Refractions 30: Trout, the Dow and our Bottom Lines

Refractions 30: Trout, the Dow and our Bottom Lines

Part I of II

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pg 18

They were rising, or tailing the surface. “It’s hard to imitate,” Doug said. “They are feasting on something emerging.” I noted in the swirls of the amber surface a few mayflies with yellow bodies. The river waters smelled of fresh, cold rain from a few days ago. The brown trout (the Scottish kind Doug told me) were dancing not more than ten feet from where we were wading, but we could not see them, even with our polarized glasses. The autumn leaves floated in and out of the swirls, and my fingers no longer felt numb as they did earlier in the day.

The next thirty minutes, we kept on trying multitudes of fly patterns that Doug had in his small box. Inside the dark green lid, diminutive patterns lined up handsomely, from small dark nymphs, looking somewhat sinister with beetle like wings, to muddler minnow streamers with shapely little shaved heads. And then, finally out of options, I took the last pattern I had not tried, a red ant pattern, tied on a minute number 20 hook tightly wound with rust colored thin yarn. As soon as I roll cast the fly line, and the tiny ant turned over to float, I heard a gentle suction beneath the water and felt the line tighten. A small trout with orange spots shimmered in the water, with its silver belly moving sideways, churning the waters in its wake. “It’s a brown, but looks like a rainbow trout,” I said to Doug as he came over to help me take a look, and helped me unhook and release the fish. It was the first fish that took the fly all day. But as soon as I let the line out again, this time whipping it a little upstream, I would see the ant, now slightly battered, disappear again. Another trout, looking like a twin of the first, sprung into action, now tugging at my rod. As Doug released it back into the water, it nudged its head a few times against the sand, still feeling where the wire-thin hook had penetrated in its mouth.

Fishing works like that, I supposed, going all day without any success, but then in a few moments, with just two casts, rewarded with small treasures. Trout with miniscule brains can somehow outwit fishers with thousand-dollar equipment. An experience that convinces you, after all, that we were given permission to glimpse into their secluded world, a rare privilege as recipients of a moment of grace, before the veil closed.

Doug, my “guide,” really is the father of the bride my son, Ty, married over the summer. We had spoken of going out together to fish for a while. And now, in the waning days of the fall, we found a day to travel west from the city into the stretches of water near the border of Pennsylvania. He, an avid fisherman, let me borrow his equipment and lead me to the best spots, which is a substantial, and necessary, part of a successful trip.

Before we saw the day close, a bigger trout took Doug’s Cahill grey pattern, and he was in for a good fight. After Doug fought the sixteen inch brown with a distended belly full of insects, and released it back into the amber water, we packed up and headed for his Dodge.

*


As I imagined the trout going up and down in the stream to catch their morsels in front of me, I had a strange overlap of images. I could not help but to be reminded of the charts of the volatile market captured almost daily in the headlines. It was a few weeks after the Dow lost more than 1000 points, down to the 8000 level that we had not seen since 1998. It was to come up again, ever briefly, and dip to 7000. The volatile market would vacillate up and down, inevitably ending lower. The traders, and ordinary investors, were caught in a downwards spiral.

Unlike the market, you have only something to gain in the river (unless you lose your lures or flies in a snag), and even if you do not catch fish, you know they are there (and sometimes see them, a skittish few, swimming in front of you.) And groups like Trout Unlimited and B.A.S.S. have now made the “catch and release” policy popular, with many of the streams being “no kill zones”, so the idea is we come home without a trophy, worthy of bragging or not. Even without a catch, the serenade of the water, and the afternoon sun warming your face, all amount to a good day even without any action.

As I sought to untangle my lines caused by my inexperience of back casting a fly line, my mind kept on overlapping my effort to find elusive fish in a river, with the gyrations of the market (a tangled mess indeed). It was not long ago that catching fish, or hunting for deer was an economic necessity. Perhaps we have traded our grey Wall Street suit for waders, and the cold, dehumanized floors of Wall Street to a certain grace of the recreational outdoors, two ventures that share in a Darwinian quest for success. Just as we find the stretches of a river hard to read, even seasoned investors and hedge fund managers see the market as being perplexing and difficult to read. Alan Greenspan noted just as much in his recent congressional testimony, confessing that he had “found a flaw” in his ideology and “that’s precisely the reason I was shocked.” The murky river of the economy confounded even the best of the experts.

