Breathing Exercises

We celebrated the birth of Christ Jesus last night at our meeting with a reading of Mary’s song in Luke (ch 1.39-55 in Greek, with English on-screen), and a participatory candle lighting that slowly illuminated a nativity scene. I resisted the urge to Photoshop the dirty plates and cups out of the above image … because that would make the incarnation less real. To paraphrase: while we were yet unwashed and sloppy, Christ came to live among us.

We shared some art and listened to some of Bruce Cockburn’s beautiful Christmas album. Michael read “thoj” …

kevin asked me to write a poem about humility
which is like asking a speeding freight train
to write a poem about the sound made
by a butterfly’s wings

the oxford american dictionary
defines humilty as
“the quality of having a modest view of one’s importance”
then defines modest as
“viewing one’s abilities or achievments in a humble way”
which means that despite probably having multiple advanced degrees
in english language smartness
they have no clue what humility or modesty means
and hoped that nobody else would notice

discovering this little spinning dance
would normally be all i need
to wind up a good rant about the stupidity
rampant in people who aren’t me
inviting you to join my special club of people
who are above that sort of thing
because we notice it

but i am writing a poem about humility
which pauses the snark express just long enough
for a moment of silence to be heard
it washes over me like a wave,
or am i feeling it echo in my bones
sitting
perfectly still
trying to hold this …. thing … long enough
to tell you about it,
an invitiation that has nothing to do
with rising above

if the current holders of the nobel prize for lexicographic ineptitude
at the smartypants oxford american dictionary writing company
got their act together
and wrote an entire volume on humility

it would still be the beat of an insect’s wing
against the waning stillness of morning air
drowned out by the cosmic freight train of humility
infinity just became finite
eternity just appeared now
the creator of space and time
lying in a manger, trying to find his hand
so he can put it in his mouth

Just cause I’m excited about the creativity thing I posted, like, minutes ago, here’s another video that is cool because the process that the artist (/vandal) goes through to make his art (/vandalism) is cooler even to me than the final product (and the final product is cool: though it’s easy to call it vandalism, it’s also unquestionably a shameless act of urban improvement). I like the idea of a process being complicated and labor intensive in service to a seemingly simple outcome. Again, this is not a life philosophy, but a catalyst for my creativity.

for extra credit, identify the common theme between this and the previous post.

The title of this post is not a new philosophy. It is a quote from this fun little video featuring Todd Barricklow, a maker of impossible bikes. Combining several appealing ideas (bikes!), the minute-and-a-half video is here because I find it inspiring. I think I could use some encouragement in the area of creativity, and this video has just the right mixture of provocation and fun.

Taken on its own, this post might seem out of place, but I see this as the first in a series of posts on creativity catalysts, inspiring perspectives on people making new things in ways I had not considered. (It’s the first in the series because it’s the last in a long list of collected videos and other sources I’ve been collecting over the last couple years … stay tuned for more.)

From the inside cover of my last notebook (I cover the outside of my notebooks with homemade art, collage, etc. and sometimes the inside too). This one is called Carefully Follow Instructions.

Been thinking a lot about how much easier my life would be if I had instructions, rules, a path to follow. But then I remember I chose to walk off the path. I’m often torn between anxiously wishing I had a book of rules for my life … and patiently looking for signs that God leaves for me to follow.

It’s hard because God doesn’t put up permanent road signs. God drops bread crumbs, and they can get snatched up by birds if we miss them the first time through the forest.

At least I know that if I see a bread crumb, it’s fresh.

When Mary said yes to bearing Jesus into the world, she said yes to considerable pain and risk. Who knows how well she comprehended the risks — to her reputation, her relationships, her family — when she heard the invitation to become pregnant by God and submitted her will to the divine. But no matter how prepared she was in the beginning, it must’ve been a little upsetting to hear the words of Simeon 10 months later, who upon seeing the infant Jesus, spoke a prophecy about the turmoil he’d bring to Israel, and then added this: “… a sword will pierce your soul also.” Ouch.

