everyone's spatial

easter poster

2009-04-21T07:59:00.006-05:00

Below is a poster I made for the HopeArts Easter exhibit, which was 'garden' themed.

storytelling part 2: good friday

2009-04-21T07:26:00.007-05:00

I went AWOL from blogging for a few weeks because I was caught up in preparing for the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services at my church and working on the Easter exhibit and installation. I think I'm mostly recovered from Holy Week and I've started writing again. You may have noticed that I didn't quite get to the 40 entries that my 'writing for Lent' post suggested. Oops.

Anyway, I'll include some of the introductory and concluding remarks that I made for the Good Friday service here to bookend my previous introduction to Lent. You can hear the whole service online here. It's rather long but it's worth a listen, and you can tell a bit about what the service entails from my intro:

Welcome:

Welcome Hope Chapel, welcome Christ Church, welcome guests, welcome brothers and sisters in Christ.

Let’s pray.

Father, we acknowledge and welcome your presence here among this, your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon a cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Bless our speakers this evening with courage and comfort as they generously share their stories with us. Grant us open hearts to receive your word and your work in our lives. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Our story and God’s story

Each year as we walk through the seasons of the church, from Advent to Christmas, through Lent to Easter and on to Pentecost, we re-tell the story of God’s work for us.

Moses told the Israelites to ‘remember this day on which you came out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery . . .’ (Exodus 13:3)

Jesus told his disciples at the Last supper ‘. . . do this in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22:19).

We need to hear the story of God’s grace in our lives over and over and over again. I need to hear the story of God’s grace in my life over and over again.

But God’s story is new to us each time we hear it because we’ve lived through another year, found new trials and new joys, and because the story is so rich we can hear it many times over a lifetime while always discovering new and beautiful things in it.

On Good Friday, we come to the second-to-last chapter of the story, the execution of our Lord, Jesus Christ, on the cross. It’s not the last chapter where we find out if everything turns out ok (or not), it’s the second-to-last chapter:

- It’s like the moment when Odysseus finally arrives home after 20 years but he’s lost his ship and all his men and his home has been taken over by suitors who, believing him dead, want to marry his wife.

- It’s like the moment when Frodo finally makes it to the side of Mount Doom, but he can’t muster the energy to go on, the battle outside the gates of Mordor is going badly, and Gollum is lurking behind a rock waiting to attack.

- Or it’s like the moment when it looks like Wile E. Coyote’s Acme Catapult will finally help him catch his prey and he can have the roasted Roadrunner dinner he’s always dreamed of.

It’s the darkest moment, right before the end of the story.

As we’ve done for the past eight years for our Good Friday service here at Hope, we gather together to hear seven of our friends use the ‘Seven Last Words of Jesus from the Cross’ as a starting point to share their own struggles with us. We hear these very personal and often difficult stories and connect them with our own lives and with God’s story. And just like the struggles of Jesus on the cross, we know that our struggles are not the end of the story.

This year we are honored to have two members of Christ Church participating in this service with us and look forward to what God has in store for these two communities together.

Our Good Friday service has a very simple structure. It follows a pattern of a song, then a personal reflection, then a moment of silence. This pattern happens seven times, once for each of the sayings of Jesus from the cross. We’ll go straight through the service from song to reflection to silence without comment or introduction.

As many of you know, David Taylor initiated this service and has managed and introduced it for the past eight years. I’ve always been amazed at the depth of this service and am truly grateful for all the vision and work he’s put into this service over the years.

And because I’m taking over for David here, I feel compelled to end with a list. So here’s my list:

Why is it important for us to tell these stories of our struggles to one another? I’ll give you three reasons:

1. The first reason it’s important to tell these stories is so that we all know that we are not alone.

We all struggle. I’m sure most of you will find that one or more of our speakers stories echoes your own story.

2. The second reason it’s important to tell these stories is so that, again, we all know that we are not alone.

We can comfort one another because we understand each other’s struggles – we’ve been there too.