The forces of nature, too, can be wicked and unrelenting toward the Earth’s inhabitants. Last year, for example, the Delaware River in the Nor’easter of 2007, and surrounding streams suddenly overflowed and flooded overnight, washing away homes along the riverbanks. We might see such incidents as inevitable consequences outside of our control. But if the proper response to nature is to admit that we do not fully understand her mysteries, shall we not do the same with the market?

Lurking deeper beneath the currents of the economic ecosystem is an assumption, or perhaps a presumption. Greenspan had faith in the self-correction of the system, and he was shocked to find that greed and deceit had unbridled multiplying effects. Adam Smith, who many consider to be the father of modern economics, even speaks of the “invisible hand” guiding over each decision made in self interests, which he called “self love.” He stated in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, “by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” (Italics mine) We presume in such goodness, a self-correction, to guide our economic growth. But in these days when greed and fear melts down the economy, or when our favorite fishing stretch does violence to our world, we might do well to consider what the Bible calls the “substance of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1) at work that challenges our presumptions. For the question concerns issues of faith, whether it be our faith in natural or economic cycles or in the “invisible hand.” What can we learn when our expectations go awry? And will our economy, like the river, recover?




*



Doug operates a small elevator company called HandiLift, which serves the metropolitan New York area with handicap accessible elevators. As we negotiated the highways, he told me about his involvement with an entrepreneurial business group. They have success accountability and network sessions, but he felt he had a different bottom line than the others. In a recent newspaper interview, Doug stated:

"We could be a smaller business with more money," Boydston says. "But we’re trying to grow something here. It’s not just growth for its own sake…”

Seeking quality breeds quality, he points out. “If I don’t buy quality, (our vendors are) not going to make it for me.” Doug seems to run his company with multiple bottom lines, seeking more than profit for profit’s sake. He desires to serve his employees, helping them to thrive in his business environment, and raising the quality of his product, from service to execution.

A multiple bottom line would include concerns for ethics and community values. In my conversations with entrepreneurs like Doug, business leaders are increasingly open to considering multiple bottom lines, considering financial, social, environmental and spiritual bottom lines.

David Miller, another friend, founded the Avodah Institute in Princeton,
(and also teaches at Princeton University and serves as the Director of the Princeton University Faith & Work Initiative), to deal with these issues
between workplace and faith. He states in a recent book:

Businesspeople want the ability to bring their whole selves to work--mind, body, and soul--and are no longer satisfied with sacrificing their core identities.... People in the workplace of all levels and types no longer seem willing to leave their soul with the car in the parking lot.
(From God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement)

In my recent discussions with David, we spoke of the overlap of business and art, with a particular focus on this issue of multiple bottom lines. I, of course, advocate for the consideration for beauty, and a nuanced (think color, rather than black and white) approach to be considered even in a hard-nosed business environment.

But, apparently as I have learned of late, having multiple bottom lines from a faith perspective requires a deeper consideration of how we view ourselves, our motives, our priorities and values, or, as Augustine, the 4th century theologian put it, our “order of loves.“

At a recent Entrepreneurial Forum in New York City, I heard a lucid perspective of these questions. Dr. Tim Keller spoke to define the bottom line for Christians.

Tim quotes 1 Corinthians 12 and 13 of the New Testament. It’s the passage that ends with verses that are often used in weddings:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

“You are supposed to be loving your neighbor as yourself. That is your bottom line. And profits are a means to that end,” he stated. He went on to distinguish between motives that bring honor to only yourself, and the motive to give honor to others. Augustine framed these competing realities in “The City of God”: contrasting “the city of men,” driven by self-centered motives, with “The City of God,” driven by other-centered motives.


But this, assuredly, is easier said than done. Love is not just a sentiment or an ideal, but repeated actions of self-sacrifice for the good of others. This notion runs counter to our survival instincts. In the Darwinian competition of a business reality, it is hard to think beyond the bottom line of a profit motive.

Christians can easily do lip service to these verses, if we treat this verse as an “ideal” reality, but not possible to put into practice. We do often use these verses in marriage ceremonies, but Christian couples experience as much struggles in marriages as non-Christian couples. If we fall short of implementing this principle in our marriages, what are the chances of doing so in our businesses?

