ruah arts group

Have you heard of Grassroots Films yet? Yes? No? Perhaps you’ve seen the “Fishers of Men” priesthood DVD clip? Check it out if you haven’t. When I first saw this 18 minute clip, I couldn’t believe Catholics had done it. No offense, but if you haven’t noticed, the artistic bar in the Church isn’t that high. (Is there a bar at all?) It’s not perfect or a masterpiece, but it’s just really, really good. They’ve got talent, and it doesn’t come from three PhD’s in film studies; they’re relative fishermen in today’s film world. They may just become the rock upon which other Catholic artists will build their work.
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They just came back from Peru and Africa where they were shooting on location for their next project, a full length feature called, “The Human Experience.” It’s going to be brilliant. I have an idea to have some sort of premiere or screening in the Madison area this fall, so stayed tuned. And meditate on their cinematic theme for this film: The meaning of life is discovered in the Journey.

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The Director and Producer Lauralee Farrer spoke at the Washington Arts Convocation in DC this past May. She was an absolute delight! She spoke with a refreshing authenticity and ease of expression. This woman has loved and suffered. She seeks the face of God, wearing red clogs and three non working watches on her arm (reference to time of creative flair in beginning her current project).

Her current project is “Praying the Hours,” and it is everyone’s story. It’s a narrative of eight people’s lives, struck by the epiphany that time is more than the clock–Khronos; time is also supernatural–Kairos. It’s journey into and beyond time, beyond the urgent, into what is truly essential. I urge you to take a look at the Burning Heart Productions website, www.burningheartproductions.com and keep her in prayer as she follows God’s Call. Also, if you’re intrigued by the questions of time and eternity, kronos and kairos, read T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”

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(Continuing on the Washington Arts Group Convocation Commentary….)

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths; ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” (Jeremiah 6.16)

Frederica Mathewes-Green has the speaking voice of a broadway singer, or a voiceover actress with a contralto flair. She makes her living writing books, but public speaking is a close second, and for a good reason. She really talks the talk. And walks the talk, although I’m not exactly sure where she walks the talk to. Flair and style took flight from the first moment she spoke, but it was not so much a direct flight via certain points, as much as it was a balloon flight of uncertain direction.

She began the balloon flight by bringing attention to (St.) Andrei Rublev’s “Old Testament Trinity,” which is fitting since the Trinity was the inspiration for convocation theme. Mathewes-Green explained in her talk’s prologue that though she originally brought the Rublev icon as the talk’s centerpiece, but in the genesis of her speech, she really felt called in another direction. Thus, after a brief but lovely explanation of the history, significance and luminous attributes, she moved on to three points, coming to a rather beautiful and humble finish.

In the winding path of her points, I discerned a couple major themes.

First, she began by talking about the nature of culture and what it does (or doesn’t) mean to “challenge the culture.” She poked fun at six common foolish things we say to propose a Christian Re-Renaissance—things like, “We need a movie!” or “I’ll be cryptic [with my faith]” or “I’ll do imaginative works of pre-evangelization.” She shook a witty finger at everyone, and I had to laugh (and re-write my movie script).

Second came the real heart of her talk, the part of “seeking the ancient paths.” As a Catholic Christian, I gave silent (and probably a few not-so-silent) affirmations to her call to “return to the Fathers” (hat tip, R.R.Reno), but to do so in an authentic way. For all the richness of her very strong Orthodox faith, I felt she could have hit this point home a little harder in a room full of Chrisitians whose very existence was based on leaving those ancient paths. She is probably more delicate than me. In the end, she exhorted the largely Protestant audience to not only do things like read the Fathers, but to make an honest and exhaustive search into the past, and to keep the context in whatever they found, rather than cutting and pasting the ancient paths onto their own deconstructed driveway to who-knows-where. (Tony Jones, do you have ears to hear? More on Tony in a coming commentary…)

In the end, I liked the balloon flight-talk. I had to do a little post flight navigation through the typed speech, my notes and the talk on CD, but the seeds I picked up on the way were enough. In parting, here are a few of my favorite quotes:

“When churches try to get attention by offering something akin to what they enjoy on TV, entertainment and sentimental uplift, failure is likely because Hollywood just has better resources. And the mere act of trying to copy the mainstream world makes us look lame.”

“[In our televised culture] There is no death you could die that could not be followed by a commercial.”

“Instead of digging diamonds, let’s think of it as gathering flowers. You can come in with a big armful of flowers with the ancient church, and they look lovely. But they have no roots and they’re going to die.”

