What Does the Resurrection of the Son of God Mean Today?

I was thinking about my Christian experience today, and as I was considering the implications of a certain emotional state, I got to thinking about the Victory of God in Jesus, and the idea that despite all things God has won a victory in this world and that ultimately, I am participating in that victory.

 

Sure, today I am not in the best state, but I have hope. Hope reaches into me, to lead me towards the victory of God. I am the essence of all consciousness, being constantly resurrected from a fallen state. I am baptized into the body of the Risen Lord, and united with him by one Spirit, made one flesh with him by that same Spirit. I am not forsaken, but am embraced by this beloved who ushers me into his presence with glee, as I approach with trembling reverence.

 

My tears are merely prayers in a different language. In them is the hope of glory, as true suffering somehow brigs true redemption. Our ideals are not God’s ideals. The Risen Lord shows us that in suffering is the cosmos replaced where the chaos once was. Idealism is ultimately backwards, and in those ideals I am further from the Resurrection of the Son of God than closer.

 

So it occurred to me that in order to truly experience the meaning of this great and glorious resurrection, it means that I must not shed the ideas that I have thought were ideal, I must also embrace those which are seemingly backwards to me.

 

Suffering is not the emptiness of dejection, though that is experienced, it shall prove to be more integral to the resurrection of my person than should I never have suffered. The world, I can’t speak for, but for me, for Eli, this suffering is my invitation into God’s plan of redemption.

 

So, as I enter into the lower depths, I know that my war with the forces of evil is not in vain, as I leave behind those things which would lead me from the narrow path, I find pleasure in the backwards ideals of God. Sipping a Lady Grey tea blend and wondering about all this gives me pleasure, and as I pursue my future, I realize that in time I will get there, regardless. Today is a day, tomorrow shall be another, and ultimately, it is completed in such a way that my purpose will be accomplished, I have faith and hope that the path set before me is not in vain and that which I feel called to complete will be completed because I have dedicated myself to it and to enjoying today.

 

I am enjoying beauty, the joys of mentoring, and being mentored, the beauty of togetherness, the bliss of separation, the ebb and flow of presence and absence.

 

Beautiful.

 

As you read this, I don’t think you’ll understand half of what was said here this day, and for that I am sorry.

 

I don’t blame anyone or anything for these things which we pass. We are all journeying towards something, and I am whole in the redemption of my body. I am whole in my expectation that this is going to be well. 

 

So, brothers and sisters, my little children, remember that suffering causes the redemption of things outside ourselves, and in the end, it is not about how God is going to save me. It’s about how God is going to save the universe through me.

 

Love one another, as I remember to do the same. Hold fast. Stand strong.

 

The Resurrection shall live through me today, and in this we are well pleased.

Alive

To feel great suffering is to be alive in today’s world. For with every great deep and chaotic valley, we know we are truly alive among the sedated masses that stumble in and out of bed obedient to every passing whim of authority, be it the job they serve, the advertisements they attend to, or simply the silent desperation of anesthetics for the soul, to feel pain is to be alive.

In past ages we’ve had pain to deal with, agonies of the soul, quiet meditations to life’s big questions. Today, we sit in an emulsion of sound and lights and flashy colors and distractions, so that when we do contemplate ourselves, we despair. We ache and hurt because we are not at rest, we live like the kings of ages past, and yet have not found happiness, and as Nietzsche pointed out, we are the last man, we are the final ones, who will claim with our sleepy eyes, “We have invented happiness.”

So, know then that when you suffer, and ache, and have riddles to ponder, great questions to overthrow and overcome, when you are tortured, you are alive. You are not sedated. You are empassioned, you are not anesthetized against yourself, you embrace your weary bleeding heart, and carry your heavy cross across the landscape of humanity, calling forth with clarion call, ‘this is the way!’

Have we become so blind? So as not to feel our souls retreating as our distractions flood us with less energy, less life. To contemplate is to be alive, to be conscious of oneself is to be a self, without this, we are shells.

Such heavy passions such as burden the hearts of the weary, these are the things which make us alive. We either live in great tragedy and ask why, or have no tragedy at all and are resigned to sedation which is the worst of all evils that can happen to the human soul.

To suffer is to be aware.