Surely finding a business with the bottom line of love can be as elusive as finding a native trout on a cold autumn day.

But the difficulty of execution does not prevent us from thinking through the inevitable consequences of not living in a principled manner consistent with Biblical ordinances. The consequences of not doing so may be far worse than the necessary cost and sacrifice required. We must consider the cost of the stripping of human decency based on a single bottom line of survival, and the effect of dehumanization that will make the enterprise ultimately not sustainable. Pollution due to industrial growth has taught us that inhospitable environments do not ultimately contribute to a thriving economy. Perhaps we need to look at the economy, too, as a river; a river that flows into and out of the heart of our cities. And that river has a reservoir called Wall Street whose tributaries trickle into Main Street.


*


When imbalance in the economy creates havoc, the tendency is to come up with regulations to safeguard us from experiencing another painful downturn, or to limit greed and pollution from taking over. And of course, such measures must be taken to force a paradigm shift in the industry. But corrective measures will not change human behaviors ultimately, for laws can be designed only to limit evil, but cannot create good. We need generative measures that will tap into the holistic realities of community and effect lasting change.

“But perfect love drives out fear,” writes St. John, “because fear has to do with punishment.” (John 4:18) As Biblical love casts out all fear, our efforts must formulate ways to invite creative risks that can counter fear. We need to change the meaning of success to include the holistic thriving of all inhabitants, in order to have meaningful reform. But to consider such a thriving, we must return to our first loves. To be convinced that rivers need to be cleaned up, we must remember the experience of a beautiful river that once was. We need to re-experience our love for the river that once was, so that we can come up with a proper stewardship strategy.

This re-envisioning involves a deeper reflection on the nature of loves, and even challenges the assumptions about economics, as did Adam Smith of the Scottish Enlightenment. Such a journey will consider not just the outcome, but the process of integration that moves us toward a change in belief system.

Dr. Elaine Scarry of Harvard, in her classic little book called Beauty and Being Just, states, “Beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors. (pg. 31) In other words, the encounter with beauty convicts us, and that conviction causes transformation. She continues:

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction – to locate what is true. Both in the account that assumes the existence of the immortal realm and in the account that assumes the nonexistence of the immortal realm, beauty is a starting place for education. (pg. 31)



I am well acquainted with the beauty of a trout. If not, I may not be so ready to release them back. And as I saw them swim away, I asked myself why was a trout made so beautiful if all it is asked to do is survive in the river? If the function of survival were its only bottom line, then why this wasteful extravagance in the details of intricate design? A gentle reminder of ephemeral nature of our lives does point to the beauty of the moment. And this does not require faith in the Creator. An atheist and a theist can share a common fly stream. Standing side by side, we can both be “educated” by the details of extravagance.

Then I asked myself, what is the object of such beauty that would sway our business to operate differently, to “locate what is true” in the economy?

*

St. Paul, when he was writing his epistle to a group in Corinth, was perfectly aware that such teachings and seeking after truth will seem “impossible” to mortal ears. And yet, he did not see himself operating in a gap between the ideal and the real. He saw it as the greater Reality at work behind the convoluted worldly system devoid of hope. That’s why he makes an audacious claim that “Love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13:8) The impossible becomes the only path to the future, and the Good News is to claim that Christ, the very embodiment of love, prepared that path to appear before us.

And if he is right, then all things or systems that work against the principle of love will fail eventually. Sacrificial love, in other words, is the only sustainable operating force in the universe. We can complain that we simply cannot accept the assumptions proposed here; but Christians should not be able to operate, if we do indeed believe these principles, in some half way land, on one hand claiming to believe the ordinances, but also functionally accepting the worldly systems at work as the only reality.

The medium of beauty in a business world is the workers that make the businesses run. It’s not the stock options or profit. They comprise far more capacity, and far deeper longing and invigorated promise for future generations than the system gives them credit for. So the question is not whether they are paid enough, or given enough work: the question is, does the workplace enlarge humanity, or endanger humanity.

