The Gospel According to Spiderman

The Gospel according to Spiderman:

“With Great Power comes Great Responsibility”

I was recently having a wonderful conversation in which several things came up about my personal inspirations in life. I started relating the story of how Ben Parker has always been a profound influence on my life, as I discussed my goal for the school year and the developments in my person I would like to see. As I started relating the story of my desire to live up to my responsibilities before God.

As I started thinking about it, and relating the story, my desire to live up to my own responsibility to be less cynical and actually love others shed light on soemthing that has been in my mind but unexpressed.

I started conveying my experiences about being a former muslim and how Allah represents Plato’s necessary being and demiurge of raw power but does not have love. When thinking more closely on it in context of Ben Parker’s words, everything made sense.

I am a Christian because I cannot respect Raw power by itself because power is a burden of responsibility, and with that responsibility comes the necessary action that stems from it. God’s response to God’s power is Love. God’s will is that in the midst of great Power, he does not command things to be, but is gentle enough even in sheer unmitigated power to invite them into existence. Let be.

I saw God as the ultimate expression of the things i feel i need to do in my own life, which is respond to the burden of responsibility in love and humility rather than anger or cynicism. I saw God as the one who has undertaken it upon himself to act with ultimate responsibility to the ultimate burden of power and God’s unceasing action towards unceasing power is Love.

We see it throughout the Prophets, in His actions towards Israel, love, the burden of not destroying a people of unrepentant hearts, but setting them aside as his dearly beloved.

This is nowhere near what I wish i could express, but I wanted to throw it out there, see what happens.

So, in Short, The Gospel According to Spiderman is God’s action in response to his great power is the responsibility of love.

The Toad’s lesson on the arts

so i was sitting in my happy place contemplating and stumbled upon something marvelousa field full of mushrooms inhabited by fairies, the lights were wonderful and of course i tread lightly, so as not to disturb, and coming upon a little brook, i gingerly crossed over, mindful of the stones, so as not to shift them, and came upon a magnificent toad, who looked at me, and told me to paint, and gave me the tools to do so, and when i had painted, he asked me why, to which i answered, Mr. Toad, art is as these great mushrooms and this quaint little brook, it simply is, and must be seen

Untitled II

Do you believe me? I asked one night, as we drifted through the night air, heavy laden with the tears of our saints. It took a moment to register that feeling, a soft twitch, a quirk in your smile. Weary and tired we approached the old theatre, tried and beaten down by the vagaries of reality. But within, within was really where the treasure was.

You’ve always known how to look within.

So, we descended the steps, hearing our echoes carry across the proscenium, listening to the whispers around us. Covered in rain, I lit up a cigarette and sat beneath the heavy curtains, drawing lines across your skin in whispers of broken revelry. You never join me here anymore.

Your lipstick carried the chorus of a thousand souls that night, breathing out the softest hues of murder and lullabies. Stroking your rain laden hair with my cold fingers, I felt you near me, felt you shiver inside your skin. You looked at me, caught in those eyes I emptied myself to the stars, and told you your dreams.

You told me I was your everything, now just a reflection. That night under the blood red curtains, I sang you a song from another world, that old song, from another life, when we were both cats. In that moment your eyes lit up and looked beyond our theatre, fell into revelry, and absorbed the ecstasy of our commingled voices as you joined me in our endless requiem.

Covered with each other upon the faded stage, upon that scratched wood, worn with love and age and ending memories we found each other, we found a song. I always knew you would find yourself. I was a saint. I was yours that night, and I asked if you believed me. You fell into that endless gaze and rose from my lap to dance before the eagerly awaiting audience of chairs and moths in the flames. You twirled about like that little girl, smiling out in open fields.

You told me to believe in you. You told me that everything was in its place. You asked me to love you like an endless dream, to enter you, an inseparable reflection. You were my voice, and I was your eyes. Justice, used to pass between us like ceaselessly flowing water, freely given. We used to watch the day go by from the roof, waiting for our chance to join the sun in her home under the earth. The moon we knew was our guardian, and the twilight, our sweet abode.

