Art is Faith: Hopeful, and Fragile.

One of the things I love most about the creative world (arts, literature, music, all these categories that overlap and interplay) is the way that, as people give themselves to art, there’s this beautiful interplay of the sacred and the secular. Of course, NT Wright would say that there is no such thing as secular anymore; that after the death and resurrection of Christ all things are reclaimed and made sacred. 

That may be true theologically, but in practice we know the difference. Maybe. Or maybe not. Because I think, particularly in the arts, the draw and the impulse is always to something transcendent. It is to create; it is to take on the task that God names himself with: Creator. Sometimes this takes the form of the offensive. Sometimes it takes the form of the mysterious. Sometimes it takes the form of tear-inducing beauty—or heart-wrenching brokenness. The thing about art, though, is that it is always trying to reach towards some sort of Truth. It is always trying to be more than it is. Art has a soul. Art has a piece of the eternal. Art transforms, even as it offends. 

Those emotional and spiritual places that art explores are actually places we see Jesus explore in the gospels. He tells offensive stories, like when a Samaritan is the hero. This story is so intentionally culturally offensive. It is combative. It is not a surprise that the Pharisees charged Jesus with blasphemy. The parables were deeply mysterious; Christ said he taught that way because people weren’t ready to see. They weren’t ready to hear. And in the same way I think sometimes art hits us in a visceral and subconscious place that maybe heals and maybe transforms, but we can’t handle consciously. We don’t have eyes to see, yet, the truth of our brokenness or bondage or frustration. Jesus weeps along with a grieving family when Lazarus dies—heart-wrenching brokenness—and then in a moment of beauty and power he commands death to heel. Jesus turned water to wine so the party didn’t end (because his mom asked him to, even though she knew it wasn’t “his time”), he aggressively forgave sin and violation, he consorted with the dregs of society, and he indulged in anger and violence towards those that would warp and control truth to their benefit.

Art is never done. There’s always more. There’s another story, picture, interpretation. Art is forever seeking. Faith, I think, is the same. It is never complete. It is never safe. It is always nested in this place of incredible hope and overwhelming fragility. I don’t think that’s an accident, and when faith moves from wonder to certainty, I think we ought to grieve the size of that god and the death of his art.

Art can get too esoteric for me at times. It can get too inaccessible. As I wrestle with what to do with contemporary poetry or conceptual visual arts, though, I'm challenged to find a way to receive it. Because maybe sometimes that’s what we need—just like we need, to really live in a place of faith, a Bible that’s at one time pacifist and at one time genocidal; it is poetry and symbolism and history and mystery. Perhaps, just as we encounter truth through art, we encounter truth through Scripture as we are offended by it, as we are challenged by it, and as we have to try to reconcile it to itself, to our experiences, and to our understanding of God. And perhaps, as weird as it seems, the world needs a Church that’s imperfect. That’s inefficient and broken and rampant with insecurity and misunderstanding. A Church that in the midst of its flaws suggests that there is process, and that is reason enough to have hope.

On Jacob and Esau and Psychopathy

I’ve been toying with the story of Jacob and Esau, really most of my life. I keep reading this story and every time I see something else. Sometimes I read it heroically—things make sense, align, God is provident. Sometimes I read it and it seems like every damn person is a villain. Jacob for stealing the inheritance, his mom for helping him, his dad for trying to give it to Esau against God’s will, Esau for trying to take what he traded to Jacob (even if Jacob was a real opportunistic jerk about it) ,and God himself for setting the whole situation up in the first place. 

I keep reading this story because it’s my namesake. It’s my middle name, Jacob, that I get from my mom and I get from the Bible. He’s the deceiver. He’s weirdly chosen and gifted, but deals in deception most of his life. It’s hard to figure out how this guy stays in God’s favor. Everything he does is a con, and he’s got the greatest ally you could ask for. 

And fair warning, I might be reading personal experience into theology. There’s a hell of a lot of projection that goes on in the theological world, particularly with bad theology (but even in good), and perhaps I’m trying to rationalize some belief set that makes sense of my family and my flaws. Or maybe the best we can do is read and interpret, to meditate on these stories over and over and dig into the core of who God is as best we can know him, given the cumulative sum of our own experiences. That seems to be how Paul approached scriptures, at least as far as I can tell.  

Regardless, this is what I have: my brain, my lens, my dysfunction applied to God. Sorry God. I’m doing my best. 

