Whenever I read the owner’s manual for my cell phone, my mind starts to feel wonky. I know enough about my phone to press the red button to turn it on and the green button to make a call.  If I need to do much more than that, however, I call my son who, is the expert in all things technical. This essay on spiritual formation and making art is a red button/green button description of how making art seems to help some people in their journey with Jesus. It consists of three snapshots.

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01.  Snapshot One—Parable of the Sower

I could see it in their eyes when they walked through the doorway that afternoon. They were done. It was day three of a six-day conference for college students at Campus by the Sea, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Retreat and Training Center located on Santa Catalina Island off the coast of California. I had been asked to lead fifteen community college students through an inductive study of the first eight chapters of the Gospel of Mark. Using a manuscript of the text, we had spent eight hours each day rigorously reading, reflecting, and discussing Mark’s gospel. The more academically oriented four-year university students at the conference center were just getting their second wind by day three, but my group was done. Their analytical left brains had overheated and shut down. When they walked in the door, three of the young women promptly went to their table, put their heads down, and closed their eyes. The class skeptic made spit wads. Fred, who sat across from me and had taken us on numerous imaginative tangents over the past three days, would not stop talking.

The text for the afternoon was Mark 4:1–20, the Parable of the Sower. The passage is the linchpin for what comes after, so I wanted them to take it seriously. But seriousness was not in the room that afternoon. Part of me was frustrated that I could not get the class to settle down and focus on the text. Another part of me saw their eyes filled with fatigue and boredom, and I felt compassion. After thirty minutes of futile effort, I declared a short recess. I asked them to take a walk on the beach to get the fidgets out while I hiked up the canyon to pray and figure out what to do next. While wandering through the up-canyon storage/junkyard, I stumbled on a pallet of surplus telephone cable. Inside the black outer cable covering were eight color-coated copper wires. I got an idea. A month before, I had helped my third-grade Sunday school class make wire sculptures out of telephone wire. If the project worked for squirrelly third graders, maybe it could work in this situation. I ran to the tool shed, found wire cutters, ran back to the pallet, and cut off ten feet of cable. By the time the class had returned to our room, I had peeled off the outer cable and extracted the brightly colored wires.

When the students saw the wires, they looked intrigued. I told them we were going to try to engage the text in a different way. I said, “I want you to read the Parable of the Sower one more time and see if anything in the story captures your attention. Then I want you to make a wire sculpture of what you notice. Mount your sculpture on a rock that you can find on the beach. Be back here in seventy-five minutes, and I will give you the opportunity to share your creation with the rest of the class if you like.” To those instructions I added the following: “You are to make something that is meaningful for you, so don’t worry about trying to impress someone else.” To my surprise, the sleepy girls woke up. The class skeptic set aside his spit wads and grabbed the wire cutters. Fred stopped talking and got to work.

Seventy-five minutes went quickly. At the appointed time, each returned to the class holding a wire sculpture, which they placed before them on the table. I told them sharing would be voluntary. I then asked who would like to go first. To my surprise, the class skeptic spoke up. He pushed his sculpture to the center of the table for all to see. It was a large black crow with wings extended. In its beak was a spit wad painted with a yellow highlighter. On the rock base were three other yellow spit-wad seeds. As he briefly told us what he had done, I heard sadness, not cynicism, in his voice. It was as if he were sad for the seeds. Curious, I thought.

A minute or so of silence followed, and then his girlfriend, seated next to him, said she would like to share. Sarah had hardly said a word during our first three days together. She had a gold ring through her lower lip, multiple black studs piercing her ears, purple hair, and tattoos on her left arm. She pushed her sculpture to the center for all to see. She had made an exquisite red flower with a purple center on a stem with green leaves. The stem was jammed into a crack in the rock. The leaves were drooping, and the face of the flower was pointed down. A bright yellow sun was suspended by a piece of driftwood above the rock. Everyone ogled her superb craftsmanship. She then said in a very quiet voice, “My parents took me to church since I was an infant. They sent me to expensive private Christian schools. But when I got to college, I wanted to choose my own way. I wanted to be different. I wanted to question.” Her voice cracked, and she began to weep. In the sacred moments that followed, I wondered, Does Sarah grieve for the confusion that her parents experience, or are her tears over the difficult pathway of authenticity that she seeks to follow?

