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

Refractions 29: The Island of the Misfit Toys Part II

Matthaias Grunewald (1470-1528), Isenheim Altarpiece, Colmar, France





Refractions 29: The Island of the Misfit Toys, Part II

Jasper Johns, Grunewald and Life after Life after Death


“Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” Heraclitus, Fragments


N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, wanted the title of his new book to be “Life after Life after Death.” Harper Collins, his publisher, decided the title would be a bit confusing, so they re-named it as “Surprised by Hope,” surely more conventional, but an appropriate nod to C.S. Lewis’ classic book “Surprised by Joy.” I prefer Bishop Wright’s initial instinct; for the audacious reality of the resurrection claim does not invite easy, conventional titles. The claim of Christianity was, and is, a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth who redefined life, death and, the Life thereafter. The expression “Life after Life after Death ”invites us to a severe paradigm shift in our thoughts on life and death. What we think of as the end, is only a pause,: and the pause is only the beginning; a beginning of a new beginning.

N.T. Wright points out that the popular culture’s distortion of the idea of heaven has truncated the true message of the gospel. He notes, for example, Maria Shriver’s version of heaven, written in her book to children – “is somewhere you believe in… It’s a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there…If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go to heaven…” (quoted in pg. 17) He argues that the language of heaven in the New Testament doesn’t work that way.” “’God’s Kingdom’ in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’” (Pg. 18) Heaven, in other words, is not our final destination (as in speaking of Life after Death) : but the biblical writers spoke of the New Heavens and the New Earth, a reconciled whole in which we will inhabit, work and create (Life after Life after Death). We are called to assist in the creation of this new reality through our earthly lives, bringing justice, mercy and beauty into our broken realities. Instead of people simply “going to heaven,” The Bible tells us that at a future point in history, Heaven comes to us, and earth will be re-birthed in one glorious fulfillment of hope someday. “Heaven,” Wright continues, “is the place where God’s purposes for the future are stored up. It isn’t where they are meant to stay so that one would need to go to heaven to enjoy them; it is where they are kept safe against the day when they will become a reality on earth.” (Pg. 151)

This view of the scriptures directly impacts how we are to view our calling as culture makers. Especially in evangelical circles, many will argue that earth is to be burnt up in the Judgment fire of God, and everything will be destroyed anyhow, so why worry about culture at all. Wright walks through this issue carefully in his book, noting and clarifying many theological nuances deftly, correcting the knee-jerk anti-culture stance of the “Left Behind” theology. Even if you do not fully agree with all of his theological conclusions, his arguments are worth exploring.

I’ve always wondered why, for instance, in 2 Peter 3:10, it is not the earth that is burned up, but heaven. (“The heavens will disappear with a roar.”) And why 1 Corinthians 3 passages give a resounding nod to the remarkable idea that even our works, and not only our souls, will remain after the Judgment. Further, as another theologian Richard Mouw points out in his wonderful book, When the Kings Come Marching in: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem, Isaiah 60 and Revelation passages seem to point to the final celebration of the coming of this new Reality, would have pagan Kings and secular ships sailing into the edges of New Jerusalem. In other words, cultural influencers of all types, whether classified as Christians or not, seem to end up joining the parade in some way.

This pro-culture stance, based on what theologians call common grace, makes sense because our effort to bring beauty, justice and peace into the world is a universal calling. Theologically, I am not a Universalist, one that believes that all roads lead to heaven. But scriptures points to a universalistic bent of culture making that bring beauty and empathy into the world. After all, don’t we desperately desire to know that our efforts to create, to administer justice and to bring mercy into the world, are not in vain. To this longing, N.T. Wright goes further than mere affirmation. He states;

You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are – strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself – accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. (pg. 208)


In other words, earth is connected to heaven NOW. Further, anyone can be agents of change, partake in Godly activities without even having the assurance of our eternal destiny (i.e., not be a church going person who does not confess to being a Christian). By God’s sheer grace, we are invited to generate the new Reality of the “Life after Life after Death” into our broken realities of all of our Wasteland. Common grace allows for competency to be universal as well. This is why I would rather have a competent plumber who does not share my faith than an incompetent one that tries to give me a Biblical reason why I should hire him.

Culture shaping is not an escapist activity from our current woes: instead it is breathing life into the very ashes from our present and our past, and finding, with T.S. Eliot, “the still point of the turning world.” Generative creativity flows out of not just Eden, but out of this reality of “Life after Life after Death.” We can begin to deposit our efforts into the future, rather than hope to escape into our Edenic past. Our earth, no matter how bleak, is full of promise on this side of Easter. Heaven can invade into our art of life, right in the midst of our ground zeros.

And if the earth acts as a conduit of heaven, then this yeast-like hope can be worked into the dough of culture. Naturally, as I pondered Wright’s comments, I began to ask what if art is infused with heaven, what would that art look like? If true understanding of heaven is not mere escapism, but the physical manifestation of the “substance of things hoped for,” (Hebrews 11:1) then art needs to echo this promise into tangible reality. If Wright is correct, then even ephemeral expressions done in faith will remain etched in eternal reality, and somehow earth, all of earth, is fair game for heaven’s invasion. And every act, done in faith, will count.



AS I mulled over the enormous impact that Wright’s thoughts have had in recent days in my journey of faith, Jasper John’s recent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum kept on sneaking into my thoughts. Of course, you might rightly ask, what has Jasper Johns got to do with N.T. Wright, or ask what has Jesus got to do with Jasper Johns, one of the most enigmatic of contemporary artists? But the “Life after Life after Death” notion does force us to ask such surreal and surprising questions. This heavenly invasion creates a ripple effect into the details of art and life: and that power cannot be tamed by any of us, but will spill out into the general culture. Thus the true test of this radical premise would force us to ask whether works by a contemporary artist that seem contradictory to themselves, and are agnostic at best can teach us something about the resurrection? Indeed, I am convinced that Johns’ works do this, but the key to understanding this principle is linked to John’s admiration of a little known German artist named Matthaias Grunewald (1470-1528), whose altarpieces are in Colmar, France. Grunewald, in my creative journey as well, stands out as one of the greatest post-reformation artists.



Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958, Whitney Museum

Jasper Johns, a central figure in the contemporary art scene, became famous for his encaustic flag paintings, setting a record at a contemporary art auction in 1980, selling for one million dollars. This turned out to be a bargain: recently David Geffin sold a Johns piece for $80 milllion dollars.



He has been known for his cryptic, zen-like images of numbers, more flags, targets and more recently, works that what seem to address multidimensionality constructs while still remaining paintings. The current Metropolitan exhibit surveys the last 50 years of his work, but to call it merely “a survey of a leading post-modern artist” would do injustice to his works. Even in our post-modern reality, the art of Johns is far closer to the reality of the post-resurrection, mirroring what Wright calls Life after Life after Death, than many would dare to admit. It is far more profoundly refracts the new creation reality than, let’s say, Thomas Kinkade’s sympathetic, cozy paintings.

