Category Archives: Anglican spirituality

The O Antiphons: “Drenched in the speech of God”

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Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine and Magdalene (detail), c. 1500, Accademia, Venice

Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine and Magdalene (detail), c. 1500, Accademia, Venice

When belief in God is the matter to be decided, the central question is whether you can and should allow yourself to retain or be drawn into the patterns of thought that make the believer’s world what it is.

– David M. Holley

Pierced by the light of God…drenched in the speech of God,
your body bloomed, swelling with the breath of God.

– Hildegard of Bingen

One of the joys of Advent’s final days is the praying of the O Antiphons, seven eloquent supplications based on biblical images or attributes of the divine. Liturgically, they begin and end the Magnificat at Vespers from December 17th to December 23rd, but they can also be a rich resource for personal prayer as Christ-mass draws near. I tape each day’s particular antiphon to the mirror where I begin and end my day. Doors, dashboards and desks would also be good places to encounter these compelling texts, letting them awaken our attention over and over throughout the day.

Today’s antiphon, in my free paraphrase:

O Sophia, you are the truth of harmonious form,
the pattern of existence, the shapeliness of love.
Come: illumine us, enable us, empower us
to live in your Wisdom, your Torah, your Way.

The best-known version of the O Antiphons is the hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” You can find my own variations on the seven antiphons here.

In my December 17 post last year, I wrote:

Each antiphon is both greeting and supplication to the God who comes to save us:

O Sapientia, O Adonai, O Radix Jesse, O Clavis David,
O Oriens, O Rex Gentium, O Emmanuel … O … O … O …

O is such an evocative word. We use it when we come upone something outside ourselves, often unexpected, something that engages us face to face.

 “O” can be an inhalation, a gasp, the cry of astonishment at the heart of every encounter with the Holy. If our place of prayer were suddenly filled with smoke and angels, or if the Holy called us out of a burning bush, our first response might well be “O!”

 There is also the O of understanding, or recognition: “O, now I see, now I get it.” Or even, “O, it’s you!”

 And then there is the ecstatic O, expressing delight, wonder, the sigh of surrender: Ohhhhhhh!

 Each of these is a fitting response when we meet the divine:

 Astonishment
Recognition
Surrender

As the Antiphons return this year, I happen to be reading David M. Holley’s illuminating book, Meaning and Mystery: What it Means to Believe in God. In fresh and thoughtful ways, he suggests that God is not a hypothesis to be tested or a puzzle to be solved by detached observers, but an experience to be encountered by receptive participants, those who know how to say “O!”

Thinking of God as a hypothesis to be inferred from specifiable data means starting from an understanding of a world that does not presuppose God, but belief in God is not a matter of moving from such a world to a reality in which God is included. It is a matter of finding yourself within the kind of world where God is implicit already.[i]

In other words, the truth of belief isn’t something that can be decided from a position outside of the patterns of life and thought that constitute a religious view of the world. If you want to experience God, learn to genuflect, learn to pray, learn to sing and dance in the presence of the Holy.

Astonishment. Recognition. Surrender.

It is certainly possible to live inside an alternative story, where God is absent or nonexistent. But I find that a bleak and unpromising account of reality. This old world, beset by human folly, massive violence, economic injustice, and dispiriting politics, needs divine imagination more than ever.

The prophet Zephaniah responded to his own dark times with a profound hope in God’s Advent as a redemptive rewrite of the human story. Amid the current proliferation of hateful speech, faithless fear and violent bluster, how we long with Zephaniah for a new story, a better language.

At that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the holy Name and serve God with one accord.[ii]

May that day come when we are all “drenched in the speech of God,” whose language is justice, peace, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, communion.

O Desire of all nations and peoples,
you are the strong force that draws us toward you,
the pattern which choreographs creation
to Love’s bright music.
Come: teach us the steps
that we may dance with you.

 

Related posts

Praying the O Antiphons

Ten Ways to Keep a Holy Advent

[i] David M. Holley, Meaning and Mystery: What it Means to Believe in God (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 47-48 [the epigraph is also Holley, p. 48]

[ii] Zephaniah 3:9

“God isn’t fixing this”

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Advent installation by Jim Friedrich at St. John's Episcopal Church, Los Angeles (1977)

Advent installation by Jim Friedrich at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Los Angeles (1977)

O come, O come Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel.

Once upon a time, worshippers entered their church on the Second Sunday of Advent to find a great wall between themselves and the sanctuary. The beautiful mosaics, the richly colored marble walls, and the magnificent carved Christ above the high altar were all hidden from view by this strange iconostasis, made from front pages of the Los Angeles Times. Instead of the images of holy men and women that adorn a traditional altar screen, there were banner headlines screaming catastrophe and mayhem.

When the assembly was seated, a mime came up the aisle to stand before the wall, searching for some way through it. His movements and gestures indicated perplexity, frustration, and finally discouragement. Then a voice from beyond the wall cried out,

Jerusalem, turn your eyes to the east,
see the joy that is coming to you from God. (Baruch 4:36).

Responding to the voice, the mime tore a small hole in the wall, and peeked through. He seemed entranced by what he saw.

The voice continued:

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
and put on forever the beauty of God’s glory. (Baruch 5:1)

The mime began to tear down the wall, encouraging others to join him. One by one, people rose from their pews to rip down the veil “of sorrow and affliction,” until the beauty of God’s sanctuary was finally revealed.

This simple but powerful ritual, the prelude to a eucharist I curated forty years ago at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, comes to mind whenever I hear that passage from Baruch in the December lectionary. It’s what we pray for each Advent from our place on this side of the wall: Good Lord, deliver us. Stir up your power. Tear down the wall between us. Show us your glory.

That wall of headlines reflected my ongoing interest in connecting Advent themes with the news of the world. The WTO protests in Seattle (1999) and the Occupy Movement (2011) both coincided nicely with Advent, mirroring its prophetic themes of judging the present order with the hope and vision of something better.[i] And just last week, the front page of the New York Daily News supplied a marvelous Advent provocation. By noon, it had 11 million Facebook views, and 74,000 shares.