3. The third reason it’s important to tell these stories is so that, yet again, we all know that we are not alone.

Our God suffered tremendously for us, He understands our struggles from personal experience, and is there with us in them.

Let’s begin.

(seven verses, seven speakers, seven songs)

Conclusion:

To be vulnerable is to risk being hurt. It’s to offer more of ourselves to others than we normally would, and it can be answered with judgment or rejection, but not here, not with us. We share in each other’ struggles, mourning with those who mourn, rejoicing with those who rejoice.

Each speaker is in a different place in his or her struggle. Some have already found healing, for some their struggles are lifelong, and others remain in the wilderness, feeling forsaken. And Jesus felt all those things as he walked through his struggle.

Comfort

One of tonight’s speakers directed me to 2 Corinthians 1:3-7:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.

You can hear in Paul’s words how tangled up in our lives are affliction and consolation, suffering and comfort. Each of our struggles puts us in a place to comfort others who suffer.

We are not promised a life without suffering, but we do have others to join us in our struggles and a God that is by our side in them. We also know that it’s not the end of the story.

We’ll conclude the service in silence. The speakers will remove the veils from the panels on the wall and lay them at the foot of the cross. We’ll end in darkness. When the lights are off, you may remain to pray and meditate or you may leave quietly. We do ask that you refrain from talking until you are completely out of the building.

Could the speakers come forward to remove the veils?

critical theory part 2: utopia, an island and a city

2009-03-24T08:33:00.001-05:00

The dreaded ‘u’ word: Utopia

It is a naïve, hopelessly idealistic vision of a seemingly achievable perfect world. To come up with a utopian plan for something, be it a small community, a large society, or a physical city, is to be a fool at the very least. But to attempt to create a utopia is well beyond simple folly, it is to be an oppressor seeking to impose one’s own vision of the common good on all others.

Or maybe utopianism is the only way to look forward in a constructive way.

I am interested in the question of utopian thought and action from both an architectural perspective and from a philosophical perspective. I understand and agree with many of the critiques of utopianism in architecture and urban design but I also see some real potential in a highly modified form of it. I also think that those who make buildings and cities have an important challenge to offer to thinkers for whom critique is their final goal. To explain this I’ll start with a discussion of utopia and design to be followed later by utopia and critical theory.

I’m less interested in the way utopia was used originally than in it’s current usage, but I should mention its origins. The word was coined by Thomas More in his 1516 book entitled Utopia: On the best state of a republic and on the new island of Utopia. The name for the fictional island in the book comes from Greek words that combine to mean ‘no place’, and is likely to have been intended to suggest its homophone, eutopia, which would mean ‘good place’. The book describes the seemingly ideal social and political order of an island in the Atlantic where everything is done differently than in sixteenth century England. The only other thing I would like to mention about More’s work here is that I believe this book is a satire. I know this is not the only interpretation of the book but I fail to see why. First, More had already been immersed in satire along with his friend Erasmus. They had translated ancient works of satire and More had participated in the conversations that led to Erasmus’ classic satire In Praise of Folly. Second, the only reason I can see for determining that More’s work was at all propositional is that it was written a long time ago and therefore is much less enlightened than we are now – an idea I see little evidence to support.

Let’s jump from the sixteenth century to the twentieth.

In architecture and urban design, utopian visions for a ‘new city’ or a ‘new architecture’ were part of the grand visions of modernism. Many designers came up with alternate ways of making buildings and the ways they relate to one another that were faster, or more open, or freer, or simply newer. Broad, sweeping manifestos often accompanied drawings of new cities that required a broad sweeping away of existing cities.

Sadly, many of these ideas began to be implemented. This sweeping away of cities involved the sweeping away of people. And, as it turned out, much was lost that was of value in existing communities and their buildings.