In Johns’ later paintings, which the Metropolitan exhibit gives considerable attention to, writers note their many visual connections to the Grunewald altarpiece in Colmar, France. Johns repeatedly visited the altarpiece, and was moved by the painting. This connection has proven irresistible to me over the years, and to see Johns’ paintings is to rediscover the many hidden references to the altarpiece. For me, it is impossible to see his later works without pondering the visual reference to Grenewald. Of course, commentators typically limit the nature of this affection, as in “he may have been moved by its aesthetic properties far more than its religious mythology.” But knowing how a creative mind works, and how a profound experience can alter and, even, haunt, an artist’s imaginative vision, I dare say that any profound aesthetic influence is, in the essential core, spiritual.

After my journey of faith turned to Christ, a Japanese dealer gave me a magazine with a pull-out of images of the altarpiece. He said, “You now need to study him.” I remember with fresh faith and fresh vision, marveling at the details of Christ’s sore filled body, and the triumphant reversal of that violence in the moment of the resurrection of Christ. The images out of the magazine opened up a new vista of creativity, and the resurrection panel, especially, leapt out at me. It was one of the few images of the resurrection that felt weighty, and not disembodied, like Dali’s image of an incorporeal Christ.



The monastery of St. Anthony in Isenheim near Colmar, where the image was commissioned for, is known as a place where skin disease sufferers, commonly called “Saint Anthony’s Fire” or ergotism, was treated. “Annales Xantenses for the year 857: ‘a Great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death.’”







Thus, the artist embodied the sores and loosened limbs in the body of Christ. When patients, who were taken in by the monks, looked up at the image of Christ, they saw Jesus suffer with him. And as they looked beyond to the panel behind the crucifix, they saw his bodily resurrection from life, and from the pain and suffering. And it was this resurrection panel that Jasper Johns profoundly connected with.




Richard Shiff, in one of the essays contributed for “Gray” exhibit catalogue, states:

The aim of an artist as a creative individual, Jasper Johns suggested recently, is to do ‘something a little more worthwhile than oneself.’…To be worth more, you would need to change in a fundamental way – change your life – or, at the least, experience change and become a channel for its communication.

In other words, art can function to mediate transformative experiences, and to create a conversation around them. Jasper Johns suggests here that in order to do so, one must transcend oneself in some way. This humble premise, one that stands apart as an anomaly in today’s ego filled art making, opens a way for a conversation of art as a catalyst for transformation, not just for the artist, but for society at large. Humility can lead us to a higher vista of creativity, and Johns’ process of creativity stands out in an Island of the Misfit Toys called Manhattan. His idiosyncratic journey, though shared with Rauschenberg and other luminaries of his time, is unlike any other of his time. His creative approach may suggest even a paradigm shift in contemporary art toward our new century.

Johns’ works are intentionally obscured by negation as a premise, as much as the affirmation of a path of “The Road Less Traveled.” Thus even his personal connection to Grunewald is also made unclear in his own works. The idea of direct connection to meaning, intent with the content of an artwork, is being refuted by Johns, and it is precisely this disconnect that has become his signature style. By disassociating himself, and his works, from conventionality, he takes simple, common imagery and turns it, with a deft slight of hand, into a philosophical and aesthetic riddle. If art is about asking questions, and not giving pat answers, then Johns’ works are creating a labyrinth of questions, one that, somehow, end up invigorating us, rather than alienating us.


Take, for example, his famed Three Flags painting (the one million dollar painting). Upon first glance (especially in photographs or on the web), the work seems to be a facile rendition of a three US flags, with differing sizes, stacked on top of another. But as with all of Johns’ works, a simple image provokes so many questions. Why paint the American flag (he claims to have seen a dream of the painting)? Did he have a patriotic cause in mind? Or is he mocking the subject? Johns’ answer would be simply that the flag was a convenient vehicle for the act of painting, or to ask questions that he desires to deal with, and to do it with an object that he found immediate access to.

The flag paintings are done in a typical Johns encaustic technique, an ancient wax technique of painting that goes back to Egyptian times. In the surface of the Flag paintings are torn newspapers, covered by melted wax. Johns creates deceptively simple, and flat, but when you look closely, the gestures undulates, complicating the surface.

Critic and art historian Max Kozloff writes:

This [newsprint] would be a hidden collage…The “real” is whatever is underneath, partially withheld from sight. Art reticently covers up or shields life, instead of assimilating and triumphing over it as in traditional collage.

In the accumulated collage of newspaper and wax, Johns actually goes beyond copying the imagery, and manages not to make the image banal. Somehow, in the execution of his painting, he imbeds tension and history, and creates a precious object. There is even a sense that the act of painting has become a private ritual of sacred order: but, at the same time, by choosing known ordinary objects, like the American Flag, targets, a beer can, he intentionally reduces the impact, deceptively making us question the preciousness of the object. With lesser able hands, the same motif, even with same materials, most artist would not come close to creating such a tension; art is both in the execution and in the revelation of the extraordinary.

I’ve heard many people say of contemporary art: “my kids can do that.” I encourage them, then to try it themselves, don’t let kids have all the fun! Try to make drip paintings like Jackson Pollock. Or paint an object with encaustic, layering color upon color, like Johns. Try silk screening images like Warhol. You soon find out that in the ordinary gestures and materials, there are deceptively complicated and sublime twists. Our drips become unnatural and confined, where as Pollock’s drips dance, and form delectable edges that seem to undulate in front of our eyes. Our edges of encaustic strokes become unshapely, because If you try working with wax (as I have tried to in college,) you find out soon enough that it is unforgiving, making it very difficult to create a clean, sharp definition. The melting wax constantly oozes, and moves about, and the colors muddle,. If you are finally able to paint a stripe with bright colors, the stripes would not resonate, in ways that Johns’ Flags do.

And that is to speak only of the method of execution. Johns’ works not only collage materials, but they also synthesize concepts, culture, the zeitgeist of his day. One may be able to copy his technique, but it is impossible to mimic the complex layers of confluences that he is synthesizing as he mixes beeswax and pigments. To Jasper Johns, the medium of his art is not really encaustic, the medium of his art is Time itself.

He stated:

I prefer work that appears to come out of a changing focus – not just one relationship or even a number of them but constantly changing and shifting relationships to things in terms of focus…I am concerned with a thing’s not being what it was, with its becoming something other than what it is, with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely and with the slipping away of that moment.


Johns, like the Greek philosopher Heraclitus believes that “everything is in flux.” By “changing focus,” and dealing with “changing and shifting relationships,” his art focuses on what is not static. But then he intentionally uses objects and symbols of static fixture, like the American Flag and targets, to ironically remind us that even what the culture considers iconic as an American Flag is not a static construct, and targets can be, well, moving targets. His task is to force us to recognize “any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely and with the slipping away of that moment.” His use of encaustic, an ancient medium used in Egyptian times, makes sense in this emphasis on the ephemeral. The material itself is both vulnerable to heat and cold, but also remarkably stable, if kept in the proper climate,. Encaustic is a paradoxical emblem of change and stasis.

Thus, the art of Johns operates in “constant negation of impulses,” ( pg. 84) and therefore, his art cannot be simply “Pop” imagery, and is not readily digestible in the way Warhol’s paintings are. Johns’ creativity demands more of us, and his exhibits are full of maps (sometimes literally, in his series of American maps) that depict visual riddles swirling deeply in the currents of culture. The journey of a viewer on that river can be full of generative discovery. Good art gives birth, impregnated with meaning for future creative journeys.