New York Daily News, 12/3/15

New York Daily News, 12/3/15

The headline was a sharp rebuke to the shameless politicians who promise prayers for the victims of gun violence while refusing to do anything about the guns. Calling them “cowards who could truly end gun scourge” but instead “hide behind pious platitudes,” the newspaper offered a blunt theological assertion: “God isn’t fixing this.”[ii]

The daily office Old Testament readings for early Advent, calling the world to account for its evils, say much the same thing. To those who refuse to “renounce the dictates of our own wicked hearts,”[iii] the prophets imagine God declaring, “You made your own bed. Now lie in it.” (Thankfully, the prophets always redeem their rants in the end with comforting decrees of mercy and salvation).

However, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas was not comfortable with the Daily News’ riff on the old biblical idea that God sometimes gets fed up with human folly. His photoshopped revision was posted on Facebook and Twitter.

God hears our prayers

Of course this clueless retort (note the unfortunate juxtaposition of the headline with the red banner above it) did not actually answer the question of whether – or how – God acts in the world to “fix” things. It was just a clumsy attempt by a presumed gun lover to change the subject. Platitudes about prayer in the abstract are safe because they have no consequences, unlike real prayer, which always implicates the petitioner in a process of change and action. If we pray for an end to gun violence, we obligate ourselves to do all in our power to reduce it. Prayer is a call for action; it politicizes what we pray for. Prayer is not simply leaving things up to God. It is an act of volunteering to be part of God’s solution.

But is there such a thing as God’s solution? Does God – can God – fix things? It is not a question with a clear and simple answer. Human freedom has thrown a monkey wrench into the story of the world, while God has surrendered absolute control of the narrative. If we make a mess of things, God is not an indulgent parent rushing in to cover for us. We don’t get to multiply our weapons and then wonder why God allows so much violence.

So where does that leave us? In the Advent section of his Christmas Oratorio,[iv] W. H. Auden describes a closed-in, godless world where hope is absent.

Alone, alone about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind …
The Pilgrim Way has led to the abyss.

But what if we are not alone? What if there is a God who can make the abyss into a way? What if an unexpected future is breaking through the walls of our self-made prison? The Advent message is to embrace this hope, as we take off the garments of sorrow and affliction to welcome the God of joy into our midst.

Whatever the “solution” (salvation) may be in the tangled histories of the world and the soul, it is a long-term, sometimes excruciating, process, requiring honest engagement with the consequences of human sin in acts of confession, repentance, reconciliation, justice, healing, sacrifice, and transformation. And I submit that these are not simply things we do with God, as though God were only a helper from the outside. They are things we do in God, or God does in us, as our own intentions and actions become the embodiment – the incarnation – of divine purpose.

So yes, I believe that God is fixing the world, but not in the short run. And not without us.

 

 

 

 

 

[i] I preached on both these events at the time, with mixed results. Some were not so ready to find traces of God in social movements which trouble the powers-that-be. One church subsequently banned me from its pulpit for being too “partisan.” Guilty as charged.

[ii] New York Daily News, December 3, 2015.

[iii] Baruch 2:8

[iv] W. H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), 273

Reprise: Ten Ways to Keep a Holy Advent

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Here in Puget Sound, the first Sunday of Advent has begun in darkness, fog, and frost. It is for many of us a deeply felt time, the season where we wait expectantly for the dawning of the New. The spiritual practice of waiting is not a state of passivity, but rather the cultivation of attention, lest we miss what is being offered to us in the unfolding of God’s future.

I do not usually do re-runs of old posts, but some readers found last December’s “Ten Ways to Keep a Holy Advent” a useful list, and you can access it here. I hope you will find some blessing in it. And please feel free to share it with your communities.

We are the singers of life, not of death

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A Choir of Angels (detail), Simon Marmion, 1459

A Choir of Angels (detail), Simon Marmion, 1459

“The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.”

– Marilynne Robinson[i]

Gonna rise up, burning black holes in dark memories,
Gonna rise up, turning mistakes into gold.

– Eddie Vedder[ii]

One of my favorite stories by the naturalist Loren Eiseley recalls a moment of awakening. He was napping in a forest glade when a sudden commotion of birds roused him from sleep. They were circling a raven which clutched their small nestling in its beak. It was not only the nestling’s parents crying in protest. Birds of half a dozen other species also began to join in. “No one dared attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries.” The raven sat unperturbed on its perch, a perfect symbol of pitiless mortality – “the bird of death,” Eiseley called it.

It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death … For in the midst of protest, [the birds] forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.[iii]

On Sunday night I experienced a similar miracle of transcendent exultation in a new musical at the Seattle Repertory Theater, Come From Away. A musical about 9/11 might sound like a dubious idea, but it succeeds brilliantly in turning the darkness into a song of unconquerable life and resilient spirit.

Like the birds in the glade, Come From Away shifts its focus away from the familiar 9/11 narrative of horror and death to tell a powerful counter-story in which the bonds of community and kindness prove stronger than the forces that divide and destroy. Like the utopian “no-places” of Renaissance romance – say the forest of Arden or Prospero’s island – the small town of Gander in New-Found-Land is on “the edge of the world,” a liminal space where both individuals and social groups, free from conventional and habitual constraints, can explore alternative ways of being and being-together.

An island town of 9000 people, Gander had once been a key refueling station for transatlantic flights, and its remote airport is still relied on for emergency situations. When all North American airspace was closed on 9/11, 38 planes were rerouted there, bringing nearly 7000 people who needed to be housed and fed for six days. The logistical challenges were enormous, but the emotional ones were even greater – so many people from different cultures, stranded far from home in those surreal days of uncertainty, shock and anxiety. Their planes had found a place to land, but what about their hearts?