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I, John, have been reading the Wednesday audiences of Pope John Paul II. Many know this to be the collective work: Theology of the Body. Well, I thought amidst the depth of philosophical and theological weightiness that I’d pause and write a few lines. To be sure, my brain just needs a rest!

As anyone who reads this may already know, the world is seeing a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit through a “New Evangelization.” This current pedagogy of the Spirit is nothing more, I think, than a “wake-up call” or “remembering” of that which we’ve known since the beginning. And that is that God, who sincerely loves and wishes to be with us in an everlasting communion, is redeeming His people, His beloved Israel, through the Holy Spirit and most perfectly in Christ Jesus, so that “we all may be one” in Christ, the only Son of God. (Of course, I need not point out that Jesus lives as the first in the Resurrection, that is, of the Body.) We are being called to encounter, to “see”, God through the beauty of the Resurrection Body and where, one day, we, too, will live like-wise in a “glorified” body.

How might this “new” body appear? Will it be much different than the way in which we “appear” to-day? Essentially, through a theology of the body, the thought is that the human body, fully integrated, becomes wholly subject to the Spirit. As such will be the case, this reality, fully consumed in Love, serves as a vital resource for the artistic imagination.

This (the fuller embrace of a theology of the body) is where I believe a very important event will take place in the artistic imagination. The human body, beautiful and sacred, will be re-presented, proper to its dignity, not totally in ways unlike the past, however, with a very special dimension which (when taken up through the real enlightenment in a theology of the body) helps to more clearly reveal, artistically, the very image of God, a Holy Trinity of Divine Persons.

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As promised, I will comment more on things seen and heard at the Washington Arts Group Convocation…

There’s an intellectual nausea over a certain kind of sentimentality that creeps into the Christian art world. This was one of the pithy themes of Greg Wolfe’s opening talk. “Art is linked with prophecy,” he proclaimed. He went on to remind us that “Beauty always creates shock–a surprise, a flash of radiance…” He insisted that tragedy is an essential dimension of the Christian life.

We live in the shining shadow of the Holy Cross of Christ, and who are we to think he walked from Tabor straight to the Resurrection? Indeed, Christ is Risen. He is truly risen! However, it is the moral imperative in a fallen world to preach Christ and preach Him crucified. That is a brave prophecy–to portray in one’s own medium the wastelands of our time. I will take the darkest verse of T.S. Eliot over a thousand Thomas Kinkade pieces any day.

When we participate in His suffering willingly, and “dare to disturb the world” by portraying brokenness, we become prophets, not of doom, but of the the redemptive power of pain.

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Just read this interview by Steven Greydanus on his Decent Films Site. It’s brilliant, long and evokes awe for the Lord, much like the movie, I imagine.

I feel sorry for the short attention spanned socialites I saw walking out of the movie two weeks ago in Indianapolis. Telling sign of our culture, no?

Thank you, Philip Groning, for being a perhaps unwitting instrument by holding up the unspeaking mirror to Goodness, Truth and Beauty.

Stay tuned, Madison, for a DVD screening of this movie in the next month or two by ruah arts group!

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Here’s the text for an article I wrote for Ave Maria’s St. Austin Review :

Breathless.

Of all the words that describe the Washington Arts Group (WAG) Convocation (and there are many), breathless gets the blue ribbon prize. Has there ever been such convocation of speakers, presenters, painters, writers, filmmakers, academics, musicians presenting at such a breakneck pace? If T.S. Eliot were alive to attend, he might have humorously penned, “At the turning point of the still world…” in a poetic meditation on pace and place in artistic gatherings.

The Washington Arts Group Convocation gets the 2007 award for Most Speakers & Topics in the Shortest Amount of Time. The Convocation took place May 18th and 19th in Northwest Washington, DC, and it is a sort of miracle of time that twelve plenary speakers, thirty five breakout session leaders, dozens upon dozens of artists and hundreds of other participants convened for just two days. It was a cultural marathon. And I loved it.

It was in Love that Jerry Eisley, Christian, curator and art gallery owner, founded the Washington Arts Group in 1978. Bringing his own passion for his faith together with his love for the arts, he established the group to be a sort of nexus for Judeo/ Christian artists and art lovers. The relatively small non-profit has grown in size and prominence over the years. They hosted a number of events in the 1980’s, and continued to break international ground with a social conscience in the 1990’s by hosting the first exhibition in post-Communist Russia, inviting Ugandan singers to tour the DC area and initiating programs to develop young artists.

