The first was a post by Don Miller on his blog: The Context for Spirituality is not Spirituality

If we think we are going to grow in faith by sitting around at a Bible study, we are wrong. That stuff is fine, but without a story, without diving into something really difficult, something that requires us to look to God for support and wisdom and comfort, it will be more difficult to become a person of great faith.

The second was an old talk by Tim Keller: The New Jerusalem. The stand-out for me in this was his discussion of the statement in Revelation that God is ‘making all things new’. He brought out the distinction  – lost in english — between chronological newness and the quality of newness/freshness. That everything that God touches becomes fresh and new; there is endless opening up and discovery. We’re so used to decay and deterioration that we only experience this with chronologically new things, but with God and in the New Creation all that changes…

It is my profound conviction that the world requires – today more than ever – enlightened, thoughtful politicians who are bold and broad-minded enough to consider things which lie beyond the scope of their immediate influence in both space and time. We need politicians willing and able to rise above their own power interests, or the particular interests of their parties or states, and act in accord with the fundamental interests of today’s humanity — that is, to behave the way everyone should behave, even though most may fail to do so.

Vaclav Havel

Partially quoted by James Sire in Vaclav Havel: The Intellectual Conscience of International Politics and in full on Project Syndicate.

from Desert Perspectives

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’

from stories of the desert fathers (HT: Daniel Siedell)

“…wilderness cannot be home because it does not provide the necessary culture-forming resources to make it home….The wilderness is preeminently the place where it seems impossible to fulfil our calling to be God’s image-bearing agents in creation. It becomes a place where [we are] reawakened to the gift character of the world.”

Middleton & Walsh (from “truth is stranger than it used to be”)

I’ve been experimenting a little with some photo ‘re-mixes’. Taking an old desert photo of mine (from a visit to Joshua Tree National Park) and ‘borrowing’ some textures from Makoto Fujimura (taken from his Countenance donation at The By/For Project.)

Here’s a taster

For more see the Desert Perspectives album.

“Thank God for hard stones; thank God for hard facts; thank God for thorns and rocks and deserts and long years. At least I know now that I am not the best or strongest thing in the world. At least I know now that I have not dreamed of everything.”

G.K. Chesterton

Borrowing Justin Taylor’s summary of Davison:

Thomas Carlyle’s “great man of history” view — “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”—is mostly wrong.

Rather, “the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network [=community] and the new institutions that are created out of those networks” (p. 38). The more “dense” (active, interactive) the network, the more influential it could be.

Yes, there have been charismatic, heroic geniuses in history (Luther, Calvin, Wilberforce, etc.). But “charisma and genius and their cultural consequences do not exist outside of networks of similarly oriented people and similarly aligned institutions” (p. 38).

…

In history, “at every point of challenge and change, we find a rich source of patronage that provided resources for intellectuals and educators who, in the context of dense networks, imagine, theorize, and propagate an alternative universe.” Along with the elites there are often “artists, poets, musicians, and the like who symbolize, narrate, and popularize this vision.” New institutions give tangible expression by forming and enacting that culture. The result is a “vibrant cultural economy that gives articulation in multiple forms, and critical mass to the ideals and practices and goods of the alternative culture in ways that both defy yet still resonate with the existing social environment”.

In Culture Making, Crouch talks about the 3, the 12 and the 120 of any cultural project: the small group who ‘innovate and create a new cultural good’; and ‘concentric circles’ of people who add the weight that allow it to reach it’s full potential.

Absolutely no one makes culture alone. There may be periods of solitude where we work to shape our contribution to our own cultural sphere and scale. But for our work alone to bear any fruit at all, we will need to join a three. So one of the most important questions for our calling is, Who are your 3? Who are the few people you trust enough to risk creativing something together?

It is such communities, not just their famous representatives, that actually transform culture. Communities are the way God intervenes to offer, within every culture, a different and better horizon. To be Christian is to stake our lives on this belief: the only cultural goods that ultimately matter are the ones that love creates.

The seminar on art by Matt Hatch and David Sorley made the point best – probably because the message and the medium were so well matched.

In the discussion it was clear that the successful place of art in their church came from relationship; that the key was building trust (between the leaders and ‘creatives’ in the church) gradually over a number of projects. On top of this, the church, acting as a regular client, is effectively a benefactor of Sorley’s creative work both in and outside the church.

The words were backed up by the presentation – the interaction and conversation between the two of them during the seminar made the point just as clearly: here was something that worked because of their friendship and mutual confidence.

Broadening this out, maybe we can summarise the importance of relationship in this way: without building trust more adventurous and creative ideas would be dismissed, the community would be impoverished and creatives left frustrated; without regular clients/benefactors the work would be unsustainable.

A similar point comes out in Malcolm Gladwell’s article Late Bloomers. Taking Cézanne as an example he suggests that:

If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.

This is what is so instructive about any biography of Cézanne. Accounts of his life start out being about Cézanne, and then quickly turn into the story of Cézanne’s circle.
…
But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility.

So the first challenge for those wanting in make culture is to make relationships. To lose the caricature of the artist as heroic individual, or to put aside suspicion (depending which side of the fence you are) and to work on building trust and confidence with those around.

Some of the discussion reminds me of Francis Schaeffer’s approach to apologetics: to talk with people to help them see the logical conclusions of their own worldview. And the difficulty of genuinely living consistently with what they believe. Taking a similar approach via the arts is an interesting idea. Has the potential to be a truly incarnational and compassionate apologetic…

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It struck me recently that many superhero stories feature a strange sort of grace. Here’s how it works in the Spiderman series: Peter Parker is a pretty unremarkable guy until an apparently random accident leaves him with extraordinary powers. He’s done nothing to earn or deserve them. He’s not particularly courageous or virtuous. In fact, he doesn’t start out as a particularly heroic character at all.

So, what is it that makes him a hero? As the story unfolds it seems to work in the opposite way to our expectations: rather than virtue being rewarded, it is the new powers that lead him to heroism. Famously, the recurring theme in the Spiderman stories is that ‘with great power comes great reponsibility’. In coming to terms with his powers, the changes in Parker are more than just the ability to climb walls. Maybe it is the same with all acts of grace.

As Mumford and Sons sang recently, “… that’s exactly how this grace thing works/It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart/But the welcome I receive with the restart.”