Gary Bradley recently spoke on this topic at the Minneapolis gathering.  The following is another reflection by Gary on the work of our hands…

“If I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would plant a tree today…” Martin Luther

Psalm 90
12 So teach us to consider our mortality,
so that we might live wisely.
16 Let Your work appear to Your servants
And Your majesty to their children.
17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us;
And confirm for us the work of our hands;
Yes, confirm the work of our hands.
Psalm 104
24 How many living things you have made, O LORD!
You have exhibited great skill in making all of them;
the earth is full of the living things you have made.

I have been wondering about the culture in which I was formed as a Christian and a few things that do not seem to fit have caused me to ask, “What is the value of the work of my hands?”

First, I have heard that everything is going to burn up and that the earth will dissolve. Is this true? Because if it is, then, this raises the question that perhaps the only things that are useful are those with the greatest utility for right now.

This conclusion would go nicely with the idea that we often hear: people are “resources” rather than uniquely created expressions of the triune Godhead. What about a piece of art, a composition like “the Messiah” or Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring, or any other multitude of expressions? What about your pet dog, Fido, or a well made pair of jeans? What has value if it is all going to burn? These questions wrongly answered drive us to make “Christian art;” they drive people to work at “religious occupations” which do not reflect their first born gifts (as painters, carpenters, web masters, writers, et al).

A similar question that has pushed many to live denying their first born gift is “What really counts for eternity?” The answer often given is: “The souls of men and the word of God.” I agree that they are both of eternal value. But is that all? What about the works of my hands? Do they have eternal value or does all of this life stop at the grave? Such thinking has given rise to the vacuous concept that “art for art’s sake” is a valid motif for making art.

In an immature way I could respond and say “perhaps I should destroy everything that I do because it is all going to burn anyway. I could save God some time at judgment and maybe he would look favorably on me for having seen the fruitlessness of my work.” In my worst dreams I could end up in heaven in a white robe singing Kumbaya.

What do you think is the value of the work of our hands?

read part 2.

Last summer the Northern Warehouse opened its heavy stairwell doors to strangers of all kinds who cared to tread the five floors of concrete hallways and dark metal stairs. Inside, dozens of artists displayed their work in the context with which it was created—hanging on exposed brick walls next to century old windows overlooking more warehouses, railroads, a farmers market and the Mississippi river.

The line outside the corner café was trailing through the door and onto the city sidewalk. This wasn’t always the case. Fifteen years ago, before the artists moved to Lowertown, very few people visited or lived in this dilapidated part of St. Paul. Now the Northern Warehouse stands as a cornerstone in a thriving community. Thousands ride free shuttles or beat feet on the city streets to take in as many different artists’ studios as the three days of the St. Paul Art Crawl will allow.

One resident artist, Kara Hendershot, lives in a corner studio apartment near the top of the Northern Warehouse. Maybe she speaks for the whole neighborhood when she says, “I love the idea of these old warehouses being turned into artists’ studios. Seeing places where artists of all kinds have taken an old building and turned it into a working space—wherever there is a building of studios, where there is a concentration of creative minds, it is the kind of place that is inspiring. It is where I feel most creative.”

As Hendershot paints she draws her inspiration from this old, redeemed space. It is a space, however, that also connects her to a neighborhood where she works two part-time jobs, one at a restaurant and the other at a coffee shop. As she paints what she sees on a daily basis she is often drawn to those moments where people find themselves to be alone. Loneliness, while it can be a somber experience, can also be a source of new-found strength. Each case of isolation in this city neighborhood hides a story to be explored.

Ironically, having grown to study, appreciate, and be comfortable with the power of loneliness, Hendershot, continues to gain her encouragement from those around her: “Open spaces with big windows help, but sometimes I’ll leave my studio, walk down the hall and see that there is a new painting in the hallway. When I see someone doing something new it is inspiring. It is almost like everyone is contributing. The idea of living in a space where everyone is working with the same goal keeps me going.”

Even the hundreds of casual conversations with the strangers who find their way to her studio can become formative sources for her creative work. “During the Art Crawl people can see my work and talk to me about it. That helps me to step outside my work and see how other people view it, and it helps me learn more about my work and myself.”

In this case it is the old space of the Northern Warehouse that serves to create new encounters and opportunities for creative exploration. It is a space from which Kara Hendershot can continue to examine aspects of human experience through dialoguing with local influences—whether that is the building she lives in, the neighborhood in which she works, or the people who find her there.

read part 1

Circling around an old weight and chain caged elevator the stairs empty out onto a third floor hallway where Ken Green fills his concrete and brick studio with his artwork, brushes, paint, and easels. As Green takes a seat to begin our interview, his short-sleeve shirt ripples past a bicep that must be as big as my face. I guess I let out a gasp because Green then tells me that he juices nearly four pounds of fruits and vegetables per day and works evenings as a security guard. I believe him.

