distilled thoughts

It feels like the past three weeks have nothing to show for them except an excessive amount of thoughts in my head and a much-increased credit card bill. Ok, and some new friends, long-overdue conversations with dear friends, and an almost-daily nap. Nowadays, I nap more than my son does, which is a sad proof of my physical exhaustion, the passing of time and also the certainty of 2 hours of daylight to myself. I have been incredibly spoiled, please understand, and I know that full well. Many kids give up naps when they're 2, or earlier, and many kids also were never trained to sleep well or don't have the disposition for it. Or they're just stubborn as hell and enjoy making their parents miserable. That has not been my experience, thank God, and it has been an incalculable mercy to me, with all my other issues and fragility, that my son at least sleeps well every day and has a cheerful disposition. My name might have been in the news otherwise, one of those "bad mommy" stories that make one shake one's head and tsk over, and say "What's wrong with this world?" God has had mercy on me in so many ways. Let me count the ways, so I do not wind up complaining about my lot in life or my sufferings as an artist, great though they may be...(pity me, right?)

I was so, SO encouraged to go to the Transforming Culture Symposium. It was a concentrated dose of excellence, fellowship, sound teaching and camaraderie. It was confirmation of my calling to be an artist, and a challenge to offer the work of my hands as a sacrifice to God. It was also a reminder that it will not be easy, and that I cannot attempt this or anything alone and unsupported. As Barbara Nicolosi said (my favorite speaker there), "There are two types of people in this world: artists and people who support them." This, I think, was partially in jest and also dead-serious. None of us create in a vacuum, unlike God, though we do need vast amounts of alone-time to examine and cogitate and experiment. The challenge is to emerge from that time alone to be with normal people, to relax our brains enough to enjoy things and people just as they are, without trying to improve them or put them to other uses or exercise our creativity and criticism on. To resist the temptation to further separate oneself from people, i.e. "the further I get from the things I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get," a cogent quote from Robert Smith. He knows a lot about the melancholy, the sucking pull of stardom and the drive to keep tinkering with something even years after it's been released.

I've also thought a bit lately about how much I love liturgy, formal liturgy like what I experienced at my Lutheran school, and the Episcopal church I attended in Virginia. One of the speakers defined liturgy as, "whatever a church does during their worship time," which is quite a catch-all and probably offended some people who are more "go-with-the-flow" types. But everyone gets into a pattern, or some sort of order, whether they call it a liturgy or not. The problem is that some liturgy is just plain bad. Sometimes there is such an obsession with novelty that we wind up sinning and offering something unacceptable to God. The benefit of a formal liturgy is something I think Annie Dillard said: "It's what people have said to God for hundreds of years without getting killed." That isn't the reason I like liturgy, but it's comforting all the same. To know that God's ok with these things being said to and about him--it gives us something to go on, a form to emulate and a mercy that we're not just randomly pushing worship buttons until one explodes in our faces. But I digress.

My thoughts are more along this line: I have too many ideas in my head. Each idea presents a plethora of other ideas, solutions to that idea, explorations of offshoots of those ideas, and on and on. Sometimes the result is something brilliant, but most of the time I'm merely overwhelmed and paralyzed by the infinity before me. My friend talks about creativity as "thinking inside the box," rather than outside--we need limitations in order to be creative within those parameters (whether the parameter is the edge of our canvas, choice and limitations of materials, subject matter, etc...).

So, where does liturgy fit into the chaos? It is simply this: it is an infinite comfort to me to know, each week, the structure and order of the liturgy. Though there are changes with the church year, they are quite minimal and the over-arching form remains the same. Even within that form, there is a great deal of leeway with hymn choices, sermon topics, seasonal meditations, and even the list of people to pray for each week. It is so lovely to come from the chaos and disorder of my own mind to the unchangeable-but-always-new character of God.

Another thing that was touched upon by several different speakers during the conference was the notion of time, the church calendar, the ebb and flow, the feast/fast nature of marking the seasons. It seems that we are getting farther and farther away from dependence on seasonal restraints; we can get strawberries year-round (though perhaps not great ones), as somewhere in the world it's always springtime, travel takes so much less time that we are not as awed by distance and vastness, we're annoyed when it takes a couple minutes to download a large file, Christmas junk is available for purchase even before Halloween. There's a constant rush to go on to the next marker, the next holiday, the next opportunity to consume goods, and very little time to actually enjoy the moment we are experiencing--even to experience the moment as it is. It's so much harder to wait on God, to submit to time, to savor or to mourn. A week after the Virginia Tech massacre, someone was quoted saying, "I am still having a hard time getting over it." A week?? I daresay you're having a hard time. There's time again. How long does it take to grieve? To answer prayer? To celebrate? How efficient is God in all this? The short answer: He's not. He's excessive in every way, both good and infuriating excessiveness.

Our culture is so obsessed with "happiness" and success, putting a brave face on, getting over things and moving on, cutting losses and medicating difficult ones. It seeps into church life with happy-crappy worship songs, sickly treacly Hallmark "artwork" glamorizing a time that never existed, and urging people who are depressed to just pray more and have more faith. Hardly anyone talks about death, or suffering, or depression or difficult sacrifices in church--unless it's a glib reference to the cross, or the vague hints that "I've struggled with a lot of stuff in my life, and now I've grown so much in the Lord." The songs are all about how much I'm praising You, how it will all be ok in heaven and I want to dance forever. No more sorrows rolling like sea-billows. I need those sea-billows, I need to know that I am not the only one scrabbling onto a piece of driftwood in the dark, while a glistening cruise liner slides by, deaf to my shouts for help. Conversely, when I'm the one on the beautiful ship, I need to remember the dark mystery and terror of the waters below me, and keep the search lights on.

There are many, many other things that have been germinating in my mind since the symposium, or were called out of the recesses there, which I will need to go into at another time. There's enough for a book or two or three, though that will have to wait.