Little artists are the best
Little artists make a mess
Coloring outside the line
Makes it fun and makes it mine!
So, Picasso, make that mess
Little artists are the best
Hang the canvas
Pour the paint
Call the masses
Messes ain't
So much a mess
As they are art
Call the children
Now
let's start
I'm in Australia with He Qi, about to preach at Immanuel College's 9:30 service on a Sunday when the world is supposed to end at 10:30. If it all comes to an end before I get my Tim-Tams at coffee hour, I will be greatly disappointed.
Here's a thought for the morning on the perspectives we get from travel, adding new friends from other cultures, and exposing ourselves to ideas, thoughts, and people beyond our safe little worlds:
If we stay in one place (politically, intellectually, physically), we see things only from the one point. A single point allows you to see things from only one perspective.
The moment you add a second point (a new friend from a different culture, a new spice to your recipe palate, a new experience living in a different culture, etc.), you now can move along a continuum. You are still stuck in a two-dimentional world, but at least you can move.
The moment you add a third point, things get interesting. You are still on a flat plain, but the new friends can relate to eachother, the new thoughts can bounce up against themselves - not just you. The new spices can interact with each other. You can move both up and down, and left and right. You can see from many new perspectives. (Although, you're still stuck in two dimensions geometrically if you only have three points.)
Once you add a fourth point, everything changes. You are now in three dimensions. You move from the additive, to the multiplicative. The more toys you throw into the intellectual toy box from here on out, the more quantum leaps you can take in conversations, understandings, perspectives, insights.
You still come from somewhere. You still have your biases. But you can see things, and BE things, that you didn't even know you could see.
So, here's to adding lots of new toys to your adjacent possible toy box. Here's to getting out of the office and finding friends and books and spices and lands and ideas that may scare you - but will mostly enrich if you leave your fears of change and the unknown at the gate.
Final thought on perspective: The first thing that I ever ate - and my frame of reference for what I'd call excelence - was my mom's cooking. I will always be biased to it, no matter where I travel, what I eat, or who cooks it. She was an amazing cook. In spite of the fact that other people in other lands like other foods - and may think their mom's cooking is best - you'll never convince me otherwise. I'll taste it all... and then I'll return.
The lessons that are imprinted early and often become our first and most important vantage point. Neurologically, they create grooved pathways in our brains. They are our frame of reference, and our frame of reverance. We can learn to understand and appreciate other perspectives, but our personal knowledge, our personal perspective and underlying faith, will always lean toward that first imprinting. Even the new vantage points we may experience will be shaped, influenced, and directed in relation to that initial vantage point.
Here's to moms and dads, pastors and teachers, friends and strangers who teach us to value the point and place, the faces and faiths where they came from, but who aren't afraid to challenge us to move from those points to new and enriching perspectives.
While spending the week stategizing with Carl George, I took the opportunity of a drive through the South Carolina/Tenesee mountains to ask they guy who started me on the road toward changing Lutheran Confirmation from a "sit still while I instill" left-brained linear lecture into a large group/small group whole brained learning community model a few questions about worship and the arts.
I did it partly to pick his brain, and partly to distract myself from the fact that I was letting a Califonia boy drive me - a North Dakota boy - through a deadly storm on a mountain road. (An act of faith if there ever was one!)
The sound quality is poor from my handheld phone, but see if you don't agree that Carl's insights are worth the listen.
Emerging to safety... with Nashville and a longer life a real possibility!
My niece Sara sent me this photo, and I had to jot a little song on the spot:
If only everyone
Would take a little time
To steal a sacred second
And add a dash of flair
A drop of instant art
To every little thing they do
What a won-won-wonderful
Mar-mar-marvelous
Place this little space
We call the world would be
For me and thee and you
Back in '83 Herb Brokering took me, my wife, Monty and 50+ youth to East Germany. Guard dogs, machine guns, barbed wire, the whole Iron Curtain experience, plus a whole lot of fun. And very educational.
Last week the Pew Forum came out with a survey telling us that Athiests, Agnostics, Mormons and Jews know more about religion than your average evangelical or mainliner.
Buried in the article was the (alarming) info that 53% of protestants couldn't name Luther as the spawner of the Reformation.
Two favorite images came to mind from that trip for you semioticians (people studying symbols and signs and signifiers and trying to find the deep meaning) this morning.
In the first, Luther is holding the Bible in one hand and pointing to the cross of Christ with the other. I think that sums up his life pretty dern well.
In the second, the crucifix is still in the center, but the risen Christ is treading on death (a skeleton) with one foot and on the throat of the beast with the other. He holds a near invisible speer. A pure white lamb sits beneath the cross, holding a near invisible standard. John the Baptist points to Christ. The painter, Cranach, decided he needed to be in the picture, too, with hands folded in pious prayer. Something flies in the air in the background. What is it? Someone is camped in tents. Who are they? And there's Luther pointing to the bible. And the strangest little addition... is a squirt of blood coming at an arch from Jesus' side directly onto the painter's head...
Talk about standing under. I want to be covered with the blood, too.
So semioticians, in this reformation month, what do you see?
Speaking of crosses, when you - Google Crucifix you get 1.2M images.
And our friend He Qi's Crucifixion shows up in the top 20!)
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