But if the trajectory of his career only points to this paradoxical, and confounding “negation of impulses,” then it could fall short of providing a meaningful dialogue, and end up being just a game, or worse yet, an existential, and hopeless, end-game. What Johns found intriguing in the Grunewald panels, especially the resurrection panel, must have been a confluence of paradox, astonishment and transformative but also definitive, and static, reality. Therefore his later paintings, like “Untitled” 1992-95, which seem to irk the critics as they are less ironic, and more personal and dreamy, seem to me to be the most generative and inquisitive. They point to an ontological question (question of origins), rather than being stubbornly agnostic. As with all intuitive artists, such deep existential wrestling may release, in process, a deeper reality. Perhaps Johns found the greatest enigma of all; or perhaps he sensed that his art needed to point to the supra-natural enigma, not be trapped in a closed cycle of natural causes.


Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1992-94

If so, Jasper John’s trajectory points to a generative reality that very few contemporary artists have dared to tread. The supra-natural enigma is the question of Time, and how we, as artists, deal with the eternal timeful questions. Something happened at the beautiful little village in France called Colmar to one of the greatest living artists of our time. We need to pay attention to this journey. Perhaps we can make that pilgrimage ourselves to Colmar, France, transfixed, looking up at the ascending Christ, in wonderment and delight.

Makoto Fujimura, 2008

Makoto Fujimura's New Commission for a New Haven Church

Dear Refraction Readers

Thanks to Brad Guise, a premier fashion photographer, Christianity Today selected the image above for their cover this month. The background painting is "Splendor-Ghost," which was part of my Charis exhibit at Dillon Gallery. My wife and Judy and I were also blessed this summer by the marriage of our son Ty and his long time friend Priscilla, which also took place at Dillon Gallery during my show.



















I realized that this, too, was a fulfillment of promise that I wrote about in a Refraction essay "A Wedding and a City."

Valerie Dillon, the owner of Dillon Gallery, also told me that her friend had requested to have a memorial service at a gallery during my exhibit. So during my exhibit, my works stood behind both a wedding and a memorial service.

I now have a sense that my art should serve as a backdrop to the joys and sorrows of family and community. Art should mediate as a servant of humanity, to act as a theatrical backdrop to our human dramas. A friend of mine noted, musing, "it would be hard to imagie a wedding taking place in any other gallery in Chelsea." Imagine getting wed in front of a Damien Hirst (as much as I admire his art), or a memorial service in front of Jeff Koons? I told Valerie Dillon, who generously donated the space to my son and my daughter in law, that perhaps a gallery should take as a compliment that it is fit to host such meaningful functions. We are all looking for a "third place" in culture to wed, to lament and to celebrate our humanity.

My next Refractions entry on Jasper Johns will be out later this month. The book version of Refraction essays (up to 2006 and extensively re-written) will be out next February, so stay tuned...

Charis,

Mako Fujimura

Refractions 28: The Island of the Misfit Toys Part 1

Refractions 28: The Island of the Misfit Toys: New York's Avant-Garde Artists of the late 20th Century

Part 1: Robert Rauschenberg

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. Gaston Bachelard

I had been working on a Refractions entry on the works of American contemporary artist Jasper Johns, when the news of Robert Rauschenberg passing away hit the news wires. Rauschenberg was Johns' comrade in the frontlines of the avant-garde art world. Both artists are now considered seminal and central to twentieth century American art. Along with other notable figures such as John Cage (composer), Merce Cunningham (dancer/choreographer) and avant-garde painters such as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, Rauschenberg redefined the landscape of contemporary art. The radical nature of their art challenged and shaped the new capital of art, continuing a century of dominance of American art, and of the New York art scene.

These artists left an indelible mark in my artistic vision during my undergraduate years, as I visited New York museums and galleries, having several notable "epiphany" experiences there (Gorky's retrospective at Guggenheim Museum in the early 80's being most potent). I wrestled with their art, often with the question of "what is art?" or even "is this art?" These questions continued during my stay in Tokyo as a National Scholar graduate student in the Nihonga department. As I learned the revered tradition of Japan, these artists, like characters in a theatre of the absurd, kept creeping into my consciousness, dancing in and out of the process of my works.

They were misfits, but the island of Manhattan did serve as a perfect backdrop to these artists' existential dramas. Surely, there was to be a unique destiny for those willing to eek out a meager living in their illegal lofts, without having to sell a single painting for many years, receiving ridicule after ridicule if they were fortunate enough to have their works shown. These vanguard creators always lived in tension, both in their art and in life, often juxtaposing contradictions together in a patchwork. No simple or singular definition of their art, or their lives, would suffice: they were surprisingly varied in their personalities, political persuasions, and aesthetic dispositions, but found a common ground in their ambitions and in their brokenness. They were quite like the toys on the Island of the Misfit Toys: and in Rauschenberg's world, Charley in the Box, the pink spotted elephant, and the red-nosed reindeer would all find a place in a single canvas.

In writing Rauschenberg's New York Times obituary, Michael Kimmelman states that Rauschenberg's work "helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life..." He made art with an extraordinary sense of design, appropriating media imagery, inventing with any found materials he saw fit to use. Beds, broom sticks, stuffed birds and animals, quilts, bicycles, cardboard, newspaper..., it seemed there were no materials forbidden in his art. His greatest contribution, though, may not be in bringing ordinary objects into museums; instead, he brought Art into life's ordinary objects. He, along with another seminal twentieth century figure, Joseph Beuys, desired to liberate art to the everyday person. His visual language of combining text, newspaper images, advertisements and objects, often in a contradictory manner, seemed eclectic and electric at the same time. He was never a profound artist: but every object was, to him, indeed profound. His art teaches us to consider every moment, every material as potential material for art. "You begin with the possibilities of the material," he has stated, "I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made of the real world."

Calvin Tomkins' book Off the Wall, one of the most interesting book on Rauschenberg's art and his contemporaries, notes that Rauschenberg as a child, as with Cage, had desired to be a preacher;

"Our church was so strict that it was a full-time job for any Christians just to search for evils," according to Rauschenberg. "Even so, I was going to be a preacher until I was about thirteen. I was really serious about it. Finally I decided I couldn't spend the rest of my life thinking everyone else was going to hell, but I kept on going to church - I still went when I was in the Navy and for some time afterward. Giving that up was a major change in my life." (Pg. 15, Off the Wall, Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Calvin Tomkins, 1980 Penguin Books)

Indeed I find it remarkable that these avant-garde artists, while denying and often decrying the institution of Christianity, and living transgressive lifestyles, delved deeply into theosophy (Mondrian), Zen (Cage, Johns) and Jewish mysticism (Rothko, Kline), often blending these religious traditions, almost like Rauschenberg paintings. Mark Rothko equated the process of painting to a religious experience. Many of them, like Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns were brought up in Protestant church. Often these influences are treated as footnotes in the accounts of the art and life of these artists. But when you consider their artistic trajectories, especially in what they chose to work against, and how they saw their commitment to art as "religious," then clearly their early development figures quite significantly.(1) Barnett Newman, the high priest of the religion on avant-gardes explicitly stated, "instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or life, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings."(2) In discussion of contemporary art, such crucial details of counter-spirituality are often left out. In understanding culture and her spiritual journey, what the artists were wrestling against is just as noteworthy as what they embraced.

