is what happened?

I am always struck by how powerful modern interpretation of Christian themes is, and how, perhaps without fail, they are accompanied by information from the artist and the critics that it isn't religious. I often speculate on what the hell happened in the church that made people pull away so strongly. In a very basic sense, religion is a systemic speculation of meaning. One might say, a collective expression of WTF. And the counter-culture, the post modernist of the 20th century, really were engaged in asking that question. Exactly what were churches doing, that such powerful religious art was created and all I ever encountered were Chick Tracts and song lyrics by Stuart Hine and John Newton (I'll let you look up those incredibly popular songs yourself.) I grew up in a Baptist church, and I don't know them to be very interested in visual arts - so we sang a lot of bloody songs(blood, jesus, lyrics gets you 9.5 million tesults in .33 seconds, each one more banal than the next). As an adult in the Episcopal church, with all that stained glass and stations of the cross around the rooms, I still encountered lots of pithy art, lots of church goods catalog art, lots of imitation and reproduction art from long, long ago, in a mawkish universe far, far away. Yes, it's tasteful, except for all the brass plaques everywhere, but none of it really takes your breath away.

I really want to know why churches and demoninations and Christians (although they are not alone in this) became so sentimental. I want to know why we sing such assinine songs in church - not just the remants of the 70's folk mass, there are agregious examples throughout history, although in a course of music, it seems that the real thrust of nausea started in the late 18th or all of the 19th century. And the mid 20th century was a nostalgic dream that we are still trying to stay asleep for. (Yes, I went to a tiki themed party at the Disney museum for my 19th anniversary. I'm not saying that I am immune to this delusion.) What is wrong with all this? Why is it so tacky and cheesy and boring and tastefully uninspiring? Why, when I live in the 21st century, am I supposed to relate to art from 500 years ago, why is the current stuff all Victorian tripe? Where are all the grown up Christians hiding? Where am I supposed to go when I am not a newbie and I am not interested in exploring the same old introductory to Christianity? How many catechisms am I supposed to attend? No wonder we have the spiritual wanderers? The only way to encounter something new is to find someone elses' introductory materials.

I'm awfully glad I went the art museum today. Awfully glad that I saw examples of creations clever and ingeneous specialization in the Skulls exhibit and our human response to the need to find meaning in our experiences of that creation. I feel far more fed than usual on a Sunday afternoon.

Christian Values in Non Church Settings

Yes, this is the most boring title for a blog post in the history of posting, but this is what I am thinking about this morning.

It seems to me, more and more, that joyfully, openly living Christian values in non-church and non-Christian settings is more important than Sunday services. I can't speak for places I have not lived, so I'm talking really specifically about the West Coast and out West, is where people migrate to in order to get away from whatever they left behind. Sadly, what a lot of people are leaving behind is unemployment and bigotry. I don't think Walmart gets all the blame for the shrinking of the small town in America.

So, at least in terms of faith, what I see a lot of on the West Coast are people who have left home because of a preponderance of bigotry, a lot of it to do with being non-traditional in their sexuality/gender, but also, for simply being too intelligent, too thoughtful. I don't tend to believe in reckonings, they have a tendancy to destroy everything in their path, but I do sometimes hope there is a reckoning for the ways in which people both appealed to and were seduced by small minded, keep doing things the way we have always done it even though it is obviously broken, backwardness.

In terms of how we do church, this is not about changing up the liturgical structure in what are often random and personally preferenced ways. Personally, I like a non-changing liturgical structure that I can sink into and then have space within that for nuance. What is often lacking in my experience of church liturgy - of every single type - is that is holds people static. It is a very difficult thing to facillitate Sunday worship (or any group activity, really) that feeds the uninitiated through what my friend Wendy calls past-Christian, or people who actually think critically (not just negatively) about religion and faith. Somehow, the middle road has been to stay in the framework of grade school social development and this Cleaver model is feeding fewer and fewer people in this world. We could let it go, if we were willing to piss off those few Cleavers left, but they tend to pay the salaries, so who knows if church can do anything except be reborn like a pheonix.

Faith is more than just two hours on Sunday morning. Seriously, I wish we could just set that aside for 10 years and talk about something else. I am a Christian every day of the week, when I am awake and asleep and when I am helping out a homeless vet and when I am picking my nose in traffic. I want to really talk about and really have access to someone who is thinking about what it means to act like a Christian when I am at a drunken orgy. And I am not some 16 year old to be told, oh you shouldn't find yourself in those places. Whether or not I should find myself in some situation is completely a different discussion from what I should do once I've found myself there. It is these missing discussions, I think, that leave us with those tedious repackaged platitudes we find surrounded by flowers and rainbows on facebook. Whether or not I participate in said, theoretical drunken orgy, I should be able to articulate in terms of my faith, why I am there and what I am doing. And it better not be - I'm here to save people from the grip of Satan, or I'll pray for you, a sinner, or Jesus was a hippie free-love communist so pass the beer.

This is an over the top example for many people, but it's not off the table for everyone. And I don't think that you need to have a snappy one-line comeback for every angry person who says, "what are you doing, I thought you were some kind of Christian?" Those people are not asking you a genuine question. Those people are not talking to you at all - they are reacting to some echo of hurt within themselves,  and it is best neither to take it personally or to think that you can change them right there. My husband has what I think is the best response to these sort of jabs, which is to respond to the effect that he doesn't believe in the God that they are refuting, either.