Over those six days, remarkable bonds formed among both Newfoundlanders and passengers. It was an experience of love and goodness which none of them would ever forget. Ten years later, many of the “plane people” returned to Gander for an anniversary reunion to re-collect that extraordinary experiment in community. Two Canadian playwrights, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, went there as well, spending a month listening to thousands of stories. In four-hour interviews with hundreds of people, Sankoff and Hein compiled a remarkable record of the human spirit.

The play’s title is a Newfoundland colloquialism for “immigrant.” In a time when many are bashing immigrants as “them,” such a powerful reminder that we have all “come from away” feels like a well-timed gift of grace. As the Bible puts it, we are all strangers and pilgrims on this earth[iv], and the essential human project is the overcoming of fear and division to make connections and create community.

Sankoff and Hein were fascinated to learn that Newfoundland is where all the continents crashed together eons ago. “So, geologically,” they said, “there are pieces of Africa, Europe and America all right there. It’s this wonderful metaphor for the world coming together.”[v] The theologians say that we are made in the image of a God whose essence is relationality, and that human nature is most fully realized in communion. What happened in Gander was a test of that thesis.

The stories collected in 2011 were gradually consolidated into a coherent musical drama, with 12 actors representing nearly a hundred characters. There are no flawless heroes, exempt from the fears, frailties and foolishness common to all of us. There are no villains either. They are just people making their way through an unknown land without a map, exhibiting an innate desire to do good to one another. Both recognizable and sympathetic, these characters stood in for all of us, and what we might become.

And how brilliant to make it a musical. The driving Celtic rock score by a nine-piece onstage band was irresistible, and the songs made you want to shout and dance, even as tears streamed down your face. Beautifully crafted by Sankoff and Hein, the infectious music made us all believe in our common vocation as the singers of life against all odds.

In her book on the musical genre, Jane Feuer observes that “musicals are unparalleled in presenting a vision of human liberation … Part of the reason some of us love musicals so passionately is that they give us a glimpse of what it would be like to be free.” But she cautions that the genre can also fall into the trap of being about nothing more than its own energy. “In its endless reflexivity the musical can offer only itself, only entertainment, as its picture of utopia.” In such a case, the musical remains self-enclosed fantasy, untranslatable into daily reality.[vi]

But Come From Away, grounded in remembered stories of real goodness, offers something more than a temporary escape into fantasy. It proposes the richness of human community as an authentic prospect, however imperfectly realized in actual practice. The merging of Christian, Jewish and Muslim prayers into a single song was but one of many scenes in which the characters discovered that their best selves were grounded in the interrelatedness of mutual belonging.

And to the extent that this play manifested an ideal by which our failures to love one another might be measured and found wanting, it was not unlike liturgy. Neither theater nor liturgy are “real” life, but they can still exert a transformative power. Through symbol and metaphor, song and story, they can suggest a hypothetical alternative to our tired old stories of decline and fall, luring us toward a higher vision of human becoming. When we rose to our feet at play’s end for a prolonged ovation, we were not just thanking the company for a good time. We were, at least for the moment, subscribing to its vision. Whatever it was they showed us, we wanted to be part of it. As Marilynne Robinson puts it, human community is “a work of the imagination”[vii] – a life-giving story we tell as we strive to make it real, in ourselves and in our world.

When the house lights come up, we all go our separate ways, and the vision weakens in the glare of ordinary time. The same thing happens after a liturgy. Yet something of the dream remains. The intuition of a better way of being lodges deep within us, and over time, if properly nourished, it may produce real outcomes.

 

 

Related posts

 

Remember

No Place like Home

After Paris and Beirut, what kind of story shall we tell?

 

 

[i] Marilynne Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 33

[ii] Eddie Vedder, “Rise”, from the film, Into the Wild (2007)

[iii] Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York: Random House, 1957), 174-5

[iv] I Peter 2:11

[v] Interview with Shirley Fishman, Come From Away program notes (Seattle: Encore Arts Programs, Seattle Repertory Theater, Nov. 2015), 15

[vi] Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 84

[vii] Robinson, 29

After Paris and Beirut, what kind of story shall we tell?

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Barthelemy Toguo, wood stamp from tree trunk, Venice Biennale 2015

Barthelemy Toguo, wood stamp from tree trunk, Venice Biennale 2015

We played the pipes for you,
and you wouldn’t dance,
we sang dirges,
and you wouldn’t cry. (Luke 7:32)

This was, as Jesus observed, the perennial cry of the poor children in the marketplace, playing their instruments for the crowd, hoping for a handout. Every street performer could relate to this description of an unresponsive audience, but Jesus wasn’t using the image to address their plight. Instead, he was characterizing his critics as childish in their contradictory complaints about the prophets in their midst. They whined that John the Baptist was too austere and antisocial, but they didn’t like Jesus’ partying with sinners any better.

The failure of others to respond appropriately to the tunes we play for them could also describe the incredible discord among competing versions of reality in these days of terrorist violence. The actions of those living in alternative realities to our own seem inexplicable, and our often clueless responses to those actions fail to produce the intended results. We pipe, but they don’t dance. We bomb, but they don’t submit. We reason, but they won’t be persuaded.

In a long and unsettling article in The Atlantic last March, Graeme Wood diagnosed ISIS as a “dystopian alternate reality” grounded in an apocalyptic worldview. According to Wood, the western violent response to the Islamic State not only feeds their medieval narrative of Crusaders versus Muslims, it is the longed-for fulfillment of millenarian prophecy. In the Syrian farmland around the city of Dabiq, the armies of Islam will face down the armies of “Rome” (the West). This decisive battle will inaugurate the End of Days, resolving all the tribulations of history into a final triumph of God’s people.

