I haven't written

Currently I have a job where I read the same response hundreds of times a day. I've done this before and now, 15 years later, I'm doing it again. It's a relaxing job, otherwise, working with people who are also over educated. But it is mentally taxing. Doing this job I realize how difficult it is to be creative, when you just want to let your mind relax. I know that others would love to be creating something right now, but that their work takes vitality out of them. Certainly Jami and I plan for a day when we have the where-with-all to devote ourselves to writing and painting.
It is a curiosity of human history that what marks The Human across the centuries is identified with the creative traditions fostered and created artifacts left behind. The part of the image of God that is traditionally underplayed is the image of Creator. Instead we find ourselves involved finding our identities in the work of survival - which is not part of God's image: God doesn't work to survive. In Proverbs 8, beginning with verse 22 and culminating in 30, Wisdom describes God's work and her presence with God, in fact her activities as a master craftsman, as play, as delight. Work as we experience it, as a necessity to sustain life at the expense of leisure, is unknown in the "work" of God.
And this is the benefit of Sabbath: that we refrain from working to sustain ourselves and allow others to do so as well, in order to set aside the non-God's-image of workingness, or labor, for celebration of God's image in us, the image of work as play creativity, the rediscovery of ourselves.
It's been a wonderful Sabbath, but in the morning I'll get up and go to work and Jami will go to work, as will my friends and family. But I do not forget the promise of God's final Sabbath for humanity, a feast, a celebration.

From 30000 feet

A typical Sunday. Relaxing, being sabbatical.

Problem solving, Maria

A week ago Jami and I went to the Divinity School's Broadway follies, where students play out various scenarios from musicals. Since then my mind has pondered the question these nuns had: How do you solve a problem like Maria? [and its ancillary] How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? The statement concerns solving a problem "like" Maria, and this problem is compared to holding a moonbeam in your hand. This was certainly a daunting problem the Church had on the eve of the Anschluss. If the "like" Maria problem could have been solved, moonbeams could have been welded in the face of the German blitzkrieg. The problem with moonbeams is, certainly, that their mass is negligible, even if they could be broken off and welded independently of their light source as weapons. Perhaps though, the Panzie divisions could have been delayed if enough moonbeams could have been laid in their path as a diversion.
And holding a moonbeam in your hand is only a problem like Maria. The problem that is Maria was probably solved with electro-convulsive therapy - a scene that is only available on the director's cut. More importantly though-- Maria can ordinarily be solved in time: she will outgrow some of her idiosyncrasies. Actually the problem is not so much with Maria, but with the people who carp about her, who try to solve her. Their song could by better sung, "how do you accept someone who'd different than your conventions allow?"
As we follow this line of thought along, we discover that encoded in Roger's and Hammerstein's musicals is a foretelling of the global war on terror. "Corn as high as an elephant's eye", "Our state fair is a great state fair", "Some enchanted evening, you will meet a stranger": these and other songs bode dire tidings for the future. God help us if on some enchanted evening some stranger might be welding a moonbeam in their hands against us.

Oil, blue and gold figure

My friend, Karen, and her husband, Bruce, bought this painting last year. It's a little gem. I haven't been writing as avidly as last year. I've been busy and found it difficult to take the time. For instance, now I'm rating writing responses for a company here in Durham. I did the same thing 15 years ago in Athens. Can it have been that long? Now that I don't have a studio, I'm not painting as much. We hope we can afford a studio sometime this year. Meanwhile I continue to draw. I continue to not have a church. I am still searching, waiting. I am itchy to preach again. I wish that I had a painting stretched out and a palate covered with paint.

What do our kittens think

Catelina, hiding under the chest: what is she thinking? A big space, known quantities, and yet, she'd rather be under a chest in the bedroom. I had so much more to write today. I'm grading papers, reading Barth (4.1 - which I recommend vigorously, especially the section detailing the human condition; then read Farley's Good and Evil and Becker's Denial of Death with maybe Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript: it's a real handle on the human condition, our own existential predicament). The latest issue of Poetry is the translation issue and I recommend that people go to Border's and get a copy (April is poetry month also) - the translations are wonderful and the comments by the translators are very inspiring (this is what we do with the Greek and Hebrew in exegesis, treading that line between literalism and catching the punch in the gut of the original). Poetry is the best small magazine to subscribe to and in April a year's subscription is half off - 17 bucks.
Jami and I ate at the Federal today - the one place in Durham that comes closest to Twains. It has an incredible pork sandwich and the garlic fries - --- heaven. Now that spring is here, take Milton's Comus and read it on the green aloud with friends - it's great with a couple of IPAs.
Let art carry you away. Let poetry carry you away. Let your creativity, the expression of God's image in you, carry you away. When we create, we participate with God in God's creation; when we refuse to create, we miss out on God's joy in creation. At least skip stones across some water in the waning of the sunlight.

