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What Kind of Artist Are You?by the Rev. Kerry MuellerService at UUCSS on November 28, 1999
Opening Words"God's Joy" from a poem by Rumi Opening Hymn #111 "Life of Ages, Richly Poured"The Lighting of the Chalice and a Uniting StatementAs we gather here for worship, Song of Exaltation#381, #379, and #374 Welcome and AnnouncementsStory for All Ages presented by Natalie FenimoreParting Song for Children #413OffertoryGenerosity honors the real world. This church honors the real world also, and it lives by the generosity of all of us. The morning offering will be given and received in grateful appreciation of our shared hopes and values. Sharing of Joys and SorrowsAt this time in our service we take a few moments to share what is in our hearts and on our minds. If there is an event in your life, or the life of the world, which moves you this morning to joy or sorrow hope or gratitude, I invite you to come forward and share a few words with us and move a stone into the water, letting the ripples remind us that everything that touches one of us touches all of us. If it is better for you, we will bring the microphone to you. [Sharing] Let us remember to hold in our hearts the joys and sorrows of the whole company of humanity, whether they are spoken and shared or silent and solitary. Meditation with Silence and With Music Let us share now a few moments of silence. And in the silence [1 full minute] Amen ReadingFrom Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness, a sign that God is implicit in all creation. Or maybe you are not predisposed to see the world sacramentally, to see everything as an outward and visible sign of inward, invisible grace. This does not mean that you are worthless Philistine scum. Anyone who wants to can be surprised by the beauty or pain of the natural world, or the human mind and heart, and can try to capture just that -- the details, the nuance, what is. It you start to look around, you will start to see. When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walk to town. And I would like to add: May we live our lives so that we do not miss the mockingbird; may we live so that we share the hope of the woman in the red hat. May we learn to pay attention to the world around us and within us. May we honor the real world with lives that make it an ever more inviting place to be. Amen What Kind of Artist Are You?"by the Rev. Kerry Mueller When I was a student at Wesley Seminary, I passed the by art studio every day on my way to class. Wesley not only has an art studio, it requires every student to take at least one course in some form of art. The school has a good theological reason for this -- at the end of each phase of creation, God looks at what God has done, and pronounces it good. The physical, concrete world is a good place. And creativity is good. So Wesley's arts requirement is well grounded in its own theology. But in my heart I certain that all that didn't apply to me. I think of myself as a not very artistic person. And I don't believe literally in that version of creation. So I passed by the studio every day, a little intimidated. Sometimes I would look in and admire the works -- Greek Orthodox style icons, large, brilliantly colored abstracts, small complex assemblages of metal and wood. But mostly I passed by, wrapped up in my own lofty thoughts about theology or ethics or the dynamics of growing a congregation. Sometimes the studio door was closed. That's when I saw the sign. For three years this sign addressed passers by in the hall: "An artist is not a special kind of person; every person is a special kind of artist." That sign haunts me yet. What kind of artist am I? What kind of artist are you? Then suddenly I was up against the requirement. I had to take an arts course, this semester. I didn't dare take anything that required singing or dancing. Chancel drama seemed too demanding -- though those of you who came to the Cold Sassy Tree service here in October can see that Dave had a good time in the course. I didn't want to put in the travel time for the field trips in church architecture. The course on vestments and paraments and other church decorations seemed too bound up with Christian symbols for me. I could have gotten by with a course in the history of hymnody. But that seemed too tame, too comfortable. After all, Dave and I share old hymns every evening. And my UU friends were taking Contemplative Drawing, so I signed up for that. Every Monday night for a semester. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, perhaps a reprise of an art experience in ninth grade that we called "Drawing to Music." Contemplative Drawing was only a two hour class, but I sweated more over that course than all the others combined. In a book-based course, you can skim the reading, ask interesting questions in class, or cram the night before an exam, but there is no shortcut in drawing. You just have to sit there with pencil and paper (and a large eraser). You have to pay attention to what you are drawing. You have to see. And you have to take risks. We all had to post our drawings before class for everyone to see. It was agony. No matter how much my professor, Cathy Kapikian, assured us that this was about process, not product, I could see that my drawings were feeble at best -- though they were much more energetic and interesting than anything I had ever imagined I could produce. I finally got through the course and put away my drawing materials and my portfolio with relief. What kind of artist am I? Evidently, not the drawing kind. But I didn't seem to be entirely done with visual art. I found myself seeing things differently. Look at the lovely negative space where the chairs almost come together. Notice the rainbow shimmer of oil on a rain puddle. Pay attention to the shadows made by sunlight and curly willow twigs against the wall. A semester of drawing is with me still. It has become part of my spirituality. In preparing for this sermon, I dipped into some reading from the official art world of galleries and museums, critics and universities. Some of that reading was more intimidating than the course. I quickly found myself drowning in conflicting tides of modernism, deconstruction, postmodernism, culture wars, all of it outside of my intellectual ken. So I stepped back and thought about what I have learned about the origin and value of art in my more ordinary reading and in my own not-very-artistic life. I wanted to explore the religious elements in the art experienced by every person. And I found some direct and straightforward thinking about art and life and religion in a wonderful book called Conversations Before the End of Time. Author/editor Suzi Gablik records her conversations with a series of artist and critics and thinkers. Some of it is familiar and homey. Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence, an ecophilosophical magazine, quotes the words on that sign on the Wesley art studio door -- every person is a special kind of artist -- attributing them to a famous Indian philosopher, Coomeraswamy. He also cites his own mother, a craftswoman who did beautiful embroidery, but who insisted her art be used in everyday life, not something to be set aside. "Don't put it on the wall -- it's for you. I made it for you to wear. The day you start to put beautiful things on the wall, you start to put ugly things on your body." (p. 137f) Kumar makes a direct connection between art and religion. When you have a sense of art -- which means a sense of aesthetics -- it means a sense of the sacred, from an Indian point of view, because aesthetics and the sacred are two sides of the same coin with us, or even are interchangeable. When you say the earth is sacred, that is an imaginative, creative, artistic point of view. Because when you set out to do a painting of the landscape, you will not paint just any old landscape, but you have some kind of heart connection with that landscape -- that's why you paint it. You have feeling of reverence for nature, a reverence for the environment and for the landscape, and that is the spiritual, sacred point of view.... Art in India is tied deeply to everyday life and the community, especially the art of women. Several years ago I visited a wonderful Smithsonian exhibit called "Painted Prayers." Every day millions of women in India begin the day by sprinkling rice flour in a design in front of their homes, a visual prayer to the goddess Lakshmi, inviting her bring prosperity to the people who live there. This painting is quickly scuffed away as people walk by -- this art is truly process, not product. Festivals, celebrations of life passages, and holy days call for more elaborate paintings, on the walls of houses, or composed of thousands of flowers. Even women in dire poverty or those living in big cities find ways to express their religious feeling through art. Art is an everyday matter, both sacred and mundane. Asking myself about the connection between art and religion, I thought back to those Sunday afternoons struggling to really see my subject matter, and those Monday evenings taping my paper to the blackboard and wishing I could disappear. Two ideas jumped out at me from my ruminations: pay attention and take risks. And when I poked around in my theology library there they were, those same ideas. Be mindful and be generous. Different authors expressed them in different ways, but these two imperatives dwell at the heart of artistry, and of a living faith. Here is Anne Lamott, a writer and teacher of writing. Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of -- please forgive me -- wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious. Try walking around with a child who's going, "Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky! And the child points and you look, and you see, and you start going, "Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud! I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world -- present and in awe. Poet Kathleen Norris calls it "attentive waiting": [I]t's a fair description of the writing process. Once, when I was asked "What is the main thing a poet does?" I was inspired to answer, "We wait." A spark is struck; an event inscribed with a message -- this is important, pay attention -- and a poet scatters a few words like seeds in a notebook.
Actor and educator Eric Booth, author of the everyday work of art, insists that what we ordinary folk do as artists is different in quality from what Beethoven does, but lies on the same continuum: "You need to set things apart form the commonplace to attend to them in a special way." (p. 7) It doesn't matter whether you are story telling or dancing or painting or making music -- or planting a garden or preparing a meal for special friends or knitting a sweater. Art is available to us all. When my daughter, Amanda, began her freshman year in college, she brought with her a stack of outdated microfiches from her summer job in a bookstore. She taped them to the corner of her room, where the ceiling meets the wall. It looked cool, kind of fish-shaped, all shiny and dark blue. Quite outside her normal bookish, scholarly approach to life. Playful, even. But behold, it was art: she called it her "microfish." Everyday life, everyday spirituality, every one of us -- even Amanda, even me, even you -- engages in the work of art. It begins with noticing, of paying attention, of making special, of admiring and honoring the real world. And so does Unitarian Universalism. We are not an otherworldly people. We begin with respecting the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Our first source of religion is that transcending mystery and wonder which inspires us. We begin with the real world, we notice it, we honor it, we attend to it. That's why it was so wonderful when the Arts Committee recently met with a reporter for the Gazette, to be photographed with their art, and to talk about the Art and Craft Fair, and their faith as Unitarian Universalists. It's all bound together, beginning with honoring the realness of the physical world. Not to mention the splendor of the fair itself, and the wonderful things I bought. . . . Thank you, Arts Committee. And after paying attention, then comes generosity -- taking the risks of creating, putting together (that's what art means literally, "putting together") and offering your art. Mickey Goldberg, DRE at Cedarhurst, quoted one of her theater professors: "Talent is sharing yourself with others." Generosity comes from an Indo-European word meaning to "give birth," and create from a word meaning to "grow." Making and sharing our art is part of life itself. Art can serve the wholeness of life in many ways -- I think this week of the annual Day Without Art, on December 1, a day of fasting from art, to commemorate the many who have died of AIDS, a day to rededicate ourselves to ending the plague, both the disease and the social stigma attached to it. Or just look around in this room, at the exquisite memorial quilts, art in the service of the generations of life in this congregation. Growth and life and generosity are at the heart of art making. Alice Walker writes of generosity, of making something special, and making it available, with the hope, but not a certaintyc that it will be appreciated. In The Color Purple, Shug and Celie talk about an eager Creator offering us a world of good things to admire. Shug speaks first; she speaks of God as not as He or She, but as "it": Listen, God love everything you love -- and a mess of stuff you don't. Generosity is always a risk; at the least you risk indifference. But there's an up side. When you risk yourself in art, you don't have to stake everything all at once. You don't have to be perfect to do something worthwhile. Anne Lamott reassures her writing students that creativity always begins with imperfection. The risk begins with baby steps: to give yourself a short, manageable assignment and commit yourself to a crummy first draft. (Actually, she uses a word somewhat more colorful than crummy). Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a [crummy] first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it. (p. 28) Pay attention. Take risks. See what you are already doing in a new light. And have a lot more fun while you are doing it. There's a mission statement for you. Every person can be an artist of some kind. Every person can take part in that singing of the human spirit that comprises art. Why does art matter? Ann Lamott answers in terms of the art of writing: Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves of life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. (p. 237) I can't say it any better than Ms. Lamott. So I leave you this morning with a question, "What kind of artist are you?" Hymn #322 "Thanks Be for These"Closing Words#682 |