The results of these experiments were so clearly disastrous that many challenges arose to the implementation of modern urban projects. One could argue that the reexamining of architecture and urbanism that began in the 1960s is still going on today. Design writers such as Robert Venturi (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture) and Colin Rowe (Collage City, written with Fred Koetter) began proposing heterotopias as an alternate model, valuing multiplicity without unity for buildings and cities. It took someone outside the echo chamber of design schools, though, to really get to the heart of the problem. Jane Jacobs’ sprawling The Death and Life of Great American Cities takes a detailed street-eye view of existing urban spaces and details how communities use these spaces to provide safety and maintain social connectedness. She uses this to point out why high-modernist urban projects are a huge mistake. Venturi and Rowe attack the surface of the problem, Jacobs gets to the core.

Part of what makes Jacobs’ work compelling is design related. She demonstrates all that is lost when a designer ignores the collected wisdom of existing urban communities to create entirely new kinds of cities. This is not a challenge to those that propose new ideas, only to those who do this with hubris. But I would argue that the more important lesson from Jacobs is how much the process of change matters. It doesn’t matter how wonderful the physical spaces of a city are if they are created in ways that ignore or are forced on actual human communities. Because of this she proposes a model of incremental growth that is slow, messy, and complicated, kind of like communities. (The planning strategies of the New Urbanists seem to take into account the design-related aspects of Jacobs’ work while completely ignoring the process-related aspects of it, continuing many of the problems of their modernist forbears.)

So what do these challenges to utopian architecture and urban planning mean for us today? Stay tuned to find out what I think – and to tell me why I’m wrong.

critical theory part 1: ideology and sin

2009-03-12T08:11:00.003-05:00

Architecture school can be a strange place. One minute you might be cutting cardboard and sticking it to other pieces of cardboard with Elmer’s glue, then the next minute you could be arguing about how false ideologies maintain relationships of power and oppression and if resistance is possible. The cutting and pasting of kindergarten exist alongside the esoteric idealism of a graduate school philosophy seminar. This combination can go badly sometimes - fingers and beliefs can get cut and bleed in the process - but I appreciated this part of architecture school. I also avoided schools and professors that lost sight of either part of the equation, the making of things or the thinking about things.

The field of philosophy has many different branches, each with its own methodology and its own priorities. One particular philosophical discourse seems to have taken hold of art and architecture theory and hasn’t let go, even as other fads and fashions have come and gone. Critical Theory, though it sounds fairly general, is actually a specific set of ideas birthed in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1930s. It has its roots in Marxism and was developed as a challenge to early twentieth century capitalism, the failings of communist governments (seen as distorting Marx for their own ends), and to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. They had a lot to be upset about.

The name for this school of thought came from Max Horkeimer’s 1937 essay, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’. The basic idea is that traditional theories seek only to describe the current state of affairs (in politics, in culture, in social relationships) whereas critical theory challenges the current state of affairs with the express intent of effecting change. Traditional theories were not considered wrong only because they didn’t seek change, they were also accused of being part of the system that maintains and enhances existing injustices.

From within this framework, critical theorists developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary, often using words quite differently from their normal usage. ‘Positive’ became a pejorative description of an idea or practice that maintains the status quo. One of the most important concepts in Critical Theory, ‘ideology’ is not simply a generic description of a set of ideas, it denotes a broad, powerful system of ideas that is innately false and exists to maintain the current state of dominance and oppression. Though the word is sometimes grouped with ‘false’ as in ‘false ideology’, this is rare because it is considered redundant. Critical Theory has deep (and somewhat anachronistic) roots in the Enlightenment version of rationality so ‘ideology’ is often contrasted to true ‘science’ or ‘reason’.

