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Beauty and Sacrifice

Makoto Fujimura

 

In his haunting, beauty-chasing story of the northern Iraqi girl running toward a trampled flower, Makoto tells us, “In a desert culture, a flower represents life itself. In a war-stricken land, a flower may even be a cruel reminder of beauty in the midst of human brokenness—an ephemeral vision that is ever-present, being trampled by us as we try desperately to save our lives.”

Our lives can often be marked by sincere efforts to flee to safety while all the while trampling beauty underfoot.

 

• Reread Makoto’s account of this story and spend some time imagining yourself as the photographer, dispassionately visually recording the scene. Imagine the girl is representative of your authentic life. What are you fleeing? Where is beauty being trampled? Consider journaling what God gives you.

 

Makoto writes, “Every beauty is sacrifice. The sun is dying. Cherry blossoms fall.”

We live in a bullet-ridden world; the bullets are inescapable, it seems. And if we try to flee to safety, we often miss the beauty the light shining through our bullet holes illuminates as we run instead toward the danger, toward sacrifice.

 

• Continuing this theme of running amidst flying bullets, what are you running toward? What is being illuminated through the brokenness around you?

 

Makoto writes, “Authentic self runs toward beauty.”

It’s our inauthentic, manufactured selves that seek protection and avoid sacrifice. These self-made representations must flee the bullets, just find the bunker, because they are, after all, tissue-paper-thin creations that cover our wounds where the light shines through, hiding our beauty within and obscuring our vision of the flowers around us.

 

• As you return to the story in your imagination, where do you see Jesus in this scene? Is he running toward you at the pace of love? How does this make you feel?

 

What would it look like for you to refuse to live your life without beauty?

 

• As you step out of the bunker and look around you, what flowers do you see that Jesus wants to run toward with you? In what way(s) is Jesus inviting you to sacrificially and generatively create beauty in the midst of it all?

 

“That flower you seek to protect, to preserve, and to resurrect is connected to your soul. And because beauty is connected to our souls, beauty is sacrifice.”

 

 

Van Gogh’s Struggle with Passion

Jan Johnson

 

For Jan, life had become empty when she encountered Lust for Life, Irving Stone’s biographical novel about the life of Vincent van Gogh. Jan describes the emptiness inside during this “book-sliding” time in her life and the resultant impotency of something she loved—books—to speak into the void.

The opening image she paints of a barely read book listlessly sliding to the floor of unread meaning is an apt descriptor for many of us at key points in our journeys. During these dark nights, we often move from believing there is meaning, though we can’t grasp what it is, to not even believing in belief anymore.

But then, something unexpected happened as God met Jan’s anger with an introduction to another man’s pain. And so a virtual friendship was born, and deeper understanding of how pain and failure often germinate art and beauty arose from this unlikely pairing spanning a century.

Jan describes the shared journey she and Vincent traveled from youthful idealism to non-climactic burnout, from depression to “being no one but myself.” We all start with big dreams and excitement in our youth, and many of us are left with nothing but the blackened mark of a spent firework we have to clean up after the kids have gone to bed on the Fourth of July.

But a turning point can come if we listen, as Jan describes Vincent courageously doing. Passion is messy; it defies conventions and, as the author says, “may not be acceptable in a suave, air-brushed, let’s-do-lunch world.”

Perhaps God’s repeated encouragements to “fear not” have something to do with what passions emerge as we follow that advice.

1. As you read Jan’s story (and Vincent’s), what parallels to your life can you notice?
2. Jan vividly describes sinking her anger in Vincent van Gogh’s pain. What do you think she meant by this? Can you see any interrelation among the community of anger, fear, pain and depression?
3. Set aside a few moments to reflect on your passions, on what you most want. Allow yourself to dream again, to hope anew. Journal any fears that come up.
4. Consider getting some crayons or paint supplies (or any crafty or artsy way you feel led) and prayerfully create a piece of artwork that captures the intersection between your dreams and fears. Does a bridge emerge? Is your art (your life container) large enough for both? Why or why not?

 

 

Creative Expression, Spiritual Connection, and Friendship

Cindy Bunch

 

For a gathering of creative friends meeting to share their creative lives, the name of Cindy’s group was rather unadorned: Creative Group. But the name stuck for over twenty years, and Cindy shares the story of how this group opened the front door of the group members’ creative lives first, and then moved into other, more tucked-away, rooms of one other’s spiritual houses—where God was doing his creative work.

Friendship has been described as two (or more) people gazing at each other with admiration. But an even deeper friendship forms when two friends turn to share their regard and awe for an even more glorious beauty, a beauty that seems to be enlivening them both personally and together, but beyond them still and even more luminous.

As Cindy shares the journey of this group, the beauty of God’s creative movement was woven through the vulnerable and hard places of the friends’ lives as well as the break-through moments of celebration.

Cindy summarized the group experience with this marvelous truth: Creativity and spirituality are an incredibly potent combination. As Psalm 42:7 declares, “deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all of your waves and breakers have swept over me.” Often, as we call from our depths our creativity, it’s the current of our spirituality that carries it to the surface of the canvas. Cindy describes how this spiritual life then spills all around us in our lives and those we are close to.

A creative group like Cindy described gives a consistent rhythm for creative spirituality to flow.