John Cage, in developing his compositions, or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, reducing things to non-compositions, worked squarely against the classical tradition. His 4'33", 1952 work is performed without a single note being played. Why 4'33"? Artist David O'Connell, a colleague of both Cage and Rauschenberg, states: "He did a survey and came up with the average time spent getting comfortable in their seats coughing, opening gum and candy wrapper etc... Both he and Bob had the ability to turn the camera around and point it at the spectator." The pianist, thus, simply sat in his chair, and the listeners were to hear the environmental sound as "music". He boldly asserted that "Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been extensive as it has been lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music" (Tomkins, Pg. 70). Not only was he working against the classical tradition, he wrestled against the conservative, controlling environment of the church he grew up in. He saw art as a way to explore his spirituality, seeking answers in Zen Buddhism and incorporating elements of I Ching (ancient Chinese cosmology.)


Cage often spearheaded other avant-garde artists' experiments, generating a new creative language of openness, freedom and transcendence. Though they did not intentionally intend to do so starting out, they created a new religion of the avant-garde, preaching their virtues eloquently, persuading countless numbers of artists to join in. The world they depicted anticipated the spiritual climate of post-modernity, and the multi-media culture to come. Avant-garde expressions and artifacts echo Hazel Mote's "Church without Christ" in Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood." If to O'Connor the south was "Christ haunted," then so was the avant-gardes scene in lower Manhattan. What is in the negative can be revelatory.

Negative spaces are just as important as positive shapes, so we learn in a drawing class. If a chair is to be drawn, a good instructor will help the student pay attention to the shapes in between the legs of the chairs, or the back rests, as much in the "positive shapes" of the chair itself. In the same way, these artists depicted the spiritual climate by negative shapes, but by doing so they effectively described the shape and influence of the churches they rejected. Their observations serve as an invaluable service for the church, as they gave shape to the spiritual vacuum that pervades our culture today. They are important precisely because they depict an honest spiritual wrestling within empty spaces.(3) In that sense, art can always point to the profound, and, even in perverse disagreements, artists accurately reveal the spiritual vacuum. But, while they rejected the church, I contend that they did not throw out Jesus altogether. Many of these artists, Warhol, Beuys, Newman...perhaps, do I dare say, all of these artists would be interested in Jesus of Nazareth simply because of the extraordinary means through which Jesus communicated to the world. Jesus often confounded his disciples, using unconventional terminologies. Jesus spoke in negative shapes, too, upsetting the authorities. Jesus transgressed -- but he transgressed in love. An artist is always interested in an Artist. For me, even to reflect on the work of a contemporary artist is to wrestle deeply with questions of faith. For me, the role of an artist and a follower of Christ in contemporary culture is to transgress in love, learning from Jesus.

In Rauschenberg's key work Monogram, an installation/combine piece with a stuffed Angora goat placed upon a collaged canvas. This important work reveal an artist surveying images from all around him (literally) walking about in his South Street seaport blocks, and salvaging objects being thrown out, appropriating all influences, but especially and notably specific Christian iconography. There's a clear overlap between Monogram and 19th century British artist Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat. Rauschenberg took Hunt's image of the goat as Christ, and re appropriated it. Rauschenberg may have walked away from the church, but spirituality, and even the tenets of the gospel, were never far from his creative core. Art to Rauschenberg was like a truth serum, and all of what he saw, experienced, and even rejected, was blurted out on canvas. Undeniably, he wrestled with the reality of Christ throughout his career. But the way Rauschenberg wrestled was unlike the way of a traditional artist such as Holman Hunt. No, Rauschenberg's process of creativity worked like a powerfully intuitive search engine that explored the deep recesses of cultural realities. A traditional artist like Hunt focused on communicating already accepted spirituality. Rauschenberg probed deeper. And in doing so Rauschenberg's vast speculative purveyance actually anticipated how we are to experience the world in the years to come.

Consider this: if my thoughts were to be projected onto a screen, even in the process of writing this, I am sure it would look a bit like a Rauschenberg painting. Part of this essay was completed while riding a transatlantic airplane 892 kilometers per hour, at 34,000 feet, assimilating various thoughts; I watched a Japanese movie (Yama san, a "salary-man" goes fishing, and ends up fighting against the company he works for. The company wanted to destroy the beautiful coastal town known for fishing with their real estate venture), I pondered the shapes of the terrains of Alaskan territories on a video map in front of me (thinking of Andy Goldsworthy's terrain drawings in the documentary Rivers and Tides), while listening to Alison Krauss on my iPod... these thoughts, and other random thoughts, are like elements of a collage, interdependent, but often competing. Our lives are "combines" being simultaneously worked on.


Of course, such thinking could become a self-fulfilling prophesy of an artistic kind. It could be that I see the world through Rauschenberg's eyes because I am trained to see the world through an artist's lens. But even so, to be given such an inclination is the mark and influence of a significant artist, one who facilitates the viewers' imaginative journeys. As Time magazine critic Robert Hughes has noted in Shock of the New, we will never see a cypress tree in the same way after seeing a van Gogh painting. Likewise, we may never see a worn out quilt, or the collage of competing neon signs called Times Square, in the same way after Rauschenberg.

***

In 1951, it was John Cage who became Rauschenberg's first collector (Tomkins, pg. 65). Although Cage could not pay the price being asked which was less than $100 then, he convinced dealer Betty Parsons to allow him to take a pink work home. But one day, Rauschenberg snuck into Cage's loft, and repainted it completely in black with enamel.


That painting would be worth tens of millions of dollars today. A Rauschenberg just recently sold for $14.6 million. Of course, the fact that their works now sell in the upper echelons of an auction market (often without the artists getting a single penny from the auction transaction) made these avant-garde artists newsworthy for the first time. But our interest here goes beyond the auction prices, to Rauschenberg's true cultural value as a pioneer. We must not forget that Rauschenberg was the first living contemporary American artist to be recognized and honored overseas. Others like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko who died too early to allow for such a retrospective. Rauschenberg's notoriety, after winning the coveted Venice Biennial in 1964, extended far beyond the reach of any other American artist. I remember the exhibit at Setagaya Museum in Japan in 1986, when he exhibited, among other pieces, the biggest print ever made (it was still in progress). His prodigious output took over the vast halls of the museum, and in Japan where small and compact things are the norm, Rauschenberg's works seemed delightfully outlandish and raw. By going to a Rauschenberg exhibit, the viewers were baptized into contemporary American art. By the time the viewers walked out of a Rauschenberg exhibit, the fresh "melting pot" called America had become a delectable collage, so democratically arranged, blatantly and confidently imprinted in their visual memory.





