Guest Sermon on Art Making
Deer Isle-Sunset Congregational Church
Deer Isle, Maine
February 26, 2017
Beauty As Worship
When I thought of calling this sermon "Beauty as Worship", I considered adding the subtitle No Matter What You Believe or Don't. As this small poem of mine says:
Dragonfly, you land atop my writing hand
tiny cinnamon stick with gossamer wings.
In your intimate touch an I-Thou experience
no longer than the moment between breaths
I cannot hold you; only the back of my hand
remembers what we might have been trying to say.
That mystic, Cistercian monk, writer and poet, Thomas Merton writes in his book No Man Is An Island, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” You should know as you listen to me today that when I use the term “art”, I mean in it the broadest sense. I understand that currently it is poplar to refer to “makers” -- which skirts around that old chestnut of a question “Is it art or is it craft?” It feels like art when you find yourself returning again and again in pleasure, to find more meaning in what is made. We humans do love to make meaning.
On his web site, Robert Fulghum, popular author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, says “Everyone has doors in the living room of their lives that they assume are locked. Doors that lead to artistic expression. People say "I have no talent -- I can't dance or sing or paint or write poetry or play an instrument." More often than not the doors are not locked, just closed. One may turn the handle, open the door and pass through into a larger life space.”
When I went to high school there was tracking. I chose to take Art as a major subject but that conflicted with College Prep English. That meant that I was able to attend what would now be called the magnet program of the nearby Philadelphia Museum School of Art where I decided that lacking paraphernalia such as black stockings and kitten heels I was not arty enough to become an artist. It also meant I headed off to college never having written an essay or read Shakespeare or any poets. In my English class we had talked a lot about what reform school in New Jersey was.
In college I became editor of the literary magazine and was inducted into the honorary literary society known as the Quill Drivers. Unfortunately for me, those one-upping girls challenged me caustically saying “Haven’t you ever read anything?” “Not in English” was my unguarded reply since I was then studying Latin poets and taking German and French at the time.
So I did not major in English after all but I wrote prose. My subject was the nature that I loved and studied as a Biology major and Masters degree student, as far as I went since women were not welcome in entomology at that time. I did not write poems until we moved here. A birding friend, Marion Stocking, co-founder of the esteemed Beloit Poetry Journal, told me “I love your poems but don’t bother sending any to the Journal; your work is not in style. Fortunately I have since been asked to make poems for the dedication of the Penobscot Narrows bridge and the Community of Christ Church in Stonington. Former Maine Poet Laureate Wes McNair chose three of my bird poems for his Maine Poets anthology. I have found my style.
Although I stand before you in a choir robe, I did not sing a note from the time I was twelve until I was fifty because my own mother mocked my singing of Silent Night. So I was silent. I was a member of our very inclusive choir when I fell while ice skating one moonlit night and became the first LifeFlight rescue from the Island. I sustained a Traumatic Brain Injury and for several years I could not physically write a word, did not recognize letters, couldn’t visualize pictures. No art making at all for me. Because my voice control was damaged, I stood over there in the side aisle so I would not throw others off when the choir rehearsed Although I did not sing in the Sunday service, I felt supported.
My small motor coordination is still not what it was, so imagine my delight when I discovered that there was an app called Procreate that one uses on an iPad. Hold down your finger or stylus after you make that wobbly line and magically it straightens. Make a mess and press Undo and the blob vanishes forever. I do not love technology but the struggle to learn how to use it has been worthwhile.
That is why I agreed to stand before you now. Back when we came here, before Haystack, there was no art teacher in the school so I taught watercolor painting for several summers. That means I know that the aging lobsterman about to retire with the shoulder now ruined from hauling was once a lad who wielded a paint brush. Might he paint again now? I hear the poet in the man who pumps my gas or fixes my plumbing. My electrician is not the only one who makes art.
I like to think of Deer Isle as the community where everyone makes art. It will take some doing however, for our community members to feel sufficiently comfortable with one another—those who do not dress like me, drive the same kind of car, or who talk funny. And hardest to deal with, there is our Inner Editor, our very worst art critic. You hear that inner whisper: “My art—my singing, my painting, my writing—is not good enough; nobody wants to buy it; nobody wants to publish it. Somebody will laugh at me.” So your Muse retreats and goes into hiding. Call her back! Every Sunday Amy tells that we are loved just as we are. Grace. Trust me, that is what making art truly is.
Whether you follow the breath or follow the brush, making art is a form of meditation. Making art is wordless. That means beyond arguing about how people should name God. Art making seems quite intrinsic to being human. Like the artists who made the oldest cave paintings that we have, dating back well over 30,000 years, perhaps we are not making our art just to communicate with other humans. Those hand prints, those dancing animals are deep underground, not in a cave that is a shelter, not in a cave that serves as a community space for early humans to gather when they are not busy hunting or gathering. Deeper. Think about that.