1. Consider starting a creative group of your own! Cindy gives some suggestions for a simple lunch-time gathering. Invite a few friends to lunch, share this article, and ask them to pray about it.
2. Set aside thirty minutes to contemplatively consider Ruth Goring’s poem Tuesday. Spend a few minutes simply enjoying silence and gently letting go of your thoughts. Read through the poem contemplatively three times, and first take note of any words or phrases that seem to have meaning for you; second, notice any feelings that arise; and finally, is there a response arising from your life you’d like to pray back to God?
3. How can you draw from the experience of this group and apply it to your own life? Notice the “We lean Tuesday against Tuesday . . .” line in Ruth’s poem. Are there rhythms of life, or concrete constants, you can stand on as life twists and turns around you? Is there one friend or a few with whom you can gaze together at something beautiful, something beyond?

 

 

A New Creation

Juanita Rasmus

 

Juanita begins by telling us about the exuberating feeling she experienced as a girl growing up in Frenchtown, Houston, Texas, as she jumped from higher and higher launch points to solid ground below. The most recent great leap was the beginning of a new kind of ministry, The Art Project, Houston.

The Art Project, Houston, as Juanita tells us, “emerged out of my desire to help people express their creativity and empower themselves through artistic endeavors, and was birthed during my recovery from cancer.”

In her article, Juanita describes the identity transformation that occurs for the homeless she works with, as they begin to see themselves as artists. But this journey is not unique to these artists, as it’s a universal journey of redemption in which we all participate. Much like these artists, our own transformation happens through experiencing God (encounters), noticing opportunities to embrace and practice his presence (experiences) and thereby showcasing him and your co-creative agency (exhibitions), and all through the initiating power of his grace (empowerment). Think of the work God is doing along these lines as you read through the questions below.

1. Are there any memories you enjoy from your childhood where you took some sort of dangerous leap of faith and were thrilled by feelings of joy as a result? Are there
2. some good launching sites in your life today?
3. Are you surprised God chose to give birth to this initiative in Juanita’s life during perhaps one of the most trying and dark times of her life? If there’s an area of challenge in your life that is perhaps a place of closed-off darkness, is there some new life you can sense God wanting to birth there?
4. Juanita describes the overwhelming emotions that were stirred as she heard the word “cancer” and that the creative process was a means by which she could declare her feelings in a way that words were inadequate to express. Are there places in your life where expressing yourself through art would be spiritually significant for you? Is there a form of artful expression that comes to mind?
5. Juanita describes the identity shift that occurred with the folks she worked with from “homeless” to “artist.” Do you think of yourself as an artist? Why or why not? What movement of identity do you sense God creating in your life presently?

 

 

Seeing in the Dark

Steven Stuckey

 

Steven’s article, subtitled “Spiritual Formation and Making Art,” includes three snapshots of his experience of how art has deepened and contributed the interactive study of the gospel with college students, assisted the author personally in a season of life transition, and improves and informs the practice of spiritual direction.

We read in the first snapshot, “Parable of the Sower,” how art unconsciously opened the door for the students to imprint something of themselves into their creations. By accessing “the sacred space where words cease and dreams are born,” the students were able to “find their story in the gospel story.” Their artwork allowed them to give visual representation as to what was going on their lives in the darker places beyond words, bringing forth these areas into the light.

In the second snapshot, “Jacob,” Steven illustrates how art helped him to navigate a sabbatical and provided discernment regarding a season of life transitions. Steven comments, “The act of making a piece of art unlocked my imagination and energized me.”

Snapshot three informs us how Steven utilizes art for spiritual direction with those with whom he journeys. Art allows us to help others to get in touch with the deeper places where words don’t seem to venture. As Steven has learned, as one makes visual images more detailed and concrete, it becomes easier for the Lord to be engaged and to speak and move.

Art can help us to give voice to the wordless, darker places within ourselves. It can provide discernment to us as we embrace mystery and metaphor in our own journeys and give us a tool to help others do the same thing in their lives.

1. If you were to describe your current inner emotional state using only colors, which colors would you pick and why? Grab a box of crayons and create a piece of abstract art, using color in place of words to describe your emotional life at present.
2. If you are currently mentoring or providing spiritual direction to others, consider utilizing one of the exercises mentioned in Steven’s article in one of your upcoming meetings.

 

 

Artful Discipleship

Carolyn Arends

 

As Carolyn begins, she lays the foundation that “the arts need no defending.” In fact, the Bible begins with God’s creative agency on display in precisely the first sentence. Our very existence is owed to God’s breathtaking creativity. What’s even more astonishing is that God has created us to be co-creators with him “in an irrepressible expression of our identity as the Creator’s image bearers.”

Art can be a very important part of our spiritual formation, since we, at our core, are creators. As we create, we necessarily draw on our spiritual life, our essence; this in turn forms us in spiritually significant ways.

Carolyn describes four specific ways in which art can serve as a spiritual discipline in our spiritual formation:

First, the arts help us quiet ourselves in order to hear and focus our vision in order to see. The arts help us to notice what’s really there, so to speak.

Second, the arts help us to rekindle our longing. The arts often form a bridge between what can be and what is by exposing the chasm between. Art can draw us out of our life of comfort and leisure as it inflames longings without resolution.

Third, the arts assist us in renewing our minds by training us to embrace non-dualistic thinking. Art can be metaphorical, and as we embrace the mystery it can expand our vistas, teaching us new ways of seeing Jesus and his formational work in our lives and the world.

Finally, art helps us to see things and people beyond their utilitarian usefulness. We learn to enjoy beauty for beauty’s sake, for instance.

1. As you look through the list of these four ways that art can help in your own spiritual formation, which area are you most drawn to explore?
2. Is God nudging you to consider art, or learning to practice some new creative expression or hobby, as a way of opening to new opportunities for spiritual formation in your life?
3. Scan the suggestions Carolyn made in the sidebar of the article and consider trying a couple as a way to get started.