When Artists Get the Keys to Church, in 13 Pictures (With Video)

On Saturday, November 23, Jim Robertson curated (and largely created) a worship experience called Reign of Christ the King. This 'Feast Day', in Christian tradition, focusses on the rule of Jesus in the world. What does it mean to say Jesus is king of all, when so many don't even believe in his existence, and especially not his everlasting life? What does it mean to say God is still in control, in the face of Ferguson and Ebola and the middle east? It means a lot that is perhaps best understood beyond reason and rationale – beyond the brain and into the heart. Through image, sound, language, dance and practice.

All of these elements were brought together at St.Paul's Anglican Church on November 23, when dozens of us came together to create an experience for 'one night only'.

I can't describe what that kind of experience is like – when artists get the keys to church for an evening. But I can show you. And I will, in 13 pictures and a video.

When one walks into the room, there may be confusion. Surprise. 'What the ...?'

You've got a lot of explaining to do, Jim Robertson. Here, Jim does explain, and does it well, walking us through the evening's activities and sharing words from his deep well.

The gathering is split into times of singing and reading and listening and sharing together, as well as time for a short dance. Then there is the bulk of the evening, the 'fat middle' where we are on our own to wander through a series of stations. This station, at the back, invites participants to pick up chalk and write (or draw) answers to some guiding questions. Questions like 'What do you see when you see Jesus in others?"

A poem written for the evening by EmTee (and featured in the video below), peers into the various names for Christ. So does the installation piece above, acting as another worship station. 

Rocks feature heavily in Jim Robertson's Interface Worship experiences. This display is my favourite. I'm not alone. I once heard Jim recall the incredible story of finding these rocks, years apart and yet two halves of one whole. Behold The Blessings of Brokenness. 

Another favourite piece of mine, this station features a large stone, the 'stone the builders rejected' crowned with some very painful looking thorns. It is accompanied, as all the stations are, with a written reflection, either curated or written by Jim Robertson. 

In one of the evenings first movements, the congregation each brings a carnation up to lay at the bottom of this beautiful wooden cross. At the bottom of the cross regal robes are draped. It forms a beautiful backdrop to the rest of our evening together, and at the end of the night we will surround this scene for Communion.

Light plays a big part in the evening, and so it should, as Jesus has declared himself Light of the World. I can't get enough of this retro star lamp. If Jim ever wants to get rid of this piece, he knows where to find me.

Interface Worship uses prayer bowls heavily. These liturgical objects are accompanied by written meditations and invoke images of prayers rising like incense, burning in bowls.

The Prodigal Son story forms part of our evening. We are embraced by the king. We are robed in his righteousness. These colourful robes are put on by the participants near the end of the evening, as we gather round for communion. The colours also evoke 'the lilies of the file' - lilies which remind us not to worry, because if God dresses those flowers so beautifully, won't he also care for you and I? 

These vintage windows rotate, and as they do, the view through them changes. Reflects. Refracts. Windows for a few newer stations at the back of the room, and offer rich metaphors.

And what would the evening be without these beautiful fabrics hanging above? These colours are rich with liturgical symbolism, and set the stage perfectly for the evening experience. Always look up.

Can you smell those fresh carnations? A reminder that engaging all five senses is a powerful way to connect with God and one another.

The simplicity of candles in the dark remains a favourite image of mine from this evening. Here, a trinity of candles shines small and unassuming. So low I have to nearly lay on the ground to photograph them. But if the Reign of Christ the King matters anywhere it is here, in the dark and low places.

I hope that from those 13 strands you can weave together something of the whole. And if not, perhaps this video will help. And if not, there's always another nterface Worship experience ahead.

Sacred Space, and 2 Poems on Language

Tomorrow night we meet once again to create our next Sacred Space evening together. Perhaps there is no better time to reflect on our last Sacred Space, and share what I consider two absolute gems that came of it–original poems by Stephen Berg on language and inclusion. April 25th's Bleeding Heart Sacred Space was all about inclusion, exclusion, and the role language plays in both. Words have power. Words of hate, or even words misunderstood, can divide and conquer us. Words of hope can bring us together, like the rallying 'I have a dream' of Martin Luther King, Jr.