Though this by no means resolves suffering, know that you are alive when you feel, your passions are still beating in your weary heart, better than nihilism of the soul, better than sedation, better than a lack of identity, you are still alive.

And in that life we find our passions steady beating, that solemn agony.

It still echoes across our hearts and minds, in the visions of our memories, in the hearts of all children, the knowledge that suffering is within us all.

We are alive in this, and as we near that great consuming fire, we find that we are all alone, outside the walls of normality, outside the jurisdiction of sedation, outside the facets and boundaries of acceptable. We are not acceptable, we are prophets. We are not the joyous announcers of salvation, but the harbingers of awareness, bringing suffering to the forefront of our minds, in order to answer the question which has never been answered successfully. From Buddha to Jesus, to the New Age and beyond, no one can answer.

The Outside is Within.

Dogma and the Imagination: Architecture

What is faith? Faith is that by which we are called to live out in awareness of something at times beyond immediate perception.

We live in a beautiful world, a world of wonder and amazement, you can feel it in the waves. It echoes in the wind, passes through the mountain peaks and into the valleys, fills the earth with life and green fields endless beauty on every side. We live in a world of color and inspiration, a world of music and sound and light, and warmth. We live in a world full of God’s glory. We can feel it at times, looking at the sunset, listening to the world around us at peace and rest. We find ourselves being in it, captured by it, alive through it, and reacting to it.

We live in a world full of chaos and greed. Full of vicious cycles of violence, where reason out strips beauty or ethics, where efficiency is king. We live in a world full of money, and slavery. Bloodshed is on every hand and the taste of blood on every lip. All are responsible. Nature is a competition and war zone for survival. Predators hunt prey daily and all nature itself knows is violence, terror. Politics rage around our heads as nations fling themselves at other nations and the threat of nuclear war shows us how much our own state of mind is fallen in the world today. We live in a world where people kill people for pocket change, where disaster lurks around the corner, and chaos is on our breath. We have bullet shaped teeth a penchant for violence, oppression in our every step, our institutions enslave us, we enslave others, and no one is free. We are a fallen world. Our planet decays under our cities, our strip mines destroy landscapes and our landfills hide our disasters.

The world is hideous. The world is beautiful.

Both of the above statements are true.

So what do we do about it? What are you and I supposed to do about a world that’s out of whack and thirsty for violence? It takes a move beyond the cursory glance into the news to do something about it. We live in a society where everything needs a microwaved, ready packed, do-it-yourself-in-seconds, prepackaged answer. But you cannot do that with life’s big issues. It takes moving out beyond the 30second attention span and into a meaningful reflection on what it means to be in the world.

So, what is the answer to our problem? I believe it is The Creative Imagination.

Art has the ability to bring with it presence, to create presence between the observer and the object being viewed. I think we can all agree that when we find a truly beautiful piece of art, we move beyond our everyday into something peaceful, serene, soothing, and tranquil. This does not mean all art is this way, but at the same time we can find those works that inspire us with their great beauty. Now, art is not just a frivolous and empty experience that makes us feel good about ourselves for a few moments. I believe that art is an integral part of humanity, and subsequently of Christianity. Why? Because through art, we experience the presence of something beyond ourselves, it takes us to a reality outside ourselves where we can admire our world with the beauty that it has. Furthermore, as a creation of beauty it glorifies the Creator God, who is the Triune Lord that we confess.

It would seem to me that art is going to play a central role in God’s reconciliation of all things. Because art is a means by which we can create beauty, observe the world, and celebrate what we see. This is not the only type of art though, nor does it need to be. While it is beautiful to paint a natural setting, there are other beauties, shapes, and forms, colors, shadows. Art can also show us darkness, the horrors of things past, nightmares from the minds of others, sadism, and death. But this is not the way art has been done before. Where modernity would seek to tell us to move along and be functional, rational and effiecient about the world, we must say ‘No.’ Where modernity would tell us that art is purely political, purely forms or minimalism, we cannot agree.

