Author: KPB Stevens

How can our faith communities become the centers of our neighborhoods again?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

As Darren Meyer spoke to the Ministerium of Ideas, I could feel a growing sense of excitement and bewilderment fill the room.  In a clear, logical way, using many slides and statistics, Darren was telling us a story about our neighborhoods and nation that we hadn’t heard before.  As he talked, I found myself grasping at each node of thought, each specific statistic, and wishing that I had hours to sit and consider it.  The last decade has seen a reversal of the driving boom that started at the end of World War II – people are driving less and for shorter distances than they used to.  In the next thirty years, racial and ethnic minorities will account for almost all population growth in Ohio.  In the last decade, there has been an overall move back into cities, which are now often safer and and have better public services than the suburbs that people once fled to.  And I kept thinking about how many of our faith communities are commuter communities, serving parishioners who drive far distances to attend, and how many of our faith communities aren’t integrated and make little effort at integration, and how we’ve been closing urban churches in the very neighborhoods that are becoming revitalized.

Darren talked about how public services in Ohio are funded through income tax, which means that cities need business offices and factories to pay for trash pick-up and park maintenance, and will offer property tax incentives to corporations that move into them.  But public schools aren’t funded through income tax, but property tax.  In 1991, owners of residential properties paid 48% of the costs of schools.  By 2011, they were paying 70%.  In neighborhoods where there are high property values, the schools can do quite well.  But in poorer neighborhoods, the schools will always be worse off.  While he talked, I thought about the people who live in our neighborhoods and sit in our pews, bearing all of these fears about their children’s education, and how seldom we talk about property taxes and school levies in our faith communities.  As Darren pointed out, safety, education, and economic opportunity are basic needs in our neighborhoods.  Shouldn’t our concern for social justice center around these needs?

So how can we help city governments and school boards create and sustain great neighborhoods?  Architects like Darren start by identifying enduring bright spots – historic buildings and institutions, geographical features like rivers and lakes, and city parks and village greens.  Faith communities are often historically rooted in a neighborhood, but, too frequently, they’ve closed themselves off from that neighborhood and limited their ability to stand as enduring bright spots.  How could we change this, I wondered?  Darren told us about other institutions – libraries, museums, hospitals – that have changed their images and their community impact, beginning with a process of genuine engagement with the community.  Public-private partnerships are important.  For Darren, who was the lead architect on Columbus’s Scioto Mile project, there is something deeply exciting about bringing civic groups, corporations, and non-profit institutions together for opportunities to dream about what a neighborhood should be like, and what needs its public spaces, its parks and squares, can serve.  But the truly exciting moment comes when the park is built, and people who didn’t help plan it start showing up and using it in unexpected ways.  For him, this is the sign that it’s a successful public space.

All week, I’ve been wondering if our faith communities can follow the example of public libraries, which Darren identified as a key third place within these revitalized neighborhoods.  The rise of the internet meant that libraries had to change their focus, since they were no longer the primary portal to information in our communities.  They expanded their service to their neighborhoods and develops programs that brought the community in.  What would it be like if a church or a synagogue created a calendar of programs for neighborhood kids, with no other motive than being of service.  Our buildings are tragically underused.  After Darren finished his talk, the members of the Ministerium began to think and dream about how to change this.  Could we remove the pews from our sanctuaries, and invite people in to do yoga, like they have at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco?  Could we host after school programs, plays, recitals, parties, movies?  Could we spend time with neighborhood partners, figuring out what they need, and then lend our resources to meeting those needs?  Can we, in short, become enduring bright spots in the revitalization of whole neighborhoods?

 

How Can We Find New Ways to Collaborate?

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Twelve years ago, Pete Anderson went on sabbatical from his position as a Professor of Material Science and Engineering at OSU.  Although he and his family were living out of state, he found himself returning to Ohio through the course of the year to check on programs and experiments that he was in charge of.  To save costs on lodging, he bought a sofa sleeper which he put in his office on campus.  It was living in these cramped quarters, a few paces from the desk that he worked at, that sent him out onto the campus on a Sunday morning and brought him to Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church.

As he’s grown older, Pete says that he’s come to value collaboration more and more, especially as he’s gained some sense of the limitations of his own creativity and ingenuity.  A few years ago, he became involved in a project to grow engineered skin.  He was at a cross-disciplinary campus meeting, where he met a burn specialist attached to OSU’s medical center.  When he spoke before the Ministerium of Ideas last week, he told us that the key to such collaborations is finding a person with a great passion.  The burn specialist he met had spent several years treating people with severe burns, and knows how pernicious infection is for treating this kind of injury.  Pete agreed to her vision of speeding up the process of creating skin (in vats, from the patient’s own cells), and they enlisted two others to help in the effort.

