Category Archives: Art

Art can be a source of great healing, expression, and self-discovery. It can also be a powerful tool when used together in community.

Church for the 21st Century

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Shawna's art notes-remix

Art notes by Shawna Bowman

I just returned from a 3-day leadership consultation with the national offices of the Presbyterian Church (USA). My good friend and colleague, Rev. Shawna Bowman was there too. She wrote/drew the amazing notes above, while we were talking about new things that are happening or that we wish were happening in the churches.

The gathering left me very hopeful about the larger church beginning to shift into a more creative era which addresses and engages our contemporary age more effectively. I met many inspiring leaders who are trying new things and facing many of the same challenges faced by Grace Commons.

One new friend is Dawn Hyde, the pastor at Mission Bay Community Church. She wrote a nice overview reflection on our group time in Baltimore this week. You can read it here. In part, she said:

I am renewed in my belief that God is still working among us and that we now have better ideas for how we can share our resources (intellectual, financial, artistic, and physical) with one another. We dreamt together about PCUSA TED talks, Craigslist for the church, church partnerships, funded sabbaticals and rest, organic new ministries found and funded quickly. We reflected on how we are called to be open… to God, to each other, and to this new reality that we experience in the church. We worshiped together and gave life and breath to words of Isaiah 43 “Do not be afraid. I have called you by name you are mine… [PAY ATTENTION] I am doing a new thing.”

What I love is that it’s not just pastors and leaders in emerging or “presby-mergent” churches that are doing new things. Pastors in traditional churches of all sizes are trying to do new things, too.

So I hope we’ll be able to develop some ways to share our resources better and quicker and support each other’s dreams and creativity.

Art notes by Shawna Bowman

Art notes by Shawna Bowman

Be Amazing

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Santa by Dale SawyerFor the last two weeks I’ve been preaching on 1 Corinthians 12, the verses where it talks about us having a variety of gifts empowered by the same spirit.

It’s a message that Paul was giving to the church at Corinth, so that all people in the community would be honored and so that people would use their gifts for the common good.

Charismas for the Common Good
1 Corinthians 12: 1-11
In the first sermon, I talked about my dad’s giftedness as a carpenter (he carved the santa pictured here), and how my mom once said to me, “he’s so amazing” when she was talking about the woodworking that he does. I actually started a blog for/about him over here: Handcrafted Woodworking.

(As an aside, I have several boxes of really cool hand-crafted toys by him that I’d love to sell on his behalf. Message me if you’re interested. But, I digress…)

My point about my dad is really a point about all of us. When we step into the gifts that God has given us, and do the things that we love, the things that heal and center us, then we all become amazing.

If we do that, then together we are much more than we could ever be alone. This is how we become a blessing for the world, by receiving and living into the blessings that God has given us.

Body of Christ, Body of Humanity
1 Corinthians 12:12-27
In the second sermon, I talked about how important it is to work for the healing of the world from a center of Love and not from guilt or anger or fear. To accept that we are loved by God, to forgive ourselves and to honor ourselves (and each other), is not to become passive, but to become brave.

Coming from this core place of loving and being loved can make us brave enough to work to change the world.

Audio links here:
Nanette Sawyer- Charismas for the Common Good
Nanette Sawyer- Body of Christ, Body of Humanity

Unambiguous Appearance of God

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icon-epiphany

Icon in-process of being created by Grace Commons and St. James Presbyterian Church.

Today is Epiphany, a day on which we celebrate the appearance of God in human form–the incarnation.

Although we celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25th, today we celebrate the first “appearance” of Jesus to the Gentiles. This marks his being seen by the Magi, the “three kings.” They symbolize the first non-Jews who saw Jesus and his expansion of the circles of people he would touch.

The word epiphany is used in the New Testament to refer to Jesus’s birth, but also to his post-resurrection appearances and even to his future waited-for appearance.

A related word is theophany, the appearance of God. This is God being manifest in a burning bush, or a pillar of cloud or fire, or speaking to Hagar or Abraham in the form of an angel. The epiphany of Christ is also a theophany, an appearance of God.

One definition of Theophany is an “unambiguous appearance of God” such that the person perceiving God has no doubt that it is God. Well, when do we ever experience an unambiguous appearance of God these days? For me, God does not speak out of clouds or bushes when I walk by. I have to look for God in much subtler ways.