We got to these thoughts through the four passages from the Lectionary, each one revealing a facet of this theme. Peter receives a vision telling him to eat a variety of animals once forbidden–animals representing cultures outside his own tight religious community. The dream is from God, and it means Peter is to move beyond his safe community and share God's Good News with the waiting world. Every nation, we are told in Revelation, will be singing songs together in the end. Those like us and those very, very different, will have 'hallelujah' on their lips. We will all be singing Psalms, and we will be surprised at some of the voices around us. Jesus has thrown the doors open. Love spills over. Everyone is invited.

Our Sacred Space evenings last an hour, and include communion, prayer and readings. Beyond that they each look quite different. Each has left an treasured image or experience in my mind. This time, it is the words of Stephen Berg that linger. Stephen wrote two poems for our evening together (fitting, as it was Poetry Month). Each poem gave us pictures to ponder and metaphors to tease out. The second gave us a prayer for the night. Stephen has graciously posted those online, and I'm happy to share them with you here.

Stephen Berg's first poem

1. Consider the mechanics: your thought, a lexical chain, turns wheel, pushrod presses diaphragm, air rushes from lungs to trachea, excites larynx, passes over vocal folds, periodic pulses of glottis, fashions phonemes, for post-throat conditioning, and in the roll and yaw of mandible tongue clicks free from its cavity, flings phonemes through caves of mouth and nose, past teeth to lip aperture, and you pray, that this phonetical filament, in resonance of pitch and tone, might bear some similarity to your original thought.

2. If language was used less, it may last longer. But tell that to the tongue.

3. The tongue, impatient, conceives its own path,

no chain of thought threatens its domain. It is too nimble, too quick; jacks up minds, high-jacks hearts.

So heart and mind must take tongue by the hand, to the wilderness, with its slow forms of fingers, feather quills, ink and bark,

to peel and pare, and make tongue fit, for a king indicting a goodly matter. The tongue at last, the pen of a ready writer.

4. I tell my love: words fall through space out of sheer loneliness. Go wild on their own, pine for connective tissue.

Take this noun for instance, huddled against abstraction, vagrant, indigent, dying in isolation even with other nouns.

But should a willing adjective stop by, noun is changed, liberated, coloured, like a scarlet macaw, through coupling.

And see that verb that glances, how it’s struck by the painted preposition enticed into a syntactical ménage à trois to create the tight triadic world of a sentence.

Forging fact or fantasy, able to convey beauty or blight, hate or light, or this singular thought: My love, I adore you.

5. I know a poet who listens to the spaces between words. Narrows the gap of these small cracks through which meaning falls. Resists the temptation to choose the better sounding word rather than the right one. Waits for 20 years until the better sounding word becomes the right one.

6. Language is a river, its headwater unscalable, unseen; gathers lexicon from a great glossal basin of branches, feeders, rills. And dialectic detritus from distant rains.

River winds, flows toward fluent confluences of meaning; meaning shared, then sundered by rocks and rapids; languishes in argot eddies, reconstitutes in quiet currents.

Silt, sediment, alluvial sleep, force lingual bends into overstated arches until banks are breached and the bend cut off, leaving behind an oxbow lake, stagnant as Latin.

Still the river flows.

---

Steven Berg's second poem (a prayer)

Zachariah, Peter and Sly Stone

Soon the Octave of Easter weeks will be swallowed by the flat terrain of ordinary time, left to graze on the greying memories of holy week.

And now I’m wondering: does sacred need profane? Didn’t the eyes of Zechariah burn with a new light? Gazing on those common cooking pots and horse bells seeing ‘holy-to-the-Lord’ blaze itself onto the quotidian, his inventory overturned, unbound, suddenly fluid.

And Peter too—in the shimmering glow of his inclusive act, standing by his new friend, quaking in the greening comprehension— had cried, the dream-in-waiting has arrived, the revelation-revolution is that you, friend, are holy.

He’d seen, at the in-gathering of everyday people the sacredness of all breath and breathless things. How God had sung the buzzing, blooming world, this giant bejewelled chalice, holy.

But how hard it is to transpose this new song. Hard to find our meaning beyond division. Easier to stay safe on the righteous side of a conjured line, call our exacting ability to classify and codify, the gift of discernment.

Easier to be over and above, than to love; easier to breach than to merge; easier to preach than converge, and try create a supple ‘we’ beyond the icy ‘us-and-them.’

And back at the Temple we sweep out the odd and ungainly, the queer and the quirky, all those mismatched colours onto the coarse ground, keeping holy holy, and profane profane.

