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Paul Nash, “The Division of Light from Darkness”

I recently read Karol Wojtyla’s (St. John Paul II) retreat text God is Beauty: A Retreat on the Gospel and Art. Delivered to a group of artists in Krakow during Holy Week in 1962, this set of talks invites the retreatants to reflect on the meaning of the beauty of God, the creative life and process, and the centrality of prayer in the creative life.

It is this last theme that I’d like to briefly reflect on in this post. Wojtyla’s point is not simply that it is important for these artists to pray, but also that prayer itself can be a creative act. He makes this connection around the theme of silence.

Before turning to silence, Wojtyla offers a simple thought about prayer so often forgotten—“The essence of prayer is conversation.” Conversation, of course, requires at least two participants for the requisite back and forth, but conversation also requires silence. Even if only for the smallest sliver of a moment, in a conversation one must, at some point, pause to listen. The lack of the pause, either because of ignorance, or more likely, the anticipated terror that the silence will last forever, often keeps prayer from being a conversation. While the first mistake of prayer is never to begin, the second mistake is to leave no room for a response, no space to listen.

Reflecting on the necessity of silence in prayer, I am reminded of a section in Anthony Bloom’s Beginning to Pray. When Bloom was a newly ordained priest, an elderly woman described a problem she was having with prayer. She told him that she had been practicing the Jesus Prayer for years and years but that she had never gotten anywhere with it. Boldly, Bloom simply asks her if she had ever paused to listen. Instead of only speaking, he suggested, she might try listening.

Though initially offended by his brashness, the woman decides to try it. Here is what she reported back to him. Initially, the silence gave her the chance to appreciate where she was and what she had. The silence gave her space in which to cultivate gratitude, even for what we would call her modest circumstances. Then something else happened, as she slipped deeper into silence:

“I perceived that this silence was not simply an absence of voices, but that the silence had substance. It was not absence of something but presence of something. The silence had a density, a richness, and it began to pervade me. The silence around began to come and meet the silence in me…All of a sudden I perceived the silence was a presence. At the heart of silence there was He who is all stillness, all peace, all poise.”

To connect this back to Wojtyla and the retreat, listening in the way she describes is a creative act, and risky too, like all creative acts, because it involves a kind of surrender of control. It is that fear of surrender that so often keeps us from allowing silence, let alone slipping into silence. If we consider the lack of silence in our lives at all, we are likely to blame those things we believe are unique to our time and place—distraction, technology, busyness—but the spiritual masters tell us that there has always been a deeply human aversion to silence. The fear of silence is the fear of absence, the fear that silence is nothing but void. The woman’s reflection on the power of silence, however, points beyond this fear. To trust in silence is to trust that what seems a void might become a womb.

Wojtyla’s point is that in prayer the spiritual life is birthed in silence and by analogy much art is birthed in silence too. Like Bloom, Wojtyla describes the necessity of listening in prayer:

“Yet prayer is a conversation. Perhaps we don’t have to say so much; perhaps we don’t have to tell God so many of our grievances, but simply listen. What does he want to tell me? Perhaps underneath all of my words, grievances, and regrets there is some issue that he wants to bring to the fore and point to! And that is the turning point! The moment that sometimes determines my entire life! Because if he speaks to me, he is doing so in order that I might become a better person, more similar to him. After all, I am—that is the assumption—similar to him, created in his image and likeness.”

A second observation is that when we treat prayer more like a conversation built on back and forth and on silence, it begins to conform to the shape of worship itself. As in prayer so in the liturgy. When it comes to worship, we don’t start the conversation. We join the conversation. The liturgy is built on this fundamental rhythm, the back and forth of God speaking and us listening and responding.

Worship, like prayer, depends upon the rhythm of conversation. Liturgy, the work of the people, only really works when there is a back and forth, a call and response. The call of the liturgy finds its source in the creative voice of God, in and through his saving acts. All worship, but liturgical worship in an explicit way, moves to the rhythm of back and forth, the call and response, a rhythm sourced by a more fundamental rhythm—God speaks/creates/redeems and his people respond. The praise of creation, and Wojtyla calls this the prayer of creation, is a response to the creative act of God, not simply the first set of “Let there be’s” but the ongoing, upholding, and loving word that sustains creation now.

The Song of the Sea recorded in Exodus 15 is the ecstatic response to what God had done in delivering them from Egypt and through the Red Sea. I mention that particular example because that song may be the oldest bit scripture there is and so by extension may be the oldest strain of liturgy that we have, the first recorded response to the saving act of God. The song was a creative act in itself, the very human desire to praise what is praiseworthy, to craft the language and the rhythm of music in a way that befits what the song sings of, which leads us to a the final observation—Wojtyla insists that work can be prayer too.

As he says, “There is no issue in our lives, there is no activity, there is no effort, which cannot be turned into a prayer.” His admonition to the artists is that they be people of prayer, who enter into the conversation, who practice silence, letting the seeming void become a creative womb, and this too applies to their work. If they will see it in this way, their work too might be prayer because their creativity can be a kind of conversation, wherein silence becomes the seed bed of creativity, and where the work itself is a response to the voice they hear in silence.