There’s no star for me to follow. There’s no manger at the end of my looking. But there is a place for me to fall to my knees, to be overcome with awe. Or to cry out in need for a strong and reliable comforter.

Those are two times when I often feel God’s presence. First, when I’m around incredible beauty, and second when I feel a very great need. These two kinds of situations crack me open.

What opens you? What makes you have an epiphany of God? What kind of moment or situation helps you open to God?

Here is my Epiphany sermon from this morning at St. James, in which I teach about traditions of celebrating epiphany, reflect on my own experience of epiphanies, and invite people to practice marking the doorways of their homes in blessing, as is traditional in Eastern Orthodox and some Catholic churches.

I love learning different ways of honoring and encountering God through other Christian traditions.

Visual Prayer–Dear God, are you here?

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These original photos were taken at Lake Michigan on my iPhone 4 through the instagram app. I tweeted them with words of prayer, and this is how I prayed that day.

I put the slides with words into a PowerPoint slideshow, then turned that into a Quicktime movie and uploaded it to YouTube.

In the slideshow, the words fade in and out with special timings which you don’t see in the movie. It’s a bit choppy here, but gives you a way to watch it without downloading the whole PowerPoint slideshow.

If you *do* want to download it, there are links below to two different sizes. The quality of the slideshows is much better than the YouTube video.

Below, you will find the words to the prayer, which I made up while looking through my camera lens. It’s really much, much better with the photos. They are the center of the prayer.

Visual Prayer by Nanette Sawyer-8MB pptx file

Visual Prayer, by Nanette Sawyer-53 MB pptx file

Dear God, are you here?

I am listening.

The way does not seem straight.

I am worn down by the waves.

I am trying to see the patterns.

Everything changes all the time.

I can’t go back the same way.

Can’t go back.

Some of it looks familiar.

The waters are rising up to my neck.

Come to the aid of your people, Holy One.

Foundations of old have passed away.

The footing is uncertain.

Bit by bit I have been worn away.

From where does my help come?

Never have you forsaken me.

Answer me when I call.

You are my strength, from morning ’til night.

Lead me, O God.

Make a way out of no way.

Listen to your people.

You are our strength and our redeemer.

With you at my side, how can I be afraid?

In and through all things you guide me.

Creation is so big, and we are so small.

But we are inside it.

All of us are.

All of us.

All of us.

You have heard the prayers of your people, O God.

May your steadfast love endure forever.

May your steadfast love endure forever.

May your steadfast love endure forever.

Amen and Amen and Amen.

Wordle!

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What fun! This week I was introduced to a new website: wordle.net.

Just type in words, or paste in large amounts of text, and “create.” The larger the word, the more times it appeared in your text.

This wordle is based on a combination of words people wrote down during the Taize Vespers gathering on Sunday, a recent community retreat, and the most recent Community Life essays on Wicker Park Grace/Grace Commons’ website.

This is a word picture of my faith community.

 

Born of a Woman

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Last year (2010) in the weeks leading up to Christmas, we did an art project at Wicker Park Grace during our Sunday Gatherings in which we transformed Christmas advertisements into a spiritual symbol. The idea was to disconnect from the excessive commercialism that Christmas has become, and reconnect to the underlying spiritual story of how the Divine came into human form through the birth of Jesus.

We got the idea from our friends at House for All Sinners and Saints and their pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, in Denver, CO. They did the project in 2008. They called their icon, Our Lady of the New Advent. They did theirs on poster board, but we wanted something more long lasting so we used a 1/2 inch thick art board and painted details on top of the collage.

I describe the project, tongue-in-cheek, as a paint-by-numbers Mary and Jesus project. The first week, with the background painted in green but Mary and Jesus blank white space, we thought it looked like an alien snowman from outer space. Each week we painted in a new color as background, and during the prayer time at our Spiritual Practice, people brought forward torn up bits of Christmas advertisements they brought from home, and glued them into the color-coded section.

Artist Monica J. Brown guided the project, and painted in the details, the faces and hands, at the end of the project, using an Ethiopian icon as a model for the features. Now this piece of art, collaboratively created, holds a central place in our gathering space on Sundays.

For pictures of the project all along the way, check out this set in flickr:
Theotokos icon project

Catching the Light

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When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

Psalm 8:3-4

While I was on retreat in Maine this June, I did some experimenting with my camera. I aimed it toward the sky, which was filled with more stars than I ever see in Chicago. I tried to photograph them in the dark. I have a good camera, which I can manually control to hold open the aperture and expose the image for a long time.

