by Elizabeth Webb 

I was asked a question recently: how does someone feel or act when they do not believe that they are loved?  I work with these kids in New York City. Some of them come from broken homes, financially struggling homes or homes dealing with drug use or neglect.  Others seem to have a fairly good home life and stable parents in their lives.  When we work with these kids, many of them act out by picking fights, ignoring authority, disobeying, and lying, while others listen well, obey and are generally easy to watch over.  When I was asked this question, I thought of these kids.

It would seem that each child acts out of an automatic response to how much they feel or do not feel loved.  For example, if a 12 year old girl is belligerent, tough, picks fights a lot, is not very responsive to co-operating with others or simply shuts down around others, would it be so hard to imagine that this girl may not feel loved?  What if her parents do not act like they care or are addicted to drugs or alcohol, forcing her into a situation where she feels completely on her own, unloved, unnoticed, forgotten and neglected?  I think that, if I felt forgotten and that no one cared about me, it might make me a little mad sometimes and defensive and untrusting and definitely more than a little irritated at others who I perceived to have what I didn’t have.

I compared and contrasted two ideas in my mind: A child who believes he or she is loved has a calmness about them, they have an ability to simply trust, they can love freely, they feel safe and know that they deserve love and that it is completely normal to need and want love.  A child who does not believe that he or she is loved, however, seems to be full of fear, is distrustful of everything, is afraid to love freely for fear of being hurt or having their love rejected, feels constantly insecure and has no assurance that they deserve to be loved.  Their acting out or shutting down, their arguing and fighting or their lack of responsiveness is all a reaction to these feelings which are rooted in a belief that they are not loved.

But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much like these children I am in my response to how much I believe, or don’t believe, that I am loved.  It’s as if we all live somewhere either on the extreme ends of these beliefs or somewhere in between and our actions, like the actions of these children, reveal how much we really believe we are, or are not, loved.  I may believe that I am loved at about an 80% level so, while I can love freely, I still fight a fear in my heart that I am not loveable.  Or, I may believe I am only 30% loved so, while I can’t trust anyone, I still have so much love to give.

I never really looked at life through this lens before.  Honestly.  I believe in love.  I believe love is the most powerful thing in this world! I am a die-hard romantic.  I LOVE love!  But I still never thought to look at the world around me through a lens of “how do we live our lives out of how much we each believe we are truly loved?”  If I really believed, deep, deep down in my soul believed, that I was loved, that I was so unconditionally loved that I could never, ever lose that love, how would I live out my life?

I try to imagine it and it’s almost like trying to imagine walking on air.  Life would be so easy and so full of richness and depth.  I would be able to breathe through every day and just enjoy everything around me without being so caught up in myself and my fears.  Fear would fall away!  And yet I would feel my deepest desires with more clarity and understanding.  I would be able to add to others’ lives and they to mine.  The ego would fall away!  It’s not as if I wouldn’t feel pain or grief or anger but it would be full of healing instead of injury to myself and others and it would be full of wisdom rising up in wave after wave.  It would feel like wounds actually healing instead of being simply bandaged if I knew, through my entire being, that I was loved.  Forever.

I do not know if anything or anyone on this earth could ever, being as selfish as we all can be even on our good days, make me feel this loved.  100% loved.  Could I look to myself for this love?  But, then, how could I? What about the deep desire in my heart to have this love from someone outside of myself? I am sometimes the LEAST unconditional toward myself and my self-love has hurt others around me so, it does not feel possible that I could provide 100% love for, well, myself.  And I’ve learned the hard way that any success in my career or my craft or in my relationships can never make me feel this loved because I am never good enough even for myself much less a fickle public or a frustrated partner.

The bible is full of images of God as a father and humanity as God’s children.  I think this is a positive statement on how loved we are and how loved we can come to believe we are. Little children, little babies, are so automatically open to love, so quick to assume that love is theirs, should be theirs, simply for the having! It’s as if unconditional love is an absolutely natural thing to expect in this life and should be an absolutely natural part of it.  But it is only over time, as love is built up or chipped away, that they, that WE, respond and act out accordingly.

The beauty of the freedom offered through love is extraordinary but this world lets us down, people let us down, we let ourselves down.  Every day.  All of our lives.  We know perfect, unconditional love HAS to be true!  We know it in our guts.  Little babies just KNOW it!  We NEED perfect love!  Something inside of us knows that this idea CANNOT be a fairy tale.  Because we yearn for it.  Every day.  All of our lives.

The apostle Paul writes constantly in the new testament about love and famously states that “love never fails”. Could it be possible that the reason belief in love or lack of it affects us so deeply is that perfect, unconditional love really DOES exist?  A love that never fails?   Could it be possible that we’ve just been looking for it in places and people that will only let us down?  I say, keep looking for it.  Be open to it.  Lift up your eyes to the sky and ask for it if you want and maybe that frightened, angry, acting-out child in you will understand how loved we really are and will finally be able to be still and rest.