Thus, we need to see the market not just as a tool to make money, but a complex labyrinth with a generative creative order. In such an ecosystem, we need to consider investments as a form of stewardship. Conversely, we may redefine investments as a way to create and sustain beauty, rather than gain power for ourselves. And true beauty, at her truest aim, is a humble stream that flows through the heart of a city, re-humanizing its inhabitants, and allowing them to breath in what would otherwise be unbearable air.

Beauty flows out of love. Beauty is in the presence of love, an aroma of re-creation. A beautiful business would consider the context of that busy-ness, to create an opportunity for fully human expression to take place. I asked one Christian executive what a beautiful business would look like to him. He paused for a long time and said: “it’s when I had to fire my staff due to restructuring, and instead of having my human resources person fire them, I spent time with them to notify them personally and to ask if they would allow me to help them transition into a position with another company. It was one of the hardest times of my life, but looking back, I needed to do that.” Such care may not be taught in business schools (imagine a class called “Leadership 101: how to let your staff go.”) But would be part of a fallen, but re-humanized business practice.

The floors of the stock exchange, by contrast, can be a place of brutal commerce, devoid of that humanity. But the Exchange floors are not the only place where forces of dehumanization can work. Same thing can be said of Chelsea art galleries, our universities, or even church offices. Our art, education and spiritual endeavors must be hospitable, beyond just utilitarian functionality, to invite others to a journey toward the City of God. We must be invested in so much more than profit driven reality if our bottom line is sacrificial love, as defined by the Bible.

It does make sense to me, then, that Doug operates a Handicapped accessible elevator service. It even seems symbolic. He is considering service toward a re-humanized city. Often is the case that our limitations, even our handicaps, can point us to a greater innovation, even greater art. Even an elevator can be as beautiful as a trout stream.

Art, too, can refract beauty in its wake. Art follows nature, pointing to the same generative reality. Art, too, can serve, just as connected to the disabled realities of our lives. But art has also presumed in the “invisible hand” that guides the process, never questioning that ego-filled landscape of art might regress, rather than progress. Perhaps we need to consider that rooted beneath all of art is a much more sane and humble premise than celebrity or success. Perhaps art is to the economy what trout are to a stream: beauty that once caught, can be, and needs to be, released back generously into the cultural waters so that those who come after us can enjoy them. Perhaps that generosity is what makes waters teeming with created gems that delight our senses and sustain our well-being.


Makoto Fujimura, December 2008

image: Winslow Homer's Jumping Trout image overlaid with the Dow chart

Makoto Fujimura's New Commission for a New Haven Church

Being a Child of the Creative Age

Being a Child of the Creative Age
Makoto Fujimura, International Arts Movement's Redemptive Culture Conference, 2007, at TriBeCa Performance Center, Ground Zero.




Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.

Songs of Innocence, The Lamb, William Blake


Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame they fearful symmetry?

Songs of Experience, The Tyger, William Blake



1. Inviting Monsters into our Hearts

A child uses all of her senses to discover the world. She picks up and finds fascination with a dandelion, feels the bumpy bark of a tree, tastes the baseball, smells the fallen leaf.

If you asked a room full of kindergarteners “Raise your hand if you are an artist!” Almost every child would raise his hand. But if you ask a room full of adults, almost every adult would not. (At a conference full of artists like this, you might say we are not just a gathering of artists, but a gathering of children!)

And if you are an artist, you know you are seen as out of the main stream, as avant -garde, but you also have been treated like a misfit or patronized like a child. You struggle to find meaning and significance in that gap between the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. “Grow up and do something useful for society!” The world seems to place in opposition pitting the Innocence against the reality of the Experience. We are caught between being able to have that curiosity, inquisitiveness and emboldened sense of discovery of a child and the reality of the “adult world”, a reality that forces us to realize that we all indeed live in fear, in a ground zero of some kind or another. In our conversation to create a world that ought to be, we must start at that zero point of devastation.

In a recent Fresh Air broadcast of Guillermo Del Toro, Terry Gross interviews the writer/director of Pan’s Labythinth (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7000935). A remarkable film. Not what you would call a family film, but as a kind of Narnia for adults, it delves deeply into the mystery of redemption within the cruel setting of the Spanish civil war. Terry Gross interviewed Del Toro about his upbringing, in which his strict Catholic grandmother tried to exorcize him twice because he was drawing monsters. He was forbidden to imagine a fantasy world. That was his “ground zero.” So he grew up having to bifurcate his moral sense of duty to his family, and his growing imagination. He was lead to believe that he could not have both imagination and religion, that the two worlds could not be reconciled: so he chose to journey on the path of imagination, leaving religion behind him.