And now, as I write, Sly and the Family Stone comes pop, funk, soul, rock-ing over these cafe speakers, singing “Everyday People.”

And a girl in a red top sitting in a purple chair starts to sing, “There is a blue one who can’t accept The green one for living with a black one… And so on and so on… Oh sha sha… We gotta live together.”

First band to mix race and gender, Family Stone climbed the stage and danced their kaleido-delic diversity onto the human plain.

But alright, we’re still in our swaddling clothes, needing to designate times, places, things holy, raise to mind and stamp our memory matrices with coordinates through which we can seize and fuse a reality that can be rehearsed, transcribed and coaxed, onto the cosmos entire. And by this, should we be moved to see what we are —we may call it liturgy.

Zachariah, Peter and Sly knew the aim; knew that every day is Easter, knew that all time is ordinary—and kissed holy, that all people are everyday—kissed holy.

--- This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. On this day, millennia ago, God performed a miracle of language. Fresh off the death and resurrection of Jesus, he spoke to an international crowd each in their own language, through ordinary Jewish followers of Jesus. It was the first occurrence of 'speaking in tongues' and it was all about inclusion. God's spirit is still calling us all to the table, in our own language.

The most beautiful thing about Sacred Space is discovering what each participant brings to the table. Stephen Berg brought poems. What might you bring?

We hope you can join us this Thursday night at 7 at St.Faiths (11725 93rd street).

---

Read more from Stephen Berg at growmercy.org.

Bleeding Heart Epiphany: A Sacred Space Reflection

Picture a Jack-In-The-Box. You know, the kind that plays 'Pop Goes the Weasel' while you turn a crank at uneven speed until, POP!, a character bursts unexpectedly from the closed tin box. A Jack-In-The-Box is now what I see whenever I think of Epiphany. At the Bleeding Heart Sacred Space event on January 31, these boxes became a metaphor for the surprise of Epiphany. The Gospel story was not what people expected it to be 2000 years ago. Jesus was full of surprises. He still is.

He asks us to love surprising people, and often works among those people, rather than among those of us who'd think ourselves 'insiders'. He dances along the surprising fringes of culture. He spends surprisingly little time with people whose main concern is maintaining and protecting their Religion.

These are the truths I was grappling with during our Epiphany Sacred Space event. But enough abstraction. Let me tell you what we did.

The evening took place at The Studio, an art space run by Glen Ronald. It has a warehouse feel, white and grey except for the exuberant splash of colour brought by Ronald's artwork, hung on every available surface. There were tables and easels in the middle of the space, creating a sort of labyrinth to navigate and quiet, solitary pockets of hidden space where chairs awaited participants.

A Small Group and a Large Question

There were four Jack-In-The-Boxes present, and if we count them as attendees, 10 of us in all. We were small in number, but willing to tackle the very large question that began our evening together;

Who do you distance yourself from?

It's a question too big and too important–too revealing–to answer honestly without time for reflection, and perhaps to prep and preface one's answer. So we didn't answer the question right away, leaving the pregnant promise of a difficult discussion later on. The night continued as follows.

What Do You See?

We took 10 minutes to draw ourselves. First right side up and then, to take a page from Betty Edwards' Drawing On The Right Side of The Brain, upside down. We chose from a variety or art materials to better or chances at a decent likeness. I can't be the only one who gets inspired by new crayons, pastels and pencils? We scattered to private floor spaces, tables and chairs, and tried to draw. Most of us found this challenging. I was pleased with my moderate skill, but disturbed by the fact that I cannot remember the exact look of my own nose. It tilts up, I think. but how much? How big is it? How high above my lips?

When I cannot even recall my own face, do I even know myself that well? And how, then, can I correctly perceive those around me? Perhaps they are full of surprises? Epiphanies?

Grab Bag

We were called back together and progressed to the middle movement of the evening which I'll call 'Grab Bag'.

Six readings were referenced on six scraps of paper, scattered at random in a cloth shopping bag. In turn, we each drew a paper, and did what we were told. Thus, the 'order of service' was out of our hands and, well, surprising.

Some papers read, 'scripture'. The participant would then grab a Jack-In-The-Box from somewhere in the room, bring it back and turn the crank. All played 'Pop Goes The Weasel' until, at some surprising moment their lids would pop, springing a stuffed creature. Inside the lid was a scripture reference from the Lectionary (basically a weekly Bible reading plan used by Christians around the world for centuries). The participant would then read that scripture.