I just watched this on You Tube. I suspect you will want to see it also.

Gary Bradley

We would like to invite you to the Healing Through the Arts 2007 “Thriving and Surviving”.

The show opened last week with a reception on Oct. 20th, 2007 from 5:00-7:00pm at the Lawrence Art Center. Both Darin and Shannon White have art work being shown related to events surrounding their son Caden’s bout with neuroblastoma cancer.

Please let others know about the show if you think they would be interested. Also coming up in November at the Art Affair Gallery in Baldwin Kansas, there will be a show for BALM the art group they are involved in showing “Destination Postcards“.

These days, everything is for sale. Everyone from marketing executives to fundamentalists has appropriated this Greek triumvirate of goodness, truth and beauty, in an attempt to sell a time-share, or lipstick, or God. In the beginning of the creation narrative, God is first seen as the Creator. When he names the crown of his creation, and declares that we bear his image, he is defining us as being creative at the very core of our humanity. Are we created for more than just sales? How do beauty, truth and goodness inform the way we engage with our world?

When language becomes brittle, when tradition becomes rote, when imagination shrinks, when our ability to laugh atrophies, when the wonder at the strangeness of life—and things like lizards—begins to evaporate, we become foolish. We allow our creativity to be twisted by fear. We lose our courage to play and discover ourselves as participants in a larger story. G.K. Chesterton says that we have grown old; Jesus calls toward the fear-filled masses to have faith like a child. How else without maintaining faculties limbered by this faith can we remember how to create? To worship? To live? To love?

It is in these questions that Via Affirmativa was born. It began as four friends wrestling with the narrow definition of beauty and art found in much of Protestant Christianity. In the spring of 2005 the group expanded to twelve men and women who gathered for three days to dive further into these questions, and to move into what it meant to be a catalyst for cultural change. Why was sub-cultural art so often driven by a didactic message, rather than a response to the mystery the three transcendentals provokes, and the pain of living life outside the garden? Why was artistic excellence being trumped by didacticism? What sort of encouragement needed to be offered in order for artists, writers and thinkers to find freedom to pursue excellence, bringing their questions into the larger contexts of culture and art?

Every culture is defined by how they have engaged with questions surrounding the nature of goodness, beauty and truth. They enter into a global conversation that through history has been shaped by how artists of all types envisioned and re-visioned their worlds. The role of art and the artist is to reflect this world with passionate honesty, to see what truly is, and to imagine what might be. We do not live as those who have no hope; neither do we pretend that hope is easily obtained. The message that began with Jesus is that redemption is possible—indeed, that it is near.

The name, Via Affirmativa, means the way of affirmation. We seek to affirm artists and all who we encounter to live with redemptive creativity. This is an inherently lonely journey, one for which community is indispensable. We need each other to be reminded of the sacramental nature of all of life; there is no dividing line between what is “sacred” and what is “secular.” As we journey into chaos and noise that fills this world, we believe that we are called to see penetratingly both what is and what is possible, and speak artistically into the yet-uncreated world that might be.

This is a poem I wrote as a young teenager while going through a trying time. Not only did I believe that I was I being ripped apart by some silly teenage relationship, but I was also on a foundational soul-search. In retrospect, I believe I was looking for someone closer than a brother, my best friend.

I grow to know him better and better each day now. Some call him Jesus Christ, some call him Yeshua, Emanuel, etc. I choose to call him simply my best friend. As my relationship with him has grown over the years I have overcome the emotions I express in this poem. And although I don’t miss that time, I do believe I am stronger today having gone through it…

Loneliness
-by Larry Cole

Loneliness,
The Quiet Pain,
being alone during a dreary rain,
a hunger for another,
the need to share,
not just one, but a pair,

A dark room,
an empty jar,
a huge parking lot with only one car,
That emptiness which needs to be filled,
The Quiet Pain,

Can it be killed?

by Elizabeth Webb…

I am filled with an anxiety that alludes me.  Why am I so nervous right now?  It’s some general sense of fear that is making my stomach tight and filling me with discomfort.  But I don’t know why I feel fearful.  Usually, I know specifically why I’m afraid or nervous but sometimes there is this: this anxiousness that creeps over me and, even if I realize that it is simply “fear.” I still cannot for the life of me figure out why I am so afraid.

What am I afraid of?  Or is this just something that happens as we age?  These moments of general fear with no seeming object of that fear?  I am 35 years old.  I am single, I still have a roommate and I am not sure whether I will ever have what this world defines as success in my career.  Is this why I am full of fear?  Simply because the clock, it would seem, is ticking?  But ticking toward what?