Art teaches us to stop, to breathe, to appreciate. It inspires us to see the world through different eyes, through another mind, through another perspective, through another heart. Art is not an aside to the Christian gospel, nor does it stem from scant and scattered verses about the arts in the Bible, rather it is integral to God’s plan to set things to rights within the created order. Art is the creation of repose, maybe secondarily, but how many of you have ever painted or taken a picture and found a rest and peace in that moment? The arts inspire us, bless us and heal us, they are a reminder of a world beyond modernity, beyond efficiency and offices.

Not just art alone though, because art can be done by anyone with talent. What it takes is Creative Imagination, inspired by the Creator.

The imagination is not a frivolous empty place where imaginary things hide in our closets and scare our children, the imagination is an active participant in the nature of human being. The imagination is an integral locus of what it means to be human. The imagination needs freedom to express itself and create beauty in our lives, without it we lose a pillar of our existence. The modernist pursuit of function actually served to our detriment, because the buildings of the era, like the thought of the era homogenize and reduce, alienate and divide. This is not supposed to be, created spaces should cultivate relationships and human interaction rather than divide people and separate them. The Creative Imagination can create these spaces.

For an assertion on the nature of Imagination, I briefly turn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose work and reflection on the imagination serve a great good in society, and whose voice and contemplation point to something higher than himself. For Coleridge, the Imagination mediates between a world of real objects and a real presence, an “I am,” if you will. But the imagination does not create reality, it creates poetry. It creates a willed experience of the real. It is consciously willed creative control of the potentials within something that characterizes and signifies what the imagination is to Coleridge. It is a conscious mediation between the real world and something other, through the exercise of creative control that allows the mind to create something new and beautiful between the real world and the mind perceiving it.

As Christians, we should call for architecture that speaks meaning, and as Christians in architecture, spaces need to be functional but should also capture relationality between people and the space, should inspire imagination and create a place of reflection and interaction. We need to exercise willed creative control of a space in order to properly imagine all that space could be. Art is not divorced from life but is part of it, creating the environments we live in, and the places we have our interactions. If In Him we live and move and have our being, should not the spaces where that living moving and being reflect the glorious splendor of the creator and inspire something within us?

Have you ever considered what the architecture of our age says about us? We have no open spaces, we have symmetrical monstrosities that make us feel crowded in and insignificant. Our architecture worships our intellect and the feats of humanity’s vertical achievement, but reduce horizontal space to a trivial necessity in order to go higher and higher. I’m not an architect, not a philosopher of architecture, but we cannot let industry create our world, so that there is “a coca-cola advertisement in every village” [1] and a megalithic apartment complex every three blocks. This is not they things should be, buildings have voices, and symmetrical anonymous, identical, faceless buildings impose conformity and oppression. An age that promised enlightened thinking has stripped us of our freedom, an age that sought to create the ultimate humans has alienated their individuality, and stripped them of their power.

Have you as an architect or building design engineer considered that function is important but buildings can be used to point to something greater? To God Himself? Not as an empty sort of homogenization of architecture into cathedrals or religious buildings everywhere, but each space as its own voice and way of expressing the glory of God. Each space should be cultivated to the full extent of what it can be in itself, not as a universal style of distinction, but within each space a maximization of space, utility and relationality creates the Christian vision of what architecture means to us. Colin Gunton claims that one of the chief failures of modernity is the lack of reconciliation between universality and particularity. What this means for architecture is simple, either our buildings all look the same or they are disjointed and fragmented spaces juxtaposed over each other in a struggle for supremacy. What culture, what architecture needs is unified diversity.

Postmodernism is attempting to restore to particularity those things which belong to it, such as individual significance and importance, however, we cannot allow postmodernity to flatten our sense of space, place and being so that all things are equally valid. When all things are equally leveled out, they are all equally reduced into identical categories, none can be more beautiful, more special, or even individual anymore, and thus they all become boring. It’s like school uniforms, even in the uniformity of everything, it’s the people with the accessories that stand out.

Art and its mediation of presence to us through a created reality draws out the beauty within our own imaginations and inspires us to do something more with ourselves than merely be functional. Functionality is death if it is all that we do. We cannot possibly attempt to have any meaning beyond our bank statements and credit history if we do not actively engage in something beyond functionality. What is the purpose of life?