Some of us identify with Del Toro, thoroughly. We feel that the church has tried to “exorcise” us of our imagination. Del Toro states “I invited Jesus into my heart as a young child…but then I invited monsters into my heart.”

International Arts Movement exists for this type of wrestling of faith, culture and humanity. It starts with the admission that living and creating in ground zero means you live with both Jesus and monsters.

Wrestling in this way, we give ourselves permission to ask deeper questions. What if the monsters do take over? That would be a concern of parents in this room for their children. That may be our current cultural condition of fear. But, in reality, I think the situation is reversed: monsters have already taken over in reality, and the only hope we have is to imaginatively work backwards. We are to take charge of the situation, and we mediate both the sinister and the good. Just like in Pan’s Labyrinth, we need to know we have a greater inheritance waiting for us.

Some have called the 21st Century the “Creative Age.” Phil Hanes, philanthropist and arts advocate, at a recent National Council on the Arts meeting, began a discussion on how we need to prepare ourselves as a nation to address this shift. Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pink and others have noted similar shifts in culture: The Information Age is behind us, and yet we, in America, are educating our children to thrive in that past. The skills and knowledge for Information Age are now outsourced, but we are ill equipped to lead in the age of imagination, the age of synthesis. While a hard term to define, The Creative Age will certainly mean one thing: we would have to reconcile living with both Jesus and monsters in our imaginative territories. We have to reconsider the artists’ role in society, in our education of our children: and we need to redefine how we see ourselves, all of us, as creative human beings who need art in our lives so that we can preserve a child’s innocence in the midst of horror and unspeakable evil, and help them to prosper and thrive in the creative age.

In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he exhorts us:


“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”



Thus, if the whole creation longs for the revealing of God’s children, we see that creativity, too, longs for some reality. Creativity longs for our “fittingness” in God’s plan of redemption. But this “frustration” causes setbacks, and birth pangs.

In Eden, Adam the poet names animals, and then discovers his need for Eve. Before the Fall, Adam’s creativity revealed his inner lack. After the Fall, then, the whole creation longs for a redeemed humanity to appear, not to return us to the Edenic state, but to move us into a better longing, for the New Creation. Our longing is not just to be restored to the fullness of our being, our longing is for the glorious freedom of the children of God and for liberation of our creativity and Creation. Our longing is for nothing less than a coronation/wedding celebration. The glorious freedom is in anticipating what that day will reveal in us and in our creativity.



2. From Being an Orphan to a Bride:



In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte’s Gothic tale, I see a (romantic) parable for us for the Creative Age. Now, I have known about Jane Eyre for a long time now, as this book had a transformative effect on Judy, my wife, when she encountered it at the age of 13. I heard from her how God filled her heart via the voice of Helen, a little girl (probably about 13) who befriends Jane in the school for orphans. Helen sows seeds of belief into then very bitter Jane. Jane had a right to be bitter, rejected by her cruel aunt who adopted her, and bullied by the new siblings; she was not only cast as an orphan, and falsely accused in the process, and some often used Biblical reasons for doing so. But Helen spoke of forgiveness and her confidence in God, even though she was treated just as unfairly, and even as she lay dying of typhoid fever, caused by less than adequate facilities at the school.



Recently, I watched with my wife the Masterpiece Theatre production of Jane Eyre, which, by the way, sadly, but typically, took out Helen’s exhortation to Jane (although I did like the casting of Ruth Wilson as Jane, and Toby Stephens as Mr. Rochester). I realized, though, how this powerful story, written before the Enlightenment schism, anticipates the modern dilemma and opens new vistas. Jane Eyre is a story of an orphan who finds herself becoming a bride of inheritance, even a double inheritance. She perseveres betrayal, neglect, and abuse and breaks through class barriers. It is a parable of liberation of humanity from “our bondage to decay” to that “glorious freedom.” She is also an artist, learning to draw at the school where she was exiled as an orphan. Written in first person narrative, the depiction of her world is done via a first-rate artist’s eye. In short, if you have not read Jane Eyre, take my advice: “Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay.” Actually, I am quoting Charlotte Bronte here, speaking well of her Yorkshire native William Wilberforce.

“Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay;” she wrote, “and read the Memoir of Wilberforce,--that short record of a brief uneventful life; I shall never forget it; it is beautiful, not on account of the language in which it is written, not on account of the incidents it details, but because of the simple narrative it gives of a young talented sincere Christian."
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/egaskell/bl-egaskell-cbronte-8.htm



Charlotte Bronte, consciously or unconsciously, fuses this Wilberforcian idealism into her creativity. In her novel, she makes art with the belief of liberation for all people. This is precisely why we need to be speaking about her at this conference. She incarnates our common call to “create the world that ought to be,” and speaks through Jane Eyre’s voice.


It humbles me to think that I have been married to Judy for over 20 years now, and have never read the most influential book in her life. When I told her this, she, with her typical gentleness, countered by saying “That’s why it’s so worthwhile to stay together. It may take 20 years to start to read each other’s books…we’re just getting to the good part!”

Jane Eyre is equally as patient, a plain governess who determines her path of forgiveness, choosing to love her enigmatic, brooding employer Mr. Rochester, despite his inevitable downfall. There’s quite a drama in this rich landowner conspiring to hide his past, and the disastrous path that he paves for himself. But somehow, throughout, he acknowledges Jane, an orphaned woman without glamour, a woman of intellectual and creative thirst, as his equal.

But because of Rochester’s failures, she is exiled and again abandoned, to be one without family or friends. If you know the story, she then gains the favor of a missionary suitor, St. John Rivers, who takes her in when she is at his door, in near starvation. He then discovers her to be a determined force. St. John Rivers wants to marry her to take her to India, to be a missionary although neither loves the other. Jane would tell Rochester later, her true love, trying to allay his jealousy: “He (Rivers) is good and great…but as cold as iceberg.”

I find it curious that Charlotte Bronte sensed in the early 19th century that just like St. John Rivers, the church will manifest the effects of the enlightenment: theology veering towards depicting the gospel intellectually and only as a set of facts or information, but not communicate with the heart. The church is “good and great… but as cold as iceberg.” Bronte, throughout the novel, ties in Jane’s spiritual state with her creative, artistic state. Jane is an artist, cast away by society and circumstances from her true love. And the missionary can only present a sound, rational argument why she should join him, and this without love.

This disconnect is, also exemplified in works of van Gogh, where the church is still present in the Starry Night, holding the image together visually. But the Spirit has left the church, swirling into Nature. Her lover Rochester is the emblem of that Nature, swirling in her mind as her salvation. But Rochester, once a wanton world traveler, now is haunted by dark secrets. Though initially, Nature taps into her hunger, Nature herself fails ultimately, as Rochester fails her. But even in a severe, literal hunger that Jane experiences, Bronte also paints a landscape of hope.


I was recently going through the Biblical book of Joel, which I find to be a stark reminder of the catastrophes all around us, and those to come. I had put a post-it note on Joel 2 that I had forgotten about. I wrote: “The world is 90% catastrophe, but 100% grace (not 10%). “

Theologically, the whole world, after our expulsion from Eden, is ground zero. But art can refill the world with the aroma of grace.



There’s grace at work deeply imbedded in the novel, Jane ultimately using words reminiscent of Helen to cry out to God in her wilderness. She is exiled from both the world and her lover. Meanwhile, Mr. Rochester has literally been blinded from tragic consequences, though he finally begins to “see” his real wretched state. Jane would chose to return to him. “It is time some one undertook to re-humanize you,” and she begins to comb his tangled hair.

Re-humanize: what a wonderful word. Rochester needs to be re-humanized. Jane needs to inhabit that enigmatic, but now repentant heart. Just like Mr. Rochester, we need to be re-humanized. This culture needs to be re-humanized. Culture has been a tangled “shaggy black mane” like Rochester’s, that Jane has to comb out, blind to it’s own misery. Modernism has resulted in a tangled mess, or perhaps a neatly categorized supermarket of ideas, as in this photo (http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2001/07/22/28891.html) re-presented in Andreas Gursky’s “99 Cent”.

