I wish I could have listened to Jesus tell his own parables. What a storyteller he was. He was awake to the world, he paid attention to the moments he was living and found things to feed his imagination…an imagination wrestling with how to communicate so much with the people he so loved. Wheat and fig trees, sheep and vineyards, oxen and estranged sons became the paint with which he colored the canvas of his days, bringing life to concepts no propositional presentation could. How brave, and trusting, to allow his audience to filter his stories through their own experience of the world, and through the exercise of their own wills, arrive at their own conclusions.

I love spending time with people whose heritage is still infused with the value of oral tradition–or who just know how to tell a good story. Whether around a campfire, from a podium or on the written page, a well-told story grips me. It slips past my mental defenses and grips the core of who I am, leaving me to consider the world and what is real in ways I may not have otherwise.

What are the stories I respond to most? Why? What does it look like for me to be more awake to the world around me? What are the stories which are uniquely in me, that I have been given to tell?

posted by Amy Wevodau

Thought I’d share this article (click here), because I’ve always been fascinated by Tolkien’s view on Art. Please post if you have any thoughts at all, would love to hear your views on this.

Here’s a summary:
Tolkien refines “Art” into two categories:

- When we create in harmony with God’s creation, we create Art
- When we create for our own purposes, we create Power (aka Magic or fallen/corrupted Art)

What’s the difference?

In Tolkien’s view, Art reflects a sliver of God’s primary divine creation. Our secondary creative acts work like lenses to see the original Goodness, Truth, and Beauty in the divine creation more clearly. In Tolkien’s books, his Elves do this literally by creating 3 jewels that capture the divine light from the beginning of creation.

In contrast, when our secondary creations reflect our wills and not God’s, this is Power. The chief aim of Power is to use our creative urges to dominate others. For example, When oratory skills are turned into propaganda, or when graphic arts are used to promote a selfish agenda. Tolkien also refers to Power as Magic, and anyone who creates in this way as a “mere Magician” (in contrast to an Artist). For Tolkien the modern incarnation of Power/Magic is technology, and it’s off spring “progress”.

The great masters of the imagination (in this case Jeremiah) do not make things up out of thin air; they direct our attention to what is right before our eyes. They then train us to see it whole–not in fragments but in context, with all the connections. They connect the visible and the invisible, the this with the that. They assist us in seeing what is around us all the time but which we regularly overlook. With their help we see it not as commonplace but as awesome, not as banal but as wondrous. For this reason the imagination is one of the essential ministries in nurturing the life of faith. For faith is not a leap out of the everyday but a plunge into its depths.

Eugene Peterson….Run with the Horses