True artists swim upstream of culture, and their work will eventually affect the entire river. What seemed once peripheral, inconsequential gestures, their experiments and thoughts, now takes up center stage of a global popular culture. What was upstream a decade ago is now downstream. The jarring array of competing, but uniform patterns of the YouTube culture, ambitious collage of time events over vast geography in movies like Babel, the blurring of high and low art in Takashi Murakami's orgiastic world at his recent Brooklyn Museum exhibit, all can be traced to Rauschenberg's canvas (although, one can rightly argue that Warhol was ahead of both.) Takashi was my classmate in Nihonga department, so he must have seen the Rauschenberg exhibit of 1986. Our thoughts, our media and our conversations in general are filled with such Rauschenbergian incidental gestures, thinly spread smears of competing stimuli. Our lives, and perhaps even our identities, are collaged tapestry, sometimes neatly arranged, sometimes warring against another. What is now a ubiquitous hodgepodge of post-modern montage was not only anticipated in Rauschenberg's images, but they serve to warn us as an emblem of our overloaded, scattered lives. What Rauschenberg was appropriating was not just newspaper images, but actual experiences of our time: he froze the movements of contemporary moments that bombard us everyday, and he thereby mediated our fragmented realities. In that, he was exceedingly successful, often masterful. He breathed life into transient images, giving them reprieve from our disposable culture, literally rescuing our cultural memories from the dumpster. "Materials are never wrong," Rauschenberg said. "It's only me that can be wrong." (Off the Wall, pg. 213)


His materials may not be wrong, but they are not permanent. When I saw his last exhibit of his assemblages, including the famed "Bed" paintings, at the Metropolitan Museum, I noticed that the colors of these assemblages have already become pale, losing the zest and impact that I remember them to have when I saw them as a teenager. People passed by in a whisper in the hallowed halls, and Rauschenberg, according to a friend who went to pay homage to him at the opening, wept the whole time. He knew that the end was near for him. I wonder if the backdrop of the decaying assemblages spoke back to the creator of them, even more than the visitors' well wishes. Whether Rauschenberg's assemblages can be preserved remains to be seen. What we know for sure, though, is that contemporary art will not be the same again.


Rauschenberg's process-focused art refracts time, trapped in materials, in a generous spatial display. Did he generate more than that? We are not sure, yet. Kimmelman is right that Rauschenberg obscured the boundaries between genres of the arts: but it is also true that Rauschenberg obscured the notion of time itself. While his combines are decaying with time, his prints, including the largest print ever pulled, will outlast any of us, trapping time and sequence of historical events. Unlike other artists, he remained remarkably consistent in the signature style he developed, without the works becoming too staid and repetitive. The question that we must ask is whether he captured something deeper in the blurred lines of time and space.

The purpose of art is to mediate and steward Time. Artists do this via space and matter, being poets of materials. Writers can do this through words, dancers via movements of their bodies, architects via creation of space. Their work is to make Time freeze, and even "create" Time. When a gifted artist does this, the art creates, or taps into, Time-fulness. If the purpose of art is to mediate and steward Time, did Robert Rauschenberg not only capture time, but generate Time-fulness? That is the ultimate question he, or any artist, has to answer. Such deep quests need to be considered, and in order to do so, we must, for our next Refractions, turn our attention to his fellow journeyman, Jasper Johns, one of the few living artists from the heyday of the avant-garde movement of twentieth century. Johns delves into these deep philosophical, and metaphysical, questions. For if Rauschenberg danced with Time over his paintings in a blur, Johns imbeds Time right into his paintings.



Late in his life, Rauschenberg, influenced by the art and culture of India, stated; "everything is relative, that everything is acceptable, and that you don't have to be afraid of beauty, either." Of course, critics sneered, for the notion of beauty was taboo in late twentieth century art. When I began to show in SoHo in the 90's, it was still unfashionable to speak of beauty, or use beautiful materials of Nihonga. Perhaps the resurgence of material and beauty in the art world that we are experiencing today began with Rauschenberg's generous art. Quintessentially American, original and prolific, Rauschenberg's images do lead us, like a strange red nosed reindeer, right into the thick fogs of our post-modern night. His images, even in decay, would resonate to those who look for signs of good fortune from a strangely, but beautifully, collaged sky.



Makoto Fujimura


The author acknowledges and thanks artist David O'Connell, who knew "Bob," for invaluable assistance in preparing this essay.

Next Refractions: Part II Jasper Johns and "Life After Life After Death."


(1)"The development of abstract painting in the early 20th century was a religious as well as an aesthetic movement." (What Good are the Arts, pg 137, John Carey, Faber and Faber UK, 2005)
(2)Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, Knopf, New York, 1990, Pg. 173
(3)My wife, a psychotherapist, tells me that there is "negative space" in relationships as well. Children, for example, growing up in consistent parenting grows the ability to take the failures of a parent as "negative space" and infer, or learn, to take positive message out of a parent's failure. See www.judycares.com under "Judy cares about my parents."

Image:

Robert Rauschenberg
Retroactive I, 1964,
Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas,
84 x 60 in. (213.4 x 152.4 cm),
Wadsworth Athenuem,
Hartford, Connecticut

Refractions 27: A Wedding and the City

Refractions 27: A Wedding and the City

On a rainy Saturday morning in February, Judy and I attended a wedding in the city. The bride was a daughter of good friends involved with a mission organization that serves the poor in the city. The Kleinknechts became for us surrogate city parents when we moved back to the New York area in 1992, guiding us on school choices, shopping options and churches to check out. Their daughter, Morgen, and their son, David, both attended public schools. We did, after all, need much help navigating how to raise our kids in New York City. We have had many mentors in our lives, and we are grateful for them all.

The Kleinknechts were involved in a church planting project which became the Redeemer movement and invited us to their activities as well. We visited Redeemer and heard Dr. Tim Keller speak to a crowd of some two hundred folks (it attracts more than 5000 every Sunday now). Judy and I turned to each other after the sermon and said "That's like a humanities lecture at Bucknell, except it was about the (Christian) gospel."

Well, it turned out that Tim did attend our alma mater, Bucknell University, a few years ahead of us. We ended up "commuting" 40 minutes to the city from cozy suburbia each Sunday to worship with them. The Kleinknechts and the Kellers preached a new paradigm for Christians being involved in the cities. "We must love the city," Tim Keller would tell the leaders. "Many Christians are against the city, or become too much 'of' the city." In order to truly love the city, all leaders involved were challenged to consider moving into the city and raising our families here.

If their vision consisted of mere idealism, or mere passion, I am not sure that would have convinced both my wife and me to make the move. Every time doubts welled up and tempted us to move our family as far away from the city as humanly possible, we reminded ourselves that our friends had a deep theological grid to work from. They were not saying, "Be a hero, move into the heart of strife." They were communicating a gospel that we had never heard and understood fully before: If you want to affect the culture, you must plant yourself in the soil of that culture. If the early Christians were willing to move into a plague-infested city, we must be willing to move into a city dealing with the AIDs crisis and many other social ills. Of course, I knew that the city is one of the few places where I had a shot at making a living as an artist. But still, why move our family there?

"The city attracts the best," Tim told me one day as I drove him in our rusty Toyota station wagon, our last car before we gave up that mobility (renting our parking lot was costing us more than we paid for our first apartment after college) for city subways. "You have to seek the best if you want be the best, you need the city to shape you." Of course, he was not just speaking about being an artist. His theology would include the idea of shalom, the flourishing of humanity.