At 56 years old, it has been a long road to this studio space. When Green graduated from college just over thirty years ago with an art degree his father wanted to know in what company his son was going to find work. That was what was expected from a hard working father who held down two jobs to pay the bills. So for over twenty five years Green set aside his art to endure a career in sales.

During those nearly thirty years Green not only disliked (hated) his sales jobs, but when he could paint, he also had to work hard to be taken seriously as an artist. Early on during the black power movement Green was often asked by others in the African American community if he painted black people in his artwork. Green explains that there was a desire to see black faces in the cultural landscape of the white population often depicted in Impressionism and Renaissance art work. Although trendy for the time, Green soon grew sick of putting a black face on a white body.

Instead, he found that when he could begin to focus on the general image rather than whether or not the face was black then his work became more interesting. Rather than focus on the political correctness of a scene, Green began to paint the more universal emotions, color and energy that connects with viewers of many different cultures. In fact, his jazz paintings often depict blue people in order to bring more attention to shared emotions and experiences—what Green calls the energy of an image.

As Green refines this cultural dialogue he draws inspiration from everyone that he meets. Many artists, he explains, are tempted to live in their own little artistic world and look at everything through an artist’s eyes, but they often miss out on the realities that grip others. As a gun toting security officer, Green often rubs shoulders with ‘thugs,’ thieves, con-artists, and people who enjoy taking advantage of others. Green bridges this gap by using the topics of jazz and dance to infuse hope into the hopeless struggle faced by many. Even his cityscapes can appear somber yet somehow hopefully alive.

As one might expect, this dialogue of hope closely resembles his own life as he continually seeks to make the best of everything whether that be the trials of raising a handicap daughter, recovering from serious health issues, wrestling with broken relationships, bankruptcy, or attempting to make it as an artist.

Ken Green continues to carry on a conversation with whoever will listen by bringing continuity to what he sees in life. He seeks to add hope to struggle and, while not abandoning his own cultural setting, he seeks to bring life to a universal human energy that transcends ethnic boundaries and skin color. As he paints he seeks to connect with whoever might be drawn to his work.

In the end, just as Green writes in his journal, “Throughout history humans have carved and painted images that they hope would bring about enlightenment. We constantly look for approval whether from a divine source or from one another,” it is that connection which Green forges between his art and the viewer that has potential to last for years to come. It is an ongoing conversation full of questions and future possibilities.

continued here.

When I was 11 years old my dad decided that it was time to break into my introversion and teach me how a conversation was supposed to work. Apparently, many people would talk to me but I would rarely respond. I never noticed my own silence. My mind was so active with reactions to what people said that I had just assumed I had spoken one or two of them out loud.

“Conversation is like baseball,” my father began, “It is like playing catch. See, I throw you a ball and you catch it. Then you throw it back. In conversation, I say something; you catch it, think about it, and say something back.” I sat in silence.

Now, twenty years later, I am ready to toss the baseball back. Only this time I am thinking about art: Art is like a conversation. It is a dialogue with our families, with our own desires, with our economy, our churches, our friends and our culture at large. It is even a dialogue with the spaces in which we live and move. Art is the baseball that some of us toss back to whoever will take up the conversation.

Recently I was able to sit down with two artists from St. Paul’s Lowertown. It is an old part of the river city full of revamped warehouse studios and artist co-ops. I wanted to know just how artists conduct this conversation—how they use their art to dialogue with the world around them. The answers that I found, while having their similarities, were as different as the artists I interviewed.

continued here.

Last weekend I attended a wedding in Durham , NC. What a beautiful celebration. Two hearts, two souls united in life. How much more can God do to delight the soul? At a point in the ceremony a friend read the following poem. It captures the heart of the artist to live out of our created image. I share it with you go and spread your wings.

Gary Bradley

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
The one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
from New and Selected Poems, 1992_Beacon Press, Boston, MA Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver._All rights reserved._Reproduced with permission

Check out http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
Welcome to Poetry 180. Poetry can and should be an important part of our daily lives. Poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race. By just spending a few minutes reading a poem each day, new worlds can be revealed.
Poetry 180 is designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. I have selected the poems you will find here with high school students in mind. They are intended to be listened to, and I suggest that all members of the school community be included as readers. A great time for the readings would be following the end of daily announcements over the public address system.Listening to poetry can encourage students and other learners to become members of the circle of readers for whom poetry is a vital source of pleasure. I hope Poetry 180 becomes an important and enriching part of the school day.
Billy Collins_Former Poet Laureate of the United States

The good news is full of beauty, goodness, and truth. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit also exhibit these and many other attributes. Romans Chapter 1 also says men can find God through creation (beauty), conscience (goodness), and truth.

For some time the emphasis in America has been to focus on truth-telling. Reaching people with the truth by first being good or beautiful has not been considered an effective way to reach the lost. The social gospel may have scared some away from using goodness to attract people to Christ, and the arts themselves have for many decades been a scary place for people of faith.