Weary and tired, you fell to your knees and cried out, a panic swept over your face, undying torture, a shriek of terror locked on your face. Suddenly, you no longer cared for beauty. Your knees locked in that bitter position of weeping agony, feeling the breaking of a thousand hearts, hearing the cries of a dying child, you were endlessly above me. I fell to my knees, welcoming the terror, feeling that horror that is our existence I joined you. Weeping hearts and breaking bridges, burning lives all around, and nothing for solace save the sound of our own tears.

You asked me to believe. I stopped hearing the sound of running water.

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.

Kubla Khan

I have been reading this poem recently, and just really enjoy it, thought I’d share.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

This is Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I love this poem. Coleridge is not only an amazing poet but a brilliant theologian. You may want to look into some of his other works as well.

Close Your Eyes with Holy Dread

Close your eyes with holy dread…

Prayer, prayer for me is a moment of holy dread. Not always, sometimes I forget to be afraid of God, other times I am welcomed before Him.

This is what it is to have religion, to come into an encounter with God, holy dread. I remember the first time i ever had a vision of God, I was filled with overwhelming fear at first, there was an objective otherness that enshrouded my mind and captivated all my senses, it was like the skin cells in my pores were flooded with something just outside them that demanded they stand at attention.

Without waiting, i am caught in an endless interlude of presence and absence. To know God is to divest in yourself that means outside yourself by which you come before God for worship. Life is not about fitting God into my schedule, into my story, it’s about worshiping objectively the ONE who deserves to be worshiped simply for the fact that He is. There is a dread weight that draws tight the strings upon my heart in the face of overwhelmingly objective holiness.

God is the true objective, and I with all my subjectivity can but wish myself to survive such an encounter. To be stricken with the weight of holiness, and fall before that Holiest of holies, this is my desire. To be filled with Holy Dread, not for lack of love, not for the sake of distance and removing the personal, but because I desire the power of his holiness to enshroud me about with the awareness of an objective God that lies at the center of my heart, as the fuel of my life.

I dunno, i guess i don’t really have a point in writing tonight. I just am thinking about this holy dread, it’s something i feel i used to know at sometime, some days I feel fallen, divided in myself. I apologize first to myself for failing to unite into a whole the various persons that make up my being. I am not an academic, I am a Christian. I am not just a brain, I am a person. I do not seek to choke out my spiritual life with academics, but to be a Christian amid and between academics, always in the power and presence of the Spirit.

I have no real point tonight, only to say this much:

Father, forgive me my sins, hold me where I am weak
Lord, give me strength to awaken my heart in the midst of my trials
Jesus, I am weak and have failed, I have forgotten to take the straight and narrow path
I have sinned, and cast stones, stolen and forgotten the widows
I have taken bread from the orphans and forsaken your name
I have looked in the mirror, and forgotten what I look like
You are gracious and compassionate
You are the Holy One,
The Great Redeemer is in the midst of his people rejoicing over them with singing
I am not subject to myself, but entrust myself to you
Father, heal this broken weary heart, whose words you can commit to memory,
whose longings you alone can truly know
Help me, fill me with that Holy Dread
Fill me with abounding love,
You have done a great and mighty thing in my life
Let me not forget you in my busy ways
May my heart be near you always
even closer than my very breath
For in you alone do I find my completion
You alone deserve my being,
For you have called me to yourself,
The Spirit says “Come”
The Bride says “Come”
Maranatha,
I await the parousia in my own life,
I eagerly await your kingdom
let it come on earth as in heaven and redeem all things
give us bread that we may share with others,
water so that they never thirst again
give us hope Lord, in One Faith, One Hope, One Lord,
One Body, One Baptism, One God
You alone are truth,
Your word is truth
Be unto me that inseparable vine
so that I may be the branches
You alone are Father,
My heart is overjoyed at your beauty,
Thank you for your reconciliation
I dedicate myself to you again,
Be my healer, as I seek to be your son