In this narrative, the escalation of American military involvement would not be a deterrent, but an incentive. As Wood put it: “During fighting in Iraq in December [2014], after mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.”[i]

If Wood is correct, then ISIS is operating from premises which we would dismiss as senseless and fantastic. But then what do we make of a recent poll on religion and politics, where1000 American adults were asked, “Do you think that the end of the world, as predicted in the Book of Revelation, will happen?”[ii] The results suggest that alternate realities are not exclusive to other cultures:

Yes, in my lifetime (13%)
Yes, but not in my lifetime (39%)
No (25%)
Not sure (22%)

I’m not sure what “not sure” means in this case, but I’m guessing some of those folks are at least conceding the possibility. In any case, more than half of those surveyed embraced the literal fulfillment of a highly metaphorical text with its problematic mixture of sacred violence and sublimely consoling imagery.

When they said “yes” to Revelation, did they mean verse 21:4? God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying will be no more. Or were they thinking of 11:18? The time has come to destroy those who are destroying the earth.

 Who knows? Polls on religious belief are misleading because they cannot measure ambiguity and nuance, nor do they distinguish between proposition and practice. Religion is not just what people say; it is what they do. And the correlation between the two is not always clear. If 52% of Americans believe that Revelation is predictive of human history, does that make us more or less likely to choose war as the means to “erase ISIS from the face of the earth?”[iii]

There is no consensus about the human story. The world is full of alternate realities. Sometimes we choose which story we want to live inside of. Sometimes the story chooses us. ISIS is living a story which seems crazy and evil, easily rejected by the majority of humanity who live outside it. But a consensus on competing narratives is harder to achieve when we consider our own national life.

The argument about Syrian immigrants is a perfect example. More than half of the state governors in America want to shut the door on them, while the President, speaking for many others, says that is not who we are as a people. Who is right? It depends on which story you are living inside of. Just in time for our national celebration of the Pilgrim immigrants, we get to choose between xenophobia and the Statue of Liberty. Of course my own framing of this debate tells you which story I live in.

My alternate reality, the story which I have chosen and which has chosen me, begins at the eucharistic table, where everyone is welcome, forgiveness is shared, no one goes hungry, and love is the costly gift. I may falter in my daily embodiment of that story, but I have no desire to belong to any other.

After 9/11, Americans had to choose what kind of story we wanted to live in. Many of our choices proved disastrous and toxic, but there were some who chose a better story, a better way. One of the finest articulations of that better way was a manifesto written by the Catholic Worker of Los Angeles in September, 2011. In the wake of Paris and Beirut, its eloquent faith still resonates:

Even after all this…

Our grief will not be short-circuited with cries of vengeance nor with acts of retribution. We will not cooperate with incitements to become that which we most oppose, namely perpetrators of violence.

We will honor the deeper levels of grief, acknowledging the woundedness inflicted upon us, and the woundedness that our nation has inflicted upon others…

We invite you to participate with us in all our wildest dreams and visions for peace. For now we sadly know that our affluence, our power, our possessions cannot serve as protection from harm. We invite you to clamber off the wheel of violence. It is the only worthy legacy we can offer to those who have died…

We are Catholic Workers and we still believe… the only solution is love.

 

 

[i] Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic (March 2015): http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

[ii] YouGov/Huffington Post poll conducted Nov. 10-11, 2015. In the same poll, 42% said the earth was created in 6 days, but only 4% believed the pyramids were used for grain silos! https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/11/11/poll-results-bible-politics/

[iii] The quote is from a liberal politician I admire who is not an advocate for war. His use of the phrase suggests a rather apocalyptic consensus about the goal if not the means.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do not fear: Reflections on the Venice Colloquium

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The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.

– John Ruskin[i]

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I’m frightened of the old ones.

– John Cage[ii]

John Ruskin, the influential Victorian oracle on all things pertaining to the visual arts, had a particular passion for Venice. As a young man, he made repeated visits to analyze and record, in words, drawings and watercolors, the endangered architecture of the place he described as “a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak, so quiet, – so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which was the Shadow.”[iii]

A city floating on the sea, a mirage of reflections and watery light, an endless play of surfaces and mazes, seems more imagined than built. Ruskin’s fevered description of San Marco celebrates this fantastic evanescence:

… as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst.[iv]

Artists, writers, and dreamers have long made pilgrimage to Venice not just to admire its beautiful treasures, but to be immersed in its spectral fancies, a provocative analog for their own imaginative processes. When a small group of Christian creatives gathered there for the Venice Colloquium in late October, we arrived with that same longing for inspiration and discovery.

Our collective intention was to “dream the Church that wants to be.” It was born of a shared sense of urgency about the state of imagination in the common life of God’s friends. In my last post, I wrote that “the practice of holy imagination is like a sanctuary lamp in the life of the Church. If not duly attended to, it is in danger of going out.” In a week of group conversations and Venetian wanderings, we tended the flame as best we could.

We had little interest in being theological spin doctors, cranking out persuasive messages or illustrative answers. Art is not argument or propaganda. Its purpose is not to answer questions, make a point, or silence doubt. The artist should not know what is going to happen when she goes to work. One of our group, a painter, said, “I am not trying to get a message out with my work, but to evoke a deep experience. What right do I have to impose my meanings on the incredible lives of other people?”

“Church,” said another, “has become the place where you go if you know, rather than the place to find out. It has become the place of the answer instead of the question.” Could we possibly abandon the project of collecting the best answers and devote our attention to curating the best questions? Where would that lead? Would we just get lost in the maze of unknowability? Or as the Psalmist says, is there anywhere we can go where God is not?

Where can I escape from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I climb up to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in the underworld, you are there.[v]

When we discussed the drag imposed on creativity by the institutional rage for order, the young leader of an “emergent” Christian community spoke up: “I want a wild church, where things are out of our control.” For Christians concerned about communal stability and institutional sustainability, that might sound like a recipe for chaos. But as our sacred stories remind us, chaos is prelude to creation. And if anyone thinks the Church is not in need of some serious re-creation, they aren’t paying attention.

The worship spaces of Venice, with their monumental forms of marble and mosaic, their exuberant decoration, their Bellinis, Titians, and Tintorettos, express a religious confidence that is nearly incomprehensible to our own time. More frequented by tourists than believers, they seem like gorgeous tombs for an expired past. Then what shall we say when the prophet asks: Can these bones live?

