Where's your art at? What level of maturation. How integrated is it with the rest of your life. We are meant to be becoming one expression. To integrate all parts of ourselves is motivated by wanting to become the full expression God intended us to be. Art brings life to the other aspects of who we are. And those aspects help ground our symbolic lives, keeping them teethered to our core identity.

Jesus wants to be at the core of ourselves, cultivating each part into maturity. The art part is the aspect which symbolizes and expresses core identity. If detached or blocked, it can start attaching to things outside of self, and even become possessed by random spirits. There is no dimension where Jesus is not present. This means we are free to roam into dreamland, into creativity, into imagination and still remain grounded in Him and have intimacy there.

People and cities, and nations have creative lives. Cultural expressions are collective symbols of the core identity of a place or people.This life is at various stages of maturation. Some cities have very underdeveloped creative lives. Other's are detached and no longer expressing the true identity of that city.

To unblock and nurture our creative lives is to be part of mending ourselves and our cities. It is to be caught up in God's restorational work. Behold, God is one, and He is making us one as well. Bringing "home" our creativity and integrating it with other aspects of our lives is part of this restorational process. It is then part of His Kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. So where's your art at?

Often artist have a developed symbolizer, but it is not integrated with other aspects of their lives. Often "non-artist" have a blocked or immature creative life. Often from voices of judgement, or not being validated or encouraged to develop their creativity.

Either way, Jesus comes into the center of our lives and beckons all the aspects of who we are us back home! He draws us into His Creativity and cultivates and matures our imaginations. He wants to shepard each aspect of who we are and grow each part into His fullest expression. We are allowing Him to convert the entire self, when we come to Him, and if there are aspects which He is not allowed to touch, we block His conversion process within us.

He wants to dialogue with our imaginations, our physical bodies as well as our thought life. He wants to reattach symbols and ideas, images and thoughts. He wants to make us one for His own enjoyment, and ours! May we become His poems pronounced clearly and ecstatically into His Universe!

Today, i want to talk about art as a part of ourselves. I want to call it our creativity, and say that it is part of being made in God's image.
Art is not somewhere "out there" or "over there", it is part of who God made us to be. We are symbolizers, we are creative, it is part of who we are.
What I see in the church still, is a lack of integration of its own creative life. There is still a sense in which art is good to use--to evangelize etc; but not to "be". The fact is we are made in His Creative image as well, and so should be symbolizing, creating etc as a church. The divorce of the arts from the church has happened on the ontological or level of being.

When a person has an unintegrated creative life, they lack the vital freedom and life and innovation and possibility that strengthens the other aspects of their life, such as management, finances etc. People need to BE creative, and to have this aspect of their lives giving valuable life to all the other aspects. This is also what one wants to see on a collective level in the church. The church as a whole needs to integrate or "bring home" its own creativity.

This is not just about harvesting artists, or using the arts to spread the word. It is about becoming a fuller expression of who the Church is meant to be. It is about the Church being a true symbol of Jesus Christ--which is its primary job, ie to be His "Body". Christ is creative, we are His Body, so we also should be creative. When our creativity is not integrated, we misrepresent Him. He is the Way, the Truth, and The Life. Creativity comes somewhere under the life aspect of Christ, and we desperately need this aspect of Him as a People.

So our motivation is to represent Christ more accurately. He is creative, so we also should be. Now what this could mean to the world is obvious. When the church is symbolizing the things of God, it is powerful. When her creative self is integrated, God can express very directly through her onto earth.

Three Stones:
Three stones, or internal obstacles remain unmoved. These three block the church from becoming the artist she is. Each of the three generations now on earth have had their own unique obstacle to integrating God's creativity into their own lives and leadership in the church.

The older gen, the generation of Billy Graham and many great men and women of God, had the stone of lack of vision for the arts; the subsequent generation--the boomers--struggled with "the museumification" of the arts out of fear of everyone getting too wild (stone of control); for gen X, my own generation, it is the wound of an unvalidated creative self, so the need to compete with or recover their lost creative past. All of these stones must be removed or rolled away, so we as a whole three generations strong can BE the whole symbolizer God wants us to be.

In my parents generation, there simply was not the "luxury of art", as they say. The nature of that season on earth, was less creative, others say. The fact is, God was building a foundation through them, and though there were men of great vision, vision itself seemed to not be the primary way God was communicating. Almost the opposite to our own generation.

With the boomer generation--the Jesus People generation--there was tremendous creativity, but coupled with spiritual immaturity in other areas. So that there came to be a fear of the creative unless is was pretty tightly bridled. So it was.

It was contained to worship, or some house churchy expressions. But not as in the beginning of the movement, allowed to run free, and just express authentically what God was doing in people. Still, there was a great creative breakthrough accompanying the entire Jesus People movements in California and Europe, which happened simlutaneously to the "hippie", "beat" and other arts and cultural movements in the 60's and 70's.