For Pete, this is the central insight into strong collaborations.  Someone with vision and passion needs to be the catalyst.  Others need to align themselves with that vision and bring their own skills and talents to bear.  Like all the questions we examine in the Ministerium, this insight presents us with an opportunity to act.  Who in our neighborhoods and faith communities have the most passionate visions, and how can we help people articulate those visions, and support them?

 

How Can Our Faith Communities Support Prophetic Voices?

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We stood in the Columbus Museum of Art, all of us a little damp from the downpour outside, and listed to Melissa Wolfe, Curator of American Art.  We had come to the museum to view the Modern Dialect exhibit, which features paintings from the 1920s through the 1940s, paintings that offer a stirring critique of American society in that time period.  We wanted to explore the question of how our faith communities can support prophetic voices, and standing in the gallery we found ourselves in the midst of such prophesy, and a little awed by it.

Melissa told us about how artists in the 18th and 19th centuries used busts of eminent people and scenes from great moments to coax viewers towards emulation.  If we want, for instance, to be as brave as Washington crossing the Delaware, we might gaze on a painting of that subject to train our souls in bravery.  But after the Jacksonian revolution in American thought, we became less interested in the consideration of great people and moments, and more interested in scenes from everyday life.  We were saying, in essence, that American greatness lies in the ordinary lives or ordinary people.

In the 1920s this became complicated, since the lives of ordinary people were being disregarded by the very rich.  So paintings that showed people at a fair or a barn dance had a political subtext – they defiantly celebrated people who were otherwise being ignored.  As she walked us through the exhibit, Melissa led us from this low-key type of prophetic voice to more clearly stated and strident prophecies.guy_waterfront  As she pointed out, prophecy is almost always the voice of the disenfranchised and disinherited, a voice from the margins of society to critique the whole.  We spent some time looking at James Guy’s “On the Waterfront,” which borrowed from European surrealism to exaggerate figures and landscape, but for a social rather than psychological purpose.

We talked, during the tour and afterwards, about how prophecy roots itself in history, and becomes louder and more understandable when we understand the contexts into which it is spoken.  We looked at Clarence Carter’s “Down the River,” which was painted in Portsmouth, Ohio in 1937, after the Ohio river flooded.  More than three hundred and seventy-five people died in the flood, many from exposure in the January cold because they were made homeless by the disaster.  Carter painted a scene of two women, looking over the flood wall in Portsmouth before the flood.  Melissa pointed out that these women act as prophetic seers.  Plainly dressed, they symbolize the people whom the flood will effect, and seem to be looking where we can’t look, onto the flood plain that will soon be under water.

After the tour we ate lunch together and talked about this painting, and the others we had seen.  Maybe, someone suggested, our faith communities can best support prophetic voices by cultivating seers, people who can see over the horizon to the coming disasters.  Maybe they can teach us all how to bear witness to those disasters, particularly the silent, unobserved disasters of poverty and hopelessness.  In order to do this, someone suggested, we need to cultivate an understanding of beauty and truth that doesn’t rely on pleasure.  If we’re to prophetically present ugly, sometimes aggressive truths to our faith communities, we have to foster communities that can hear those truths without being offended by the fact that they’re not pleasurable.  Finally, prophecy calls us to action, and the best support a prophetic voice can receive is a willingness to share in the work of righting the wrongs that such a voice brings to our attention.

Stephen Colbert and Christ Pantocrator: A Week in a Second City Improv Intensive

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I stood in Piper’s Alley, in the hallway of the Second City Training Center in Chicago, and looked at a photo of Stephen Colbert.  It was taken twenty years ago, when he was a student there.  He looked very young.  His hair was in a messy part, and there was something unruly about his jacket and tie.  His grin was manic but his eyes were shy, the same expression that he often wears now that he’s very, very famous.  I was staring at his photo because I admire him and what he represents.  For a segment of the population, he is America’s most public Christian.  And he’s very different from other media Christians, because he combines deep faith with a sense of play.

I enrolled in a week long intensive at Second City because I wanted to learn how to live this combination.  I thought that I was bringing the faith with me, and wanted to learn the play.  Kevin Reome, our instructor, didn’t talk about faith, and I don’t know if he has any religious belief at all.  But he taught us an ethic that compliments and amplifies the ethics that the church has taught me, a social ethic based on mysterious and interpersonal graces.  “Improv is love,” he told us.  Its tenants work best when its practitioners love each other.

I had read Sam Wells book, “Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics,” and was already familiar with many of these tenants.  I’d been trying to live them for more than a year, but without a spiritual practice to sustain me.  Could actually doing improv be that practice?  Sam Wells had taught me not to block, to accept other people’s ideas without automatically thinking that they wouldn’t work or, more usually, that they’d take too much of my time and energy.  This has been immensely helpful in my church work, which is all about trying new things and not worrying about the possibility of failure.  But I still find myself slipping into the negative mode, automatically rejecting other people’s ideas or pitting my own ideas against them in a kind of interpersonal contest.  I wanted to learn how to let this go, how to accept the gifts that other people offer through their passions and their hopes.