1 Corinthians 13 instructed that, above all, we must always love. We cannot see clearly now–cannot understand the details–but we must love anyways. In Luke 4, Jesus proclaims himself the fulfillment of Messianic promise, but not necessarily, or at least not only, for those who were expecting him. He will go to outsiders, to the disdained, despised and discarded. The crowd of listeners, praising him moments ago, attempt to throw him from a cliff. We also read about Jeremiah, whose calling to speak to those even outside his own nation brought a double surprise, for he was only a boy.

Love. Surprise. Dissapointment. Difficulty. Surprise. Love.

A prayer written by Scott (you can read it below) and two stories completed the readings in the grab bag. My story came from the book, Speaking My Mind, by Tony Campolo. It touched on a powerful move of God among the gay community - a move that surprised a preacher. Scott recounted his discovery that an unabashed ultra-conservative colleague was out-loving him.

Flesh and Blood

Soaking in these scriptures and stories, we moved to Communion. Josh introduced the sacrament, and we served one another in turn, Radiohead's 'No Alarms and No Surprises' playing low and distant. While we waited, we could retrieve one more surprise from under our chairs - an excerpt from 1 Corinthians 13 telling us some small and huge thing about love. "Love doesn't strut". "Love doesn't want what it doesn't have" (The Message).

During Communion, two folks wandered in from the street. Drawn in by Glen Ronald's artwork, they wanted to look around. I left to chat with them, and tried to explain what on earth was going on over at the other side of the room. Six people, quiet. Jack-In-The-Boxes. A shared cup and tiny bread. It turns out they were followers of Jesus themselves, and were quite interested in our little experiment. I handed them some materials and hope they'll join us again some evening. It was one more nice surprise.

Let's Talk

I returned to a sharing circle, each person giving their answer to the night's opening question, "Who do you distance yourself from?"

And this is the part I cannot convey well here. This is the part where relationship and proximity and the movement of spirits with Spirit make all the difference. Suffice it to say, the question ran deep. There were some tears. There was much thought. Some revelations.

So, what would you say?

Who do you distance yourself from?

The Scripture's words bouncing off of this question, we left with thoughts of love. Challenging, surprising, upending love.

It's the challenge I hope The Bleeding Heart can rise to in every endeavour. It's the challenge I hope to live, and not just talk about.

There were epiphanies, and there continue to be even as I reflect on that night.

POP!

A BLEEDING HEART EPIPHANY PRAYER

by Scott Drennan

Father of all people,

We ask for your blessing on us.

We confess that:

We are people of the radical routine. We are people of the marginalized in-group. We are people of politically correct possibilities.

We confess that:

We push the boundaries out and implode the interior. We stand at the margins and judge the centre. We seek the new and the new-that-was-old and condem the merely old as "it's been done."

But

You are the God who draws together the whole. You are the God of both the outside and the inside. You are the God of the radical ancient and of the passe. You are the God of the ordinary and the extraordinary. You are the God of radicals and those they reject. You are the God of all possibilties.

Lord Jesus

We ask that you draw us around the edges and through the centre. We ask that you open us to the near neighbour as well as to the far. We ask that you settle us in the familiar and the former as well as the fantastic.

Lord Jesus

Burn our sophisticated selves with the fire of your Holy Spirit. Drown our cynicism in the waters of your baptism. Kill our pride with the feast of your flesh and blood. Jesus, we ask this in your name.

Amen.

---

Sacred Space nights are created in community, then enacted in community two weeks later. Each event seeks to wrestle with the scripture readings from the Revised Common Lectionary in a creative, communal way. We pray, read Scripture and take Communion together. Other than that, all bets are off.

We invite you to become part of the process. Find out when our next event is on our calendar.

AdventInArt.org

No more Bleeding Heart events for 2012, but as we approach Christmas Day, we find ourselves now in Advent - a season of waiting and watching.

What are you waiting for? What are you watching for? How sharp is your expectation?

Many of us are waiting for Jesus. Many artists have tackled this waiting throughout the years. You can see some of their work at 'Advent in Art'. Perhaps these images will help you in your own waiting and watching these coming days.

Or, perhaps, a lot of tiny chocolates will help, too?

http://www.adventinart.org/