But if you are at all living an openly Christian life, which many, many people I know are not, someone, eventually, is going to ask you why you bother with all that nonsense, because you are a good and nice person already. And I am reasonably sure that most hidden Christians are good and nice, and that they have absolutely no way to articulate an answer to that. When we complain about the types of Christians who dominate the public sphere, it is because those are the ones who get talking points articulated to them and they are the ones who get people to help them reconcile their faith with their day to day life. If you want to be ashamed of your faith tradition, consider that the bigots are much better at helping people articulate their faith than you are. Consider wether you really have faith, wether you really have a deep seated spiritual life that you are drawing on, if you cannot articulate why you are a Christian for yourself, or help others to do so.

And we don't seem interested in this - in the Epsicopal tradition, at least. I went to seminary, and I had an opportunity to meet seminarians all over the country, and I made it a habit to ask my fellow seminarians to articulate their faith. The answer that sticks with me as the saddest of all, because it came from someone whose faith I deeply respect, was "the Nicene Creed." That is no answer. But it is the answer that discernment committees are looking for. I know - I washed out of discernment because I couldn't, literally could not, say that the changes I saw in a deeply hurting place were because of the Holy Spirit. To say that, which had not even occured to me, would have been a Peter sized denial for me. Maybe the Spirit was doing great things, but I don't measure the work of the Spirit as "butts in seats." And if I get to Heaven and discover that is really all there was to this Christianity that I have committed to - I'm going to ask for a hall pass and never come back.

So, I live out my values in non-Christian settings. I think my faith asks me to see people for who they really are, and not as means to ends. I think my faith asks me to build people up, help them feel whole, happy, to have a sense of belonging, satisfaction, and purposeful. I think my faith asks me to bring my best self forward for the sake of others and that the more I let myself do that, the better chance I have to be on the receiving end of of that same goodness. I think I have a duty to facilitate others - expand their opportunities to share, to laugh, to learn, to be helpful. I think Christ asks me to let myself be broken for others, to be this open knowing full well that some people are going to stab me in the back, use me for their own advantage, and steal or even physically harm me. But to not let the fear of that, or the fact of that, stop me from all these other things. Christ asks me to be honest when someone asks me why I am such a good egg, but never, ever, ever, do I think Christ asks me to proliferate facebook memes of faith. Jesus may love me, and this I may know, but not because the Bible tells me so. It is because in the face of the deepest human rejections I have known, I have also known that I am not valueless, that I am still lovable, and that I can move on - even if I have no idea how at this moment.

That is what my faith gives me. And that face of Jesus, that is the love and sympathy and genuine sorrow that other Christians expressed to me in my darkness. Not some random platitude toting Christians but the ones that I walk my whole life journey with. The friendship and family that the bible does promise. It's the part of Christian life that is really hard to see from the outside, it's really hard to explain on a Sunday morning, and an awful lot of Christians get a few members in their friends and family plan and they just stop being open to more. That is the saddest thing of all. That, I believe, is the real denial of faith and Christ - to not be open to adding more people, not as means to ends, but as fellow loving creatures.

My religion stands on the belief that God walked the earth among us. Lots of gods do this, they were coming down and having sex and creating rivers of sperm for thousands of years before Christ. Gods coming to earth is nothing new. Jesus participating in our suffering, that was new. For all you Star Trek fans - Q pops in and out of our space-time continuum all the time, and tut-tuts at our silliness, wrecks havoc out of distant curiosity, and with the snap of a finger, is gone. That is not what Jesus did. Jesus did the whole human experience - left Godliness behind to experience birth, childhood, adolescence, stubbed toes and hungry stomachs and sore muscles. Also, Jesus experienced happiness and disappointment and love. (While we know little of Jesus' love life - I expect this has far more to do with the need to distinguish our God from a swan shaped Zeus who came to sleep with the ladies, than it does with Jesus not experiencing lust, requited or otherwise.) Jesus stuck it out, to the end. Q would not have tolerated the aches and pains of a bodily existence, let alone stuck around to feel how that body dies.

And that is what sets Christianity apart, what makes it unique among the worshippers of the Abrahamic God. And the ridiculous convolutions we come up with to explain this are probably why people think we are nuts, but for some of us, this is what is important. Me, I don't have much interest in a distant God. In an unknowable God. In a Father God, even.  But I have a lot of interest in a God that has enough interest in me to get down on the floor and try to understand what I am going through. And that willingness to really try to understand my point of view makes me more willing to try to see God's point of view.

So, here I am, on Pentecost, the "birthday" of the church, writing my own sermon again, because my parish is having a literal birthday party, complete with presents for the facility. And I like a nice facility as much as the next person, but it's not the church. And as sweet and nice as all the ladies are, they love that building and I actually couldn't care less if we had it. And I'm not sure we have known each other long enough for me to say that church is happening far more in the ride home you give me, or the invitation to the farmers market you give me, or the conversation we have at the bus stop, or even the introduction to your children when they visit, than it is on Sunday morning during Rite II or downstairs at coffee hour unwrapping paper towels for the facility kitchen.