Fred then asked to show his work. He too had made a flower, but it was entangled with brown and green weed-like figures. He had labeled each of his weeds with strips of paper taped to the stems. The labels said things like “Desire to be Wealthy,” “My Car,” “Pornography.” Suddenly, it dawned on me what was happening. When the students created something in the parable that captivated their interest, they inadvertently imprinted themselves into their creation. Without knowing it, they were like Rembrandt painting himself into a picture. The project unlocked something in their minds that gave them access to that sacred space where words cease and dreams are born. They were able to find their story in the gospel story and express themselves in the symbolic language of their artwork. I was stunned, as were they, by their vulnerability with one other.

The morning after the Parable of the Sower experience, I got up early, went to the craft shed, and filled a box with art supplies—paper, crayons, paint, glue, string, brushes, and popsicle sticks—and took them back to the room. For the rest of the week we continued our normal inductive study process, but at the end of each session I added a creative art assignment as a way to deepen their encounter with the Bible. The group made mobiles and rubber stamps, and wrote poetry and silly songs about the Gospel of Mark. On the final night, the group created an art gallery and invited friends to stop by and see what they had done.

I have no idea whether any lasting change happened to those students as a result of our week together. I never saw them again, and to be honest, I was just glad we made it to Friday and avoided a mutiny. The transformation road to Christlikeness is filled with twists and turns, and the journey is painfully slow. I don’t know whether Fred disentangled from his weed patch. It’s very hard to do in a culture that continuously sows weeds of distraction. I don’t know whether the class skeptic was able to embrace and integrate his sadness into his inner world. If he did, he has the chance of becoming a person of wisdom who refuses to settle for easy answers. It he can’t own his sadness, he may become the bitter person who flaps around the Internet firing off blistering emails at his unsuspecting enemies. I don’t know whether Sarah was able to expand her visual arts vocabulary as a way to explore her inner world. If she did, she might become a spiritual guide for other seekers. If she didn’t, she may become the eccentric old lady who wears purple hats.

I do know that the experience changed me. It changed the way I taught the Scripture to students. It also changed the way I engaged the Scriptures for myself.

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02.  Snapshot Two—Jacob

In 1993 I was halfway through my eighteen years of service as the regional director for InterVarsity in Southern California. I had climbed the organizational ladder for twenty-two years, and as a forty-five-year old I had started to wonder whether my ladder was leaning against the right wall. I was granted a three-month sabbatical. I wanted to use the time to reflect on life stages because I sensed I was in the middle of my own life-stage transition. I decided to read the book Seasons of a Man’s Life by Daniel Levinson.Daniel Levinson, The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986). I also decided to study the life of the patriarch Jacob. He is one of the few people in the Bible for whom we see his life from the day he was born to the day he died. I also needed a vehicle to express what I was going to learn. Most people in my organization might write a sabbatical report. That straightforward approach bored me, so I decided to try to express my observations in painting and poetry.

My academic training was in civil engineering. My work experience was in organizational management. I am not a professional artist or creative writer. I am an amateur in those fields, but I take comfort in the words of Father Brown from the PBS series of the same name. “Professionals built the Titanic; amateurs built the ark.” Each morning for three months, I studied the life of Jacob using a manuscript and reading commentaries. In the evening I read the book by Levinson. At midday, I painted simple scenes from the life of Jacob. Like the community college students that I had met at Campus by the Sea years before, the act of making a piece of art unlocked my imagination and energized me. It was also refreshing to work on a project with a tangible outcome. So much of my effort as an organizational leader involved exchanging one set of problems for another. It was nice at the end of the day to point to something and say, “I did that and it is done,” even if it looked like it was made by a third-grader.

One month into the project, I realized that the life of Jacob is about hands. The first picture Scripture gives to us is of Jacob reaching his hand out of the womb and grabbing onto his brother’s heal. That was how he got the name Jacob, meaning “heel grabber.”http://www.jesus-resurrection.info/heel-grabber.html (accessed 28 February 2023). Another early image is of Jacob deceiving his father with hands covered in goat fur. In order to gain favor, he became someone he was not. The last picture we see of Jacob is of him on his deathbed blessing his two grandsons with a cross-handed blessing. His life went from grabbing/deceiving to blessing in one hundred forty-seven years. The transition point came when Jacob let go of all that he had gained in the first half of life and grabbed onto the God-man in Genesis 32. The realization that hands was a unifying theme came to me when I saw the images side by side on my easel.

I decided to cut my small watercolor sketches into four-inch geometric shapes and mount them on a three-foot-by-five-foot black mat board. When viewed left to right, the images told the chronological story of the life of Jacob. When viewed from right to left, the images spelled the word “Israel” in Hebrew. I then framed the artwork and moved it to my office. My office space was small—six feet by eight feet. There was room enough for a desk, bookcase, credenza, and two chairs, one for me and one for my guest. Whenever a guest stopped by to talk organizational business, the painting was always on the wall behind me as they sat in their chair and faced me.