We know that Paul shared as of first importance that Christ died, was buried, and resurrected victorious in defeat of our separation from God, and that without this truth, people would not enjoy a personal relationship with Him. But somewhere along the line we lost the first importance part of this and decided it was of only importance. The result has been a good news that has largely been the bare truth; in your face, black and white, us and them; dividing the saved from the lost.

This worked for hundreds of years in U.S. history because the government, the culture, and the religion were all in synch with the message of the truth – you either know Jesus or you don’t – make a decision. But in the last 30+ years the culture, the government, and the religion are no longer in agreement about what is true. And in that environment, truth by itself can become divisive.

Jesus met people where they were, not where he wanted them to be (the woman at the well, Zaccheus in the tree, the many people who needed physical healing as well as spiritual). We would like all people to be at the point where the only thing left for them to do is to decide to embrace Christ’s resurrection, but as our culture drifts farther and farther from this never-changing truth, more and more people won’t respond to this message as our first attempt to draw them in. In fact, this direct truth-telling, or didactic approach to reaching people can have the opposite effect. If my understanding of “truth” is a long way from the actual truth, my only reaction might be to be offended by your truth.

While the good news is true, the good news is also beautiful and good, and these are values that all men seem to still find attractive, even if we disagree on the truth itself. People who would not first respond to a discussion of the truth might still be attracted to a discussion of goodness or beauty, or better yet, actual ACTS of beauty and goodness.

Via Affirmativa (The Way of Affirmation) affirms the need to be involved in acts of beauty as well as goodness, and that these acts can be used to invite people in, to create community that can create conversation, which can lead to people wanting to know Christ.

All Beauty was created by God and is owned by Him. Rather than abandoning the arts, the convinced community should be deeply involved in the arts to infuse it with beauty that is also good and true. And this Beauty should be attractional, inviting people into a conversation that will eventually or very quickly lead them to a relationship with Christ.

We don’t need to infuse our art with obvious overt symbols and/or words of religion (although some do this successfully). What we really need is to love our God with all our heart, soul and mind, love our neighbor as ourselves, produce art that is beautiful, good, and true, and become fully engaged with the culture of the artist as an artist. (We don’t ask welders to stop building cars and only weld crosses after they come to Christ. Although a welder here and there might want to do that.)

Via Affirmativa affirms the need for artists to be in the mainstream arts just as business people are in the mainstream of business. We affirm that God wants to redeem artists in their “place” not out of their place, because an artist in the mainstream of the arts who loves God can be salt and light in a place where others who love Christ may never have an influence.

Chuck Blakeman

I grew up in the Philippines surrounded by a lot of medieval Art. The older generation who grew up during the Spanish occupation, still lived in a world connected to medieval Spain’s Catholic culture & society, and their Art reflected that.

The one thing that I remember is that the christian Art of that generation scared the beejezus out of me. I was always terrorized late at night when I wanted to get a snack from my grandmother’s kitchen. The big hurdle was the altar in the hallway, presided over by a dark wood bust of Jesus with an emotionless face, which my imagination filled with all sorts of mad and crazy things. Even with all the courage I could muster, it was always a mad dash out the bedroom door to the safety of the lighted kitchen.

Funny thing, when I got to the kitchen, other family members who’d made it past the dark hallway, would tell me older pagan stories of dwarves sitting on your chest while you slept, evil harpies hiding in the night, floating torsos in the dark, or cats stealing your soul. But nothing could reach me like the dread and awe of the old christian Art.

Later we’d visit a museum which housed items that had been mysteriously un-earthed during an excavation in a village called Villa Escudero. The items were a crazy amalgam of the history of the Philippines: christian, Japanese, Chinese, old filipino, and newer american things. No one knew how they got there or who piled them all together like that, but all carried the weight of their age and experience. The dust they’d been buried in still hung on them like they’d just been dug up.

And once again I felt the dread and awe of those things reminding again of that crazy gripping fear, that makes you want to run, and holds you to that spot at the same time. Whenever I finally left the museum, I always felt like I’d been holding my breath the whole time.

Even now the thought of those things fills my heart with wonder, awe, and longing … I miss it. I wonder where it went and why very few things make me feel that way anymore. Why isn’t there anymore christian Art that moves me like that anymore? That stops me in my tracks and reminds of the big story we’re really a part of? Of the amazing and dreadful things that the story contains? Where’s the christian Art that reminds me how joyful things can be so I can also see how un-joyful they can become? Reminding me no matter how bad things get there is always a sliver of hope un-looked for?

Darin White’s sculptures reminded of the old christian Art. There was something in them that made me feel the dread and awe I felt when I was a kid. His sculptures feel old though he’d made them recently. The thought of an open heart teetering on top of a hard, sharp metallic spike, completely exposed, connects me to the big story again, even for just a second, but that second always seems to expand into eternity and I’m holding my breath one more time.