It would seem that something in me expects there to be a time in my life when I “settle down,” have a home, a family or, at least, a loved one to share my life with.  Isn’t this something we all want in one way or another?  I live in a big city . Most people are single and living as I am well into their middle years.  I know two women who did not have their first child until the age of 42 and I know men and women of the same age who are still single, still dating, still living with a roommate and still pursuing a career not yet blossomed with that job on the side that “pays the bills.”

It shouldn’t need to be said that many societies and cultures function very differently.  I recently visited the Dominican Republic and had the opportunity to spend some time drinking cervezas with a few locals and two other American women who were vacationing as well.  When the local men were told that these two American women were in their early 40’s, still single, not married, no children, they practically fell out of their chairs saying, “We have grandmothers that age!”

In many parts of the U.S., building a family and a solid career starts right out of college or soon thereafter; and even in New York, one of the biggest cities in the world, there are small clusters of inner-city culture that, like the locals in the D.R. would say that they have grandparents in their early 40’s, marriages and families started in the early 20’s, and aunties who are 10.

Could it simply be that big cities with big artistic cultures draw artists who, historically, have a hard time building a career with their art?  The “poor starving artist,” right?  But, in New York alone, there are many artists earning a very good living from their craft.  And what about all of the other people—those in finance, business, production, magazine publication, fashion, or teaching?

Maybe it isn’t about what you “do,” or about your career but a habit that is part of this culture.  A habit of “holding out for the next best thing.”  Holding out for the next better job, the next better boyfriend or girlfriend, the next better apartment or the next better group of friends, the next better body or spiritual fulfillment—waiting for your real life to begin or waiting for everything to be perfect before you settle down somewhere or with someone or just simply waiting to be able to say, “NOW everything is just perfect with my life.  NOW I am complete.”

But what is this “real life?”  And, for that matter, what is “perfect?”  Maybe this general fear that I am feeling at 35 years of age is simply a growing awareness that if I keep “holding out,” I may just miss out.  Could it be that if I could accept that I am living my life NOW, that my life could possibly, just possibly be “perfect” right NOW, that my career is successful NOW, no matter what stage it is in, then I would actually find myself settling down inside of myself even if things don’t appear to be settled on the outside.

Holding out for what is best and necessary for ourselves is a good, good thing but holding out and not being open to what is available and offered right now may be trapping us in a never-ending cycle of thinking that satisfaction in this life will only come when we find that “next best thing.”

I want to hold out for true love and a fulfilling career and a beautiful home but what if I already have it or could have it if I just open my eyes and lived my life RIGHT NOW and not in the future?  Maybe, if I could be open to that possibility, I would have riches beyond comprehension in all areas of my life and maybe, just maybe, I could live without fear.

Wow what a weekend in NYC,

Via Affirmativa held its first art slam in NYC this past weekend and it was a superb time. Friday evening we hosted a gathering of around 35 fellow art makers in a gallery in “The Village” on Bleeker Street.

The evening included three short films made by recent and current students from the Tisch School of Arts. Then we had several singer songwriters perform new pieces of work. I shared a few thoughts on excellence in the arts. The evening concluded with a fabulous 45 minute jazz session with Victor Lin on Piano and Tyler Schwartz on the Alto Sax. They brought the house down.

Saturday morning we reconvened and watched the Liviu Mocan Film followed by a conversation on excellence. Then we heard from Allen Wolf who is currently in LA. Allen has just finished his first feature length film called “In My Sleep” (check it out here). It was exciting to hear his passion and pursuit of excellence. After Allen we listened to Corey Mills from Minneapolis as he shared about the journey of forming a dance and theater company (check out Spark Theater). Then Lauren Fanklin shared about her experience as a Cellist in Russia for the past year lastly, Elizabeth Webb shared about her journey in NYC from acting to Film making.

The morning was a stimulating time as we explored the meaning of becoming Kingdom of God oriented art makers. Saturday afternoon we divided up into small groups and worked on our art. Jonathan Cowan and I spent the afternoon in Washington Park drawing and talking and painting (and unfortunately listening to a very bad harmonica musician singing over and over “come on baby rock my boat.” By the end I was hoping his boat would sink or at least take on water).

Saturday night we had a BBQ feast at the home of Judith Ferrenbach in Brooklyn. On Sunday morning a few of us met for breakfast and we saw that as group there was a sense of ownership in the movement and so the idea of Via Affirmativa is moving ahead and I’m sure in the next few months the dialogue will continue. Michael Wisniewski has developed an intriguing concept for a VAF film on excellence. Stay tuned.

Gary Bradley for the NYC gang