Reflecting on art and spirituality, sharing short fiction and poetry, and looking up.
If your New Year’s resolution involves posting more trivial updates online and you still don’t succeed, maybe you are the kind of person for whom New Year’s resolutions are just not a thing. My New Year’s resolution for the last three years has been to update my Goodreads regularly, and I’ve failed every year, even in 2018 when I attempted the 52 Week Reading Project (I ended up somewhere in the 40s, which is still pretty respectable).
So we’re 1-for-1 in church attendance in the liturgical season of Epiphany and in the calendar year 2020. Over the past few months, my attendance at formal (ha!) church services has been more scattershot than it’s been since before 2010 (my Decade in Review, had I written one, would have prominently featured my eventually successful search for a church home in New York City). Most regular readers of my church blogs will know this already, but in case you didn’t, I’m expecting the arrival of our first little one in May, and I’ve struggled mightily with the pregnancy symptoms that have helped me to get better acquainted than ever with my bed and my couch. And even when I was at church, much of the time I once spent writing was spent sleeping or dealing with brain fog or headaches that don’t make close and extended proximity to screens all that comfortable, so blogging fell to the wayside for the better part of the past few months. But I’m hoping, as the worst of the symptoms (very gradually) subside, to return to a fairly regular blogging schedule and figure out how to keep making this writing thing work in a way that will be sustainable when the little one arrives.
So. Epiphany. We remember one trio fleeing (the Holy Family) and another heading home (the Wise Men). Appropriate, since the news, in this young year, constantly asks me to choose between fleeing for another country or simply barricading myself and my small family in our apartment for approximately always. (I enjoyed, and by “enjoyed” I mean I did not enjoy, the Twitter discourse around Christmas regarding whether or not the Holy Family were “refugees.” Technically, at the moment of Jesus’s birth, maybe not, but by the time they fled into Egypt during/after the massacre of the Holy Innocents? I mean, yes, obviously. Seems like a pretty open-and-shut case of a matter of life and death to me!) It should be blindingly obvious to us, as Christians, at this time of year especially, that war, poverty, and the destruction of the natural world are great evils, and yet the election and news cycles invite us to debate these points, as if our tradition doesn’t repeatedly and explicitly condemn all of the above, as if the worship of empire didn’t bring about the death of the Holy Innocents and, eventually, of Jesus Christ himself. As James Taylor wrote in “Home By Another Way,” “A king who would slaughter the innocents/Will never cut a deal for you.” What is this other way?
Continue reading “Take Me to Church 1/5/20: Home by Another Way”
What is the case for exhibiting women artists as women artists? Postwar Women, at the Art Students’ League through December 1st, unites the visions of women artists in the later twentieth century in such a way as to both pose and answer questions of how women artists see, and to make a case for collecting these visions in one space that tells a story across painting, sculpture, and mixed media.
Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold both look into the past, in some cases the very distant past. Catlett’s “Standing Mother and Child” and “The Door of Justice” both recall African mask traditions (I am not an expert, but for me they evoke the Dean gle of the Dan people of Liberia) in the stylized but steady faces…
…while Faith Ringgold recontextualizes the famous remains of “Lucy” as those of a beloved ancestor by placing a miniature skeleton in a gold coffin, surrounded by flowers and colorful fabric. The scale is intimate and familiar, the notes in block printing on plain white paper, bringing Lucy out of the museum and into a setting that feels funereal, reverent, and joyous all at once.
Catlett and Ringgold both look behind to look forward, reaching into the past to bring dignity and tenderness to depictions of people of African heritage. The explicit embrace of African history and artistic traditions reminds me of El Anatsui or Yinka Shonibare; the affection the artists radiate towards their subjects brings to mind Kehinde Wiley. But ultimately, the modest dimensions lead to a different interpretation, distinct from Shonibare’s irony or Wiley’s grandeur: Catlett and Ringgold, by way of the familial and fond, draw the viewer’s attention to the ways in which people of color have been dehumanized and embrace them with seriousness and profundity.