A lot of the things I have discussed above I will try to expand on later. I disagree with significant portions of Critical Theory, but I often feel that finding problems with a thought system is the easiest, cheapest way to analyze it. Even the most false and corrosive set of ideas has some important kernel of truth that makes it appealing to its adherents. I believe that there is a very large kernel of truth in the basic premise of Critical Theory: it comes very close to accurately describing many of the broad ramifications of structural sin in the world. The voices of Critical Theory may be at times bitter, simplistic, condescending, or nihilistic, and they almost always think at such a broad scale that they miss the effects of sin and the moments of resistance to it in individual lives, but they are on to something by starting from the belief that things are not the way the are supposed to be or could be. They may not be seeking God’s kingdom but they can offer some useful ways of challenging its opposite.

writing about writing part 3: a note on method

2009-03-11T07:04:00.002-05:00

One of the joys or burdens of being an architect is that you know a little bit about a lot of things but not a lot about anything. I can, for instance, explain how a structural moment connection works in a steel frame building but I can’t tell you how thick the steel plate needs to be or how many bolts are required. I need the specialized training of a Structural Engineer for that. I enjoy laying out places for plantings and trees but I need the detailed knowledge of a Landscape Architect to select the best plant materials for a specific location. Other generalists, like composers, film directors, pastors, and presidents, are similarly ‘dependent on the kindness of strangers’.

For better or worse, I deal with philosophy and theology in the same way. I know just enough about a lot of things to get me into water that’s too deep for me and am dependent on specialists beyond that. This ‘shallowness’ of my knowledge has kept me from writing down my thoughts for a long time but I’m just now learning to live with it as an occupational hazard.

I am currently working on a post about Critical Theory for which this note is highly relevant.

thinking about building part 4: everyone's spatial

2009-03-10T09:42:00.002-05:00

If you want to understand a person, you could put him in a small room by himself and observe him through a video camera. Or you could take tissue samples and analyze those samples in a laboratory. Alternately, you could do a statistical evaluation his society to determine the broad demographical characteristics of his milieu. In other words, you could look at a person under a microscope or through a telescope, as an isolated individual or as a subset of a large group.

But both of these perspectives would miss important aspects of the person. People are intrinsically relational. Yes, they exist as separate selves from others and yes, they are affected a great deal by the societal setting in which they exist. But these two perspectives certainly do not explain the whole person and I would argue they do not get at the core of the person. The realm in which we exist most fully as humans is in our daily interaction with others.

As much as the Christian faith has often been reduced to either a mass phenomenon (like joining the church) or an individual pursuit (like overcoming sin or getting to heaven) the core of the faith exists at this relational level. The great commandments to love God and love our neighbor are about interpersonal relationships. Forgiveness is entirely about fixing a relationship that is broken. And as complex as Trinitarian theology can be, the basic concept that God exists eternally, creatively, and lovingly in relationship is a simple one.

This ‘relational anthropology’ that is central to the Christian faith has, to me, often been one of the most convincing arguments that the Christian faith is true. This fits well with the world as I’ve experienced it. (An even more convincing argument for me is that the world is very fallen – but that’s for another time.) My point here is not so much about apologetics. My point is that we do not have to choose between a Christian understanding of the person and a secular phenomenology of the person. They are one and the same.

A conception of the human person as intrinsically relational has huge implications across a broad range of disciplines, including architecture. Architectural thought has gotten stuck in a false choice between the microscope and the telescope. Some want to focus on the broad social and political effects of architecture, but others insist that the individual experience of a building matters most. Those that prefer to address the broad social and political aspects of architecture consider individual experience alone to be too, well, individualistic. And those that highlight the personal experience of built space are troubled by the way the first group misses the basic value of real, tactile, visible things. Robin Evans summed this dilemma up nicely when he referred to his task as an architectural theorist as a way to ‘. . . treat the formal, spatial and visible on the one hand, and the social on the other, as involved in exchanges that do not entail the destruction or domination of the one by the other’ (from ‘The Developed Surface’, italics in the original).