On to the matter at hand: there’s this really powerful theme in the story of favor and abandonment playing side by side. Particularly in the relationship between Jacob and his mom, Rebekah. Warning: hot button, completely biased zone for Patrick here. Buckle up. Jacob’s mother effectively destroyed Jacob’s relationship with his father and his twin, and really everything he knew. When she dressed him in goatskins and deception, Rebekah severed any paternal loyalty or brotherly affection that existed among Isaac, Jacob, and Esau. Those relationships became dead—and in doing so, Rebekah killed her own relationship with her favorite son. She would remain with Isaac, and send Jacob off (with God, but nothing else) into the desert. For the favor of a son, she removed everything that he had ever know, she destroyed stability, and she split a family. Guys, we teach this story to kids. There’s some awful, divisive, destructive stuff going on.  There’s no, “And Esau went to counseling for the rest of his life, because his mom really screwed him over on this one.” 

How do you even carry that weight as Jacob? It’s heavy. And honestly, if we want to take it a bit more extreme (why not, right?) let’s blame God, shall we? He’s the one who decreed that Jacob would have the inheritance. He’s the one who set the events in motion. He’s the one who broke up the family, so that his blessing could go on to the second son instead of the first. Jacob was complicit, yes. But he was a pawn in a plot of his mother to fulfill a prophecy by his god to give him everything—and to burn everything to the ground. Scorched earth theology. He lost the whole world, but I guess won his soul? 

So Jacob ends up fighting with God. They wrestle all night. And I’m not sure if it matters if it was really God or if it was Jesus or an angel, or if the whole thing is metaphor. Whether in act or in mind, Jacob was pissed, and Jacob was scared, and Jacob was swinging for the universe. He’s wrestling, I think, with his parents and—perhaps—himself. 

You see, what Jacob is about to face across the river is his brother Esau. But more than that, it’s his own complicit deception. And I wonder if what Jacob finds most offensive or daunting is the fact that he has to face his brother, whom he duped and abandoned, without saying that he’s sorry. Because I don’t think he is. Everything he has, if we believe the narrative, his flocks and his wives and his family, his great riches that drove him from his father-in-law’s lands, is because of that deception. What Jacob is wrestling, what Jacob is afraid of, is not just the confrontation. It is not just the presence of a God who seemed to bless deception, and at such cost. It is not his brother, waiting for him. What Jacob is wrestling is his own psychopathy. He’s not sorry. He wouldn’t take it back. He lied and he cheated and he took the greatest blessing he could find and at some point he has to acknowledge that he’s not a victim, but a willing accomplice. And he would do it all over again. 

So what do we do with that? According to the Bible, we fight. We get pissed and we wrestle and we refuse to be lost even though we feel irredeemable. And we take what blessings we've been given, even in the midst of chaos, and we hold to them until it breaks our hip.

The Essential Narcissism

I wonder if you ran an analysis of every blog—let’s go way back, xanga and wordpress and blogspot and all the others. Every angsty teenager or established professional. I’d bet the most common blog post out there is, “I’m starting my blog up. Again. But for real this time.” Followed by one or two posts, no greater blogosphere interaction, and a lull of 6-18 months. So in the great spirit of the social conscious, I, too, am starting my blog again.

I’ve sort of had this love-hate relationship with bloggers. Particularly with amateur bloggers. It has always seemed particularly narcissistic to think that, of all the nodes of information commerce on the internet, someone would actually care to land on and engage with mine. So I’ve dabbled but never committed, because of the scathing internal critique I had for myself in my declaration as a “blogger.”

But that changed. Actually, that hasn’t necessarily changed, but my perspective on it has shifted a bit. I’m reading this book by Tad DeLay (God is Unconscious) which is (brace yourself, this gets weird) a theological treatment of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The mass appeal is pretty obvious. But one of the fundamental ideas that I’m reading is the differentiation between the Imaginary (which is our ego, our conscious) the Symbolic (our unconscious) and the Real, which is a sort of indefinable concept of that which breaks into our Imaginary and Symbolic worlds and holds us to some sort of account—which then changes/shapes our new Imaginary and Symbolic approaches to thought and or unthought. Subthought? (I’m not a psychiatrist. My language may not be technically correct. I’m simply a nerd who likes reading hard stuff.)

So if this is true, that we all live in the Imaginary, then our experience with the world is, unavoidably, narcissistic. We can only identify the real as a function of our combined conscious and unconscious thought; everything is subjective, everything is filtered through experience, and everyone is without fail narcissistic. To deny narcissism would be to deny the sum of our experience, culture, family, upbringing, belief sets, etc. Essentially to deny narcissism would be to deny existence itself.

So here I am. Just another narcissistic asshole with a blog. I’m not sure what kind of market there is out there for a guy who like, among other things, fringe theological thought, psychoanalysis, sports, books, writing cathartic (which usually means bad) poetry, and now, apparently, blogging. But I’m writing again. And Seth Godin tells me that art without an audience isn’t art, just a journal. And odds are this will remain simply a journal, but in that odd chance that it connects with someone—as DeLay says, indirectly, which is the only way to connect truly—then good. If it doesn’t…well, I’m a narcissist. And an optimist. With that combination, I'm sure it will be heartfelt and meaningful and transform lives. Right?