When this project was just a gleam in our eyes, we spent considerable time asking God to speak to us and to our friends before we took any steps forward. Some of the ‘answers’ we heard/saw/perceived were directly related to the choices we were making then, and some were more obscure. But we wrote everything down, and have now begun to work our way back through the list, in order to take seriously the things that came when we chose to ask, seek, knock.

One of the things we recorded was a picture that a praying friend saw in her mind’s eye: a pincushion with pins part-way in, stopped at some hard barrier. The person who saw this, also saw a thumb ready to push and heard a voice say, “They need to go all the way in!” and then heard, “The pins are people.” There were some immediate responses to this, as we asked God to help us understand … that pins just pushed into the outer surface of a pincushion will easily fall out; but not if they are pushed all the way in … that a pincushion is a metaphor for people: our interactions often stay on the ‘soft surface’, and this is one of the reasons we easily “fall out” of each others lives … that there is a kind of hard barrier that stops us from going deep. To go past this hard barrier (with a person’s permission) is to go into the deep mystery of life, into the dark, the unanswered questions, the doubts, the fears. To pass the barrier is to become anchored, more firmly fixed, less likely to fall away when tested.

Today, we’ve been doing some spiritual listening around this word-picture, to hear more about what it means to our community. We heard more in the way of confirmation that this is a story about how we relate. “We’re the pins.” … “The cushion is like my heart: I have to choose to let you in, even knowing it will hurt at first, into the deep parts of me.” … “The hard barrier is important–at least it’s to be expected–and while it is a kind of resistance at first, it becomes necessary to the holding.”

While I was noodling on these things, and trying myself to stay open to what God wants to say, I thought it would be fun to bring it all to life with a little participatory art. I went out and bought us a pincushion and a bunch of pins. The story I shared when I brought it out at a recent gathering, was that I was going to put a pin in the thing for each choice I had made to be honest, transparent, and real with Christ and my community, because when I made those kind of choices, I was also accepting that I was going to be pierced, as it were. During a reading of the story of Simeon’s prophecy (in Luke’s chapter 2) and silent response following, there was a chance for the each of us to press a pin or two into the pincushion. One for our original choice to be in community, and another pin for any other choice to offer ourselves for this kind of ‘piercing’.

It’s risky to let people in, past our hard shells. I let myself be wounded when I choose to let you in to my heart. And that’s also the inevitable piercing that comes from bearing Jesus into the world–he’s not just some fancy pants we put on to impress the photographers. He is the original deep place that calls to our deep places. We can’t bear him into the world without having experienced him in the deep places of our heart. And we can’t very well walk the same road he walks without exposing ourselves to pain. He never shied away from the pain that comes from loving people. And he gave us a heads up: the student never has it easier than the teacher. There is one consolation: when we willingly open our hearts to the piercing, the pain of being known is our choice. That makes it bearable, and more. The pain we willingly choose is part of the way we become more like Jesus.

During worship on Tuesday, we tore up magazine ads and made more beautiful pictures out of them.

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I have a little rock garden out in front of my house, and I love the picture of solidity contrasted with flow that a good rock garden is. This kind of dry garden is popularly called a Zen rock garden because we learn them from Zen Buddhists, who see them as an aid to meditation, or entering into a calm reflective state (which is pretty close to a root definition of Zen). I’m not a Zen Buddhist, but I love rock gardens, in the same way I love how any work of art reflects something about nature, and ultimately, about God, who is the maker of all.

When I decided to pour a bunch of sand from the California coast into a large wooden platter and arrange some rocks inside, I was excited to search out the formal rules of arrangement. I wasn’t interested in becoming an expert, or in slavishly conforming to Zen principles, but I wanted to understand. I learned about the implied flow of water that is created by the arrangement of rocks in sand, as if they were rocks in a river. Another way of thinking about this flow is as a kind of life energy: the chinese word for this energy is ‘Chi’, which is literally translated as ‘air’ or ‘breath’. In Christianity, the source of this energy is the Spirit of God, whose primary names in Hebrew and Greek are the words for ‘wind’ or ‘breath’, and who ‘moved over the face of the waters’ in the beginning.