Jaume Plensa,

Jaume Plensa, “Together”

One Sunday morning I attended mass at San Giorgio Maggiore. There were less than forty people present in its vast interior. But as soon as the liturgy ended, many more people began to stream into the church. They had come not to worship, but to experience a contemporary art installation, part of the Biennale art exposition taking place throughout the city. A giant head, made of thick wire, faced the altar from the nave. Consisting of far more empty space than substance, it was a ghostly, immaterial presence, in but not of this world. A great golden hand, suspended over the crossing, bestowed upon that serene and mysterious face a perpetual blessing.

Jaume Plensa,

Jaume Plensa, “Together”

The contrast between the sparsely attended mass and the popular artwork could be interpreted as a simple duality of irreconcilable opposites: religion vs. art, old vs. new, moribund vs. vibrant, neglected vs. popular. But that would be too facile, ignoring the deep connections between the artwork and the worship space it inhabited.

It was not accidental that the head, modeled on a girl of Chinese and Spanish ancestry, faced the altar from the nave, like any common worshipper, or that the blessing hand mimicked the gesture of countless priests who had presided in that place for a thousand years. The work couldn’t be detached from Christian ritual without evacuating much of its meaning.

At the same time, there was something universal about a blessing hand and a receptive face. The extreme magnification of head and hand functioned like a cinematic close-up, focusing on the act of blessing in isolation from any specific ritual context or tradition. We didn’t see the vested body of a Catholic priest, or encounter the sociology of a local congregation. We only saw a hand that blesses and a face that receives. For me, the elemental humanity of this universal gesture reinforced rather than replaced the meaning of Christian blessing.

So instead of a rivalry between art and religion, there was a conversation, in which each informed and enriched the other. An explanatory text said that Jaume Plensa’s artwork, entitled Together, employed “a metaphorical language that will connect people of many faiths and of no faith.”

The conversation between art and religion, and among artists of many faiths and no faith, can only be tentative and experimental in an age of fragmentation and doubt. It will also be wild and unpredictable. If any of our small group came to Venice thinking we might collectively forge a vision of what the Christian artist is called to be in such a time, in such a Church, we were soon awakened from that fond dream. There will be no manifesto from the Venice Colloquium. We have returned to our homes with no answers, only more questions. And some lasting images.

Another Biennale work, Rashad Alakbarov’s The Union of Fire and Water, provided particular inspiration. As part of an installation evoking the turbulent political history of Azerbaijan, an array of swords and daggers was arranged in such a way that a message was created from their shadows: Do not fear. The instruments of violence and death had been transformed into an utterance of encouragement and hope. It was reminiscent of the Arma Christi, where the implements of Christ’s suffering become symbols of salvation.

Through the play of light and shadow, the handwriting on the wall was there for all to see. For artists out on the road of unknowing, with the voices of caution and order tugging us backward lest we lose our way, it seemed like a word from heaven. Do not fear.

Rashad Alakbarov,

Rashad Alakbarov, “The Union of Fire and Water”

[i] John Ruskin, Modern Painters III (IV: 333), abridged and edited by David Barrie (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 404

[ii] q. in Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: The Penguin Group, 2012), x

[iii] Ruskin, The Stones of Venice I, 9:17, quoted in Ruskin’s Venice: The Stones Revisited, ed. Sarah Quill (Farnham, Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2015), 41

[iv] The Stones of Venice (10:82-3), ibid., 55

[v] Psalm 139: 6-7

 

Tending the lamps of holy imagination

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Dreaming in Venice

Dreaming in Venice

We are in the fifth day of the Venice Colloquium, a small gathering of Christian creatives to “dream the Church that wants to be.” We will finish our work on Sunday in time to attend the mass for All Saints Day in the Byzantine splendor of St. Mark’s cathedral.

The conversations and presentations have been extremely rich, and I will be reporting on them in future posts, once I have begun to absorb and process what has happened here. In the meantime, while I have a rare free moment to attend to my blog, let me try to put into one simple statement the sense of need, perhaps even crisis, which has brought us together:

The practice of holy imagination is like a sanctuary lamp in the life of the Church. If not duly attended to, it is in danger of going out.

(In the very moment of writing that statement, the church bells of Venice began to ring all over the island where we are staying. I’ll take that as a “yes.”)

What would the Church be like if that lamp were to be extinguished? I had a vision of that dismal outcome yesterday, in a video by artist Theaster Gates at Biennale, the international art exposition being held in Venice.

Part of an installation called “Gone Are the Days of Shelter and Martyrs,” the video filled the entire wall of a dark room. Shot inside the dim space of a ruined church, it revealed few details of the interior. The two men who moved about inside were faceless shadows. It suggested to me a lower level of Dante’s Inferno, an impression reinforced by the repetitive violence of their actions.

Lying on the floor amid the rubble of a fallen ceiling, there were two heavy doors. They had become useless, meaningless, no longer attached to any place of entry or exit. The two men would circle the doors once or twice, raise one or the other to an upright position, and let it fall with a great echoing crash. They did this over and over, as if condemned to enact this enigmatic distillation of their wounded condition for all eternity. A wailing offstage blues singer was the only other sound, a cry from the depths of darkness.

The space between the image and the opposite wall was not wide, so that the viewer could not keep much distance from what was being projected. It was like sitting in the front row of an Imax theater. There was no escaping the image. I was immersed in it, and that added to its claustrophobic feel.

But after about ten minutes of this, the camera slowly panned away from the men and the doors, toward the end of the church where the altar had been. The apse wall was broken down, open to the sky. Being able finally to see light breaking into all that darkness seemed like the rolling away of Christ’s tombstone. And just below the roofline, one piece of unbroken wall remained, painted with a fresco of the Last Supper. The holy image was ancient and faded, like a memory not yet entirely lost.