painting is about paint

Time and Place

This past week, on Thursday, I drew with my art teacher from Brevard (who now teaches at High Point) 's class. 30 years ago I was nearing the end of my freshman year at Brevard. I had drawn the cover of the year book and furnished it with distinctive illustrations. I was making the transition from high school oddity to college artist. That is, I was beginning to discover who I am as an artist and what that means for me and how I would live my life. I'm hoping for at least 30 if not 40 more years to practice art and to keep discovering what that means. If I wanted to match my uncle Frank's age, 98, I'd need 50 more years, but that seems like a lagniappe that's up to God to give. Actually 47 years has not been enough. In my 20s and 30s I struggled with depression, but now, thanks to cognitive therapy, a bit of maturity, and marriage to a wonderful woman, my days are mostly happy. The triggers that used to send me off into a vale of melancholy, where all seemed lost against the ultimacy of the universe, are more easily endured today.
So there I was, talking with Cherl about art, New York, the art business, and art students. I thought, how odd is the passage of time. In thirty years I've gotten to this point where I live in Durham and am ordained and have opportunities in art to explore. And I had a wonderful three hours drawing and water coloring. There's nothing like making art for me.
What have I learned in 30 years? How have I grown?

The other day

Jami told me that someone she knew found my site by looking up references to Karl Barth. I was astonished to find my Annunciation on one of the first few pages of google image search for Annunciation the other day. I feel almost like I should apologize. My plea for comments the other day brought a comment from Bob - Thanks man. Please decipher my e-mail address and send me a note.
I watch the History channel from time to time now. This morning someone was searching for the ark of the covenant. He went down the Nile, through the Yukon, into the Marianas Trench, tunneled beneath the Zugspitz: all to no purpose. In one frame of the video I could make out the shadow of the ark behind a tree. Yes, the ark of the covenant had been following him the whole time. I have heard rumor that the ark has been spotted at the Sands in Vegas, listening to Sinatra in the 60s, at the 69 world series, and recently at the opening of a water theme park in Orlando. That ark's a slippery character.
This show was followed by a search for the garden of Eden. It took them 30 minutes to quit looking for an actual garden and begin a discussion of paleogeology and the origins of agriculture. It is intriguing how Genesis echoes Babylonian stories tied into some primitive memory of sea level rising. God forbid though that we don't take Genesis as ancient etiology for how things got this way as understood by nomadic peoples whose idea of the world is 200 square miles at the most, and not as verifiable scientific writing detailing the origin of the cosmos and humanity. The Bible reflects an ancient understanding of the cosmos where heaven and earth were proximate to each other and where all creation was filled with intelligence and light (the terrestrial night being an effect of the moon's shadow blotting out the light of the sun (that is, if one could get beyond the orbit of the moon, one would perceive a celestial dance on golden fields, as all creation tended to rise as it was perfected, toward the unmoved mover). I know that my explanation of ancient cosmology is very Greek, but it is closer closer to what obtained in ancient Babylon than what we know today. Today we need to take a hard look at Genesis in light of a cosmology that finds us really alone in the universe. Between us and the nearest habitable planet is a vast cold distance, not filled with dancing intelligences, not rising as it tends toward perfection. This is good, I think. I find the way the universe actually is to be more in keeping with creation ex nililo. We are utterly dependent on God and desperate that there be a God who is loving and able to meet us in our anxieties. Out of all the vast nothingness of space, here we are. Sure one might suppose that we're not alone in the universe, but no one believes that: otherwise we wouldn't scoff at alien abduction stories. Jung hypothesized that alien abduction stories were the result of technology becoming the new religion. People desire connection with the other, and with the demise of organized religion, they projected this desire onto abduction by technologically sophisticated beings. In playing out these stories the act of imagination was so involved that the experience had the feel of reality.
Out of a vast nothingness, here we are, creating, living, loving, dying, generation after generation, our efforts marred by sin, by anxiety, by misunderstanding and a lack of forgiveness, a lack of love. But we're here.
There's a wonderful essay in the April Harper's about faith. I recommend it. In fact the whole issue had items of interest for me, including a fine review of the life of WG Sebald, the German author who taught in England.