This dilemma does not exist, however, if we accept that the basic element of life is not ‘life alone’ or ‘life in society’ but is ‘life together’. We all exist physically and spatially, not as isolated minds or instances of universal ideals. And this is a good thing. Our social and political contexts are made up of a vast array of communications and interactions. These contexts may be radically messed up, but because they are made up of the actual ways we enact them we are not determined by them. We can even change them. The everyday ways we act with and toward one another, even while working toward large-scale changes, can be the building blocks of an alternate and better way of life together or they can be more of the same. These daily interactions matter a great deal. And though the spaces we enact them are of secondary importance, they matter too.

thinking about building part 3: a mad world

2009-03-09T11:10:00.003-05:00

The world. It’s a big place and it’s a big word. As a word, it can be used many different ways. It is well beyond my competence to outline all the meanings of the word ‘world’ or even to offer a very precise definition of the way I have been using it here. So I will try to offer a constellation of concepts that may start to get close to what I am talking about when I use the word.

First, I am not talking about the planet. The physical sphere we inhabit is radically important and worthy of consideration, but it’s not what I’m talking about.

What I am talking is close to the idea of ‘the human community’ but this phrase may be way too broad, and in some ways too narrow. It’s too broad because it squeezes everyone into one big box, the way ‘society’ and ‘the culture’ often do. It’s too narrow because in keeping people in the abstract it can reduce out their actual physicality and connections to things. No, the world is made up of actual people, connected to each other through a complex web of relationships, and enacting their lives in actual bodies in and through actual physical things.

The way I am using the term ‘the world’ is heavily indebted to the way Hannah Arendt uses it in The Human Condition. The language I have used of a ‘web of relationships’ is, in fact, straight from this source. This is way out of my league, but my sense is that Arendt’s concept is more communally based than either Heidegger’s ‘world’ or Husserl’s ‘life world’ and that Habermas’ ‘life world’ is heavily indebted to Arendt.

But Arendt’s use of the term is not original to her. She began her career studying St. Augustine’s concept of love and his ambivalent perspective on ‘love’ and ‘the world’. And of course Augustine’s perspective is even more heavily indebted to the apostle Paul and to Jesus.

The biblical language that says both that ‘God loved the world’ and that we are to ‘hate the world’ has often been seen as a contradiction. Arendt seemed to envision her role as a philosopher as overturning the biblical hatred of the world and replacing it with a love of the world (amor mundi). But in order to turn the idea on its head she had to begin with a very similar conception of ‘the world’ as Augustine. And I believe that in doing so she managed to get very close to the philosophical implications of ‘loving our neighbor’.

writing about writing part 2: this is not a blog

2009-03-07T08:15:00.002-06:00

The Belgian surrealist painter, Renee Magritte, once painted a detailed picture of a pipe and included at the bottom of the painting the caption ‘this is not a pipe’ (Ceci n'est pas une pipe). This 1929 painting, The Treachery of Images, takes the viewer outside of the image and into the realm of image-making itself. When asked about the painting, Magritte is reported to have said that of course it’s not a pipe, try putting tobacco in it. In the intervening 80 years since Magritte painted his pipe, this ironic turn has become so commonplace that making a sincere and direct painting can often seem the most avant-garde thing to do.

So as I embark on this new adventure in writing, it is with great trepidation that I venture yet again into the realm of writing about writing. But part of this discipline of writing every day is to write what I’m thinking about without self-censoring and this is, yet again, what I’m thinking about. I’ll try not to make a habit of it.

I tend to get impatient with small talk. I rarely find the things going on in my life interesting enough to bother other people with. Yet the things in my personal life that concern me deeply enough to write about I would not share in as open and anonymous forum as a blog. These require safe and trusting relationships.

So if I have a blog that isn’t about everyday small talk and isn’t about deep personal disclosure, what is it about? I think that the answer is that this really isn’t a blog at all but a set of essay fragments. Maybe they will some day be consolidated into real essays or a book but for right now they are brief expeditions into the realm of ideas.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to continue trying these essay fragments for a while before I figure out my voice and audience. Many of the issues that I want to write about are part of my long-term studies in art and architecture theory, philosophy, and theology. But I have always highly valued clarity and simplicity in writing and much that I’ve read in these realms are opaque and complex – sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. I also do not feel that people need to have read all about critical theory or phenomenology or Trinitarian theology to have valid and interesting ideas about the issues at hand.