The oldest extant Western paintings as such are the mummy portraits from Coptic Egypt. Using pigments in wax, encaustic, artists for several centuries around the time of Christ made amazingly personal portraits of the recently deceased. We have these now in museums preserved because of the desert conditions of the mausoleums where the caskets were stored. They were not made to be on display. Again I ask, so who is the intended audience?
For many more centuries, in Europe, the Church had the power and commissioned wooden altar panels to illustrate Bible stories to a public that was largely illiterate. The center panel usually pictured a very white and very dead Christ. Side panels would show Mary and baby Jesus and saints—and the donors. After revolutions swept Europe and the Age of Enlightenment dawned and commerce made fortunes for Europeans who sent ships out to colonize the world and bring back the goods, then paintings tended to be about stuff, the riches that proclaimed status for those who hired the portrait artists.
Not my style. Nor am I talking about the current fashion for “installations”, or abstractions that galleries have hyped to sell for terrific prices. Not poems that you struggle to unpack, short stories that simply start and stop, sound that is so dissonant it seems just noise. Certainly not the snarky style so prevalent throughout much of today’s media platforms.
None of these are the style for the kind of art about which I speak. It is not hard to think that Bach, Mozart and Verdi created their heavenly harmonies with great inner joy. But think, beyond words is a realm available to us all, this very day, in spite of styles which come and go. Am I suggesting that you find the strength you need to live the way you believe you should in some inner cave deep within yourself?
Marnie, now are you getting mystical on us? I usually don’t call it mysticism; I call this art making a kind of contemplative practice, prayer, image-making, art for an inner calm, making art where we use words like heart, soul, faith, and other such non-definable, untranslatable words. And it’s all about beauty.
I close with the Thanksgiving poem I made at the request of Win Pusey, our beloved former choir director.
And sometimes at a windless dawn or quiet dusk
comes a slack tide moment when all the bay, island, world, holds its breath
when roily seas stop their warring struggles.
The water clears like glass and you see clear in
to the deep of things, to that holy center
beyond where there are names for things
- my god or yours -
where we hear the waves sigh Give
and the shore answers Thanks
Give thanks Give thanks with each breath of living being.
Amen.
Deer Isle-Sunset Congregational Church
Deer Isle, Maine
February 26, 2017
Beauty As Worship
When I thought of calling this sermon "Beauty as Worship", I considered adding the subtitle No Matter What You Believe or Don't. As this small poem of mine says:
Dragonfly, you land atop my writing hand
tiny cinnamon stick with gossamer wings.
In your intimate touch an I-Thou experience
no longer than the moment between breaths
I cannot hold you; only the back of my hand
remembers what we might have been trying to say.
That mystic, Cistercian monk, writer and poet, Thomas Merton writes in his book No Man Is An Island, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” You should know as you listen to me today that when I use the term “art”, I mean in it the broadest sense. I understand that currently it is poplar to refer to “makers” -- which skirts around that old chestnut of a question “Is it art or is it craft?” It feels like art when you find yourself returning again and again in pleasure, to find more meaning in what is made. We humans do love to make meaning.
On his web site, Robert Fulghum, popular author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, says “Everyone has doors in the living room of their lives that they assume are locked. Doors that lead to artistic expression. People say "I have no talent -- I can't dance or sing or paint or write poetry or play an instrument." More often than not the doors are not locked, just closed. One may turn the handle, open the door and pass through into a larger life space.”
When I went to high school there was tracking. I chose to take Art as a major subject but that conflicted with College Prep English. That meant that I was able to attend what would now be called the magnet program of the nearby Philadelphia Museum School of Art where I decided that lacking paraphernalia such as black stockings and kitten heels I was not arty enough to become an artist. It also meant I headed off to college never having written an essay or read Shakespeare or any poets. In my English class we had talked a lot about what reform school in New Jersey was.
In college I became editor of the literary magazine and was inducted into the honorary literary society known as the Quill Drivers. Unfortunately for me, those one-upping girls challenged me caustically saying “Haven’t you ever read anything?” “Not in English” was my unguarded reply since I was then studying Latin poets and taking German and French at the time.
So I did not major in English after all but I wrote prose. My subject was the nature that I loved and studied as a Biology major and Masters degree student, as far as I went since women were not welcome in entomology at that time. I did not write poems until we moved here. A birding friend, Marion Stocking, co-founder of the esteemed Beloit Poetry Journal, told me “I love your poems but don’t bother sending any to the Journal; your work is not in style. Fortunately I have since been asked to make poems for the dedication of the Penobscot Narrows bridge and the Community of Christ Church in Stonington. Former Maine Poet Laureate Wes McNair chose three of my bird poems for his Maine Poets anthology. I have found my style.