Whatever the artist’s specific intentions, I came away from that screening room with an indelible image of a desolate church robbed of its light. Such a prospect is why we tend our lamps so religiously. It is why we have come to Venice.

But that ruined church is no place to leave you, dear reader. Instead, let me offer another image of the Church, in which “she” is depicted an old woman in her declining years. It is by Mark Harris, a member of our Colloquium, and he graciously permitted me to publish it here. I promise you, it ends well.

She is an Old Woman

She is an old woman,
Not well respected over the years.
Shuffling off to the bathroom
She looks in the mirror
And does not see the face of Christ.

Whatever happened to my body,
She wonders, whose parts all work
Together for good?

She has been ravaged
By some who claimed to be lovers,
And by others who had no such pretensions,
Only opportunistic rapine desire.

For the moment before the first service
She is quiet. She gathers the shambles
Of her dignity and rambles
Off to prayer and Thanksgiving.

“Who will come today, who will come.?
Will they remember me in my glory,
When I was all light and lovely?
Will they come in pity, shame and wonder
That I am still here?”

The word goes around that it was all a story,
That she was never beautiful and never lithe.
She hears them whispering. She feels
Their eyes as they wait to see her die.
They will scurry over her remains
Looking for something to take away:
A remembrance of glory past,
If glory was there at all.

She laughs softly,
And in a resurrection moment
Almost worthy of the second coming,
She is consumed in fire.

Renewed and beautiful,
She lifts the veil that hides her face.
“Behold,” she says,
“I make all things new.”

Bill Viola’s “Martyrs”

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image

The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.

– Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 (Lectionary reading for All Saints)

At the far end of the south choir aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, four “martyrs” perform a perpetual sacrifice in a slow-motion passage from suffering to glory. These martyrs are not the painted or sculptured figures of a traditional altarpiece, but two men and two women, recorded on high-definition video, and played back continuously on a polyptych of four adjacent vertical plasma panels, each 55” x 33.”

This stunning work is by Bill Viola, who has long been exploring the interplay of “technology and revelation.”[i] As David Morgan has written, “Viola’s work suggests that the human condition consists of the fact that we are embodied beings yearning, but ill-prepared, for communion with one another; that we suffer pain and loss, that we struggle to transcend our bodies and our suffering by connecting with a larger or inner aspect of reality; and that we die. Bodies, communion, suffering, transcendence, and death collectively constitute a condition, a worldview that the artist seeks to investigate in his work.”[ii]

Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) was installed at St. Paul’s in 2014, and this week I had my first chance to see it. It is 7.5 minutes long, continuously repeated. Mesmerized and deeply moved, I watched it ten times, and each viewing provoked some new thought or feeling.

The figures begin in stasis, undergo an ordeal involving time and motion, and finally come to rest in a perfect stillness: not the anti-life of death or nonbeing, but something implicitly wondrous.

All the figures are facing in our direction. In the first panel, a kneeling man, head bowed to the floor, is almost completely buried beneath a triangular pile of dirt. We only see the top of his head, clutched by his two tense hands. The dirt begins to fly upward in a column, disappearing into whatever is above the frame. He rises to his feet, ever so slowly, as if it is a great struggle against gravity, or stasis. By the time he is upright, the last of the dirt has vanished into the “above,” and he is staring out at us impassively.

In the second panel, a woman in a white shift is suspended by a rope tied to her wrists. Her feet are anchored two feet above the ground by another rope securing her ankles. She is blown by a great wind coming from the left, buffeted back and forth within the constraint of her tethers, at the mercy of a relentless exterior force. After a while, the wind subsides, her suspended body grows still, and she gazes out with an unexpected measure of serenity.

A black man sits in a chair in the next panel, his head tilted to the side and downcast. Then bits of flame begin to drop from above, continuing to burn where they land. More and more flames fall, some leaving trails like shooting stars, until the whole floor, and the chair, are on fire. By this time the man has raised his head to look out at us, but he appears calm and still even as the flames envelop him. He remains in that position as the flames finally relent and die out.

In the last panel, a man is curled up in a fetal position with eyes closed. A rope tied to his angles is suspended from somewhere above the frame. The slack starts to be taken up, pulling his legs upward, and then his entire body, until he is completely upside down like the Hanged Man in the Tarot, or one of those skinned animals dangling in a Dutch genre painting as a secularized image of Christ’s Passion. When a stream of water begins to fall from above, his arms slowly stir, moving into a prayer position, bent 90 degrees at the elbow, then gradually sweeping backward, like a swimmer’s breaststroke, until they are near his side. Meanwhile, his inverted body begins to be pulled upward by the rope, toward the source of the falling water.

All of the figures have been handed over to forces or situations beyond their control. One buried, one bound and buffeted, one burned, and one left for dead. Yet none of them rages or resists. They accept their condition with a calm grounded in something greater than their own survival.

Each of the first three, after gazing out at us for a time, gradually shift their attention to whatever is above them, out of our sight, until their upturned faces glow with the light of eschatalogical radiance. Their faces never become expressive, or call attention to their own personalities; they remain still and quiet, in a condition of “absolute unmixed attention.”[iii]

The fourth figure, the “Hanged Man,” provides the dissonant harmony within this suite of images. He is the one who appeared already dead, his suffering behind him. His eyes, either closed or obscured by the water streaming down his face, are never quite visible. Although his arms eventually make hopeful gestures of prayer or embrace, the rest of his body stays limp, totally given over to the power at the other end of the rope, which pulls him up and out of the frame. The water continues to fall when he is gone.

Unlike the prayerful final images of the other panels, the fourth is fraught with absence. The other martyrs only gaze at the transcendent. The fourth has already ascended there, and we are left with only the water as a reminder of the one we can no longer see.

