Dance and Kneel

this need to dance
this need to kneel:
                           this mystery:

                           Of Being, Denise Levertov

If you can kneel you can dance.
They use the same muscles:
beating hearts and ready legs.

Remember to Move

Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling and shouting within you. It is your duty every moment, day and night, in joy or in sorrow, amid all daily necessities, to discern this Cry with vehemence or restraint, according to your nature, with laughter or with weeping, in action or in thought, striving to find out who is imperiled and cries out. And how we may all be mobilized together to free him. — Nikos Kazantzakis, 'The March', The Saviours of God


Think of those gentle quickenings
when the heart picks up its pace 
and you finally start
to walk with the rest of the world.

We move when meditation
becomes mediation and
walking with every thing.
All desires find their ends,
as feet and beat are one 
and we move to the one 
who made our rhythm 
and who thus makes us.

It only takes one before the other, 
but we lack the courage to stride.
When we don't respond,
our steps are stilled, but
the beat of our desire will not die.

These are the throbbing times
when the heart beats you and
drags you along by the ribs,
stomping grapes in your chest
to make the wine for which we long
and which is itself our longing.
All of which explains why we're
so impatient when the stomping starts.

The burning is the half-remembered cue 
that greatness lies beyond,
but we're too dim to think it could be
anything other than utter tragedy.

In these moments the rhythm's will is done and
it has its way with you, who never made way for it.
It hurts and is scary, as are all things to the timid.

So give it room to move you,
because when it is not with you,
you are not with yourself;
though the beat goes gladly on.

I wish I could say these words have freed me,
or that this journey had a cadence to it
which got me where I wanted to go.

But these were really all
one simple step forward,
which now awaits the other . . .


Of like kind: Moving On

Scribbles from 4am

The prayer you don't say
will keep you up
till the break of day.

As you toss in bed,
sleepless through the night,
it arises in your head
to get up and to write.

So scribble your restless heart
as it searches for its home:
they may remain far apart,
but at least you'll have a poem.

The Meaning of Art

"To give the intellectual meaning of the Divine work of art is possible only by creating art."  

From a homily by Romilo Knežević

The relationship between the mystical life and the creative life is so deep as to often be overlooked, because our minds gets in the way.  For some reason, we don't intuit that a creative action requires a creative response: art is hung in museums and not in studios, while orchestras play to audiences and not to musicians.  The arts have become spectator sports, where the layman is puzzled and the intellectual evaluates.  So often people think the correct response to art  is to ask the questions, "What's it really about? What does it really mean?" These questions are asked about art as much as they are about religious life, but they are intellectual questions, which can only receive intellectual answers; and so they are essentially different than artistic or mystical questions, which must receive artistic or mystical answers.

Art doesn't work on the level of an intelligible formal cause alone, but asks us to value the fact that there is matter at all.  Paint, wood, sound, and wool are not the material wrapper to the formal lollipop anymore than human hands are to human thoughts.  All of this matter, this stuff was created with intrinsic value of its own: "God saw everything that he made and behold, it was very good" (Gen 1:31). The soul's greatness lies in its ability to elevate and sanctify the matter given to it.  This is true in the bread and wine offered by the priest in Liturgy.  This is true in health when we exercise and eat well.  This is true is social ethics when we meet the needs of our neighbor so that we can both be more than we were given.

So in one sense art pertains to the material cause, but even more so to the efficient cause.  If God's creativity is the thing we are the most thankful for, the only proper response is more creativity: "Go and do likewise" (Luke 10:37).  If we have really perceived the beauty in art we must become creative agents ourselves.  If we really hear beautiful music, we may so resonated as to sing along.  However the synaesthetic quality of humanity means that we do not only have to answer music with music: as so often we answer music with dance, which is no less creative.  The best way to give thanks for being created is to create.

So what is it really all about?  The final cause of art grows out of God's creativity and person, which are identical.  The end of every human soul is to become a partaker in the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4) such that our humanity resonates in a divine manner (theosis). Art is an energetic microcosm in which we become more creative and more persons, because just as art transforms material into a means to unite the artist with his audience, so we are the material which must be transformed to unite divinity and humanity.

Meaning means the relationship between the two entities, or the medium by which the two entities communicate themselves to one another.  Man finds his identity in being simultaneously the receptive listener in this conversation and the language created to speak the God's own Word.  We are the means to his end and we are what he means to say: "The medium is the message" (McLuhan).

The paradoxical dual- (and even hypostatic) existence of humanity, as both means and end, is the heart of artistic inspiration.  When are truly creative, we understand we can only move our pen or voice to the degree that we are moved ourselves.  Our creativity cannot come from ourselves, because what we wish to express is ourselves: how can a mouth say a word which is bigger than it?

I need a mouth as wide as the sky

to say the nature of a True Person, language

as large as longing.

—Rumi

Our creativity must draw on a creativity which is more primordial than our near-sighted idiosyncracies.  Art is a means of communication between the artist and his audience, which necessarily means it is something bigger than the artist herself: so her work must ecstatically root itself in a creativity deeper than any dreams she has sketched or criticism she could anticipate.  Some religious people root their criticism of some men in God's deeper criticism of all men, but with regard to art neither our criticism nor our appreciation cannot fathom the depths of his creativity.  So let us sketch his sketches and sing his songs until they are truly ours.

Photo credits:
Iconographer: http://vimeo.com/48602918
Arvo Pärt and Tintinnabuli: http://www.last.fm/music/Arvo+Pärt
Woman with Turkish Carpet: http://davidcolemanphoto.photoshelter.com/image/I0000WsPk0.e.aF0

Anam Cara: Friends In Silence

This book has been with me for almost a decade now.
One of my most formative books, without me realizing it.

"One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences.  Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.  In modern life there is an immense rush to expression.  Sometimes the quality of what is expressed is superficial and immensely repetitive.  A greater tolerance of silence is desirable, that fecund silence, which is the source of our most resonant language.  The depth and substance of a friendship mirrors itself in the quality and shelter of the silence between two people."

When We're Away

When I think of what you hold
is it only wine and wheat?
Will this Mystery please unfold
and my hungry heart entreat?

Could all the days of your life,
when you walked this land,
put an end to all my strife
and set themselves in my hand?

All my friends and all your souls
safely swim in holy wine.
God who loves, God who consoles,
You gave me all I thought was mine.

Friends go away and rarely meet
scattered way too far:
crushed grapes and ground wheat
offered upon an altar.

I come to take this bread and wine,
I make my way to You,
You took all I thought was mine:
O Lord, take me too.

The Political Aisle

We're interested in what's right.
You can have whatever's left.