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

July 8, 2014 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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

June 13, 2014 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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.

Experiencing the Easter Story through Improvisation & Creativity

May 23, 2014 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

On Saturday, May 17th a group of youth & adults met at St. Philip Episcopal Church in Columbus to play improv games and make movies that would illustrate the Easter story through the eyes of Mary Magdalene. We called our retreat “Chocolate & Awe.” I designed a series of cards so that we could all be leaders. We sat in a circle, and participants would draw a card and lead the activity on it. After we’d thoroughly examined Mary Magdalene’s story, we used another set of cards to take on different pre-production and production tasks, which resulted in the creation of two fabulous movies. Thanks to all the participants, particularly the enthusiastic & brilliant youth. A slide show with specifics of the event is below, as are printout sheets of the cards we used and one of the two movies that we made (we’re waiting on permission from the actors in the live action movie before we post it)!

http://prezi.com/embed/qbhdnpz19wxb/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=1&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined

chocolate & awe printout

Saint Andy Warhol

February 11, 2014 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good, I always thought had a great potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humor in leftovers. When I see an old Esther Williams movie and a hundred girls are jumping off their swings, I think of what the auditions must have been like and about all the takes where maybe one girl didn’t have the nerve to jump when she was supposed to, and I think about her left over on the swing. So that take of the scene was a leftover on the editing-room floor – an out-take – and the girl was probably a leftover at that point – she was probably fired – so the whole scene is much funnier than the real scene where everything went right, and the girl who didn’t jump is the star of the out-take.

The above quote is from Andy Warhol’s essay “Work,” in the book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, published in 1975. It makes me laugh every time. Something was happening in art when Andy Warhol came along, and people much smarter than I noticed it. Leo Steinberg pointed out that art was no longer representing nature, or reflecting on nature, or incorporating natural gestures as the artists made it. Art was filtering culture, rather than nature, and in America this meant mass culture, commercial culture, culture as it came to us through our TV screens. Andy Warhol was attuned to that culture, and he did clever things with it, accepting it but then twisting it and commenting on it through his art works. He was very humane. Someone who simply loved mass culture would have been happy with the Esther Williams movie and wouldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the girl who fell of the swing. Someone who both loved mass culture but was also engaged with the questions of who was allowed to prosper within in it, and who wasn’t, would care about that girl, and the other leftovers.

Warhol was a Ruthenian Catholic who went to church almost every day, although he sat at the back and didn’t take communion or go to confession. Faith was private to him, and his religious art was mostly kept secret until after his death. But I think his faith is evident in his concern over the leftovers, and his interest in all aspects of culture, including its bi-products and failures. His religiosity is seen in this ability to look everywhere, to be engaged by everything, and not to sift culture or art into easy categories of good or bad, serious or not serious.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement…get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. …To be spiritual is to be amazed.” By that definition, Warhol was clearly spiritual. But the world that Warhol was looking at in the morning was not a world defined by nature. It was a world defined by culture. He didn’t see the world in a grain of sand, as William Blake would have it. He saw the world in a Coca-Cola bottle.

I think that he has something to teach the church. The church is frequently afraid of mass culture. Conservatives find it openly threatening and would like to promulgate a particular kind of Christian culture that would replace it. Liberals find it trite and silly, and would like to follow Mary Oliver out into nature where, they believe, a purer kind of faith can be found. But I find that I’m an Andy Warhol type of Christian. I love mass culture. I love television. I want to spend time watching it and thinking about it. I love non-Christian music, and pot-boiler novels, and video games. But I don’t want to encounter these things in some separate sphere into which my faith cannot intrude. And I don’t want my faith to inhabit a separate sphere in which I pretend that I don’t watch “Girls” on HBO. I want faith and culture to come together in a way that’s creative, and interesting, and enriches both. And if this conjoining of the two can be clever and sweet in an Andy Warhol kind of way, so much the better.

I would like to offer a prayer for the girl on the cutting room floor, the out-take girl who didn’t jump off the swing. May Jesus heal her and make her whole. But more than that, may he laugh with her, celebrate with her, and present her as an example to all of us who just end up in the out-takes. May he name her as the star of the out-take.

There’s a way to rejoice in our bumbling encounters with culture, and Andy Warhol shows us how.

The Image and the Word Bible Study: The Beatitudes

January 28, 2014 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Encountering scripture in the company of artists and authors.