As a result of the enlightenment’s tendency to seek specialization, and minute categorization, “ it knows more about the little things and less about the big things. It knows more about every thing and less about Everything.” (Peter Kreeft, pg 108, Seel). Without the macro perspective, the grand narrative, our tangles get smaller and tighter, and as a result our creative expression has had to focus on the details, like here in Yayoi Kusama’s painting (http://www.exporevue.com/magazine/fr/kusama.html).


Technological advancements, certainly, lead to better living conditions and longer lives, and we should be thankful for that. But it also means the expansion of not just supermarkets, but of ground zeros. We find ourselves there alienated and smaller and smaller, and our injuries greater still. Just like Rochester’s limb, at the end of Jane Eyre, culture has been disfigured by the horrid fires of Hiroshima, and the poisons of the Holocaust, the twin emblems of the 20th century. These ghosts still haunt our post-modern, and now post-human realities (here captured as Willem de Kooning’s “Woman I” http://www.moma.org/ecards/write_ecard.php?object_id=79810).



Artists, the “the canary of the cultural mine” (Marshall McLuhan), know and sense this reality of being disfigured and cut off, orphaned by society. They feel that beauty, and pleasure, are both tainted and cannot be trusted. They embrace everything “anti” but rarely have much to say about what they are actually for. I was recently at the Veritas Forum at Columbia University where I was asked to debate feminist/activist artist Coco Fusco. At the end of the night, I felt very saddened by the fact that our dialogue seemed to be stuck on the NEA related culture wars of 15 years past. But the church, seen as the main source of cultural hegemony and oppression, has not provided her an alternative vision. The church has not romanced artists. As a result, the artists are left alone to defend themselves in culture, and do not have many Helens to speak God’s hope into their hearts.

Like Jane Eyre, we are to face a ruined heart and a ruined condition, our ground zeros. Mr. Rochester is disfigured, in misery. Astonishingly though, she tells Mr. Rochester as she combs his hair: “You are no ruin, sir – no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous.” She, by saying this, forgives. She not only gives a nod to Eden here, but foreshadows the New Creation to come. She is able to do this because, somehow, she keeps her innocence and purity intact, while recognizing fully the fallen reality. It was indeed during the deceptiveness of her lover that caused the actual lightning to strike on the tree she refers to. It was God’s judgment. She sees now with a refined purity of having gone through the fire of betrayal, and having come through without dross. She stands faithful.


In his book, “Breaking Ground,” Daniel Libeskind, the architect chosen for Ground Zero master design, also stood in the pit of Ground Zero, and facing, and laying his hand on the slurry wall, and heard an Augustinian echo, “Take it and read it…take it and read it.” “Take it and read” the slurry wall of your ground zero. “Take it and read” the faces of those who lost their lives there. He called his Berlin office and told his staff to scrap everything they had done up to that point: “The slurry wall is an engineering marvel, a metaphoric and literal stay against chaos and destruction. In refusing to fall, it seemed to attest, perhaps as eloquently as the Constitution, to the unshakable foundations of democracy and the value of human life and liberty.” (pg. 43, Breaking Ground)

Artists, we are called to create in our ground zeroes, too. We need to be a voice of faith there. Yes, we have been alienated and orphaned. It is time to regard the age at hand, and take individual steps to move beyond the post-modern fog into the Creative Age. It is not time to remain bitter, but it is time to bring the words of Helen into our bitter culture. Helen embraced, even in her illness, the deeper voice of her God for her friend, Jane Eyre. You, along with other entrepreneurs of the age, are asked to hold your gaze true to your original call. Though the conditions are bleak, it is still our call to listen to the voices speaking through our slurry walls, our limitations and our boundaries. The Creative Age exists because of the opportunity presented by the crisis of our age. We face a precipice of despair and fear, a culture at a loss to offer what it means to be a human being. This culture herself is orphaned, and cannot see beyond her misery. We at IAM can see our “slurry wall” in front of us, a wall that somehow withstood the onslaught of ideological attacks that claim bondage to our souls. Within, there are millions of faces, victims of dehumanization, the holocaust, and the fragmentation of our time. It is time to read those faces, and build on faith. There’s no other choice; To love is to remain human. We need to romance the culture in this present crisis. Woo her to love, and not fear. To do that is to be a true artist of the Creative Age.