Certainly it is not to edify and construct institutions at the expense of our identity, to be functional at the expense of ourselves. It is something above and beyond that, and mediating between the horrors of the world and what can be done requires imagination. It requires the creation of beauty in the world, yes in art galleries and on sidewalks and in the streets, on the highways, and byways, in the villages and towns, among the lower classes as well as the socially privileged. The horrors and evil in the world requires us to actively engage the world with imagination, to take control of the situation and create beauty where there was none. Not in the sense of buildings alone, or paintings and inanimate objects, rather the imagination should be used in every aspect of life, actively engaging the world and discovering ways to beautify and cultivate a richer experience from things for the individual as well as the community.
At the core of the imagination is not an arbitrary idea, nor an idealism that is fragile, for Christians the core of the imagination should be the dogmas that inspire us, for the sake of active engagement in the world while not being of the world. The Christian Imagination, that creative force of the will that resides within us and inspires us should look to God’s affirmations of what it means to be in the world for guidance. Christ came to redeem, restore and reconcile all things to himself. He will someday reconcile and redeem all things, and it has already begun in his disciples, the Church, this is a core dogma of our faith. What this means for our artistic merit is that we are called to reconcile all things to God actively, by the Holy Spirit and the active imagination we can participate in. Not that this should reduce art to paintings of Jesus and the disciples, or make everything about looking religious, but really, it’s a celebration not just of spiritual things but the entire creation. Everything has the potential to be beautiful, or redeemed into beauty.

Recently reading an article by N.T. Wright, he mentioned a sculpture of the tree of life, made entirely out of decommissioned weapons.[2]

The world is good, and was created to be so. In acknowledging this we don’t need a specific apologetic for aesthetics, other than ‘for the glory of God.’ We can celebrate the goodness we already see within the world. We have the right to glorify God who created the beauty we do see. We have an imagination that can envision the way things should be, and point us to that reality.

The horrors of the world are real, but in the midst of them we can find peace in the One who is already Lord, and who will continue to bring reconciliation to all things by His Spirit. Christianity is calling…and is asking us to imagine what the world, redeemed and filled with God’s love looks like, and to do our part in making that happen, to create beauty that reflects the glory of God in what we do, the space we live in, the places and ways we exist.

Practically, we can say this: At the center of all the ugliness in the world is a sacrifice that calls us to change the way we think about things. There is for us a man on a cross, who shows us where God has entered into our pain, our suffering our emotional state, and said “enough.” There is a man who has entered into the heart of where the world feels pain, and he is calling us to go there too.

Imagination is not about feeling peppy, but rather is an active engagement in thinking creatively about reconciliation. The Christian Imagination calls us to enter into that same place where the world feels pain, and actively imagine what the love of God looks like there and to set about the task of expressing and ushering in that love, be it in architecture, music, art, sculpture, painting, reflection, philosophy, theology, conversation, ecology, and everything else.

Eulogy for a Friend

This is an older work republished.

And I would ask the sky to shed tears for the lost, including me, for I am beyond any land I have ever known. Destiny whispers faint memories in my ears, and the voices make my mind wander beyond good and evil to a place I have never known before. Everyday is just another trial at the hands of judgment, and penance is an unachievable task for I am forgone the choices of my past existence. I suffer destitution for the sins of my fathers, and I weep for the ashes of the ancients.

I would ask the sky to shed tears for the fallen, for they know not how to stand. In the face of their enemies they have collapsed, and life is no more for them. I would ask the guardians of dreams to guide them through the shadows of this world and into the next. For this is the way of things. Faith teaches us to fight for the ones who can no longer struggle, to stand for those who have no faith, to speak for the voiceless. I would pray that the fallen are found in other dreams, other walks of life, not this poor existence.

I would ask the sky to shed tears on lovers for they are all so lost in this world. May the blessings of Arcadia be their guidance to the true path of this life, for not all is lost without love. The stars will weep for the lovers who are lost by their feuding, and untimely loss will fall away. This is the dying day, when the wise are lost, and the lovers are brilliant. This is the day when the lords of chaos will weep with at their creation of this love. Tonight is a night when all is lost and the world is ended with a single whisper, in the end the skies will always weep.

I would ask the skies to weep for the lament of the sinners, who try to tear away from the lies of this world. There is no freedom in this world. Fresh tears will caress the dead as they pass.