So far I have tried to communicate foundational principles in straightforward language without technical jargon and without much referencing of the discourse into which these ideas fit. For now, I’ll put these references as ‘tags’ at the bottom of each blog entry to form a clumsy little footnote so that those that care will have some idea where I’m coming from. Any other ideas you may have for how I can perform this balancing act will be much appreciated.

thinking about building part 2: useful art

2009-03-06T07:44:00.004-06:00

Art can be useful. Some art, in fact, only makes sense when it is in use. The work song or the hymn are only complete when they are used to get through a day of work or enacted in praise to God. To sit and stare at a building as you would a painting may be interesting, but it does not fully engage it as a work of architecture. A building should be used, lived in, enacted by everyday activities. Contemplating a sculpture or listening intently to a performance by a string quartet is still a valid activity. This kind of focused reception of these types of artworks is in fact using them the way they were designed to be used: for aesthetic contemplation. But our Western tradition has reduced the use of art down to just this one type of use to the exclusion of all others.

Such is the main premise of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Art in Action, published in 1980, read by me in 1992. As a freshly minted architect, I found the points he made to be encouraging and freeing. It certainly overcame the defensiveness I felt when trying to justify that architecture is indeed an art form: architecture’s usefulness does not make it less of an art. It also helped from the other end in overcoming the insidious modern dogma of functionalism in architecture: architecture’s artfulness does not make it less useful. The relationship between form and function is a lot more complicated and interesting than some stupid pithy statement about one following the other.

I have found that the idea of linking art to use makes many artists uncomfortable. At a conference I went to last weekend I learned that Wolterstorff had discovered the same thing over the last thirty years since he wrote his book. One concern is that linking art to use denigrates the value of focused, contemplative reception of an artwork. I think this is simply a misreading of the book. Wolterstorff’s reframing of the concepts of art and use does not undermine the use of art for aesthetic contemplation, it simply broadens it.

But Wolterstorff offered an important clarification or correction to the points he made in his book. By linking art to various uses, he seemed to be reducing the value of art to its utility for some other purpose. No, he insisted, art has value all of its own, quite separate from its instrumentality to some other end, and even when it is in use. The work song enobles the process of laying down railroad tracks or building a ship. Art in action provides a beauty and depth to our daily lives that is irreducibly artistic and intrinsically valuable. Life lived without beauty and meaning woven into it is an incomplete life.

thinking about building part 1: making something new

2009-03-05T07:55:00.008-06:00

When we make something new we have changed the world. For most of us, the things we make change the world only in very small ways. The bad news is that we can usually have very little lasting effect on the world, but the good news is that if the effect we produce is negative we are responsible for very little damage.

Making a building changes the world in larger ways than, say, making a pizza or a pair of mittens. It changes the world in smaller ways than making a city or a multinational corporation. But whatever the scale, we cannot step out of the fact that when we make things we change the world. There are many ways to reduce the effects of our making, like making things smaller, or putting them in remote locations, but we can never reduce these effects to zero without simply not making things.

What if I make a building that is just like all the other ones around it? I could build a house just like all the other ones on the block or an office building just like one of the other ones in an office park or even a skyscraper with very little to distinguish itself from others in a city. Does this ‘following suit’ reduce my responsibility for the effect I’ve had on the world? Not in the least. Does building the fourth or fifth or two-thousandth gas chamber make me less responsible than the person who built the first one?

This is not necessarily an argument for novelty and innovation. There is often strength and value in the way things have been done before. Trying to create things unlike what has been done before without understanding why they were done that way often leads to doing things worse. This is simply an argument for our responsibility to examine what we do, consider if there are problematic elements in our received wisdom, and to imagine a new and better state of affairs after we create things. This is the ‘thrown-ness’ of our condition as makers. It can and should make us both excited and a little bit daunted at the prospects of what we are called to do.

writing about writing part 1: a new discipline?