I was worried that we’d be asked to explain our reasons for being there, and that when I told my classmates, who were mostly improv-loving college students, that I was a priest, they would either start censoring themselves or try to shock me.  But Kevin didn’t have us do any traditional kind of introduction – he got us up and moving around and learning the techniques right away.  The trust and intimacy that we developed throughout the week emerged from the practices of improv.  “Be the person who everyone want to play with,” he told us, meaning that the people who would do best were the people who were most able to set their egos and their need for attention aside, and give gifts in a scene.  He cautioned that this didn’t mean editing away our ideas or being shy about contributing, but instead meant bringing whatever we had and sharing it without fear, letting someone else take it and play with it and change it.  This was a grace-filled process.  “Don’t try to be funny,” he told us.  “Trust that the funny will come.”  Funny, in other words, is a free gift of improv practice, and grace is like it, something that we can’t work for, but which appears anyway in the midst of Christian practice.

The class ended on Friday, and that evening I went with my family to a Taize service at Fourth Presbyterian church in downtown Chicago.  There was time built into the service for personal meditation, and there were icons set-up in a corner of the room.  One of them was the icon of Christ Pantocrator from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai.  It’s the oldest known icon of Christ.  The two sides of the face are painted differently – the left side has a drooping eye that looks away from the viewer, and a shadowed cheek; the right side stares straight ahead and the cheeks are clear of shadow.  I’ve always been more attracted to the drooping, shadowed left side.  I used to joke that I wanted to belong to the Church of Eternal Lent.  I appreciated the sorrowful, mourning part of the church.  I trusted it because it fit my nature.  But looking into the right eye of Christ, I realized how much I’d changed, how ten years of serving the church had taught me joy and a spirit of play.

Which brings me back to Stephen Colbert.  He uses his improv training every night on The Colbert Report.  Sometimes his guests are trained in improv and know how to accept his gifts and say yes to his suggestions, lifting his interviews with them into the realm of absurd, joyful abandon.  But often his guests refuse the game.  They block ideas and remain self-serious.  Faced with this, Colbert doesn’t give up the practice of improv – he continues to offer gifts, to accept the other person’s ideas and spin them out into hilarious, delirious webs of humor.  I believe that by doing so he isn’t just practicing improv, but also practicing his Christianity.  A Christianity that plays, that waits for grace, and that constantly invites others to join in the game.

Learning to Be a New Kind of Artist: A Week at the “Art as a Spiritual Connection” Summer Camp

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We’re sitting in the sanctuary of All Saints Church, in a circle of dim light.  It’s morning and we’ve finished doing yoga and put the mats away, and now Fabricia is talking.  There is a theme for this first day, as there will be for most of the days of the camp – connection and community.  How do we set our egos and need for attention aside, and become truly attentive to the people around us?  Artists are famous for their temperaments, their fragile egos.  The permission to even engage in art is hard won, the talents that can make a person an artist are extolled as individual and unique.  Most people observe and understand the world without feeling a compelling need for expression, but for artists the world isn’t quite real unless its been filtered through their imaginations.  As I listen to Fabricia, I feel a touch of fear and a great deal of wonder.  Is it really possible to make art in a community, art that surrenders individual vision to an interpersonal ethic?  Art that imitates the self-sacrificing love of Christ?  The first thing we need to learn, Fab tells us, is that an artist who loves is an artist who gives away her best work to other people.

There are thirteen of us sitting on the sanctuary carpet, nine girls and four adults.  I’m here with my daughter, who has just finished fifth grade.  On this first morning we’re shy of each other.  Some of us know each other, but we’re not a community yet.  We move from the sanctuary to the social hall, which has been transformed into our studio for the week.  Fab gathers us around her and shows us how to make prints with an array of wooden stamps that she’s constructed and collected.  There are trays with colored printer’s ink laid out at eight tables, and we take white or black pieces of paper, roll the ink onto the stamps, and print patterns, moving from table to table, color to color, building up images.  We are aware of each other’s movements, we often have to stop and wait for someone to finish with the color we need, but our primary focus is on our own work, the vibrant, stamped images on the page.  We make multiple prints, setting them out to dry and cleaning the stamps with baby wipes, which we also set-out to dry.  These look like tie-dyes, with myriad colors smeared across them.  When we have finished with this hour of print-making, Fab provides the object lesson.  We will pick our two favorite prints, she tells us.  One of them we will give away, and one of them we will display in the art show at the end of the week.  The print we give away will be cut into 2” x 2” squares, distributed throughout the community, and used to make mosaics at the end of the week.  An artist who loves, she reminds us, is an artist who gives away her best work to other people.