The stars without the camera were incredible, but once I got the knack of photographing them, even more stars became visible. The camera allowed me to see further, and more deeply, than my bare eyes could.

Metaphorically, what are the lenses that help us to see more light? How long do we have to look, before the stars shine through?

Seeing these stars appear through the camera made me think about how much bigger than me everything is. My body, my eyes, (my mind) don’t have the capacity to stay open long enough to take in enough light to be able to see what is really there.

The psalm I included above asks, “what are human beings”, but the stars made me think, “what is God?” God, like the stars, is so far beyond my capacity to see.

Click on the image below to see more clearly the photo I took.

Stations of the Cross (original art)

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In 2007 the Wicker Park Grace community created original art representing the Stations of the Cross. Traditionally, there are 14 stations, each representing a moment on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion. We added a station 15 to represent the resurrection and complete the story.

The idea of creating these stations was to bring the ancient story of Jesus’ death and resurrection into contact with the contemporary stories of our lives.

Detailed digital images of all the stations are posted on blogger at: WPGrace, Stations of the Cross

If a station has a scripture associated with it, the scripture is included as a comment in the blog (scripture says…)

Working your way through the stations, praying and meditating on each one, is considered to be equivalent to going on a pilgrimage to the locations in Jerusalem which are spoken of in these stories.

Several of the pieces were interpreted/created by individual artists in the Wicker Park Grace community, but others we designed to be community art projects, like the one shown here. This is Station 3: Jesus Falls for the First time. It is a 30″ x 24″ collage on canvas board which was created by eleven people.

Seeking to place ourselves in the Jesus story, we asked ourselves, “What things cause us to fall down in our lives, and what things help us to get back up?” This grew out of the question of what might have helped Jesus get back up when he fell repeatedly that day as he carried his cross to the place of his death. The images and words to the left of the cross push it and us down. The images and words to the right are pushing the cross back up and inspiring us to keep standing back up too.

Self-portrait :: Story Cycle :: Worth Remembering

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These Are Stars in my HairWell, I am down for the count with this cold/flu everyone has. So instead of watching TV from bed, I worked on an art project that the Wicker Park Grace Art Forum peeps have been encouraging me to do.

I’ve shared at the Forum some work I’ve done with collage and digital manipulation of photos, and I shared a really interesting book with the group about self-portraits. So Virginia said I should make one.  This is more than one, though, it’s a story cycle told all through one photo, digitally edited to show different elements of the story.

One of the things I love to do with my iPhone is use the many photo apps to apply various filters to photos I take on the phone. I was playing around with this and started naming the photos based on what emotion I thought the altered image portrayed. After collecting about eight of these, I realized they could tell a story if I put them in the right order.

That got me excited! So I began creating more images and imagining a general plot-line that could be used. The plot changed based on the images that came out of the process. I ended up with 71 images, all derived from one self-portrait photo I took with my iPhone.I Thought of My Lips

“The process” includes applying filters on top of filtered images. Some of the iPhone apps also crop and resize or put borders around the images. This all becomes part of the diversity of image which tells the story.

You can read the story and see the images here. Self-portrait :: Story Cycle :: Worth Remembering You can also watch it as a slide show. Be sure to “Show Info” along the top, so you get the words of the story. This obscures one of the eyes in a couple of significant images, but it creates a nice effect of showing the images transform from one to the next. I think I’ll try to make a nicer slide show of this piece.

Something Deep Opened In MeWorking on art like this is a process of making something beautiful and moving which I find healing. I made a healing portrait of a friend by using some of these digital alteration techniques, and surrounded his face with words of inspiration and hope.

Making that piece for my friend reminded me of Sybil MacBeth’s book called Praying in Color. I was praying in color for his healing when I made that, and I think I was praying in color for my healing when I made this Story Cycle. I called mine, “Worth Remembering.”

Shawna’s live painting at Moltmann conversation

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Painting by Shawna Bowman

Painting by Shawna Bowman

Shawna painted this 8 x 6 foot mural during the Wednesday night session of the Moltmann conversation. It took her a couple of hours. She began during the welcome and painted all through the opening presentations and the communion service.

After it was done, it was auctioned off to participants of the conference and ended up at LaSalle Street Church, right here in Chicago! LaSalle Street Church is where Rob Clearfield also plays–he calls it his morning church. Rob, for those of you who don’t know, is the music director at Wicker Park Grace.