E
ver since Debbie Blue published her book Sensual Orthodoxy, I have been struck not just by the content of what she has written but also by the juxtaposition in the title—sensual orthodoxy. The theme of this issue of Regent World is juxtaposition and the arts. The literal definition of juxtaposition is to place two things side by side to compare or contrast. There are times, however, when two juxtaposed words are instead referred to as an oxymoron, because they appear irreconcilably contradictory. My hunch is that this is the case with “sensual orthodoxy.” These words are not simply side-by-side, begging for comparison and contrast, but they appear fundamentally contradictory—at least in the minds of many contemporary Christians. Sensual connotes feeling, emotion, image, music, art and tactility, whereas orthodoxy connotes word, argument, debate, exegesis and abstraction. My early Christian life was characterized by the kind of anti-sensual sensibility that is all too common in Christian circles. Truth was content, word and abstraction; and the realization that God created us as human was muted at best and, at worst, negated. Theology was in. Art was out. Over time, and in contemplation of the incarnation of Christ, God has changed my perspective in ways that Blue captures so well: “Though religion surprisingly often has an anti-sensual, abstracting sort of tendency, the story of Christ goes in the opposite direction. God becomes incarnate, physical in the world. God is made truly human in the womb of Mary and is born into the world through the birth canal. Jesus walks around and eats and doesn’t always wash his hands. God reveals godself as a human with skin and teeth and a tongue, sensing, moving, living, suffering, dying. This is the central story of Christianity and it’s a movement to the physical not so much the metaphysical.”1
This may explain why I still get excited when I walk through Regent College. It is so encouraging to be part of a Christian graduate school that not only takes the Word (both in the person of Jesus and in the revelation of Scripture) seriously, but also pays attention to the expression of this Word in the sensual realm. Encouraging to see a wind tower with its dancing light during the day and its wonderful colours lit by solar panels at night. Encouraging to pause at various paintings and sculptures to contemplate their sensual expression of the gospel. Encouraging to see students sitting in a classroom, reflecting on poetry, paintings, novels and films with not a qualm of doubt that what they are doing is gospel work. Encouraging to meditate on the Celtic cross that graces the south end of the atrium, a visual signpost of our communion with the saints. Encouraging to feel the warmth of light and sunshine weaving its way through the glass roof of the atrium. Encouraging to hear students talk about significant spiritual experiences in writing and painting classes, food and boat courses and at community dinners. These artistic and sensual objects and activities of the College are reminders for our community that Regent is not merely a
by Dr. Rod J.K.Wilson place of concepts and ideas but is embodied in time and place. Whereas much of educational culture seems to be moving away from the relational, the personal and the sensual toward virtual education “at a distance” and “on line,” Regent continues to believe that the sensual should be redeemed by those who themselves were redeemed by the incarnate Son. For Regent College, sensual orthodoxy may be a valuable juxtaposition—but it is definitely not an oxymoron. We all must confront, as Parker Palmer does in the quote below, this juxtaposition in our own faith—asking Palmer’s penetrating question of ourselves and of our faith traditions. “I had been trained as an intellectual not only to think—an activity I greatly value—but also to live largely in my head, the place in the human body farthest from the ground…I had embraced a form of Christian faith devoted less to the experience of God than to abstractions about God, a fact that now baffles me: how did so many disembodied concepts emerge from a tradition whose central commitment is the “the Word become flesh?”2 Rod J.K. Wilson is the President of Regent College.
1. Debbie Blue, Sensual Orthodoxy (St. Paul, Minnesota: Cathedral Hill Press, 2004), p. 10. 2. Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), p. 67.
The Regent
Juxtapositions and Oxymorons
Summer 2009• Vol.21, No.2
How Beautiful the Feet
I
Maria Gabankova, Copy of Grünewald's Crucifixion, detail.