My own generation, which i would name the prophetic or creative generation, because i think we are meant to have the job of interpreting, naming, teaching, but from vision and through our creativity. We are basically the artistic generation. But there is a reason for this. God wants to communicate, prepare, instruct, warn etc. And He wants room just to BE more fully incarnate in His People.

Our generation took its creativity elsewhere, which is unfortunate. We did so for many reasons, but as we integrate into the church we can be models for an integrated creative life, at the same time as bringing this vital aspect to the whole expression of the Church. Our obstacle is earlier rejection from those in leadership from the previous generations. As, i said above, we felt the control wounds of the previous generation, or the indifference from the older one. So many of us left--not Christ, but the church. This is a sad testiment to the enemy effectiveness in dividing the image of Christ which the church is to meant to be. As many of us return to offer our gifts without the anger or hurt of rejection, we can be a vital part of rejuvenating the image of Christ in His Church.

It is a sign or prophetic act that many leaders of my own generation are feeling called to labour for the church again. And to step past previous wounding by it, to bring this vital new freedom of expression and room for the Kingdom to come into the building again. It should make the building much more vibrant and its structures more innovative. This is the mending of the generations, but more importantly, the healing the His Image in the Church itself.

Not about art, about God:

As I said, the issue is not just to bring the arts into the church, but to bring the creative aspect of God into our lives, into who we are as Christians. It is nothing less, than to let God's creativity live in us, in a daily and practical way. We are to be the most creative people on earth, as we are centered in and living from the God of all creation. The one who made heaven and earth. This is who we live in and from. And He wants to create through and in us for His Own pleasure of expressing Himself. As we allow God's creativity to dwell in us, we will feel His Life and freedom of expression well up in us and overflow out into a dry world. We will also begin birthing and projecting His symbols out onto our neighborhoods, cities and nations, in a way which helps mend and heal our world. As we become agents of symbolic healing, we will see many people start to recognize true symbolic associations in their places of work. Many will respond to this, and in this way, to heal the creative is an act of evangelism, it is indeed part of the good news, that all the earth is the Lords, and everything in it reflects and expresses His Glory!

Behold, God is one. His creativity is not separated from His Order, His Truth, His Knowldege etc. His artist is not separated from his bussiness man. In other words, He is integrated. We are made in His Image, and thus also need to be becoming one person. The one who justified, is also able to sanctify, and work in us, His own integrative process In other words, Christ is busy making us whole, and He will complete what He started! Jesus is Lord over every aspect of who we are! And wants to "bring home" our creativity, and make us whole or one as He is!

Artist tend to get solipsistic if not connected to thinkers or education. They need a context for their creative processes. Cistern gazing (getting lost in one's own process) or over insularity are central shadows in most arts communites I've lived in. This is why i think historically, artists have hung out with thinkers. The two are meant to occupy the same cafe.

The teacher and the role of priest or prophet go together. In Jesus you see both aspects. Clear thinking is essential for artists to be near, so that they do not turn their process in on themselves or towards some form of hedonism. Celebrity is not a high enough goal. Artists want to express something meaningful--even the zeitgeist of their time.
Having worked with the arts for many years, i see several reasons for a need for clear exchange between arts and education. One is that educational institutions tend to have resources to held nurture and birth creative projects. Another is that education needs the life and innovation artist bring. There is also a spiritual dimension which artist should carry which is desperately lacking at most educational settings.

I am terribly un-promotional. And a terrible 'networker' to boot. When it comes to publishing, something I love, the actual "publishing to an audience" part somehow eludes me. I like to write it, print it, or put it on the web but "publishing" implies that one is actually announcing and disseminating, telling others, cultivating an audience. As a writer, I've always found myself both in awe of and terrified of an audience. When I had a regular weekly newspaper column, sometimes with my picture included, people would recognize me, and I would sometimes cross the street to avoid them. It's such a horrible instinct!

All of this to say, over five years ago I wrote a book. It is called A Little Book on Poverty and Glory. I spent a few months writing it, cultivating it, then I spent nearly a year laying it out and designing it. I commissioned an artist friend of mine, Linnea Spransy, to illustrate the cover. And paid a good penny to have a talented designer at Jolly Design in Austin to put it all together. And then I worked with both an independent letterpress in Chicago and an independent hand-sewing bookbinder in Madison, Wisconsin to bring it all together.

The result is a wonderful book, hand touched from start to finish. The cover won a national design award from AIGA, and is now included in the permanent collection of their design archives in the Denver Art Museum and in the Rare Books collection in Butler Library at Columbia University. How's that for an unannounced book! And this hand-touched quality reflects the message, which is at its core about something quite mystical but missing from so much Christian spirituality: desire.

Because I put so much into the book, I was tempted to hide it for a long time. And I apologize for that. So here it is, an announcement, better late than never. I have about 125 copies left of first edition books. They are numbered and signed and for sale at Bread and Tongue Press. If you can't wait to buy one, you can do so right here:

Bread and Tongue Press was a small press I decided to start with a vision of producing handmade quality books and zines. There are future projects coming. In the meantime, I am working on a new book. It is bigger in scope than "Poverty" but I've recently discovered that I have actually been writing this book all along. My computer is stuffed with essays that have never been published anywhere but are tied together by a strong thematic string. Hopefully this book will not take so long to reach readers. Sometimes artists like me need a push, need an engine--an agent, a manager, a publisher--who stands outside of them and says "lets take this to people now and stop fiddling with it."