It’s early afternoon on the next day, and we’re in the sanctuary again.  We’ve spent the morning creating designs of the tree of life and then cutting them into linoleum blocks.  We will print these designs onto the tie-dyed baby wipes from the day before, because in Fab’s artistic process nothing is lost and any object can be transformed into art.  Now we are singing, and Brianna is leading us.  The day before she taught us to sing in a round, and then asked us to improvise within our parts.  Today she’s spread us throughout the church, and as we sing we move from our separate places to form a circle around a candle that’s set in the center of the carpet.  Some of the children have followed the sound of their own voices into wild disharmonies, and Brianna calls us all back to the center, to the simplicity of the song.  We have to listen to each other, she tells us.  If we each pursue our own melodies, the music’s beauty is lost.  This balance between individuality and community, between improvisation and harmony, is hard for all of us.  But singing together gives us a chance to practice it.

Fab tells me that we are engaging in spiritual direction through art, that art is a means of attaining wisdom, and not an end in itself.  We are all talented, smart, and clever.  But are we wise?  I am the only man in the group, and I find myself wondering about the kind of wisdom that Fab is extolling.  Much of it is other-directed, founded on the idea that wisdom comes from surrendering some part of oneself for the good of a community.  A large part of me agrees with this, and I am enjoying the way that we practice this idea as we make art.  But I also have a strong distrust of communities.  I’ve felt manipulated by communities in the past.  Worse, I’ve felt that many of the communities I’ve been a part of have had little interest in me as an artist, or, if interested, have wanted me to use my talents to further some community goal that’s based in needs and traditions that I don’t share.  I’ve rarely experienced a community that simply rejoiced in the gifts and talents of its members, and was willing to be shaped by those gifts and talents.  Is this distrust a male attitude, part of my socialization since boyhood?  Or is it a cultural attitude that effects both genders?

I think about this on the third day, as we paint portraits.  The lesson this morning is about Jesus as the Soul Friend.  If we are to love one another, Fab tells us, we must first learn to love ourselves.  She breaks us into pairs and tells us that we should paint our own portrait, and then the portrait of a friend.  She’s taken photographs of us, and we work from them, staring into our own faces and then the faces of our partners.  I find it easier to paint my partner, and I wonder if this is because I’m less invested in her face than I am in my own.  I squander time and thought on my portrait, trying to bring out my own sense of who I am.  I decorate her portrait with tiny clay mosaic tiles that I made earlier in the week, prettifying it.  I want to honor her, but she doesn’t present a question to me in the way that my own portrait does.  I’ve made three self-portraits in my lifetime and in a way this is the hardest.  I’m not permitting myself the same ironic detachment that I usually bring to the effort.  I’m trying to love myself through daubs of paint, and wondering why I look dour, sulky, a little defensive.  I keep working, slowly painting over these expressions, until a pleasant face emerges.  This is the face I’d like to present to the world, the wise face offered for community consumption.  But under it lies the individual face, the first portrait that I put on the canvas, the wary face.  I wonder which face Jesus loves best, and I suppose that Jesus loves both equally, the selves that give gladly to the good of a community and the selves that seek isolation and have difficulty trusting.  But which self do I love more?

On Thursday we stand opposite each other at a table where Fab has placed a large, square canvas with concentric circles painted on it.  We have squeeze bottles of colored sand standing ready.  We join hands and pray together for a moment.  Then she takes a bottle and makes a pattern of white sand on the canvas.  I add to her pattern with blue sand.  We go back and forth, changing each other’s work, making a mandala that spirals out from the center of the canvas to its edges.  When the design feels finish, we look at each other and nod.  We begin to smear it with our hands, rake it with our fingers, making new patterns as the lines of color are blended together.  This is a movement of trust and surrender.  We’re interested in the process of making the mandalas, not in the mandalas themselves.  At this point in the week we’ve become so sure of each other within the community that our thoughts can go outwards.  I find myself meditating on an old friend whom I’ve become estranged from.  He’s written to me earlier in the week, and I’ve been wondering how to respond.  As we make and unmake the mandala, it becomes clear to me that I have to let go of the hurt I feel because of the estrangement.  I phrase and rephrase how I’ll respond to him.  When we’re done with the mandalas, I slip off and write a message to him.  And I realize that I trust this small community of artists.  Our work together has pushed my concerns beyond myself, and beyond our little circle of thirteen, out into the wider world.  Anyone can make art, Fab says, whether they’re an artist or not.  And any artist can learn to make art with a new spirit and a new ethic, art that frees those who practice it and moves them beyond the narrow concerns of self, moves them towards something that feels preciously close to a state of grace.