run up the central stairs of Regent College and catch my breath at an art installation I pass on my way to my second-floor office—Vancouver sculptor David Robinson’s chalk-white piece: a preacher, pathetically thin and apparently naked, boxed in by a pulpit which is, as it turns out, also a cross. The piece is titled, “Speak,” but I give it my own title as I pass: “So, you want to be a preacher?” What particularly draws my eyes are the long, narrow feet dangling below the pulpit (Size 12, triple A, I think), feet that are painfully, vulnerably bare. Every vein is distinct, the feet bony and chalky. Normally, the speaker’s feet would be encased in well-polished leather, and perhaps draped by swishing robes; here, they speak of mortality and fragility. I find these feet throat-catchingly beautiful. In the pathos of these bare feet, the artist insists that we remember this preacher’s humanity. As I slow my own hurried steps to regard these feet, I am aware that just across the stairway landing is a reproduction of a section of the Grünewald altarpiece, the original of which is installed in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, France. Painted by Maria Gabankova, the reproduction is clearly visible from where I stand in front of the Robinson sculpture. The altarpiece is famously richly coloured and distressingly realistic: again, it is the feet I focus on: the twisted, tortured feet of the crucified Christ, wide and calloused, peasant feet that have never known shoes. These feet do not dangle; instead, they are cruelly skewered by a huge spike to a crude foot-rest mounted on a cross that is bowed by its terrible burden. The bleeding feet of Jesus force me to see Robinson’s preacher’s feet in a new way. The suffering preacher in his pulpit stands with the One whose story he is telling. I realize I notice these feet, now, because I also notice my own. For years and years I scarcely thought about my feet—then they began to speak to me. The podiatrist shows me a model, explaining the source of my pain, and I gasp at the intricacy of the bone structure that has supported my comings and goings all these years. How beautiful they are, I think, those slender bones. How tragically slen-
by Dr. Maxine Hancock
der and multi-jointed. How beautifully crafted and wonderfully made. No doubt, Jesus felt such wonder (and more, for he had created those structures in the first place) as he washed his disciples’ feet that night just before that first Good Friday. And now I am beginning to grasp something, something that slides away even as I try to articulate it: feet—Jesus’ feet, Robinson’s preacher’s, mine; the feet of the many Regent alumni who are carrying good news as they dig gardens, raise children, make meals; as they write poems, make films, tell stories; as they preach the Word, plant churches, teach, sit in government and corporate offices—all are insistent reminders that we carry out our tasks in a vulnerable humanity shared with each other, and with him. In the Incarnation, God came and walked among us, feeling the warmth of the good earth, the tiredness of a day’s standing at the workbench or of walking in the thick dust of Palestinian roads. As the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews puts it: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses….” By virtue of those feet having once been nailed to a cross, we are connected not only to earth but also to God’s very self, drawn into the life and love of the Trinity. All that touches us also touches him. So I pause at the top of the stairs at Regent and look from the cruciform preacher to the Crucified Lord and back again. “How beautiful are the feet…” I whisper, “How very beautiful the feet….” Maxine Hancock is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Spiritual Theology at Regent College.
David Robinson, Speak David Robinson, Speak, detail
Michael Ward, The Theological Imagination of C.S. Lewis
John Stackhouse and Ralph Winter
The Ethics of Filmmaking
When Ralph Winter was shooting X-Men 2 in Vancouver, one Sunday he happened to attend the church where John Stackhouse was preaching. The filmmaker and the theologian met. Now, years later, they are co-teaching a course that combines their areas of expertise. “The Ethics of Filmmaking” will examine the four biggest ethical difficulties in filmmaking: money, sex, power, and ideology. It will draw examples from Winter’s career in the film industry (which includes his production of Star Trek films and Fantastic Four as well as the X-Men series) and is primarily designed for Christians who intend to make films. Stackhouse points out, “The one remaining mass medium is the major motion picture. Teachers and preachers used to be able to refer to TIME magazine, the Top 40, or the news. Now what’s left is, ‘What movie did you see last weekend?’” Film consumes millions of dollars and person-hours, and is a force the church must reckon with. Since it shapes our culture and informs our values, learning to think theologically about film and its production is crucial. Though aimed at filmmakers, the course will also be beneficial to anyone who watches films. Stackhouse hopes that, after taking the course, students will be better able both to enjoy movies and to resist them.
J. R. R. Tolkien rejected the Chronicles of Narnia as a mish-mash, and scholars ever since have puzzled over what holds the series together. In 2008, Michael Ward published Planet Narnia, in which he claims to have found the interpretive key. His groundbreaking discovery is the subject of a BBC documentary that aired in April (www.planetnarnia.com). In his book, Ward argues that Lewis based each of the Chronicles on one of the seven medieval planets. Ward’s interpretation and its widespread acceptance among even skeptical scholars have brought him to the forefront of Lewis studies. In July, Ward will teach a course on Lewis’s theological imagination, which will use the Narnia books as case studies. “Lewis’ understanding of the imagination helps explain why the Narnia stories are so successful,” Ward says. “Their literary complexity gets beneath your conscious attention, so that your whole imagination is embraced by their symbolism.” This is why, Ward believes, the Chronicles so powerfully help to form readers’ theological convictions. The approach of this course differs from many Lewis studies. Whereas Lewis’ fiction is often examined separately from his academic writings, this course will connect the two. It will focus on his theories of myth, story and imagination, investigating how these contribute to the theological content of the Chronicles. Students will also be introduced to Lewis’ oft-neglected poetry. The discovery of the planets’ role in Narnia illuminates what readers feel instinctively; Lewis was a writer of extraordinary skill. Ward believes Lewis would be pleased that the secret has at last been revealed, and would likely ask, “What took you so long?”