Although I stand before you in a choir robe, I did not sing a note from the time I was twelve until I was fifty because my own mother mocked my singing of Silent Night. So I was silent. I was a member of our very inclusive choir when I fell while ice skating one moonlit night and became the first LifeFlight rescue from the Island. I sustained a Traumatic Brain Injury and for several years I could not physically write a word, did not recognize letters, couldn’t visualize pictures. No art making at all for me. Because my voice control was damaged, I stood over there in the side aisle so I would not throw others off when the choir rehearsed Although I did not sing in the Sunday service, I felt supported.
My small motor coordination is still not what it was, so imagine my delight when I discovered that there was an app called Procreate that one uses on an iPad. Hold down your finger or stylus after you make that wobbly line and magically it straightens. Make a mess and press Undo and the blob vanishes forever. I do not love technology but the struggle to learn how to use it has been worthwhile.
That is why I agreed to stand before you now. Back when we came here, before Haystack, there was no art teacher in the school so I taught watercolor painting for several summers. That means I know that the aging lobsterman about to retire with the shoulder now ruined from hauling was once a lad who wielded a paint brush. Might he paint again now? I hear the poet in the man who pumps my gas or fixes my plumbing. My electrician is not the only one who makes art.
I like to think of Deer Isle as the community where everyone makes art. It will take some doing however, for our community members to feel sufficiently comfortable with one another—those who do not dress like me, drive the same kind of car, or who talk funny. And hardest to deal with, there is our Inner Editor, our very worst art critic. You hear that inner whisper: “My art—my singing, my painting, my writing—is not good enough; nobody wants to buy it; nobody wants to publish it. Somebody will laugh at me.” So your Muse retreats and goes into hiding. Call her back! Every Sunday Amy tells that we are loved just as we are. Grace. Trust me, that is what making art truly is.
Whether you follow the breath or follow the brush, making art is a form of meditation. Making art is wordless. That means beyond arguing about how people should name God. Art making seems quite intrinsic to being human. Like the artists who made the oldest cave paintings that we have, dating back well over 30,000 years, perhaps we are not making our art just to communicate with other humans. Those hand prints, those dancing animals are deep underground, not in a cave that is a shelter, not in a cave that serves as a community space for early humans to gather when they are not busy hunting or gathering. Deeper. Think about that.
The oldest extant Western paintings as such are the mummy portraits from Coptic Egypt. Using pigments in wax, encaustic, artists for several centuries around the time of Christ made amazingly personal portraits of the recently deceased. We have these now in museums preserved because of the desert conditions of the mausoleums where the caskets were stored. They were not made to be on display. Again I ask, so who is the intended audience?
For many more centuries, in Europe, the Church had the power and commissioned wooden altar panels to illustrate Bible stories to a public that was largely illiterate. The center panel usually pictured a very white and very dead Christ. Side panels would show Mary and baby Jesus and saints—and the donors. After revolutions swept Europe and the Age of Enlightenment dawned and commerce made fortunes for Europeans who sent ships out to colonize the world and bring back the goods, then paintings tended to be about stuff, the riches that proclaimed status for those who hired the portrait artists.
Not my style. Nor am I talking about the current fashion for “installations”, or abstractions that galleries have hyped to sell for terrific prices. Not poems that you struggle to unpack, short stories that simply start and stop, sound that is so dissonant it seems just noise. Certainly not the snarky style so prevalent throughout much of today’s media platforms.
None of these are the style for the kind of art about which I speak. It is not hard to think that Bach, Mozart and Verdi created their heavenly harmonies with great inner joy. But think, beyond words is a realm available to us all, this very day, in spite of styles which come and go. Am I suggesting that you find the strength you need to live the way you believe you should in some inner cave deep within yourself?
Marnie, now are you getting mystical on us? I usually don’t call it mysticism; I call this art making a kind of contemplative practice, prayer, image-making, art for an inner calm, making art where we use words like heart, soul, faith, and other such non-definable, untranslatable words. And it’s all about beauty.
I close with the Thanksgiving poem I made at the request of Win Pusey, our beloved former choir director.
And sometimes at a windless dawn or quiet dusk
comes a slack tide moment when all the bay, island, world, holds its breath
when roily seas stop their warring struggles.
The water clears like glass and you see clear in
to the deep of things, to that holy center
beyond where there are names for things
- my god or yours -
where we hear the waves sigh Give
and the shore answers Thanks
Give thanks Give thanks with each breath of living being.
Amen.