In short, he was saying, in order to be the best human you can be, we need the city. That idea of can be extended in a radical principle to raising your family in the city. As counter-intuitive, and most definitely counter-cultural, as it may sound, in order to raise our children well, we need the city. To be a church that desires to be a catalyst for the flourishing of humanity, we need to move in and begin the adventure of trusting God in the midst of strife, even if that means to "exile ourselves" from familiar comfort and conventionality. TriBeCa, in 1992, had few amenities, and local paper still reported occasional gang related murders in our streets.

Jeremiah 29:4-7 states: "This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."

Planting trees and seeing our children wed in a city are not what many would consider "spiritual." But this wedding in midtown Manhattan was a manifestation of a spiritual principle bearing fruit. We were witness to a covenantal commitment between the bride and the bridegroom that transcends time and even the boundaries of this particular city. Glen and Carole, the bride's parents, have solely and faithfully served the inner city of New York driven by their spiritual principle of loving the city. Morgen and her new husband, a pastor, will carry out this same promise in Los Angeles.

Tim Keller's wedding message was, as usual, succinct and powerfully resonant. He began with Kierkegaard (1), who stated that at the end of history, we will have to take our masks off, as in the midnight hour of the masquerade, and reveal who we really are. "Marriage," Tim reminded us, "is a radical endeavor. It is radically discomforting and radically comforting at the same time. And the Christian gospel is the only paradigm that can bring these opposites together." Unlike the Kierkegaard metaphor, Tim continued, a marriage forces us to take our masks off; we are completely vulnerable. Marriage, therefore, can give us strength and confidence to move into the world, or it can devastate us from within.

In his new book, The Reason for God , Tim writes:

"God did not create us to get the cosmic, infinite joy of mutual love and glorification, but to share it. We were made to join in the dance. We were designed, then not just for belief in God in some general way, nor for a vague kind of inspiration or spirituality. We were made to center our lives upon him, to make the purpose and passion of our lives knowing, serving, delighting, and resembling him. This growth in happiness will go on eternally, increasing unimaginably. (1 Corinthians 2:7-10)"

(p. 219, The Reason for God , Dutton)

The cosmic dance is also a nuptial dance. The Church, as the Bride of Christ, is invited to a Feast. But in order to fully respond to this invitation, we have to get beyond the general sense of "faith" and move into God's banquet hall, a center room of his mansion. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that that mansion is in a city: The City of God. "The Bible begins at a Garden," Tim noted often, "and ends in a City."

After serving at Redeemer as an elder for two years with Glen, I jumped at the opportunity to plant their first daughter church, The Village Church. If this theology of the city was to work, I needed to put my efforts into the heart of culture, and create a church home for the creative. The Village Church, now in its 13th year, would become our family's exilic home. Our children know no other church; our son Ty, now at NYU, and his fiancée, who graduates from The King's College this June, both attend there.

Glen and I kept in touch, and I asked him to assist me in establishing the New York chapter of the International Arts Movement, an arts advocacy group to carry out this mission to see humanity flourish via the arts. Glen agreed to serve us as a founding board member from 1998 - 2003. He would often joke about the "farmer from Indiana" serving on the board of an arts organization. But I assured him that IAM needs to be able to speak to farmers as well as artists. The boundaries of art need to expand, to see all of life in the creative abundance of God. Besides, Glen was one of organizational gurus behind the Redeemer movement, and he knew instinctively what it meant to take risks that can impact the culture at large. If having him on the board only meant that I could glean from his wisdom on raising teens in the city, or receive occasional fatherly advice for my marriage, that alone would be worth it.

At a gathering soon after 9/11, Glen introduced himself as an "unwitting recruiter responsible for moving the Fujimuras into a loft three blocks from Ground Zero." I told him then, "If it was just you, then I don't think we would be here. It was Jeremiah 29. We just didn't know that we would be signing up to be Ground Zero residents."

Of course, I would think later, it WAS Glen and Tim who opened our hearts to the reality behind the scripture passages. They did recruit us, and it was a path that once chosen, we could not turn back from.

***

As we ate our splendid meal at the wedding banquet, I tried to convince Tim to have a jazz room in the new Redeemer building on the upper west side. Then, I shared my idea for a dedicated jazz space with Tom Jennings, Redeemer's music director, who was also at the wedding, hoping to enlist him. Tom quipped, "That's one sure way to make the building not succeed. " The fact that Tom is a noted jazz pianist makes this statement heartfelt and depressing at the same time. Tim sidestepped my ardent advocacy for jazz, and we began to discuss issues surrounding the New Atheism.

Tim has been on a book tour of sorts, speaking at various universities in Veritas Forums and debating atheist professors. I told him that I participated in one at Columbia University, being pitted against feminist artist Coco Fusco.

"So what was that like?" He asked.

"Well, it really never went anywhere," I said as I licked my sorbet, "because she kept on wanting to go back to the culture war days. I wanted to talk about being stewards of culture and creating a new language for culture, but she wanted to talk about governmental censoring of art. I told the organizers, that these debates may no longer serve us well anymore. We need a tri-alogue, not a dialogue, a mediated conversation that can create a third language to speak about an issue."

Tim asked me what I meant by a "third language." I explained that there is a huge gap in culture where the split between rational and emotive, between reason and the intuitive, has caused dialectical opposition. But now, because of the dehumanization this has caused, people are hungering for mediated conversation. "Obama is speaking that type of language, and that's why he is gaining ground," I pontificated.

Of course, it was only after I got home and began to read Tim's book that I saw his section on the "third way." In the introduction chapter, he notes that the entire book makes the case that authentic Christianity is "a spiritual third way" to mediate the current divides in culture. So at the wedding banquet table, a student was telling the master what the master already knows. I suppose the greatest reward of a teacher is when a student reshapes the thoughts being taught and thinks they are his own. Perhaps this embarrassing reality could be justified by the fact that I have listened to over 500 of Tim's sermons over the years. That has to somehow sneak into your subconscious.

***

The father was dancing with the bride now. Glen, my wife and I noted, is quite a dancer. As his feet glided across the floor, his flushed face and relaxed smile told a story: a story of a father truly willing to give away the bride and delighting in her at the same time.

He would understand that in this passage of time, a radical change is welcome, that a wedding in a city is a fulfillment of our exilic promise. Then the enchantment of folks beginning to join the dance made me realize that a wedding is indeed a dance, as the gospel of Christ is a dance, as Tim notes in his book. Jesus did start his ministry at a wedding at Cana. He would dance with those who follow him to the heart of strife. Refracting in the wedding banquet were the echoes of faithful promises kept, and love "increasing unimaginably." Christ himself did sup with us, filling our hearts with the golden light of promise, even in a dark February day in New York City.



Makoto Fujimura










(1) "Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all."

- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or II.146

Empathic Creativity: Generative Transformation

Delivered on March 1st, 2008, IAM Gathering at TriBeCa Performance Center



I begin with a photo of an installation at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (Credit: Melanie Einzig 2006
Courtesy: Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust), over looking the Hudson River, only a mile a way. Scottish artist, Andy Goldsworthy installed "Garden of Stones" as part of this museum's mission to create a "living memorial to the holocaust." As you can see these boulder rocks have been hollowed out and hold sapling Dward Oak trees. As the trees mature, each will grow to become fused to the base, and eventually, possibly, cracking the stone open.

Art, a sapling planted today in hope, can break open a boulder of cynicism, despair and corruption that pervades the art world. But we need to learn from someone who is not an artist, a sapling who did end up breaking open a huge boulder.

It was the early 1960's at Hudson on Hastings, NY about 30 miles north. Fred Danback began to work for Anaconda, a major factory where copper and wire cable were created. Fred Danback returned from World War II to come home, and to work for a now booming enterprise. But soon after, Fred found himself troubled by what he saw at the factory.

"I seen all kinds of oil and sulfuric acid, copper filings; my gosh, they were coming out of that company like it was going out of style..." He continues in his interview with Bill Moyers, "(shad fisherman started to lose) their business because there was oil in the water that would cause the fish to be contaminated with it and the Fulton market refused to take their weekly catch...(Anaconda) and other businesses were polluting a river and hurting a second business, the shad fisherman. I didn't think they had the right to do that. It used to really infuriate me. I became obsessed with fighting pollution..."

So Fred complained to the managers about his shad fisherman friends' plight. Each time he did, it seemed, he got demoted. He ended up pushing a broom for the company. But Fred never gave up. He worked in a custodian role, literally pushing his broom into every room of the company, and he also took copious notes and made maps of the company. What was deemed a punishment ended up to be the best possible opportunity to spy on the company inside and out (he had all the keys!).

We have to remember that there were no pollution laws. Fred and a few other pioneers of the environmental movement decided to sue Anaconda by citing an archaic law called the Refuse Act of 1899, which Fred found cleaning the local library. In 1972, when the US attorney's Office found a way to prosecute Anaconda, the attorney also used Fred's maps and notes as evidence.

"The company was fined $200,000 under the Refuse Act of 1899, you know... Even today for a polluter to be fined $200,000 is a big event. Back in the early 1970s, it was a huge event. It was like a thunderclap."(Fred Cronin)

Today, 3 million striped bass goes up and down the Hudson, because of Fred's efforts that lead to a series of changes in laws of the land.

Three lessons from the Fred Danback parable:

1)We need to be willing to be demoted
2)We need to remember our first love
3)We need to take notes

a)Become a custodian

To hold the "keys" of culture we may have to endure demotions.


By being demoted, we may gain a humble authority (keys) to unlock doors of cultural "factories".

Stewardship of culture and stewardship of nature go side by side. The activities of the arts are, in themselves, acts of stewardship. Many have seen the arts and entertainment as the enemy, or at least view them with healthy suspicion. The expression of the arts have twisted "the good, the true and the beautiful" in the same way that we have polluted our rivers. The arts are always upstream of culture, and artists are the creators of culture. The question is, how do we enact change?

Are we willing to be demoted to be custodians of culture? Cultural stewardship comes with needed sacrifice. Our "keys" are humility, integrity, determination and hope for things to come. In the art world in which ego, selfishness and self-destructiveness abound, don't you think you will stand out, eventually, is you have an ounce of human decency?

What if we are willing serve even one person, rather than do art for self-expression? What if we collaborated in humility and gave ourselves to serve, not expecting the world, or our audience, to agree with us, or applaud us?


b) We need to remember our first love

Fred Danback was asked by Bill Moyers, "What kept you going?"

FRED DANBACK: I love that river. It's a beautiful river. Look at it. It's your river, its my river, it belongs to everybody. Whose got a right to mess it up? That's the way I feel about it.

I still do, to this day.

It was his memory of the river, that beautiful river that kept him going. This beautiful painting by a Hudson River School master Jasper F. Cropsey (see below) keeps me going. What keeps us going?





Jasper F. Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson, 1860 National Gallery of Art, Washington

We need to remember our first love. Our first love as an artist may have come when you drew something on paper that came alive to you. Or perhaps you were playing a character in a school play, and you realized you had entered another person's world, a world you never knew existed. Or perhaps as a dancer, you made that single leap that seemed to defy gravity.

By contrast, what is now causing you to lose hope now? Because artists are gifted receptors, sensitive to the world's woes, and we may be the first internalize, and be in despair.

It is this "first love" that can recognize a world that is "not supposed to be." It's important to remember our first love, or we will end up swimming in the river that is polluted, and we will lose the vision for why we live, and why we do art.

But, furthermore, it is this "first love" that allows you to empathize.

Fred empathized with the shad fishermen. He stepped into their shoes and walked around in them a while.

"You never really understand a person, "Atticus Finch tells us in To Kill a Mockingbird, "until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, around the same time that Fred worked for Anaconda. If Fred Danback remembered the beautiful river, Harper Lee remembered her country lawyer father, and via the character of Atticus Finch translated the principles of justice and equality in to a great art form.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, we see little Scout running around in the streets of Maycomb, Alabama chasing her brother, Jem, and her friend, Dill. "Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself," recalls Scout. There is an eye-of-the-storm stillness in the streets; slow, ambling folks who "shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer." The Great Depression has gripped the county, and our country had been deeply wounded by World War I. There were more conflicts to come. Harper Lee's classic work brings the reader into the heart of that American struggle via an inquisitive, feisty, creative girl. The former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor called the book an impetus for her desire to become a lawyer. In the days when the world was tainted by common bigotry, Harper Lee set out to tell a good story, a "simple love story" she called it, but it turned into a powerful catalyst for transforming the mindset toward human dignity and equality. The book precedes Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech by three years, and it foreshadows that speech, becoming one of the great catalysts for wrestling with issues of humanity in the twentieth century. This book serves as a model for us to speak of empathic creativity, that transforms the cultural river.

Atticus Finch, a country lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a man falsely accused of rape, who is being held in jail. Knowing that the town is conspiring to lynch him, Atticus "sits guard" in front of the jailhouse, having set up a chair and reading light outside Mr. Robinson's window. Atticus creates incarnationally, using a theatrical prop to make his case, if you will, bringing his living room right into the heart of the conflict. A mob gathers. Scout, Jem and Dill walk right into that circle, making Atticus quite nervous. Scout then recognizes a face in the crowd:

"Don't you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I'm Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?... I go to school with Walter...he is your boy, ain't he? Ain't he, Sir?"

Scout remembered that: "Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in." Atticus taught her empathy.

So she speaks to Mr. Cunningham using a big word that Atticus taught her: "Entailment." Mr. Cunningham brought hickory nuts to Atticus in thanks for work Atticus performed in the Cunningham family in the beginning of the story. Now Scout reminds Mr. Cunningham about entailment, or a swap of one work for another, a sort of a code to unlock Mr. Cunningham's humanity. The code worked to not only help Mr. Cunningham remember, but she taps into a greater conscience of how a human being should treat each other, with dignity and respect. And she defuses the situation, in her determined innocence.

