Deep Hunger, Deep Joy

From October 2004

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On days when I’m stumped for words, if I sit quietly, waiting, invariably words arrive–just not the ones I was hoping for. Today, trying to push my little screenplay along, I kept getting sideswiped by thoughts of meaning and purpose, as if someone was at my shoulder prodding me to look again, look again.

Here’s the Frederick Buechner quote that’s been dogging me lately (to say that I’d been brooooding over it wouldn’t be true, but it’s been pesky, showing up randomly several times a week):

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

Today, the gladness. Tomorrow, the deep hunger.

Listen to this, a snatch of sermon from the great 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon:

“Bethink you, beloved, of his character, and surely he must have known the joy of being good; for there is a deep gladness in holiness, a blessed peacefulness in righteousness. The holiness of angels is their happiness, and although to a large degree the Savior laid his peace aside, yet there is a rest of soul from which virtue cannot separate. Distractions of conscience he never knew, disturbance of mind, on account of sin he did not feel on his own account, although as our substitute he was made sin for us. He suffered. Mark, I am not for a moment detracting from his sufferings, high mountains of grief I see; the eagle’s wing cannot reach their summit, nor foot of angel climb their brows; but lo, I see leaping streams of pleasure running adown the rugged steeps, and amid the hollows of the desolate hills I gaze upon deep lakes of joy unfathomable by mortal line.”

I write, act, direct, and teach not because they are pleasurable, but because it is there that I first discovered, and continue to touch, the deep joy Buechner is referring to. It is very close to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow.

“This is what we mean by optimal experience…It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

This doesn’t imply that we creators do so just for the fun of it, for the sheer pleasure of it. Csikszentmihalyi says these are not the moments of ease and fun, but the moments when “a person’s body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Buechner’s notion is that God has supplied us with the psychic energy and inclination to do the very work he is calling us to, revealing our truest nature even as he pour his life through us to accomplish his goals. (That begs the question of denial, but it’s the false impulse we must deny, not the true.) Even as God uses us to meet the needs of those he loves and is calling to himself, he is at the same time opening our own hearts to see and live out the essence of being he envisioned when he formed us.

Don’t ignore the deep joy…

Breaking the Silence

 From October 2004

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In a conversation this morning with a writer-to-be new friend of mine, he wondered why he should write, why I write, why any of us should “break the silence of the universe.” Why does this need to be told, he wondered, introducing me to several of his stories, each full of worthy characters and themes. He was responding in some degree to my oft-quoted Annie Dillard-ism that nobody really cares if you write or not, that the universe will get along nicely with or without the tome you’re currently working on.

I wish I could report that I gave him a basketful of upbeat reasons to rush home and dash out his narratives, but the truth is I didn’t. What are the reasons? It’s hard to say. An idea teases us, and we launch into as many wherefores as we can stand, from the idealistic (I’m changing the culture!) to the pragmatic (I’m buying a house!) to the prideful (I’m winning an Oscar!) to the religious (I’m being called!). But in the end, who can say why we stir, why we drag over to the computer, type out a word or two, hoping to get to the end of the sentence, the paragraph–the novel, for heaven’s sake? The reasons to tear into the story may be legion, but the only one that really matters is the one that gets our fannies into the chair to actually put the words down.

I find that from day to day, that one reason changes. Sometimes it’s my family, the needs they have, both current and future. Sometimes it’s a note from an obscure reader of Leaving Ruin (“Thank you for investing your heart and soul in your writing. Your labor of love has been a word of grace and hope to me.” — got that one a couple of weeks ago…). Other times it’s a looming deadline and the promise of a paycheck. Every once in a while, it’s sheer grace, some bit of prose showing up like a perfect fall day, asking no more of me than to simply catch it as it goes by.

And then there are those days, like the last couple, when no reason seems quite compelling enough, and I drag my backside to the chair (why do I have trouble joining in the current, constant use of the word “butt”?), and nothing really happens. I click here and there, and hours pass, and I slink away from my job, having done nothing but spit out some bleak words that are far more reflective of my mood that the state of things (as I am fond of saying).

But in the end, the silence of the universe is worth breaking. Is there anything as loud as the frank “thereness” of it all? Jesus said if the children of Israel stopped praising him, the rocks would cry out. And if the rocks (not to mention the mountains and seas) can’t keep quiet, why should we?

Back to the tomes…

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?

The Act of Service as Holy Grail

From October of 2004

From a conversation with my good friend Nikki. Note: This meshes well with the “neutrality” value of the emergent church.

