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.

My parents moved to Malaysia at the start of my sophomore year of college, and our connection to the small Wisconsin town where I’d gone to high school was severed.  I had never made connections to any place for long.  My dad was a United Methodist minister, and we moved every six or seven years.  But the friendships I made in high school were some of the most important in my life, and although I haven’t retained close contact to the people I knew then, I can’t think of them without happiness and gratitude.  I remember especially one summer afternoon, after I’d just gotten back from a family trip to California.  I’d encountered God on that trip.  I’d had an epiphany in the John Muir woods, an indescribable experience of ferns and tall trees and clear light.  When I arrived back home, I wanted to tell my friends about it, and we walked together to a grassy hill behind the high school.  They weren’t religious, and I hadn’t been up until that point in my life, but there was no judgement when I told them about my epiphany.  They were open to anything.  They accepted my experience as valid, because I had experienced it, and we didn’t try to assess or control each other’s experiences.

But by the beginning of my sophomore year, I had new college friends.  My girlfriend was my one remaining link to the home of my high school years, and that only tangentially, since she’d gone away to college as well, and we’d spent the summer together in Madison, detached from the place where we’d grown up.  When I thought of home, I thought of her.  So when my parents prepared to leave the country, I wasn’t worried.  I was part of a college social group, and had been initiated the previous spring in a rite that was full of joy and weirdness and a kind of grace.  I had places where I thought I belonged.

That October, my girlfriend broke up with me.  It seems amazing that this break-up was one of the most devastating experiences of my life, given that my adult life hasn’t been devoid of devastating experiences, moments that, in any hierarchy of crisis, should have been far more traumatic.  But I was nineteen, and I hadn’t learned how to deal with devastation yet.  It was all new to me, and more anguishing because it was so surprising.  And the most surprising part was that I found that I couldn’t turn to my new friends for help.  Members of my college social group soon got tired of my depression.  While sitting at dinner one night, one of my friends said “I know you loved your girlfriend and everything, but she’s moved on to a new thing, and you need to just accept that.”  To be fair, I must have been a terribly downbeat person to be around.  Whiny and mopey and angry.  But I also realized that the community I belonged to was only about fun, and that when I ceased to be fun, I lost my membership in it.

Maundy Thursday is all about good and bad communities, and the fact that a single community can often be both good and bad.  As we commemorate the day, we start with a vision of a very good community.  Jesus and the disciples gathered together for dinner, for celebration, for the pleasure of being in each other’s company.  As they ate and drank, they could forget, for a moment, that Jesus had told them that everything was going to end in death and dishonor.  He washed their feet, an act of love and vulnerability that it’s still hard for many people to reconcile themselves to.  The sense of closeness in that room must have been profound.  But almost as soon as that sense of closeness was really and truly established, it began to break apart.  Jesus told his disciples that one of them would betray him.  The disciples, alarmed by this prospect, began to quibble about which one of them was the greatest.  Then Jesus told Peter that he would deny him three times.  And all of the darkness in the life of a community was present in the room.

Communities can be places of grace and love, of true acceptance and non-judgement.  They can be composed of people who want nothing more than to journey together towards some barely defined goal, who are more interested in the journey than the goal itself.  People who will support and stand with each other in both good times and bad.  And they can be places of control, betrayal, and indifference, full of people who are all too willing to abandon each other.  Maundy Thursday is about both kinds of community.  It speaks to a fundamental truth about life.  People will fail us.  We will be hurt.

After dinner Jesus and the disciples went to the Garden of Gethsemane.  The disciples fell asleep.  Jesus prayed alone.  This is the final statement that this day has to make about community.  Community can never take the place of God.  In the end, the perfection we are looking for doesn’t exist within human institutions.  It exists only in God, and only very rarely can other people follow us to the moment when we encounter God.  But there is always the chance to return from these lonely sojourns into God’s presence, and find the people who are willing to hear what we’ve encountered.  To hear, and help us make sense of these encounters, not through judgement, but patient listening.  Through summer walks to grassy hills.  Through friendship.