The first humans were brought to a special kind of life (one not shared with animals) by God’s breathing into our dusty shells. As I looked at some examples of famous rock gardens, I saw how there was an attempt to invite this flow to move in favorable directions. I don’t believe that properly arranged rocks will cause the Holy Spirit to land on a bullseye in my home or my heart, but as a piece of art that communicates my desire to make the way straight for God to wash over me, I love the visual aid of rocks arranged in this way–they help me consider the landscape of my life.

So I carefully arranged my rocks to create a picture of ‘flow’ in that little bit of theater on my porch. Very satisfying.

Recently, we’ve been having a group of people over to our house to practice Christian community. Just as with me and my little rock garden, we are in the learning stage, we’re just beginning to look at some of the ‘formal rules’, considering examples, and trying our hand at arranging the pieces. We’ve only met a few times, but I’ve been noticing that at the end of our meetings, someone has been hanging around on my porch and messing with my rock garden, and they’re totally breaking all the rules. After the first meeting, my rocks, carefully arranged in a sort of inverted triangle on smooth sand, had now been unceremoniously lined up straight across the platter, in the middle of the sand, which had been churned up by digging. Yikes! My flow has been interrupted! The following week it was changed again, the rocks no longer in a line, but spread out, and the sand marked with finger holes. Who’s bright idea was it to make rock gardens look so much like sandboxes?

Serene source of meditative calm? ... Sandbox? ... Or both?

What will I do? I could fix the rocks each week. I could hang a sign that says You Are Beginning to Damage My Calm. I could hide the rock garden in my closet and not let anyone else see it, let alone touch it. But I don’t want to do that, not even remotely. I think I like that the rock garden is more like a sandbox than a precious work of art. And anyway, it’s just a rock garden and it’s not like someone is rearranging the pictures on my bedroom walls after using the bathroom.

Here’s what I know: when we invite people over to our home and into our lives, things don’t stay neatly arranged. I can’t hope to maintain the arrangement of the rocks, or the chairs, and certainly not the social landscape of all the members of my family or my community. We are making a place where it’s safe to say what we think, and it’s not always going to be clean or well ordered. If I wanted to keep my garden neat, I would have to stop inviting people over, or hide my garden. If I do invite people over, house rules will be broken and sand will be spilled. But the life of community, when we make room for it, is like the rock garden: an ever-shifting picture of the move of the spirit within the person who currently has their fingers in the sand. It’s not always going to follow the rules, but there will be beauty.

Highlights from the meeting:

1. Readings from Genesis, Exodus, and a telling of part of the Joshua cycle (Josh 3.5: “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do amazing things among you.”)

2. Arvo Part laying the Mood behind the Word (De Profundis, Lamentate-Stridendo, Fratres, Summa) and K’naan closing out the night (In The Beginning, loud).

3. Reviewing several word-pictures that came through praying people over the last year and a half while this community was still a gleam in God’s eyes. Tonight we took ownership of some good revelation.

4. Art.

This from Gwen (drawn during the scripture readings): The World, in the beginning (waters above and below … see it?)

This from Darla: her drawing of a vision/dream that unfolded over a month.

Darla’s notes: “This image was a simple picture — first a blank white canvas and later changed to a stack of white paper. The stack glowed blue with an electric energy and floated. This paper was imbued with ‘privilege’ and ‘responsibility’. The crisp paper beckoned to be written on. It wanted to be used. Words that came to mind while looking at the stack: ‘God-made’, ‘freedom’, ‘expectant’. I saw the sign of the paper as a ‘green light’ for us all to move forward in creating a new community. God is giving us a ‘foundation’ (the blank stack of paper) in which to begin.”

Sometimes words can open doors in the most dramatic way

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