I am thankful for friends like Andrew Jones who just do it and don't think twice. He wrote a kind blog about my book. I guess I'd say it's my only promotional blurb!!

The arts need the church. The church needs the arts. Neither needs religion, but the true living Body of Christ, which contextualizes creativity within the nature of Reality itself. The art world and the church are meant to dwell in the spiritual Kingdom of God--their true context! They are also both to be part of a full expression of who God is.

The creative aspect--whether individually or collectively--represents an aspect of God Himself, and a vital, life giving aspect. You can trace the divorce between this aspect of God and the other aspects by looking at church history. It is not just that the church stopped trusting the arts or even supporting artists after the reformation; it was something more subtle, and far more threatening for both artists and the church. It would be analogous to the Levites, in Jewish history, leaving all the other tribes once having crossed the Jordan in the opening scenes of the book of Joshua.

We've had the same ole design for our bearable light website since 2002. I loved doing that design. All my previous designs were done completely with tables and spacer gifs (and if you're a graphic designer you know what I mean). A few years ago when I discovered that tables were going to become the backwards way of doing things I immersed myself in relearning stylesheets. (At the time, there were lots of web standards gurus railing against the losers still using tables--but lo, even till a year ago google.com was using tables! I thought it was all a bit funny--people take these things so seriously,)

Derek and I love the circus and especially the old Vaudevillian posters and advertisements. Sprinkled throughout the old site you'd see a hodge-podge of old fonts I dug up, clip art of Russian dancers, Irish jiggers, rabbis, pieces from Polish cyrk posters. I wanted it to look old and wordy, like a proclamation from an itinerant preacher. And Derek had one of those in his family--he ran an ice cream truck and traveled throughout the country giving away pencils that said, "Jesus loves you". Archie Butts was his name.)

Most of us can't pinpoint the moment a disappointment becomes bitter. Many of us experience repeated disappointments in the same area, and we still recognize the pain of being disappointed, but often there comes a certain point where we believe the disappointment and it makes a home deep in our hearts. Bitterness is basically unresolved grief that is very buried.

From then on out, there is no person or situation that can prove otherwise. Perhaps from time to time we feel glimpses of hope and forget about our pain, but it won't be long before we are disappointed again in that area. Not just because life sucks, but because bitterness is an invisible ruler that sits on its own throne of our heart, ruling with its own interpretations. Bitterness is a stronghold. By nature bitterness takes root when we choose to stop hoping past our experiences. For most of us this starts in childhood.

Sometimes both space and time foreground a God-event. Such was the case in Czech Republic last week, where I attended and performed in the launching of our friend Sasa Flek's translation of the bible. This is the first modern translation since the nation was under communism. It was a sixteen year labour, and is a gift for all of Europe. Many ambassadors and leaders from various nations attended the launch, which was an artistic and cultural restorational event.

The launch happened in Jan Hus chapel, where Hus originally preached the seeds of the reformation for which he was intensely persecuted. He had a dream that one day he would return and see the painting of the gospel stories on the walls restored by artists! On this day, last week, that dream started to come true!

I'm still looking at this idea of God's restoration of the symbolic realm of communication. Here I am looking at true associations versus false ones. The notion of renewing the mind, includes renewing the image center of it, or the imagination.

People, things, places each have meaning clusters around them. To reattach the true cluster of meaning around each thing is part of God's restoration of the earth. On a city level, each city has come to be associated with certain ideas--Paris, for example, is associated with romance, passion, beauty etc. Berlin with might or strength, decision making. A false association placed on Berlin from the war is abusive use of power. But we can see that this is not a true association. The fact that it is mighty or powerful city does not necessarily mean it is also an abusive city.You see in our time a real battle in the realm of what things mean. Jesus is the light, which in part is the understanding of what things mean. He is working to reattach things to their true meaning clusters, so that it is clear, that, for instance, woman's body is not associated with evil. Or bread with death.

my kitchen turned into a cookie shop.

OK, let me back up to the 1st Day of Christmas. I've lately been on a bit of a baking kick. Although my summer resolution to bake a loaf of bread a week has been rejected in favor of more pressing life work, I still have ended up scrolling through bread and cookie recipes, and stocking my cabinet with baking supplies for some future rainy day. Well, that rainy day came Monday, when it dropped to a bizarre 32 degrees (bizarre for Austin), looked overcast and about to snow and I figured that instead of writing, I'd spend the day baking.

This year I've decided to make cookie ornaments and gingerbread men, so the first day of Christmas was spent assembling lots of baking stuff. Icing bags, extra eggs, lots of flour and way too many sugar sprinkles.