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The act of service is a kind of space created between the giver and receiver, and it is in that space that God dwells. It is a sanctuary, perhaps the sanctuary of the holy grail, the point of contact with the blood of Christ. In this way the act of mercy, compassion, or charity mirrors the cherubim arching their wings toward one another on the Israelites’ ark of the covenant. It was between these cherubim that God dwelt on the “mercy seat,” meeting the High Priest there as he offered sacrifice for the sins of the people. Much of modern life is lived as if one of the cherubim have abandoned their posts, so there is no longer anywhere for God to dwell. So where is the mercy seat today?

When someone hands a needed meal, a needed bit of clothing, or offers a ride, or a place to stay–or perhaps more needed, forgiveness and grace–in the reaching of those hands toward the hands of those who would receive these gifts, a kind of space is created. It is a space that echoes the mercy seat of the ark of the convenant. It reminds me of Jesus saying “Where two or more of you are gathered in my name, there will I be also.” (Matt 18:20) We’ve always taken “where two or more of you are gathered in my name” to mean worshippers, and I suppose that’s what he meant. But when a thing is done for his glory, it really only takes the intentional reaching out of one toward a second to make two gathered in his name. The belief or unbelief of the receiver makes no difference. And in that meeting of two in his name, just as he said, there he resides.

A Work of Art is Good in Itself

From October 2004

Brett Lott quotes Flannery O’Conner in an article in Image magazine from 2004.

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“Saint Thomas Aquinas says that art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made. He says that a work of art is a good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations and make something that is simply a good in and by itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists. He must first of all be aware of his limitations as an artist–for art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.” — Flannery O’Connor, in “Novelist and Believer” 

Accepting the Longing, Entering the Quiet…

From October 2004

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Self-portrait, 2004. by Edward Wilcox

When I first encountered this painting in LA artist Edward Wilcox’s studio, this past summer, I was stunned by his capture of the essence of wonder. “Self-portrait, 2004″ is a canvas approximately 4 ft. x 4 ft., and was leaning close to a companion piece that has Edward looking in the other direction, toward distant windmills instead of crosses. Seeing these penetrating pieces in the context of Edward’s working studio was truly a thrill, and while the near-closing night party among Act One: Writing for Hollywood students went on, I found myself continually wandering out back to the studio, to stare at this man’s apprehension of the rich, terrifying, magnificent wonder of things.

As usual this morning, the world is coming apart, as it has always been. A bleak way to think of things, perhaps, but the brokenness of the world is the bed of miraculous beauty, and why various world religions conclude that reality is a duality, an equal dance between good and evil is apparant enough. We all have friends who see suffering and shake their fists at the skies, crying, “Not fair, not fair.” And perhaps we’ve been fortunate enough to see people crushed by life who somehow rise above it in near saint-like fashion, opening their busted arms to that same sky, crying, “Thanks be…thanks be…”

I’m an artist (trying to become one) because there have been moments of wonder in my life, when I stood as the man in the painting, gaping at the dense experience engulfing me, not judging the good or evil of it, but simply reeling in the glory of presence, in the pleasure of God’s (yep, I’m going to call it that) passing by. These moments have suggested themselves in multiple settings, in morally diverse events, in both celebration and tragedy. The phrase I often use to describe such moments are those times “when the curtain is pulled back.” But notice that the phrase suggests the pulling back of the curtain is being done by someone, and that someone is not me.

C.S. Lewis said these moments create longing, a deep call inside us, that sets us to pursuing what we can barely speak of. A country, I think is how he puts it, to which we hope to return, though we have never been there.

How troublesome that is. To long for what has been placed inside us–eternity, the Ecclesiastes writer says–but in the longing, to recognize that it is not in us to find, the key residing elsewhere, in an unfathomable unknown. How brutal, how unfair, how alone in the universe we must be, to have this joke played out on us, with wonder pressing down on us, with no way to grasp it, or enter in.

And if there is no God, and He has not revealed anything of himself, as the atheist would have us believe, then fair enough–we are alone, and the wonder is an amazing bit of cosmic sleight of hand, a happy chance (or unhappy, as the case may be) in our small journey from nowhere to nowhere, stopping only in the little town of Ruin, or some equivalent.

But standing in the painting with Edward, I can’t imagine–literally cannot imagine–that we stand in a nothing, with nothing but accident as origin and destiny. And in the crush of contradiction (the duality that is no duality, but the one broken world under the sovereignty of a God whose love I have not yet begun to comprehend), it seems that this is the way to make sense of things, and somehow rise each day to face the glory and horror of the days.

I see in this face the man stunned at the lamb of God crucified. But I also see the man stunned at all the innocent murdered over long years, cultures, and generations. And he is stands stunned at the corrupt man of evil’s turning around, at the shower of grace raining down on a planet madly dancing away from it’s Maker, at the lunacy of those who sense God in every moment, but that somehow reject him, the weight of glory just too heavy, too heavy.

Esoteric? Disconnected from the real world? Musings so that reality might be avoided?

