Sometimes
friends, colleagues or even members of the church ask me: "How
can you be so
In
1934, T.S. Elliot articulated this sickness:
O world
of spring and autumn, birth and dying,
the
endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless
invention, endless experiment,
brings knowledge of
motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but
not of silence;
knowledge of words, and
ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings
us nearer to our ignorance,
all our ignorance brings
us nearer to death,
Nearness to death no
nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have
lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we
have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we
have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in
twenty centuries bring us
farther from GOD and
nearer to the Dust.
Ginsberg echoed this same lament twenty years later in "Howl" when he wept:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro
streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the
ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…
And so it continues:
the arts implore us to pause and honor the deep rhythm and wisdom of true
life while our addiction to the market place squeezes awe and compassion out of
our hearts. There was a time when public schools not only taught poetry, but
required engagement with song, dance, physical education and philosophy. There
is a minor resurgence of the value of the arts taking place in some
educational circles today, but after three generations of stripping our schools
of everything except science and math, we have succeeded in fulfilling the
prophecy Aldous Huxley envisioned in Brave New World. Neil Postman said
it best in Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985: our world has become not what
Orwell feared in 1984, but rather the doped-out pseudo-utopia that
Huxley prophesied.
But we had forgotten that
alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another -
slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling:Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy
the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome
by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother
is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he
saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies
that undo their capacities to think.
Watching the recent
Republican debates brought this additional quote to mind:
When a population becomes
distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of
entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk,
when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a
vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear
possibility... We do not measure a culture by its output of
undisguised trivialities, but by what it claims as significant.
Now cut back to my opening
query: why am I so assertive about the reclamation of the arts in worship
and everyday existence; why do I insist we relearn the ways of contemplation for our generation? One of my mentors in the work of culture care,
the visual artist Makoto Fujimura, is unequivocal. In a March 3, 2016
address in Pasadena, Mako stated:
To ask
“what if?” is not just idealism or false hope or fantasy. “What if”
questions are filled with hope and faith while acknowledging our struggle for
that quest. To ask “what if?” today is to say, “I have a dream.” What I
call “culture care” is a non-violent resistance to culture war; culture care is
not to wage war over territories of culture which only leads to polarization,
but it is to lay down the weapons of ideology, and instead to sow seeds of
goodness, truth, and beauty into the ecosystem of culture—into the cultural
soil of our cities, including Los Angeles.
To say
"I have a dream today" is to plant seeds of hope in the arid soil of
Why, then, do I insist on quiet time
for contemplation each Sunday? Because we are surrounded by an ocean of ugly
noise that steals our ability to rest and reflect. Why is it essential to move and interact with our
bodies and our buildings during our time of prayer? Because most of our experience is divorced from human
encounters with other beings rendering us isolated and awkward. Why is
there jazz, folk, high church chant, pietistic hymnody, organ, guitar, bass and
drums played within nearly every liturgy? Because we exist in a multi-cultural,
multi-generational, multi-faith world that is filled with beauty if only we had
ears to hear. Liturgy - from the Greek meaning "the work of the
people" - cannot advance segregation. Rather, worship must help us
integrate the bold love of the Lord into our ordinary, walking around lives.
Anything less strikes me as idolatry or vulgar sentimentalism. Mako concludes his address a prophetic warning:
What
we are experiencing this election cycle is but a disfigurement of democracy.
Instead of aspiring to the “better angels of our nature,” we have become dark,
mutated angels fallen to the temptations of culture war. Mr Trump, I suggest,
is fallout from those wars, a gusher erupting from the fissures of culture
wars. He successfully took advantage of culture war polarity to focus the media
on himself and his own ideas of “winning.” He gained this dominance first
by intentionally firing incendiary remarks to pressure the fault lines of
culture wars, recasting everyone other than himself “losers” from the starting
line. We may yet be able to elect the culture wars candidates of our choice,
but we all lose in that process, degrading the integrity of our culture in the
process. No matter who wins this election, an age of disillusionment will be
ushered in with the new occupant of the White House.
After relearning to "see with the eyes of my heart" on sabbatical, I am more certain than before that our worship - and our community building and justice work - are an integrated whole. Like a Celtic monastery in the Dark Ages of Europe, our worship must keep beauty, truth and goodness alive. We must actively strive to be a center where the head and heart, body and soul, dwell together in unity. We must consciously celebrate a ministry of culture for this is an integrated, albeit paradoxical, expression of non-violent resistance to the ugly barbarism that has become the status quo in 21st century America.
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