Noting that martyr means “witness,” an accompanying statement by Viola and his producer Kira Perov compares the active witness of martyrs to the passive witness of those who merely consume images of suffering through mass media, adding that these four figures “exemplify the human capacity to bear pain, hardship, and even death in order to remain faithful to their values, beliefs, and principles. This piece represents ideas of action, fortitude, perseverance, endurance, and sacrifice.”[iv]

But these evocative images can’t be reduced to a single meaning. The more I watched, the more meanings and associations were generated. The first figure suggested Adam formed from the mud, or Christ rising from his grave, shedding mortality clump by clump. It also seemed a kind of birth.

The strongly sidelit second figure, whose white shift and platinum hair glowed against the black background like a Zurburan crucifixion, mirrored both Jesus and Joan of Arc.

Like gold in the furnace God tried them, and like a sacrificial burnt offering God accepted them.[v] The fire in the third panel not only recalled the light of burning martyrs, but the positive biblical tropes of the refiner’s fire and tongues of flame.

The fetal position of the fourth martyr evoked both the womb and the grave. The falling water made me think of both baptism and waterboarding. Once he was gone, however, it spoke to me of both memory and promise: what had happened to him, and what might happen to us.

Just what – or who – is at the other end of that rope anyway?

[i] “Technology and Revelation” is the title of a lecture I heard Viola give at the University of California at Berkeley, September 28, 2009.

[ii] David Morgan, “Spirit and Medium: The Video Art of Bill Viola,” Image, No. 26 ((Spring 2000), 32

[iii] This was Simone Weil’s definition of prayer.

[iv] From the installation’s explanatory text.

[v] Wisdom of Solomon 3:6

Dreaming the Church that wants to be

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The Rev. Neil Lambert diagrams his ecclesiastical dream.

The Rev. Neil Lambert diagrams his ecclesiastical dream.

Now I look at my own experience and feel the intimate rightness of Lear’s words: ‘I have taken too little care of this.’…Today it is clear that one’s isolated efforts are straws in the wind, and we can do nothing alone – we need others, all the time… we only begin to exist when we are serving an aim beyond our own likes and aversions.      

– Peter Brook

Make visible what, without you, might never be seen.

– Robert Bresson

During a 6-hour layover at London’s Heathrow Airport last spring, my friends Neil and Helen Lambert, who live nearby, spirited me away to a picnic in the green fields of Runnymede, where the Magna Carta had been signed 799 years and 50 weeks earlier. Rain fell as we arrived, so Helen and I retreated to the site’s tea room while Neil got the lunch together under the shelter of a great oak. While drinking our tea, we met a British army veteran who had played the trumpet solo at Winston Churchill’s funeral.

When the rain let up, Neil summoned us out to the feast he had prepared with colored tablecloth, English china, three different courses and a fine local wine. As an Anglican artist/priest with a gift for ceremonial whimsey, he had successfully answered the Psalmist’s question, “Can God make a banquet in the wilderness?” And so it was that over a delightful lunch we conceived the idea of the Venice Colloquium: an intimate international gathering of Christian creatives to “dream the Church that wants to be.”

As artists of faith, Neil and I had been discussing the need for more imagination and creativity in the churches, not only in the way we worship, learn and grow, but also in the way we engage with the world we exist to serve. Part of the challenge, we agreed, was fostering community among the scattered creatives whose isolated efforts, in Peter Brook’s words, are too often “straws in the wind.”

So in the days following that Runnymede picnic, we began to ask around, starting with some people we knew, who knew some other people, and pretty soon we had collected a group of ten creatives, young and old, from the United States, Great Britain (including a man born in Peru), and New Zealand. There are seven Anglicans, two Methodists and one Baptist. Three are women, seven are clergy. All are practitioners in one or more art forms, including painting, music, film, conceptual and installation art, printmaking, writing and poetry. All have been leaders in the exploration of alternative worship.

In three weeks, we will gather in Venice to spend seven days in conversation with each other, not only exchanging ideas, dreams and stories, but also listening attentively to whatever the Spirit might have to say through the experimental chemistry of ten such people thrown together in one place.

Why Venice? We had to meet somewhere, and monastic housing made it amazingly affordable. And “La Serenissima’s” haunting beauty makes a doubly inspiring venue for creatives, since its renowned wealth of historic art and architecture is augmented by the cutting-edge work on display at Biennale, one of the world’s leading exhibitions of contemporary art.

What can emerge from such a collective interplay and cross-pollination of practitioners and thinkers over the course of a week together in the intimacy of a small-group setting? While we believe our gathering will be inspiring and enriching for everyone’s personal ministry and creativity, we think it can bear fruit as well in the wider communities to which we will return. We also hope that it will stimulate further networking among creatives within and beyond the church, and become a useful prototype for similar gatherings in the future. But as the biblical God repeatedly demonstrates, faith means not falling in love with planned outcomes. As T. S. Eliot put it, “wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing … / Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.”

Of course we will each arrive in Venice with our share of specific hopes and dreams. We have been exchanging some of these online already. On the one hand, we all care deeply about the nature, quality and purpose of our common life. On the other hand, we also want to look beyond our walls, making sure the boundaries necessary for identity are sufficiently porous to allow flow both inward and outward. What about those who don’t fit the inherited definitions of Christian? How much diversity can we incorporate and still be the Body of Christ? What do the unchurched or uninitiated have to tell us about who we might be for them – and how they might change us? How can we listen to voices from the margins, and cultures beyond our own? Where might interfaith collaboration lead?

As the angel of Resurrection famously said, The tomb is empty and Jesus has left the building. Where should we be looking for Jesus now? In the “other.” In the “elsewhere.” And what does this sometimes unsettling centrifugal dynamic mean for how we are to do and be church?

One participant has asked, “Are artists called to a particular way of being in the world, and if so how do we nurture environments that foster that way of being?” Another calls us to dream collectively a “rebirth of wonder.” Another wants to explore “the salvific power of beauty.” Another envisions doing for church what Cirque du Soleil has done for circus, so that imagination, creativity, and art are not frills or strategies or institutional departments, but “the DNA of who we are as God’s people.”

