disruptive grace

Paul posted a provocative quote from Dan Siedell this week. It offers a helpful continuation from my last post. The discipline of hidden-ness is important, but not to the extent of mediocrity, hidden-ness may be unseen, but it can still be a life will with love, passion, and compassion (‘to suffer alongside’) . The stories of old (and in fact all great art) stir our souls because they contain, as N.T. Wright puts it, ‘the echos of a Voice’ — echos that whisper of justice, relationship, spirituality, and beauty. Dan Siedell suggests this:

Let me suggest that neither “Christianity” nor “culture” per se make modern society uncomfortable. It is the self-sacrificial and uncompromising pursuit of greatness and quality in these practices, a life singularly devoted to them, which condemns the virtues of contemporary professional and personal life: compromise, mediocrity, and personal comfort that makes modern society uncomfortable.
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Are we now too sophisticated, too enlightened, too iconoclastic to believe in the myths of great art, great culture, even the possibility of a great life devoted to Christ? We’re not humble. We’re cowards.

We need courage in this journey of culture making, just as we need humility, for we are never fully aware of the implications of our actions or our artifacts. What we do may be noticed by thousands, or by only our closest friends. We must continue to have to courage to continue and create. Dan Siedell again:

The production of great culture, great art, cannot be separated from the risk of failure. Most writers, musicians, poets, and artists do not produce great art, great culture, even if they enjoy successful careers. And even those poets, artists, and musicians who have, do not produce it very often. Do we have the courage to fail, to push ourselves to the point of failure, to assume we probably will fail to produce great art, great culture and still try? … Do we have the courage to produce culture that transcends those rules, which perhaps even changes the rules of the game, or render conventions irrelevant?

Herman Melville died convinced that Moby-Dick was a failure. And most of the literary critics of his time agreed with him. As we curry the favor of contemporary critics and book reviewers, bristle at negative reviews or fawn over those who praise us, it would be a useful exercise to read those initial reviews of Moby-Dick.

“Herman Melville died convinced that Moby-Dick was a failure.” – Yet he produced and published and allowed his novel to exist. He died, (I speculate) with perhaps many believing he had “no great thing… only small things with great love.” We must live likewise.

On that line, I stumbled on this prayerful poem attributed to Sir Fancis Drake this morning:

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wilder seas
Where storms will show Your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask you to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push back the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

This we ask in the name of our Captain,
Who is Jesus Christ.

Here’s to dreaming. Here’s to failing. Here’s to being unnoticed. Here’s to continuing anyway. Here’s to hpoe. Here’s to courage. Here’s to love. Here;s to lying in gutters and looking at the stars.*

“Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus.” **

* – with thanks to Oscar Wilde.
** – from Philippians 3

I’ve been thinking about vocation recently. I would say ‘calling’ but I find that word often gets used in a way which has more to do with an obsession with self. Having said that, I have this phrase ‘calling is context’ spinning round my mind at the moment, and I’m going to explore what that could mean.

Peterson reminds use (in ‘Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places’) to remember our primary context is God and his action and intention.

“Most of the Christian life involves paying attention to who God is and what he does; but not only the who and the what but the how and the means God employs to accomplish his ends. If we get too interested in what wedo and are, we go off the rails badly”

As I’ve been thinking about this I’m exploring who the story God instigates is then our first context. As a designer and being slightly geeky I’ve been playing around with a diagram to help me think through this.

vocation and context

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The following is a helpful inclusion to the mix of the previous posts on love, and should offer some balance to them. This is Dan Wilt reflecting on the Four Degrees Of Love by Bernard Of Clairvaux.

Linking with this thought, in recent blog post Paul has noted a couple of quotes by the photographer Phillip Spears over at the ‘Christians in the Arts’ blog.

The voice of God has been very clear, though, throughout my career that I am doing what He created me to do.
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Being creative is the way I practice being a believer. It’s an act of obedience. I want to do it well to a particular end. Life is now a stewardship project, which is life-affirming. I’m unbelievably grateful that God has given me this gift. I love that I get to be creative. Being creative is a fundamental part of being human.

… and on that note: “Ronnie get blogging”

There is a presupposition that runs through theses posts which can be distilled to some thing like: the good life is a life caught up with the love of God and the love of neighbour.’ The last post touch a little on how the way we use love means the word gets tainted with self serving meaning. The following is a nother thought provoking quote concerning this:

“Love, love — the word is always ringing in our ears, but when is it not mixed up with something else? Love and the desire to possess, love and the need to control, love and the need to be needed, love and the lust to absorb, love and condescension, love and narcissism. In the Christian mystery love itself must be crucified, must die to be reborn as the grace of communion, as love set free.”

[from: Meditations on the Passion of St. John, Martin L. Smith]

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The following is a wonderfully insightful poem by William Blake (1757-1827)

The Clod & the Pebble

‘Love seeketh not Itself to please,
‘Nor for itself hath any care;
‘But for another gives its ease,
‘And builds a heaven in Hell’s despair.’

So sang a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet :
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet :

‘Love seeketh only Self to please,
‘To bind another to its delight ;
‘Joys in another’s loss of ease,
‘And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.’

I love this poem, its so perceptive, and beautifully written. It contains valuable wisdom for anyone wanting to be agents of grace and bringers of new creation, for the way we do things is as important as what we do. Most significantly — the way we love is of up most importance.

Stanza one as sung by the ‘clod of clay’ describes a sort of agape-love; that is to say, a selfless love embodied by the clay that gives preference to the treading of the hooves of the herd over itself. Conversely, stanza three describes a selfish ‘love’, an eros-love, seeking personal gratification. The first sees a cosmos with an abundance of love, where the resource of love never run out. The second sees a closed economy of love with limited supplies — the less someone else has the more it has for itself. Both ‘loves’ have the power to transform, and at any one time we are capable of choosing either.