2009-03-04T09:53:00.008-06:00

Lent is a time of preparation, a time of sharing in Christ’s sacrifice in order to share in His resurrection. Fasting from stuff - like meat, alcohol, the internet, or chocolate - is how it’s done. It’s sometimes trying to break a bad habit, sometimes cutting out something that’s otherwise fine just to see if it can be done.

So if I take on writing instead am I copping out? I seem to have avoided it for five days already. Based on that alone I could say that giving up non-writing is a real challenge for me. Dorothy Parker said ‘I hate writing. I love having written’ and that pretty much sums it up for me. I have avoided it for years knowing that I should be doing it, knowing that I have a lot to say that can be helpful for people, and knowing that I really do enjoy having the text done and read. But doesn’t that last part automatically disqualify this activity from being a Lenten pursuit?

For the last year I have begun to feel that it is now the time in my life to step up and begin writing. It may have started earlier with the CIVA conference in 2007 where I felt like I had as much to offer as those presenting. The sense that it was really now time to start began in earnest, however, with the Transforming Culture symposium in 2008 when I gave a presentation on architecture and the church. The movement of the audience from one mental room to another over the course of the presentation was readily apparent from the questions and conversations afterward. It struck me as ‘freeing’ for them.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe by not writing I am actually keeping others enslaved. I can’t pretend to live in a world where I don’t have the talents I have and where I don’t have something to offer any more than I can pretend that these talents and this something come from me. So for me, writing is a discipline, a challenging one, a serious giving up of the safety and security of non-writing for something better. I need to keep this ‘something better’ firmly in view with every word I write.

storytelling part 1: introducing Lent

2009-03-03T14:17:00.007-06:00

The following announcement was given at my church as a way to introduce the concepts of Ash Wednesday and Lent to a congregation for whom these ideas are a little foreign.

Intro to Lent

22 Feb 2009

If you want to buy fertilizer for your lawn, garden or potted plants (whether you go to the Lowe’s Garden Center for Miracle Gro or to John Dromgoole’s Natural Gardener for composted bat guano) the fertilizer will have a set of three numbers listed on the package: like 22-2-14 or 4-13-11. Some of you may be aware that this is telling you the proportion of various plant nutrients in the fertilizer. They call this the NPK number. The N stands for how much nitrogen is in the fertilizer, the P stands for Phosphate, and K, pretty much as you would expect, stands for Potassium.

This third nutrient, Potassium, helps plants retain water, helps them weather extremes of temperature, and helps them resist disease. It gets its name from ‘Potash’ which describes how it was originally derived: wood ashes, dissolved in water, would be boiled down in a pot, and the remaining stuff would be pot-ash. Forest fires, for example, leave behind soil rich in Potassium.

Burned wood leads to new healthy plants. Death leads to new life. This process is written into creation.

During the week leading up to the cross, Jesus prophesied of his own fate and called us to follow him in it with these words:

‘. . . unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.’ (John 12:24-26)

We are called to follow him even to the cross to share in His new life. Death leads to new life.

This week we begin our annual journey that starts on Ash Wednesday, follows through to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and finally, beautifully, concludes in the joy of Easter.

At Ash Wednesday we begin the 40-day period of Lent where we follow Jesus into the wilderness in a time of preparation. During this period we don’t give up things like foods, possessions, or practices because they are not valuable, but because in giving them up we are freed to focus on something much, much more valuable. The ashes mark our own mortality but they can also remind us yet again how death leads to new life.

As dark as all this sounds, we know we can safely confront our struggles because we, in fact, know the end of the story and it is good.

[the specifics of the service were included here.]

Consider this: how ready are you right now to celebrate Easter?

Imagine fully engaging in Lent, a journey beginning on Ash Wednesday and continuing through a 40 day period in the wilderness through personal sacrifice.

Imagine fully engaging in Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, finding new depth in the Last Supper and the Crucifixion.

How ready will you then be to celebrate the happy ending to the story at Easter?