The development of this perhaps one time only Arts Convocation is the twenty-year dream of Eisley, and has been five years in the making. Amply titled, “Jumping Out of the Self Referential Box: Certainties and Adventures for the Arts in the 21st Century,” the convocation was a purposeful Calling together (as opposed to a more worldly and pedestrian “conference”) of Christian artists to explore the very drama of coming together in a hyper-individualistic culture. The inspiration: the Most Holy Trinity as our reference point for unity, diversity in a society of sameness.

The theme was lofty and the ecclesial challenges great. Ecclesial affiliations ranged from the new paradigm Emergent Village Tony Jones to Evangelical Louis Markos to the Orthodox Frederica Matthewes-Green and Catholic power team Tom Howard, Stratford Caldecott, Joseph Pearce, Gregory Wolfe and many, many more. The question ruminating in my mind became an ecclesial one. How do we engage this theme on common ground when we have so many varying ecclesial viewpoints? The answer still eludes me, but what is clear is the divine heartbreak emerging. The tragedy of diversity and lack of unity became evident as the hours passed, but I reveled in the gorgeous weakness of it all.

The two-day drama had an international cast from Russia, New Zealand, England, as well as the United States. The stage was the National Presbyterian Church, a neo-gothic building with modernist expressions. The daily prelude were devotions in the chapel, followed by the Acts—the plenary sessions. Act One was Friday, which was divided into two scenes, the sessions of “Truth” and “Calling.” Act Two on Saturday consisted of the plenary session “Time.” Both days were interspersed with brief coffee breaks, lunch and the breakout workshops on everything from liturgy to writing to film.

The emcee, author and humorist Eric Metaxas referred, in between jokes, to the momentous event as an embarrassment of riches. Indeed, there were a great many gifted souls. Of the artistic and academic plenitude, I found the greatest richness in the talks given by the most honest, anciently founded and interiorly driven speakers, including, but not limited to Gregory Wolfe, Frederica Matthewes-Greene, Louis Markos, Joseph Pearce, Lauralee Farrer, Stratford Caldecott, Tom Howard and Norman Stone. The crux is, as Eisley put it, “The arts flow from our worship in every time and place.” This is the point from which all inspiration flows, and as an art historian said (quoted by Caldecott), “The fine arts were born on the altar.”

One of the greatest gifts of participating in “Jumping Outside the Self-Referential Box” was the questions it raised, the disagreement in provoked and the joy it evoked. I’m impelled to continue the dialogue with my fellow participants, and God-willing, travail into the unknown with a similar arts apostolate. As Eliot wrote, “…the work of creation is never without travail.” I’m grateful for entering into the travail of the unknown at the WAG conference amidst boredom, postmodern pride and pleasant surprise. I experience the sublime joy-filled sorrow of witnessing the gathering clouds. Standing at society’s dusk, I know that day is just beginning & Light Invisible is perpetually dawning on the altars of the world. It is on these stone canvasses, the “still points” of Redemption, that true art must end and begin.

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On this the feast of the Visitation, a beautifully full moon is visible to honor Our Lady on the feast of the Visitation. I, John, am given to contemplate the reality of the Mother of God, a Woman born in holiness, open to the perfect gift of Life and to, on this day, find herself available to leave the relative comfort of a home life with St. Joseph to wander hundreds of miles to go see her poor and pregnant cousin, Elizabeth. Most certainly, this feast day becomes emblematic in conveying the type of poverty, radical (to the root), which ought to be expressed as we live entirely for God the Father in our Lord Jesus Christ. As Mary becomes, truly, the icon of “radical poverty”, she lives in a beautiful openness to Charity, the vocation (indeed) of the artist.

To be an artist, or to be one who wishes to give oneself entirely to the One who creates (as JPII indicates through the ideas of “craftsman” and “Creator”), we become inspired instruments, living canvases, where, like Mary in her Visitation to her cousin Elizabeth, the art becomes the event/encounter of a life in “eucharist.” A most blessed event on earth which indicates the true Charity which God gave us in Jesus Christ: The Visitation.

For my wife and I, and any who share a love for the contemplative mystery of the Visitation, a most unitive mark of Christian Charity emerges. In her own way, beautiful and eloquent like the Woman is meant to be, Mary shows us (though I’m certain she knew not the reality of what she was presenting) that the Old and New Testaments are one, as John the Baptist (the “final prophet” of the OT) and Jesus (the “first prophet” of the NT) meet in the beautiful “tabernacles” of old and new. A most blessed event.

Art is found in the beauty which becomes evident in acts of charity. The idea of living a life-style of radical poverty means to give from the very poverty of one’s being. Like Mary, when we are fully available to God, He will allow us to become great re-presentations of the most sacred mysteries which have ever been created. Duc In Altum!

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