If we are faced with an angry mob, ready to do the unthinkable horror of our days, what would be our response? To fight back with fire against fire, respond in hatred against hatred? I suggest we follow Scout's lead in calling people to remember. Scout did not confront the bigotry by arguing for justice. What she accomplished in her naiveté was to step into the mob, to remind people that they were her neighbors. Within a culture that is full of cynicism, apathy and anger, we must remind one another to remember. Our task as artists is to remind people that they are our neighbors. Our arts should lead others to recall who they are. And by doing so, we may remind them, and ourselves, who we are. Our responsibility is to re-humanize the divide, to speak a "third language" of generative creativity that defuses the cultural war language.

Scout defused the situation by being fully human, fully a child.

The "third language" of culture speaks like a child, like Scout, innocent, and yet full of determined hope. The "third language" re-humanizes the mob and speaks in a generative way. The third language incorporates an attitude of cultural stewardship. That is how we can transform the world. The arts present the most powerful way of "nonviolent resistance." Scout's actions, in Harper Lee's lense of creativity, was to anticipate thousands of peaceful marches to come, by willingness to step into a conflict, and taking a risk (although she would fail the non-violent test, because, earlier, she kicks a man in his shin as he tried to physically remove Jem from the scene.)

Just like the mob in front of Tom Robinson's jail cell, the culture has blinded itself to the dehumanized forces of debased solutions. Debasement is a result bad stewardship, to allow for corruption to take over in desperation of fear.

"The third language" is a language of empathy, and empathy is a fruit of love.

c) Taking Notes:

Just like Fred Danback, we need to be custodians of culture, be given keys to the rooms of cultural production and "take notes."

How do we take notes?

Fred was not an artist: we are. Our notebooks should be filled with... drawings. We are gifted with creativity and expression. Our notes should be beautiful, good, and true.

Artists are leaders: they may never inspire with a speech, preach from a pulpit, or own a company, but they are leaders by the sheer fact of their awareness and observation. Artists are leaders because people see their work and can be influenced by it.

Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard University, the author of "Multiple Intelligences," who has identified creativity as one of the many multiple types of intelligences, writes:

"Indeed, creators and leaders are remarkably similar. Both groups seek to influence the thoughts and behaviors of other people. Both are, accordingly, engaged in the enterprise of persuasion. Moreover, each leader or creator has a story to tell: A creator is contributing to the story of a chosen domain; a leader is creating a story about his group. Finally, embodiment is important for both groups: A leader must embody her stories in her daily life; a creator must embody his story by carrying out work in his domain. "

Artists are leaders simply because we are in the "enterprise of persuasion." If we are leaders in that sense, then, comes with that influence, great responsibility. We have responsibility to use that persuasive influence to create the "world that ought to be." Or, we can use that responsibility for self-destruction. One sure way to use our influence to transform the world is by leading in the path of empathy.

Harper Lee embodied the story of oppression and injustice she saw in her small town in Alabama. She created a story which generate empathy. Let's take Atticus' advise to be polite and "talk about what people are interested in" before we begin to think about self-expression. We might just have to step into someone else's shoes and walk around in them, and take notes.

And, we take notes with tears.

We must realize that that culture of the "world that ought to be," must arrive via understanding of the "world that was not supposed to be." Our task, in the day forward is to identify with, and empathize with, the brokenness of the world, as much as to give a vision of the world that is right and beautiful. Artists need to lead the way in taking notes of the polluted substance and lamenting.

The shortest, but one of the most potent, verses in the Bible is in John 11.

"Jesus Wept."

Before this passage, Jesus learned that his friend Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary has died. He goes to Bethany to resurrect him. And when he got there, he walked right into a Jewish funeral. Upon seeing his friends grieving, he wept. Why?

If he had the power to resurrect, why did he not wave the "magic wand" and solve the problem right away. Why did he "waste time" and weep?

Before this passage, John writes that Jesus was also "deeply troubled," which reminds me of Fred Danback's response to the polluted river - the death of his friend Lazarus infuriated Jesus. Was he infuriated by people not understanding him? No, Jesus was troubled by, and infuriated by, death itself.

"Jesus Wept"

Then his heart was again "deeply troubled". He took a deep breath and pronounced and commanded Lazarus to rise. And he did.

While I was preparing for this talk, I realized something for the first time:

The cultural river is made up of the "tears of God."

Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckman, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Yasunari Kawabata...etc. etc. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Calcutta, Maycolm, Darfur. What Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail has called the "irreversable tragedies of our time." All of the 20th century was a century of lament, of angst, of anger. And Jesus wept. These expressions may look to some as if they are against God, but they are really not. They are not "pure" expressions of adoration, but they share in the same tears that Mother Teresa shed, and Martin Luther King Jr. shed.

Jesus wept, and he continues to weep today. Tears of God are powerful. They may evaporate, and soak the ground, but they never disappear. We breathe today Jesus' tears. And artists may be the first to recognize the invisible presence of divine tears. That's why the church needs artists. When we weep and join God, those are commingled with God's tears, and multiplied like fishes and the loaves that Jesus touched.

We take notes with our tears.

We also need to be moved, troubled deeply with the broken realities of the world around us. We need to stand in the pit of Ground Zero, and breathe in Jesus' tears. Then we can create. Do not let anger itself overtake you in despair. Let your tears lead to your small resurrections. If you find yourself perplexed, angry...take notes and imagine a polluting factory into an art factory of beauty, goodness and truth.




***

There's not a day that I do not think of Fred Danback. As I jog the promenade of the river, passing right by the Goldworthy installation, I thank God for him and pray that someday, the saplings will grow to crack open the rock, spilling dirt on to promenade. Fred's sacrifice was a sapling of sacrifice that cracked opened the rock of Anaconda. But there's more to the story.

On the day of 9/11, when the news began to unravel of the horrors of that day, the initial estimate of those who was thought to have perished was twelve to fifteen thousand. Then as the days went, the numbers kept on decreasing to, eventually, three thousand and some, still an unbearable amount, for sure.

I have a theory about why the initial estimate turned out to be so wrong.

9/11 was the first day of school. There are eight thousand students around the towers. The parents had just dropped off the kids, like my wife did that morning with my three children, and saw the sinister shadow of the first plane pass them in the schoolyard. Parents never made it to work. Or those who did, came down the steps right away, ignoring the famed announcement to "stay where you are."

You may not make the connection right away from Fred Danback to 9/11, but in my mind, there is a direct link. Here it is.

All of the schools around the towers were built after the late 1970's.

Because Fred Danback was willing to be demoted, the river became cleaner. Because the river became cleaner, the parks around the river became attractive. And the parents, instead of opting to escape to suburbia, decided to stay in their apartments in Battery Park designed for dual income no kid couples. Because there was tremendous increase in the population of children starting in the late 70's the city was to build all those schools, including P.S. 234, right here in front of us.

I am convinced Fred Danback made a difference on 9/11. One person's sacrifice, the ripple effects that caused because of that action, cannot be measured ultimately, but only be told in how we live our lives. Be a community of Fred Danbacks. Be willing to make your life count. And never forget the beauty of the river of your calling. One humble custodian changed the world. A sapling has cracked open a boulder, and the shalom dirt fills the empty spaces of our hearts. Psalm 46 is right, "there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God."

Makoto Fujimura