Images taken from https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/paul-nash-genesis/

Here’s a taste:

As we were planning the ministry year at St. Bartholomew’s, David+ Larlee and I believed that coming into 2024, we needed some kind of space where we could not only have conversation around important but controversial topics, but also where we could learn how to have those kinds of conversations. It was not enough to have difficult conversations; we wanted to provide people with the tools to have those conversations in distinctly Christian ways.

So, we decided to stage five conversations over five months, using the book The Deeply Formed Life by Rich Villodas as the basis for our conversations. In the book, Villodas discusses what he calls five transformative values: contemplative rhythms, racial reconciliation, interior examination, sexual wholeness and missional presence. As we planned these evenings of conversation, our instinct was that the format of an Alpha evening would provide a structure for the kinds of conversations we imagined having around these important but sometimes difficult topics.

The first principle we took from Alpha: Begin with hospitality. We knew that every evening would begin with a shared meal. We wanted to model conversations where people were “quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19).

The key word from James is “slow.” For things to be slow, we had to let conversation unfold over the pace of a meal.

The inherent slowness of a leisurely meal sets the pace for conversation about topics that cannot be understood at the speed of a tweet. In practical terms this meant that we reserved the patio of a local Italian restaurant so that our table groups could enjoy good food and drink as we engaged in conversation.

Check out the rest here!

Christianity Today published a reflection I wrote for Good Friday about the church as Christ’s wounded body. Here’s a taste:

On Good Friday especially, we turn our gaze to the man of sorrows who bears our affliction. The paradox of our faith is that in his wounding is our healing, so as important as it is for the church to acknowledge our own wounds, it is even more crucial to look at the one who bears our wounds in his wounding.

Christ’s wounds hold not only the promise of our healing but also the mystery of the church’s origin. As the early church meditated on the Crucifixion, they turned their attention to a particular verse, John 19:34, which records that “one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.”

In meditating on this verse, many in the early church insisted that from the wounded side of Christ, the church was born. Origen (A.D. 185–254) captures this conviction in a potent phrase: “From the wound in Christ’s side has come forth the church, and he has made her his bride.”

The church was born from a wound. The early church saw the last Adam hanging heavy on the cross in the sleep of death, but from his side, his wound, a new Eve was brought forth—the church. Born as we are from that wound, the church journeys with Christ through Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. In his passion is our own path and our own healing.

Check out the rest here.

I recently had the pleasure of having a story featured on The Unseen Story. You can listen to the podcast here. I talk about the role of beauty and art in my spiritual life, and I mention the experience of seeing these incredible sketches by Michelangelo in the Medici Palace.

Here is what I said about seeing those sketches while on trip to Europe with my high school humanities teacher: “There was one particular moment when we were in Florence, I was sitting with a friend. And my teacher, Mr. Biggers came up and said, “Hey, I have these extra tickets to this exhibition at the Medici Palace do you want to go?” I didn’t know what it was, but I just said, “Yes.” And then we go into the Medici Palace and we go down into this basement. There are these drawings on the wall, and I’m like, 12 inches away from these drawings on the wall. These were drawings that Michelangelo had done in preparation for the Sistine Chapel. And maybe it was just the proximity of it, maybe it was the surprise of it, but it was just a very overwhelming moment. And again, I would say that was probably the voice of God, just connecting to me with me through beauty. And that’s been a huge part of my story.”

Check out the rest!

A little late, but I still wanted to post this. In my Ash Wednesday sermon , I described the mash up of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s as the Barbenheimer of days, an initially odd pairing that are somehow both about death. Here is a little poem I wrote, reflecting on some verses from Song of Songs, but refracted through the themes of Ash Wednesday.

Stronger than Death

The priest’s finger spells
an ashy cross upon my head.
That single letter speaks
and weaves a tale of dread,
tracing my beginning,
portending my dusty end.

But death is not its only word.
That cross speaks too of cure,
of death undone by death,
of our physician and lover pure,
who heals us by becoming
the disease we all endure.

Christ’s cross is Christ’s kiss
upon my brow that seals
a love stronger than death.

“There is, apparently, an expression in French to describe the work style here. It is “un travail de bénédictin.” It means “a Benedictine labor.” It describes, as the academic and essayist Jonathan Malesic put it, “the sort of project someone can only accomplish over a long time through patient, modest, steady effort. It’s the kind of thing that can’t be rushed…It’s work that doesn’t look good in a quarterly earnings report. It doesn’t maximize billable hours. It doesn’t get overtime pay.” Anything a Benedictine monk produces is produced well. Built to last. Form and function meet. We see this in the abbeys Saint Benedict founded fifteen hundred years ago that are still standing today and the ornate woodworking that adorns the chapel at Our Lady of Guadalupe Monastery.”” From Scarcity Brain, Michael Easter

“When one experiences a profound setback in the course of an enviable life, one has a variety of options. Spurred by shame, one may attempt to hide all evidence of the change in one’s circumstances. Thus, the merchant who gambles away his savings will hold on to his finer suits until they fray, and tell anecdotes from the halls of the private clubs where his membership has long since lapsed. In a state of self-pity, one may retreat from the world in which one has been blessed to live. Thus, the long suffering husband, finally disgraced by his wife in society, may be the one who leaves his home in exchange for a small, dark apartment on the other side of town. Or, like the Count and Anna, one may simply join the Confederacy of the Humbled.

Like the Freemasons, the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.” Amor Towels, A Gentleman in Moscow