Continue reading “Take Me to Art 11/16/19: Postwar Women at the Art Students’ League”
Empire, as a concept, is built on lies. (I’ll pause for a moment to let us all contemplate the delicious irony of the Empire State, where so many of us call home.) You can think of any number of lies that exist solely to prop up hegemony, colonialism, the rampant abuses of late-stage capitalism. Poor people are poor because they don’t work hard. Conversely, Work hard enough and you, too, can become rich. Closely related: Some people don’t deserve [x] because [y], never mind the fact that a great many people who seem to be holding on to [x] just fine cannot point to anything, or at least not anything truly supererogatory, that would mark them as deserving.
But one of the most pernicious, insidious lies of empire is the lie of Never Enough. It’s one of the most foundational and therefore the most difficult to uproot. And maybe the only lie harder to uproot from our empire thinking than Never Enough Money is Never Enough Time. Because, as the thinking goes, you can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.
Or can you?
Continue reading “Take Me to Church 11/3/19: Can You Sell Your Canoe?”
Giving to church has changed in some ways since I was confirmed in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1997. Judson accepts gifts in the time-honored forms of cash and checks, of course, but plenty of people donate via Venmo, and we break up our yearly pledge into monthly credit card payments. So I rarely find myself digging in my wallet for cash to stuff an envelope the way I did when I was a teenager. But I gave, obviously in paltry amounts, from a young age, as the daughter of a church treasurer who reminded me that churches were not exempt from the demands of Pennsylvania Power and Light or the elevator repair service. Unsexy though that may sound, it’s still a stewardship narrative, and as the year leans towards an end, there’s no shortage of them around our church and many others.
Continue reading “Take Me to Church 10/20/19: Collective Memory, Collective Blessings”
Autumn isn’t typically the time of year to be thinking about planting seeds. It’s the time of harvest, the time of storing up and shoring up. But in the wake of the Climate March and Strike, we found ourselves today wondering what seeds we can plant, among ourselves and others, to inspire change and movement around the coming chaos, disaster, and mass death that unchecked climate change will surely bring.
And so I found myself wondering if things might have been different if the environmental movement had had a different message all along. When I was growing up, and maybe even as recently as a few years ago, I received the message of the environmental movement as a message about the Earth: protect the Earth, keep it clean. I dutifully recycled and took public transit and ate no, or at least less, meat. But Greta Thunberg and her young allies in climate activism put it bluntly: The future for young people looks fragile, even bleak, indeed, and even more fragile and bleak for the young people of the developing world. The Earth will survive us if necessary. But we will not survive an Earth that is rapidly warming, flooding, storming, and burning, much of it aggravated (even if all of not directly caused) by human activity. Climate change deniers may scoff at the idea of protecting the spotted owl from extinction until they realize, likely too late, how the spotted owl (or any other vulnerable species) is also a canary in a coal mine.
Continue reading “Take Me to Church 9/22/19: Seeding in Autumn”
Even if you’re not personally going “back to school,” as it were, September nevertheless feels like a return to schooling after summer, in which stasis and idleness is forgiven, even rewarded, as one tries to conserve energy and juiciness under the hot suns of the bright months. I’m not sure how much I evolved spiritually this past summer. I read over a thousand pages of Anne Brontë in the long heat of July, which, given their almost relentless and irredeemable bleakness, I do not recommend; I delayed completing my already-long-delayed draft of a novel I’ve been trying to write for the better part of five years; and, of course, if you’ve been keeping up with this blog (which of course you have), you’ve noticed I’ve been a little quiet here as I try to figure out how to keep sharing my creative offerings but also look into sharing my work with larger audiences. So I returned to church this morning after (another) two-week absence for what many churches call “Rally Day”: the return of Sunday School for children, and, for the adult spiritual truants, a return to the Psalms and the prayers and the quiet anxiety of sitting with our own hearts in the space of the Meeting Room, under the new lights we haven’t gotten used to yet, wondering what might be revealed.
If I sound tired before the “new school year,” so to speak, is even a week old, I don’t think I’m alone. “What most of us want,” Donna said in her sermon, “is to just not lose anything else.” It’s no way to receive the great gift of salvation, we all know, but that doesn’t make it any easier, not in the face of so much disaster. As I try to write this, Bahamians trying to come to the United States to take refuge with family and friends from the wreckage of Hurricane Dorian are being turned away without the visas they’ve never been required to have before. Is everything going to be all right? Can it be? Who knows?
Continue reading “Take Me to Church 9/8/19: New School Year, New Heart”
