Art and Faith 1: Art is Beauty That Moves Among Us
October 15, 2023
For Beloved Community and Mountain Community Mennonite Churches
©Vernon K. Rempel, 2023
Bible readings (NRSV)
Mark 1:11
And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’
Luke 3:22
and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’
James 1:17
Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
1 John 1:5
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.
We’re starting our second
art and faith series.
A little artist joke:
Did you hear about the
two artists who had a duel?
They both drew at the same time….
Art.
We often think of art as fixed.
A painting or photo on the wall.
A sculpture on a stand.
But in reality,
art is deeply in motion.
Our creative beauty moves among us.
Fixed objects such as photos,
paintings, or sculpture
still set up immense movement,
as photons flow to our eyes
and turn into neural firing,
and electrical signals travel
across nerve pathways.
And areas of our brains
light up like Los Angeles
on an Autumn evening.
In this way,
art is motion.
Let’s think about this
in three relationships.
Creative beauty:
—Within God
—Within us
—Between us
Motion in God
First there is the creative
beauty that flows
within God.
This is usually
talked about in terms
of the trinity.
The technical theological
term often used is perichoresis,
from the Greek for “around”
and “to go.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perichoresis#:~:text=Perichoresis%20(from%20Greek%3A%20περιχώρησις%20perikhōrēsis,term%20for%20the%20same%20concept)
So, what goes around comes around.
Or, the giving and receiving
of grace never stops.
It is the flow of love, care,
generosity, resources
among Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
It is the recognition that
the God who loves us
is a deeply relational person,
not some lonely old guy
sitting behind is long white beard
on a distant gold throne.
Rather, God is the first relationship,
God is relationship made real.
When God creates the universe,
it is the expression of relationship,
not some analytical calculation
about making stars start to burn.
This is represented on some
old cathedral windows,
as the perichoresis Gothic triskele (trî-skéel)
It is the triple spiral
or the three-legged stool,
an important symbol
especially in Celtic spirituality.
(Here is a drawing of the triskele…)
Richard Rohr writes about this
at length in his book
The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation
In this divine relationship,
there is immense generosity, sharing, and joy.
And the creative flow of beauty
gets blocked in God.
There is artistic block,
creator’s block, if you will.
God orders massacres,
even repents of creating humans altogether.
this setting this stage for Noah and the ark.
God burns with anger,
and then sets aside his anger.
Abraham, Moses, Gideon,
the prophets all negotiate
with God in order to
maintain the relationship.
And great grief enters the relationship.
God weeps over the people,
longs for their restoration.
Jesus feels forsaken by God,
and God surely feels
grief at Jesus’ suffering and death.
But in it all, there is a faithfulness
a dedication to the beauty
of what is being created,
God’s artistic motion.
Motion in Us
And there is amazing
artistic, creative motion
inside each of us.
Let’s say that the
most basic thing to remember
is that we are all by body weight
60% bacteria.
And our cells are actually
the result of bacteria
starting to cooperate
with each other,
creating the cellular engine
of energy, the mitochondria,
and the other parts.
—A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, by Henry Gee, p. 10
Our bodies are marvels of
colony upon colony of cellular organization,
uncountable cells working, floating,
reproducing….
Neurons connecting into seemingly
infinite numbers of pathways in the brain.
This creates the conditions
for immense creative flow.
Our bodies are a flow
that wants to create flow.
We want to go places, do things,
which is what our bodies
are always and already doing.
We try to learn to navigate
our internal currents.
We have flowing thoughts and feelings.
We try to understand who we are,
how to express ourselves,
how to live well.
In so doing, we also discover
where we are blocked.
Like the artistic block in God,
we also find ourselves
carrying things that stop
our creative flow.
We internalize harm,
and carry scars.
We hide our shame
from things we wish we
hadn’t done, but don’t know
quite how to move on from.
We berate ourselves.
One person once told me,
when she was getting
the negative internal voices,
“I just tell them, ‘thank-you for sharing!’
And then I move on.”
When we are unable to care
for ourselves, to speak to ourselves
in ways that are kind and compassionate,
we risk putting that negative stuff
out into the world.
This means that we are always
learning to navigate
our internal currents,
rather than just obliviously
going on.
We learn about ourselves.
This is the work of healing, of visualization,
of meditation, craft and art.
This is how we build things,
how we get skills.
We move and move,
seeking pathways forward.
It happens for me, as you may guess,
when I’m dropping deep into
blues improvisation.
But also in sermon writing.
When I was a young preacher,
there was a lot to push on,
in myself and in the world.
And so the writing process
felt like hard work, like discipline,
even when I was pleased with the result.
This was probably necessary.
But now, writing a sermon
much more an exercise
in finding words for what flows
in my heart for you, for myself,
for the Holy Spirit.
So we may learn to
better navigate all our
internal currents, the motion
inside of us, which can
be a source of immense creativity.
Motion among us
And finally, there is the motion
between us.
The former bishop of Winchester,
John V. Taylor,
called the Holy Spirit,
by the wonderful phrase:
“the go-between God.”
The Holy Spirit moves among us,
and so we share in the creative
motion that is in God,
and in each other.
Richard Rohr rightly calls
this a dance in God.
And a dance among us.
I always wish that as soon
as the Amish and Mennonites
finished building a barn,
and as soon as they had
finished off the roast beef and potatoes,
that they would then
gather in the new barn,
now hung with lights and streamers,
and they would all dance together.
Amish and Mennonites turning
and stepping and laughing
the night away
as their bodies moved in joy.
Shared joy, shared delight,
is one of the most powerful
forces on earth.
It is the power of prayer.
It is healing, it is love in action.
I don’t care much for people
doing service in a serious tone.
That quickly creates a
debt of fatigue and expectation.
But service done in joy
releases the primal fizz
of the universe.
Something breaks out,
and you can hear the angels singing
“Joy to the world.”
Of course, fires also
break out among us.
The creative flow, the dance,
is interrupted, blocked.
Church fights, prosecutions, war,
None of it is fully rational,
although we always like to think
we have perfectly good
and important reasons for
our anger, for our dismissal of others.
But my anger, I think I may say,
has never been only about the
subject of my anger.
It has always, in retrospect,
upon further consideration,
been also very much about me.
Even when people have been neglectful,
oblivious, petty, prejudiced, or cruel in ways
that I can objectively describe!
There is something I can always
discover about how I am in it,
how my actions and response matter.
In war, then, we often completely
lose this perspective.
With atrocity and answer to atrocity,
we dehumanize the enemy.
They become animals,
thugs, barbarians.
In war, we have a deep dissociative break,
and so we do unspeakable things.
We give ourselves permission
to do the unspeakable.
It is the result of some chronic
condition of harm, inequity,
structures of injustice that
just go on and on.
And often someone’s
bid for domination
in the midst of it all.
This is the deepest breach
of our shared creative flow.
And yet,
“And yet there lives a dearest freshness deep down things,”
as the poet Hopkins wrote.
“For all this, nature is never spent.”
Divine beauty flows.
It flows in God,
it flows in us,
it flows among us,
It flows like a river glorious.
It holds powerful,
faithful, and unfailing
power to heal.
We know this to be true,
and can feel it if we just
open even the smallest
part of ourselves
to God’s love,
the beauty of the flow within God,
and in all creation.
That is art.
That is the motion of art.
Questions for discussion:
—Do you have thoughts about God in relationship among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
—What are some examples of what you have learned about yourself, your “inner being” as you have gone through life?
—How do we come apart from each other; how do we find our way back to each other?
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