I don’t think so. Breakfast calls, kids head to school, wife limps off to work (she broke her toe), and stories to touch the hem of His garment have to be plotted, pounded out one key at a time. Friends moving to and from God, marriages knitting and unraveling–heck, votes to be cast, votes that will change lives everywhere on the planet.

So the contradictions in the human condition can’t be avoided. But contradiction need not be chaos, for the grace raining down is from one sovereign hand.

So Job says, “Though you slay me, yet will I trust you.”

So the Hebrew writer says, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus…”

“Stunning, stunning…”

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)

Hero

Seeing as how we’ve been watching Heroes this past year, a look at another Hero seemed appropriate to post.  This post is from the summer of 2004.

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Daniel said he was bored, and we hadn’t done as much as we’d liked together this summer, so we set out to see a film. I talked him into seeing Zhang Yimou’s new filmHero, no mean feat, seeing that we were going to have to read sub-titles.

Jeffrey Overstreet wrote in his review that “If you miss seeing Hero on the big screen, you have missed one of the peaks of cinematic spectacle-on par with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.” I’m not sure I’m willing to go that far, but I will say that it’s the biggest aesthetic “wow” I’ve had in a long time.

The story of Hero is one thing–it’s glorious cinematic beauty another. Hero tells a story set against the backdrop of China’s period of warring states, in which the kingdom of Qin is locked in a war to unifiy the land in a single empire. The Qin king (Chen Daoming) has been the victim of numerous assassination attempts and offers great reward–and a personal audience–to anyone who can rid the land of China’s most lethal threat, three extraordinary assassins. When a man simply called Nameless (Jet Li) appears before the King bearing the weapons of the three assassins, making his claim that he has killed them all, the King grants the reward. The King is curious about how Nameless overcame these great warriors, and as Nameless tells his story of the epic battles, the King sees that he must now engage in a different sort of battle, a battle of wits, if he is to survive yet one more attempt on his life.

As the conversation between Nameless and the Qin King proceeds, conflicting versions of the story of Nameless’ defeat of the three assassins–Sky (Donnie Yen), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk), and Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu Wai)–are told in flashback fashion, a convenient device that allows for the same battles to occur over and over again, each time with a new twist, displayed with some of the most stunning visual sequences I’ve ever seen.

There is something in this aesthetic that penetrates my soul. (Now that’s the kind of thing I never say…) The color calls to me. This is no natural world, it is a world of gods, a world of where immortals might truly run. What are the colors of heaven, I’ve often wondered, and this film catches images of what comes to mind. The battle between Flying Snow and Moon is my favorite, wind vs. wind, as if we’re standing on the inside of an impressionist tornado, the autumn colors whirling, excited as if in celebration. Maybe on a more literal level, it’s a distortion, this marriage of beauty with violence, so that the more tight-spirited among us might say it’s the wrong kind of glorification. But then look at Broken Sword and Nameless running and skipping on water, or the moment when the wind and sand heightens the grief of Snow as she sits with her fallen love…image after image stunned me with its beauty. (This isn’t terribly coherent, is it?) Okay, I’m gushing, but what a gift to see a simple story told so gorgeously.

The first thing I’ve seen that reminded me of what is still the apex of my theatre going experience: Richard II produced by Ariane Mnouchkine and Le Theatre du Soliel back in 1984 at the LA Arts Olympics. Towering color, shimmering images of characters warring against god-like forces, artistic out-on-a-limb climbing…I want to do something like that.

Go see it…

The Mind of Christ

“The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow our minds to dwell upon.” (Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart)

Focus is difficult in the postmodern mind. Choices have grown exponentially, with no diminishing in sight. Distraction is everywhere, dressed up in light and speed, and lately, anxiety levels creeping up, concentration can be hard. Sensation is far sexier than thought, linear or webbed, and much of what it means to be human is merely this: choosing where the mind will dwell.

As there are only so many hours in a day, so there is only so much psychic attention that can be paid.

There’s the morning paper, the morning news feeds, the hundreds of articles I should comment on. The complexities of the political campaigns, the breaking news of last night’s terrors (both man-and-nature-made), the creative choices demanding by juggling multiple writing projects, the needs of family, the ongoing correspondence with an ever growing list of like-minded friends (all of whom I count as blessing).

I’m not saying anything new here. You’re swamped, too.

Then of course there are the personal goals, the professional goals, the relational goals, all of which present both opportunities and obstacles, along with the need for strategies to deal with each. What should I eat? What should I drink? What should I wear? For that matter, what should I pray about?

Jesus said, “Don’t worry about it.”

“Pay attention first to the Kingdom of God. All this other stuff will sort itself out.”

Well, he didn’t say it like that exactly, but that’s the gist of it. I think he’d say the same thing today.

What did Jesus pay attention to? Where was his mind?

It might be a place to start…