Inevitably at some point in our conversation, many of my guests would notice the painting and ask about it. I would tell them what I just told you. They would often ask a question or comment on how they identified with some part of the Jacob story. I would then say, “Tell me more,” and off we would go on an imaginative tangent. Over the next ten years, I had scores of such conversations with my colleagues. It was as if Jacob, “a quiet man, living in tents” (Genesis 25:27, WEBScripture quotations marked (WEB) are taken from the World English Bible, which is an online revision of the American Standard Version, 1901, completed in 2020. It is in the public domain. http://ebible.org/web/GEN25.htm (accessed 28 February 2023).), had become my officemate, quietly steering conversations in a new direction.

The painting also helped me find my own place in Jacob’s story. Like him, I longed for others to view me with favor. I had learned, starting in the first grade, that the way to gain the favor of another person was to do whatever I needed to meet their expectations. That trait made me an excellent student and employee, but it left me feeling lost inside, wondering, Who am I without the expectations of others? Like most spiritual formation tools, this question is far more important than the answer, because the question keeps driving me to Jesus.

In 2004, I changed assignments, became a spiritual formation specialist, and joined a small team that cares for the souls of InterVarsity staff and former staff. I currently lead retreats, provide spiritual direction, and create visual and written resources for the people we serve.

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03.  Snapshot Three—Spiritual Direction

I feel adrift,” he said. “I don’t know where I am going, and I can’t find God.”

“That feeling must be unnerving, especially for a pastor,” I said.

“You bet,” said my thirty-something pastor friend. “That’s why I’m here to talk to you.”

“Tell me more about feeling adrift. Is it like floating on a lake and you can’t get to the safety of the shore?” “No,” he said. “It is more like being in a rowboat on the ocean without a paddle.”

“Can you see land on the horizon?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “On most days it seems there is fog everywhere, and I can’t even see the horizon, let alone land. There is just water for as far as I can see.”

“Are there other signs of life around you? For example, are there sea birds flying or fish swimming?” I asked.

“I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe. It doesn’t seem like I am on a dead ocean. Interesting things happen in my life every now and then. So maybe there are birds or fish to distract me.”

“Do you sense you are in danger? Does your boat have a hole in it, or are sharks circling?” I asked.

“I don’t think I’m in immediate danger. But how long can somebody drift like this? I don’t like feeling out of control.”

“Where is Jesus for you in this experience?” I asked. “I don’t know. He is certainly not in the boat with me. I don’t know where he is.”

“You must feel lonely in the boat,” I said.

“Well, actually not,” he said. “As the pastor of a small church, I am alone most of the week anyway, so I am used to it. Plus, I’m an introvert.”

“Is it possible that Jesus might be present to you in ways you don’t immediately recognize?” I asked. “For example, might Jesus be the rowboat, or might he be the ocean beneath the boat?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “I would prefer to have him in the boat with me as a person. I just want some direction and need him to tell me where I am going next.”

So it went with my pastor friend. Each month we would begin the session by talking about how things were going in his imaginary rowboat. I encouraged him to find a photograph of a rowboat floating on the ocean and put in on his wall. As a spiritual director and visual artist, I am always listening for the image or metaphors that people use to describe their inner worlds. When I hear something, I point it out to the person and then try to help them fill in and expand their visual vocabulary. For example, I might ask my pastor friend, “What color is your boat? How many seats does it have? Is the sun shining? Is the wind blowing?” I make the assumption that the Lord is somehow connected to their image and may want to speak to them through it. By making their mental images more concrete, it is easier to engage the Lord.

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04.  Summary

When Jesus was marching toward his death in Jerusalem, he encountered a blind beggar named Bartimaeus sitting by the roadside. Mark suggested that of all the people in the crowd that day, Bartimaeus was the only one who really understood who Jesus was. It was as if his poverty stripped him of all pretense and his blindness forced him to use his imagination and see in the dark. Making art has similar effects on many of us. To create an object that is meaningful to us is a humbling experience. We always feel like third-graders because we are at the mercy of that part of our minds over which we have little control, our imaginations. We can only hope that when we open our eyes, it is the face of Jesus that we will see.

 

 

That Dreadful Desert

The cacophony of words, analysis,
dialogue, and critique ooze into the
silent sands of that dreadful desert.

Tongues stop their wagging so that Wisdom
might begin.

All is quiet in His House of Holy awe. All is
quiet in that land of dreams.

There He speaks. Burning Bushes, angelic
ladders, whirling wheels, still small
voices, silent wrestlers.

There He speaks.
Listen. . . .