You can join the Bible study in person on Tuesdays at 1:00 PM in the EASE Gallery at Saint Stephen’s, 30 W. Woodruff Avenue. Or you can enjoy it here. Please feel free to comment if you’d like.

We’ve been doing about two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew a week, but now we’re going to slow down and lavish our time on the Beatitudes, the ten verses that begin the Sermon on the Mount. They speak volumes. There are hundreds of ways to think and feel about the beatitudes, and no doubt this Bible study will leave out a lot. The beatitudes are poetry in and of themselves. Some commentators say that the first clause of each beatitude, the “blessed are the…” part, comes out of very standard cultural ideas about who should be blessed: the poor in spirit, the meek, etc. For these commentators, the radical nature of Jesus’s method becomes clear in the second clause. Everyone can agree that the poor in spirit are blessed, but it’s a wild idea to think that they’re the ones who will get to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. But Frederick Buechner thinks that every part of the beatitudes is radical, both first and second clauses. Here’s what he writes in Whistling in the Dark:

IF WE DIDN’T ALREADY KNOW but were asked to guess the kind of people Jesus would pick out for special commendation, we might be tempted to guess one sort or another of spiritual hero—men and women of impeccable credentials morally, spiritually, humanly, and every which way. If so, we would be wrong. Maybe those aren’t the ones he picked out because he felt they didn’t need the shot in the arm his commendation would give them. Maybe they’re not the ones he picked out because he didn’t happen to know any. Be that as it may, it’s worth noting the ones he did pick out.
Not the spiritual giants, but the “poor in spirit;” as he called them, the ones who, spiritually speaking, have absolutely nothing to give and absolutely everything to receive, like the Prodigal telling his father “I am not worthy to be called thy son,” only to discover for the first time all he had in having a father.
Not the champions of faith who can rejoice even in the midst of suffering, but the ones who mourn over their own suffering because they know that for the most part they’ve brought it down on themselves, and over the suffering of others because that’s just the way it makes them feel to be in the same room with them.
Not the strong ones, but the meek ones in the sense of the gentle ones, that is, the ones not like Caspar Milquetoast but like Charlie Chaplin, the little tramp who lets the world walk over him and yet, dapper and undaunted to the end, somehow makes the world more human in the process.
Not the ones who are righteous, but the ones who hope they will be someday and in the meantime are well aware that the distance they still have to go is even greater than the distance they’ve already come.
Not the winners of great victories over evil in the world, but the ones who, seeing it also in themselves every time they comb their hair in front of the bathroom mirror, are merciful when they find it in others and maybe that way win the greater victory.
Not the totally pure, but the “pure in heart;” to use Jesus’ phrase, the ones who may be as shopworn and clay-footed as the next one, but have somehow kept some inner freshness and innocence intact.
Not the ones who have necessarily found peace in its fullness, but the ones who, just for that reason, try to bring it about wherever and however they can-peace with their neighbors and God, peace with themselves.
Jesus saved for last the ones who side with heaven even when any fool can see it’s the losing side and all you get for your pains is pain. Looking into the faces of his listeners, he speaks to them directly for the first time. “Blessed are you;” he says.
You can see them looking back at him. They’re not what you’d call a high-class crowd-peasants and fisherfolk for the most part, on the shabby side, not all that bright. It doesn’t look as if there’s a hero among them. They have their jaws set. Their brows are furrowed with concentration.
They are blessed when they are worked over and cursed out on his account he tells them. It is not his hard times to come but theirs he is concerned with, speaking out of his own meekness and mercy, the purity of his own heart.

Now that Buechner has provided us with some introductory thoughts, let’s see what authors and artists have to show us about the beatitudes.

Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “I wake to feel the fell of dark, not day,” to accompany Matthew 5:3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

In 1884 Hopkins, a Roman Catholic Priest, was sent to Ireland to teach at University College Dublin. Hopkins was very petite, only 5’2″ tall, and full of personal idiosyncrasies. The students mocked him and the other teachers didn’t like him. He was a great poet, but no one had noticed or acknowledged this fact. The experience of isolation and rejection led to the period of deep depression in which he wrote what are called his “terrible sonnets.” They were called “terrible” because of the psychic terror invoked by their content, not because they were bad. ‘I wake to feel the fell of dark, not day’ is one of the most powerful statements of spiritual despair that I’ve ever encountered.

