I gave a talk this afternoon titled The Contemplative Artist at Willow Creek Church’s Towards Wonder Arts Conference. Here’s a brief excerpt from my talk. I opened with a poem by Wendell Berry, The Wild Geese.
The Wild Geese
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over the fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
“What we need is here. It’s hard for us to believe this is really true. Most of us believe that what we need is anywhere else but here. But when St Paul writes, 'For in him we live and move and have our being’ he is not handing us a notional theological abstraction. He is saying that we live in a God drenched universe. He is agreeing with the Psalmist when he says, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” A few hundred years later St Augustine put it this way: “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” A few hundred years after Augustine, Pascal wrote, “God is that reality whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
If all this is true, if God’s loving presence suffuses the whole of creation then we don’t need to maintain this manic, striving life. Everything we need is already here.
Sadly we don’t see it. We rarely enjoy the urgent immediacy of God that is in everything our eyes behold and in every human transaction in which we participate. As a result of our narcissism, utilitarianism, and unbridled restlessness (thank you Ronald Rolheiser and Andrew McNamara) there is a tragic gap between what we see and what is available to us to see.
So what makes a contemplative different?
A contemplative is someone who is being graced with a new perceptive appreciation, a capacity to see God in all things. They are arrested by God’s presence in the wind moving through trees, his majesty in the sight of a cardinal perched on a snow laden bush, by his glory in Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony.
The contemplative has a growing capacity to recognize the Vestigia Dei—the footprints of God everywhere she looks. As a result of receiving these new eyes the contemplative moves through life radically amazed, full of awe, graced with a rich awareness that all of life, as poet Elizabeth Barrett Brown wrote, is “crammed with God.” In short they are living lives full of wonder.”
Thanks to Willow’s Nancy Beach for inviting me to speak on a topic that probably pushed the envelope for some people. She is a remarkable and thoughtful leader.
I am flying back to New York tomorrow morning to sing with Rob Mathes in Manhattan at the Rubin Museum of Art.
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