Artists have the empathetic capacity to embrace humanity even in the most destitute of times. But to do so, we have to see, like Jane, in a disfigured man a “green and vigorous” reality. She did not create reality, but she saw the greater reality. It is imagination guided by faith that taps into the New Earth and New Heaven. We need to note that she saw her own heart as disfigured, too, and she had to go through the fire of sanctification herself to know and recognize another cry, the cry of Mr. Rochester, out of that fire. Charlotte Bronte created a parable that echoes Romans 8. “Our sufferings are not worth the future glory…” We are destitute and orphaned, yet Christ sees a royal wedding and a coronation to come.



Artists need to remember that the reality of faith unlocks creative vision. Christ has been disfigured and orphaned for us. The great Artist, the Author of Life, who the prophet Isaiah speaks of as “crushed for our inequities” (Isaiah 53:5), released our souls from our own “bondage to decay.” The Spirit gives birth to creativity. God’s love flows into our hearts, via our creativity, to the world. In Christ you are part of the ekklessia, the new kind of community, that Jesus died for. You are not only invited to a wedding; You are the bride of Christ. Even if your stand alone, in you ground zero, you can stand like Jane Eyre, with a wedding dress.




3. The Bible begins with Creation, and ends in a wedding.



What does a wedding require for a Bride? We are to anticipate that day with all of our resources. We are always thinking of the Bridegroom. A wedding has all the genres of the arts represented; Dance, spoken words, art, culinary expertise, fashion and music. Children of the Creative Age are really wedding planners. We are to present the best, to spend the rest of our time preparing for that reality. This anticipation will usher a new age, and a new purpose. But it will cost, and it will require sacrifice. Do not listen to anyone who tickles you with a notion that we are a generation of Indigo children, and evolving into a new, and higher consciousness. No, instead, we are the children of God in a disfigured age. Our call is to love in that condition. Our call is to see through the disfigurement and tragedy.

Mr. Rochester cannot fully comprehend how Jane would be as “happy as I can be on earth,” to be with him. “Because you delight in sacrifice?” he asks.

“Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value – to press my lips to what I love – to repose on what I trust; is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.” She, apparently, loves him more despite his infirmities.

This is the heart of the New Creation. This parable gives us artists a new paradigm to consider. How do we love a disfigured world? How do we give sacrifice, without being conscious of it?

This sacrifice, that is no sacrifice to Jane, is precisely what we need now for true, lasting beauty, to re-humanize. Beauty is not cosmetic. Botox will not result in happiness. Jane Eyre is telling us we need to love even more our wrinkled faces. It is through this path that we will see creativity that not only restores but also redeems. We need, as the children of the Creative Age, not only to create in love, but to create what love means in this culture. By doing so our art will begin to re-humanize the world.

4. Enchantment of Jesus

So how do you indeed live with monsters and Jesus in your heart at the same time? How do we remain innocent and pure in the age of wickedness? We must live with groaning and expectation of Romans 8 at the same time. After all, our world is broken but also enchanted, in the sense of the medieval word for gospel – “Good Spell.” We have been cast a good spell by the words and breath of Jesus. The arts need to cast good spells into the world that is dying and cynical. Do not “throw out the baby with the bath water”: Jesus, the babe, is the source of life and art that no religious water can tarnish. So it is no surprise that all the tales of old that we were enchanted by as children, like Beauty and the Beast, seem to fit into our journeys. It is no surprise at all, that as we venture forward, we seem to give a backward glance, as in to this marvelous image of coronation by Fra Angelico (http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/Gowing/Fra-Angelico.jpg).

In a world that ought to be, we will have monsters dancing in our cosmic wedding. Our Experience, even our greatest of fears, will be rewoven into the texture of God’s design for the Innocent. You are not an orphan, but a prince and a princess of God. We are to receive more than a double inheritance. We need to begin to live like a bride expecting a great, cosmic wedding. We need to begin to act like Jane Eyre, the first child of the Creative Age.

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This keynote was delivered at a recent International Arts Movement conference. Other keynotes by Daniel Libeskind, Jeremy Begbie and others will be made available soon at www.iamny.org

*Image above: Still taken from Distintegration Loop by William Basinski (www.mmlxii.com/)

Here's a wonderful image from a sketchbook of John Hendrix (www.johnhendrix.com). He sketched this image as I spoke.