I’m accompanying it with a painting by Eric Holmes, who’s work is in NAEMI‘s collection. NAEMI (National Art Exhibitions of the Mentally Ill) is based in Florida, and seeks to promote the art of people with mental illnesses.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

   With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

   I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

   Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Pablo Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’ series, to accompany Matthew 5:4, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’

On April 26, 1937, the Luftwaffe bombed the Spanish town of Guernica. This wasn’t a German invasion, but a German interference in the Spanish Civil War on behalf of Francisco Franco. Picasso was living in Paris at the time. He saw pictures of the bombing in the newspaper, and began sketching images for his famous painting, titled after the town. After he completed the painting, he began making portraits of his lover, the photographer Dora Maar. These portraits play on the idea of the Mater Dolorosa, the weeping Virgin Mary, which was common artistic theme in Spain. They’re a continuation of the sense of grief, anger, and protest that’s present in Guernica.

national gallery of victoria weeping woman

George MacDonald’s ‘Blessed are the Meek for They Shall Inherit the Earth,’ and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s ‘The Rolling Saint’ to accompany Matthew 5:5, “Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.’

Blessed are the Meek for They Shall Inherit the Earth
by George MacDonald

A quiet heart, submissive, meek,
Father do thou bestow;
Which more than granted will not seek
To have, or give, or know.

Each green hill then will hold its gift
Forth to my joying eyes;
The mountains blue will then uplift
My spirit to the skies.

The falling water then will sound
As if for me alone;
Nay, will not blessing more abound
That many hear its tone?

The trees their murmuring forth will send,
The birds send forth their song;
The waving grass its tribute lend,
Sweet music to prolong.

The water-lily’s shining cup,
The trumpet of the bee,
The thousand odours floating up,
The many-shaded sea;

The rising sun’s imprinted tread
Upon the eastward waves;
The gold and blue clouds over head;
The weed from far sea-caves;

All lovely things from south to north,
All harmonies that be,
Each will its soul of joy send forth
To enter into me.

And thus the wide earth I shall hold,
A perfect gift of thine;
Richer by these, a thousandfold,
Than if broad lands were mine.

The Rolling Saint
by Aimee Nezhukamatathil

Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for four thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for world peace and eternal salvation.
—Reuters

He started small: fasting here and there,

days, then weeks. Once, he stood under

a banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting

            for nothing—not even to sleep. It came

            to him in a dream: You must roll

            on this earth, spin your heart in rain,

                        desert, dust. At sunrise he’d stretch, swab

                        any cuts from the day before, and lay prone

                        on the road while his twelve men swept

            the ground in front of him with sisal brooms.

            Even monkeys stopped and stared at this man

            rolling through puddles, past storefronts

where children would throw him pieces

of butter candy he’d try and catch

in his mouth at each rotation. His men

            swept and sang, swept and sang

            of jasmine-throated angels

            and pineapple slices in kulfi cream.

                        He rolled and rolled. Sometimes

                        in his dizzying spins, he thought

                        he heard God. A whisper, but still.

Jorge Luis Borges ‘Lamed Wufniks’ from The Book of Imaginary Beings, and Thomas Merton’s ‘Louisville Epiphany’ from Conjectures of a Guilty By-Stander, to accompany Matthew 5:6, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Borges was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. His stories strongly influenced all of the post-modern literature that followed him. What he calls the “lamed wufniks” are called the Tzadikim Nistarim in Judaism. His term for them comes from the Yiddish, Lamedvavniks. But his understanding of the term is essentially right. Rabbi Raymond A Zwerin says of them that: “In our folk tales, they emerge from their self-imposed concealment and, by the mystic powers, which they possess, they succeed in averting the threatened disasters of a people persecuted by the enemies that surround them.” The idea of them is drawn from the Book of Genesis, and Abraham’s argument with God before Sodom and Gomorrah. God is going to destroy the cities, but Abraham convinces him that the presence of only a few righteous men within the city walls is reason enough to leave the cities standing. The Lamedvavniks represent a fascinating idea of righteousness, but also a somewhat disturbing idea of God.