They say democracy was born at Runnymede. To dream that a rebirth of wonder began there as well would be, of course, ridiculously grandiose. We are simply a few of God’s friends gathering in a small room to see what happens.

Pope Francis goes to Washington (and brings Dorothy Day)

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It’s always a terrible thing to come back to Mott Street. To come back in a driving rain, to men crouched in stairs, huddled in doorways, without overcoats because they sold them perhaps the week before when it was warm, to satisfy hunger and thirst, who knows. Those without love would say, ‘It serves them right, drinking up their clothes.’ God help us if we got just what we deserved.”[i]

– Dorothy Day

Let us remember the Golden Rule.

– Pope Francis to the American Congress

When the innovative and influential musician and thinker John Cage was a 14-year-old student at Los Angeles High School, he won the Southern California Oratorical Contest of 1926 with a speech that has a striking resonance for our own time.

After a critique of American capitalism and “its crazed congregation of Gold-Worshippers,” the young Cage envisioned a “great pause” in American affairs, a “moment of complete intermission, of undisturbed calm” in which they might really listen – to their own collective conscience as well as the neglected voices of others: “Then we should be capable of answering the question, ‘What ought we to do?’ for we should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think.”[ii]

Cage’s inherently religious proposal came to mind this morning as I watched Pope Francis speak to Congress. Compared to the noisy strife that currently dominates our legislative chambers, the papal talk felt like a hush of calm in which we might better hear both our consciences and one another. And in that “great pause,” we heard many themes which go largely unheard in our public life, from the common good to stopping the arms trade.

I was particularly struck by Francis’ choice of Dorothy Day as one of his four American exemplars. Everyone knows Lincoln and King, and many have at least heard of Thomas Merton. But Day, the feisty co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, is hardly a household name in America. Her deep commitment to social justice, non-violence and pacifism, her association with anarchists, communists, and intellectuals of the left, her outspoken advocacy for working people and the poor in the face of a rigged and predatory system, and her uncompromising commitment to gospel values would make her suspect even today. She was all about the imitation of Christ, and well aware of the consequences. She was jailed, shot at, and periodically investigated by the F.B.I. And though she was a devout Catholic in both theology and spiritual practice, she made some within the hierarchy very uneasy.

Although she has been called “the most influential, interesting, and significant figure in American Catholicism,”[iii] her own bishop kept his distance. After her death in 1980, he deflected requests to put forward her “cause” in the official process of saint-making. Nevertheless, the idea found other advocates. In 1983, the Claretian Fathers of Chicago announced a campaign to pursue her canonization as “a saint for our times.” Day herself would have protested. Refusing the domestication that comes with spiritual celebrity, she once said, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be so easily dismissed.”

One of her granddaughters, Maggie Hennessy, sent a cease and desist message to the Claretians: “Take all your monies and energies that are being put into her canonization and give it to the poor. That is how you would show your love and respect to her.”[iv] And the Jesuit activist Dan Berrigan, who did his own share of jail time for Jesus, wrote a similar plea:

Abandon all thought of this expensive, overly juridicial process … Dorothy is a people’s saint, she was careful and proud of her dignity as layperson. Her poverty of spirit, a great gift to our age, would forbid the expensive puffing of baroque sainthood. Today her spirit haunts us in the violated faces of the homeless of New York. Can you imagine her portrait, all gussied up, unfurled from above the high altar of St. Peter’s? I say, let them go on canonizing canons and such. We have here a saint whose soul ought not be stolen from her people – the wretched of the earth.[v]

Day was a fitting addition to what television commentator Chris Matthews called the Pope’s “spiritual Mt. Rushmore.” And Francis’ address to Congress was masterful in its creation of an alternative space, an interval where so many critical issues, hopelessly deadlocked within the combative rigidity of American politics, could be thoughtfully reconsidered in terms of shared and agreeable ends: the common good, human flourishing, love of neighbor and welcome for the stranger.

And in this extraordinary rhetorical space, he even managed to lift up the much-maligned vocation of the politician:

Politics, he said, is “an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life. I do not underestimate the difficulty that this involves, but I encourage you in this effort.”

Process theology describes a non-violent God who neither commands nor compels, a God who persuades and lures. Similarly, Pope Francis today was luring both leaders and public into a new kind of discourse, where the heartlessness, selfishness and folly so rampant in our public life seem – suddenly, laughably – quite out of place:

When the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible … rejecting a mindset of hostility.

We must not be taken aback by [the refugees’] numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories.

It is time for courageous actions and strategies, aimed at implementing a “culture of care” and “an integrated approach to combatting poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”[vi]

This was Francis’ “I have a dream” speech, and the public, the media and the politicians are all enjoying the high in its aftermath. Will it have any lasting effect? In the short term, there may be a few votes that go better than expected, but I don’t expect the House to hold hands and sing “Give Peace a Chance” anytime soon. Even if we were to renounce the toxic speech of recent years, democracy is rarely a love fest of common consensus, but rather what Chantal Mouffe calls an “agonistic pluralism.” Noting the constructive role of antagonism in public life, she argues that “a healthy democratic process calls for a vibrant clash of political positions and an open conflict of interests.”[vii] And yet, I do like the fact that Congress gave its biggest standing ovation today to the Golden Rule.

As for the long term, who knows? Conversion and formation are mostly undramatic processes, like corn growing in the night. Substantive change takes time. But the fact that Congress, and the country, paused to listen to such a sermon, to consider our common life in terms of transcendent values, does not seem insignificant. John Cage would have approved.

Personally, one of the probable outcomes that gives me the most pleasure is that many people are now going to Google “Dorothy Day,” and God only knows where that might lead.

[i] Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 179

[ii] Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: The Penguin Group, 2012), 26

[iii] Unattributed quote in Robert Ellsburg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997), 519

[iv] Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1990), 32

[v] ibid., 35

[vi] Phrases in quotation marks taken from the encyclical, Laudato Si’

[vii] Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist quoted in Kevin Roberts, Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), 102