On Hope

I love the 'goodle doodle' today (Martha Graham dancers)! A few years ago, a student in one of my theology classes did a paper and presentation on gesture in dance as a theological space for envisioning and living into the distance between promise and hope in eschatology. 
      She used the gesture of Martha Graham in particular--as you can see in this picture. As Christians, we practice this distance between promise and hope on a regular basis. With the Psalmist, we cry out “How long, O Lord? How long?” Why do we have to wait for the fulfillment of both God’s lament in Jesus Christ as well as the divine protest found in Christ’s resurrection? We live in the in-between. Hope is the space where we practice this fulfillment in our lives. Faith propels us into this unknown yet anticipated future in God and are moved into a practice of love.
    I love thinking about how dance can help us to re-invigorate the ‘gesture’ of hope, of how we practice from here to there, from there to here. It is the fullness of the gesture (as demonstrated in Martha Graham's choreography) that forms our imagination. 
I was recently at the Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship conference where a number of papers reminded me of the potential of music to call to us and induce a response similar to Martha Graham's 'gesture of hope'. Dr. Ferdia Stone-Davis argued that musical beauty could move us from a place of disenchantment (a lack of hope) to a place of re-enchantment (hope). Time is reinvested with meaning and we are moved outward. Dr. Bruce Ellis Benson contended that a model of improvisation could help us understand how beauty can move us into a pattern of call and response. Again, that we are moved outward, moved into the action of faith and hope. Finally, Dr. Randolph Johnson did a paper on how Brahms in his German Requiem was able to sound out the fullness of the gesture of hope. In the Requiem, Brahms is able to hold together the paradoxical time/space of suffering, mourning and future glory. 
This is what Jeremy Begbie calls “redeemed time” in music. Music can take time and hand it back to us. Time is restructured (moves from disorder to order in the music) and we are able to sort through our thoughts and emotions. Especially when someone dies, we need this to help us grieve in healthy ways. I believe that music does not only sooth our pain, but can also help us feel deeply the loss of a loved one. Through the music we are able to gesture into the hope of our promised life in eternity with the triune God. We are not always able to believe in the promises of God fully, but we can practice into them. And I believe that music and dance can show us how expectant waiting can be formed in us. Come Holy Spirit!

Conference in Seattle

Christians for Biblical Equality are having their annual conference here in Seattle this summer. Our own Dr. Hollins will be one of the speakers. The title of the conference is "Building Biblical Community: Transforming Sex, Power and Prejudice" and will take place from July 29th through the 31st. Check it out!

On Beauty

Today was the first day of the Beauty class. Not surprisingly, we discussed our definition of 'beauty'. In honor of defining beauty, I thought I would share a quote from Annie Dillard about the mystery of it all...

“Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out for French, that there is no key, that ‘oui’ will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.”

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 107  

Arcabas

Arcabas, Resurrection, 2003 (part of a polyptych)

I want to introduce you to a French artist, Arcabas. My friend Kirstin introduced me to this artist a couple of years ago. The image I have here is toward the end of Aracabas' polyptych, Passion-Resurrection. (There is a video below of an instillation of this series. All of the paintings are thought provoking.) I find this image stunning. This is a very physical representation of Christ's resurrection, yet it still maintains a sense of the wonder and the glory of the defeat of death in this act of God. It shows the tension between the pain and the cost of the cross with the triumph over the grave. This is no image of a disembodied triumphalism. It is this Jesus that sits at the right hand of the Father interceding on our behalf. This Jesus, who went through death back to life, is the one who is our High Priest. I think that Arcabas captures this wondrous broken beauty of Jesus in ways that I don't yet understand. His art pulls me in and helps me to see the story anew...

Here are some links for you to check out:

• Kirstin's Article on ArtWay.eu
• Arcabas.com
• A video (in French) about an instillation of Arcabas' Passion-Resurrection polyptych
• Another video of the Church de St. Hughes de Chartreuse

A Poem for Easter Monday

Resurrection, Gaudenzio Ferrari, c. 1530

Seven Stanzas at Easter
by John Updike

Make no mistake
If he rose at all it was as his body;
If the cells' dissolution did not reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent,
It was not as his spirit
In the mouths and fuddled eyes
Of the eleven apostles;

It was as his flesh: ours--
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart that pierced, died, paused
Then gathered again out of enduring might
New strength to enclose.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb
Make it a real angel,
Opaque in the dawn light,
Weighty with Max Planck's quanta,
Robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Transcendence, making of the event a symbol,
A sign painted in the credulity of a vanished age;
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back:

Not papier mache, not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality
That in the slow grinding of time
Will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest awakened in an unthinkable hour
We are embarrassed by the miracle
And crushed by remonstrance.