Isolation, Alienation and Community: A Hope that Cannot be Suppressed
T
his winter, I spent hour after gray, rainy hour in my old, broken-down green chair by the window, or at my writing desk, drafting and revising poems. The date for the presentation of my Integrative Project in the Arts and Theology had been set: March 24. I could no longer avoid the solitude; poems had to be written. Many artists savour the hours of solitary work. I, by and large, did not. I found myself vulnerable to the kind of introspection that creates a dark, nebulous vortex in the mind and heart, the kind of introspection that pulls one away from an awareness of the presence of God into a menacing awareness of only the self—and not the redeemed self, but the twisted, brooding self. Gerard Manley Hopkins calls this state the “selfbent so bound”; I would describe it as alienation—from God, from others, from creation and from the true self. The old word for this is sin, a word not so commonly encountered these days in the wider culture—or in the church. I can see now that my aversion to the isolation necessary for writing poems had more to do with the work God needed to do in me than it did with writing poems—if the two can be separated. What I would like to suggest is that the isolation necessary for getting creative work done forced me to know in a new way: to know my medium, to know my immediate context, to know myself and to know my God more honestly. And this journey of knowing led me into an unavoidable reckoning with the sin—the alienation—inside me. Indeed, we all need rescue from this “selfbent” bondage—it is not my plight, or the artist’s plight, alone. But for the artist, this plight is revealed most starkly in the creative process—in the thick of the work the artist has been given to do. Which is to say, Christ confronts the artist’s deepest brokenness in the very work for which she has been made. Poet Scott Cairns has noted that the artist “must realize that she makes art in order to find out what she doesn’t know—in part, what she doesn’t know about the world, or about God, or about human relationships, but mostly what she doesn’t know about herself.” This, Cairns states, is what makes an artist’s work a vocational calling: “it is a calling to a lifetime of toil, and its purpose is, primarily, to make the artist a better person.” 1 Further, if the artist denies the journey through isolation into confrontation with alienation, his work will be one-dimensional. It will bear witness to wishful thinking, not true hope; it will be the equivalent of Easter Sunday without Good Friday. Artistic work depends upon an honest, authentic engagement Copy of Grünewald’s Crucifixion, from The Isenheim Altarpiece, by Maria Gabankova
We are using a special format for this single edition of Regent World, in order to give you the opportunity to interact with the two works of art mentioned in Maxine Hancock's article.
by Sarah Crowley Chestnut
with alienation so that it might be meaningful not only to the artist, but to others as well. This is one of the gifts artists give to their communities. For the artist who is a Christian, the call to be an artist is bound up with the call to follow Christ. Which also means, necessarily, the call to be a part of the church. The artist’s community therefore must include not only other artists, but also the called and commissioned body of Christ, in all its diversity. Though I resented it at the time, early in the writing process I needed a fellow artist and student to tell me, “Your poems move too quickly to the light. You need to stay in the dark longer.” Oddly, I needed community to force me to face isolation (and subsequently alienation), so that I might become a deeper person—more authentically Christian, I would say—and so that my poetry might reflect genuine hope, genuine mystery, not wishful thinking or mere cleverness. Later, when my own self was bent and bound to the “dark, nebulous vortex” of introspection, I needed a pastor to ask how the writing was going—and to remind me that not only is there the “selfbent so bound,” but so too is there is an Enemy who “prowls like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” I needed an intercessor to say, “Today, I prayed for you.” I needed a prophet to remind me that God speaks and is speaking— even in the dark vortex. When I was too close to my own work to see its value, I needed friends to say, “This poem gives me shivers.” When I was tempted to throw in the towel altogether, I needed my husband to say, “Just put it aside for an evening and watch Seinfeld with me.” This dynamic relationship between isolation, alienation and community is at the heart of an artist’s work. It is the hopeful work of bearing witness that alienation is not the end of the story. Christ cried out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” so that he might say, “Go into the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” Death, the deepest alienation, is not the final word. The self need not be bound to itself; the dark vortex need not consume us; the prowling lion need not feed upon us any longer. This is the power of an artist who is part of the body of Christ; this is the gift of Christ in the church through the artist to the world: a hope that cannot be suppressed. Sarah Crowley Chestnut graduated from Regent College this spring with a Masters of Christian Studies in Theology and the Arts.
1. Scott Cairns, “It’s Not Just You: Artists, Alienation, and Getting On With It.” Re:generation Quarterly 5, no.3 (1999): 14-16.