There are on earth, and always were, thirty-six righteous men whose mission is to justify the world before God. They are the Lamed Wufniks. They do not know each other and are very poor. If a man comes to the knowledge that he is a Lamed Wufnik, he immediately dies and somebody else, perhaps in another part of the world, takes his place. Lamed Wufniks are, without knowing it, the secret pillars of the universe. Were it not for them, God would annihilate the whole of mankind. Unawares, they are our saviors.

Thomas Merton had his Louisville Epiphany after he had become a Trappist monk. He was struggling with celibacy, attracted to women on the street, and yet clinging to a sense of his own righteousness in order to fight that attraction. But he knew that there was something wrong in this, that if we claim that we’re righteous but look down on other people, it becomes a false claim. His epiphany led him into a much truer sense of righteousness.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.
Thomas MertonCertainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous.
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking.
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.

Frans Francken II’s Chirk Cabinet, to accompany Matthew 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”

Frans Francken the Younger was a Flemish baroque painter from Antwerp, and very popular in his day. The seven allegorical images that he painted onto the Chirk Cabinet depict the seven corporeal works of mercy that are part of Roman Catholic belief and are derived, mostly, from Matthew 25:34-46. The only one of the seven acts that doesn’t come from this passage is the burial of the dead, which comes from the Book of Tobit.

The Chirk Cabinet

To shelter the stranger.

To feed the hungry.

To give drink to the thirsty.

To clothe the naked.

To visit the prisoner.

To visit the sick.

To bury the dead.

John Keble’s ‘Blest are the pure in heart’ to accompany Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

John Keble is an Episcopal saint. He was one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, which brought old forms of liturgy back into the Anglican church. The distinction between low and high church became prevalent during his life time, and he and the other members of the Oxford Movement were definitely on the high church side of the divide. As a poet, he’s most famous for having written The Christian Year, which has poems for every Sunday and for major feasts.

Blest are the pure in heart,
For they shall see our God;
The secret of the Lord is theirs;
Their soul is Christ’s abode.

The Lord, Who left the heavens
Our life and peace to bring,
To dwell in lowliness with men
Their Pattern and their King.

Still to the lowly soul
He doth Himself impart;
And for His dwelling and His throne
Chooseth the pure in heart.

Lord, we Thy presence seek;
May ours this blessing be;
Give us a pure and lowly heart,
A temple meet for Thee.

Denise Levertov’s “Making Peace,” and Mark Brunner’s photograph of Keshia Thomas, to accompany Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

Denise Levertov was one of the great 20th century English poets, and one of the great religious poets during a period of increasing secularism.

A voice from the dark called out,

“The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.”

But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

In 1996, 17 members of the Klu Klux Klan held a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. More than 200 protestors showed up to oppose them. When some protestors noticed a man wearing a confederate flag t-shirt in their midst, they began to shout at him and chase him. At first Keshia Thomas, then 18 years old and still in High School, joined his pursuers. But when they knocked him to the ground and began to beat him, she threw herself on top of him and protected him. “When they dropped him to the ground, it felt like two angels had lifted my body up and laid me down,” she said.

Tom Sleigh’s poem “Fable,” to accompany Matthew 5:10, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

A little village in Texas has lost its idiot.
-Caption on a protest sign

Let us deal justly.
-Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, from Shakespeare’s King Lear; act 3, scene 6

But where, oh where is the holy idiot,
truth teller and soothsayer, familiar

of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer
whose garble and babble fill rich and poor,

homeless and housed, with awe and fear?
Is he hiding in the pit of the walkie-talkie,

its grid of holes insatiably hungry,
almost like a baby, sucking in the police sergeant’s

quiet voice as he calls in reinforcements?
Oh holy idiot, is that you sniffing the wind

for the warm turd smell on the mounted policemen
backing their horses’ quivering, skittish

haunches into the demonstrators’ faces?
Oh little village among the villages,

the wild man, the holy Bedlamite is gone,
and nobody, now, knows where to find him…

Lying in mud? lying caked in mud, hair elfed into knots?
Some poor mad Tom roving the heath

for a warm soft place to lie his body down,
his speech obsessed with oaths, demons,

his tongue calling forth the Foul Fiend, Flibbertigibbet
as the horses back slowly, slowly into the crowd

and he eats filth, he crams his ravenous mouth with filth—
and then he sits on his stool in the trampled hay

and deep-rutted mud, he anoints himself
with ashes and clay, he puts on his crown

of fumiter weed and holds his scepter
of a smouldering poker and calls the court to order.