Monastic Retreat

From October 2004

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Monks interest me–they always have. Monastic tradition (at least what I’ve read of it) captures in material terms the essential contradiction of Jesus’ exhortation to be in the world, but not of it. Over the years, books such as Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation, Esther de Waal’s Seeking God, Brother Lawrence’s Practicing the Presence of God, Thomas Moore’s On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life, Anthony DeMello’s Awareness, and various other writings on Benedictine practice have caught my attention, inspired me to move to a deeper, quieter place with God.

This is problematic for the folks of my evangelical religious tradition, who cast religious fervor in terms of souls saved, bible studies conducted, and swearing, fornication, gambling and other such sin avoided, all the while wrestling the biblical text as if it were the angel of Jacob, determined to figure out in exact rational terms what the formula is for salvation, deep goodness be damned. There is a continual great pressure to produce concrete action in the name of Jesus a la James long-contested words, “Faith without works is dead.” But put Paul’s observation (I Corinthians 13) that works in themselves prove nothing next to James, and you arrive back at the core question, the fundamental transformation called for by Christian faith: how does the corrupt heart change, so that spontaneous inclinations are moved from the evil to the good, from hate to love, from cursing to praise?

I wrote last week of God’s dwelling place perhaps being found in the moment of love given, that action being a kind of mercy seat wherein we meet God. That in the active reaching out, God perhaps allows us to touch, or be touched by, the life of the Christ, infusing us with a new strain of life, old dead spirit replaced again by new, living Spirit.

But Christ also calls us to the silence of the closet, the close quartered life where we might discover God speaking quietly to us, working on our thought-life, conversing with us about the yielding of the particulars of this day. While monastic silence and quiet are sometimes cast as escape (and they can indeed be that), retreat and contemplation are important arenas wherein we find the capacity to see human beings as Jesus sees them. The world is such a noisy, frightening place–the cheers of crowds, the spin of political pundits, the rage of warmongers and peaceniks alike–that it can be difficult to resist the temptation to simply close the soul off, and run for the proverbial hills. That way lies death. But the simple quiet sought for the sake of knowing how better to confront the noise and the frightened (and the fear)…that way lies life, and power.

Contradiction. Paradox. Die to live. Retreat to engage. Fast to feed.

Suddenly, I wonder…am I still talking about Beauty?

What is Beauty?

From October 2004

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My friend Arthur Morton (the first Fine Arts Pastor I’d ever met, now heading up a ministry called for Christian artists called Poiema: Beauty, Truth, Passion is leading a discussion tonight in Dallas about the nature of Beauty. Is there such thing? How do you measure it? What standards apply when it comes to evaluating art for it’s beauty?

If I have an idol in my life, I suppose Beauty would be it, and in the end, I have always found it hard to distinguish Beauty from God. I use the capital “B” because I believe there is an idea of Beauty that stands behind all things we find beautiful. Or perhaps it’s the capacity in us to see Beauty that stands behind all such experiences, but either way, the human experience of Beauty is one of the great gifts of God, one of the rich clues He leaves behind as He moves in the world, one of the most powerful reasons we are without excuse when we reject Him.

Beauty is order. Wait, perhaps not, you say, calling into evidence the vast wildness of nature, the unpredictability of action unfolding. And, you go on, order can be ugly, a sort of dead, conventional, long-out-of-date adherence to a substandard form. True…true. But we start with order because the word connotes that move from chaos that is true chaos to order which is true order, a dynamic order full of whirling tension through which processes move, processes that birth worlds, whether they be worlds of paint, of words, of metaphors, or materials ranging from steel to ceramics to the very stuff of planets and suns.

Beauty is dynamic. Our ideas of beauty range in diversity from culture to culture, I believe, because the nature of beauty is buried deep in all the processes of creation, material and spiritual (not that I buy that kind of dualism, but it’s convenient to say it that way). The very nature of Beauty is that it must be dynamic, an ever moving target that shifts because of our perceptive limitations–we are the blind men ranging not around one elephant, comparing faulty notes as we go, but we are blind men exploring a universe where we touch beauty in a million moments, each of us crying out when we touch it, saying, “Here, here…here it is, I found it!” And indeed we have.

Beauty is heart-breaking. I told a friend the other day that the world breaks my heart everyday. What I think I meant was that the Beauty of God’s world is more than we can stand. I certainly don’t mean “pretty.” I am referring to the sheer glory of what is around us, and the brokenness, too, which is a doorway to the greatest Beauty of all, the dynamic re-ordering of a life by the power of the One who spoke Beauty into being to start with. I am not one of those people who subscribe to the idea that this life is simply a warm-up for the next one. Perhaps that’s true, but God made this life, this world, these colors, these humans, and it is in this here and now that we are living and laughing and crying out and praying, and there is a connectedness between Beauty as experienced in a work of art, or a moment of communing with nature, and a moment of a child’s unmasked joy, and the Holy Spirit breaking through the hard casing of a life to re-order the thing with the dynamic, miraculous (nothing short of that, miraculous) love of God.

And that is beautiful…

Lord, break our hearts with Beauty again today…

Thoughts on Beauty

From September 2004:

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Two thoughts on beauty from last night’s reading in The Dramatist, the journal of the Dramatist’s Guild of America.

“[Cultural diversity policies] deny the possibility of developing common standards for judging art, and see culture as merely a collection of disparate individual preferences. The difference is that the left saw these preferences as personal identities; the right saw them as market choices. … The concepts of beauty, sensitivity and skill have all but vanished.” Josie Appleton, Spiked (April 7, 2004)

In response to a question about the importance of romance in his plays, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz (Anna in the Tropics) had this to say: “In my plays, I try to arrest beauty. Beauty is an important element of art, as important as in nature. For instance, a flower draws the attention of an insect by its vibrant and beautiful colors and through that insect is able to reproduce. It’s the same with art, with theater. You need a certain amount of beauty to draw in your audience, before they can reach that cathartic place and make a connection with the depth of your work.” Nilo Cruz, The Dramatist (September/October, 2004)