I Believe Statement
Trudi Olivetti, Creative Arts CoordinatorMy mother was an artist. Her paintings are the iconic representations of her very self that I am lucky enough to have still, though she is gone. She was also somewhat of a zealot about opera. My childhood home was full of that music every Saturday B it seemed like the entire day B and the house became a cathedral of sound B complex, dramatic, celestial. Beyond anything else, I think this atmosphere of art and music is key to what has shaped me.
Because for me, really, art was and is my religion and my religion is the arts. I could demonstrate this by giving you a biographical litany of my various artistic experiences. But I will certainly not do that. Aside from how much time that would take, it would be horribly tedious. There is always a clumsiness in talking about art. Speaking too many words to describe it or what it means is much like trying for a literal interpretation of scripture. It is the artistic expression itself that captures what cannot be explained, all the levels and paradoxes of human experience. The metaphor itself illuminates the mystery and once you have tried to explain it, the magic is gone.
I believe that art has the power to transform and heal the world. There are many ways in which I believe this to be true. A tiny sample:
The Washington Post Health section on April 8 included an article about the growing recognition among medical researchers that incorporating music, visual art, writing and performance into clinical care can increase well-being and improve health.
Art can carry a message to make large scale improvements in the world. In the recently aired film AThe Power of Song,@ we see how musician, singer, songwriter, folklorist, labor activist, environmentalist, and peace advocate Pete Seeger has given us a unique legacy of change through the sharing of his music.
The sharing of artistic traditions among cultures forges a link that cannot be made in any other way. Last February we experienced here in this sanctuary the beautiful dances of our Guatemalan neighbors. It was a revelation, was it not? It gave us a taste of the multicultural community we have been yearning for.
Art, like faith, can provide you with a connection to something beyond yourself B your experience of it, in the watching, the hearing, or the doing B like prayer. It offers peace, beauty, a call to action, an idea that you never had before. To me it is the very best expression of the human spirit and I am grateful to this church for the ways in which it has allowed me to practice my religion.
Sermon:
The Communion of CreativityRev. Linda Olson Peebles
Last October, I began the sabbatical that you, the congregation, gave me. A chance for rest and reflection, for nurturing my spirit. I spent a lot of time reading the poems of Denise Levertov.- She appealed to me because she writes about rediscovering the creative spirit, the muse, that I hoped my journey would open to me.
In those first weeks in October, I traveled to Michigan to visit the places I spent my earliest years. One day, as I drove through the beautiful fall foliage on an isthmus between two lakes south of Traverse City, in a place called Interlochen, I came upon a lovely greeting B a stretch of road that was hung all along on both sides with
colorful banner after banner. On those banners was this message - Art Lives Here. That is what the arts camp and school at Interlochen has as its motto. Art Lives Here. What a tremendous message that was for me that!
Art is not just the refined and perfected creations we see and hear around us in the museum, galleries, and concert halls B but also a way of being, a process of
approaching our living that includes openness and courage and generosity. The creative process is one that is for ALL B we can choose to be artists of life B and that will make all the difference.
As I meditate on this subject, I recall the words of the African American writer James Baldwin*B "...some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend."
These words have helped me make sense of the choices that we have in this life B to objectify and control everything around us, or to celebrate and engage and dance with life. That is the theological, philosophical choice we face in all aspects of our lives. The liberal B liberating B choice is celebration - being artists. Creating We do it in different ways - but I believe it is important to encourage each other to understand that we can be artists of our lives together B choosing intentionally to celebrate and create beauty or insight or justice or transformation. Not just to consume, purchase, acquire, own, control B but rather to observe with wonder, to engage with curiosity, to respond with a capacity and courage to interact, and honoring our connections with the world around us, to help bring new shapes and patterns into being.
Psychologist Rollo May observed in his book The Courage to Create*, "Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world."
When we participate in life as co- creators, we make a faith statement about our relationship with the beauty and forces of nature, the powers of cycles and seasons, birth and destruction, the creative energies &diversity of other people. AND we join our voices our hands our beings with those forces and contribute to the ongoing creation, guiding lines and shapes and sounds and homes and communities towards justice and beauty and wholeness. Every new act, new color, new sound, new shape B every new insight we bring adds to the whole.
Pete Seeger B musician and activist. B who is a member of the Community Unitarian Church in NYC B says getting OTHERS to join in singing was always his greatest goal in his long career. AParticipation is my religion@ he said in a recent PBS documentary.
This is the democratic ideal - our community is enhanced when everyone participates in the creation of our world. It is important to understand how this is not just a Anice idea@ - but that it is a faith statement about what we believe about human nature, and this belief makes a difference in how we affect the world. The foundational Unitarian theologian, James Luther Adams pointed out : AWe not only participate in divinely given being and freedomY We [have the capacity to] distort or petrify the forms of creation and freedom. Hence ...we must depend upon a transforming reality that breaks through encrusted forms of life and thought to create new forms. We put our faith in a creative reality that is re-creative."*
What happens when we don=t clearly make the intentional choice to be creative participants? When we instead -unconsciously or consciously- choose to colonize or to petrify creation? Societal pressures make it difficult to be actively creative beings.
How often do many of us feel we are channeled more towards being consumers or conquerors, powerless and passive, arrogant and controlling, commodities or habitual cogs in a machine? When that happens, it is hard to feel joyful, powerful or connected to the creation, and we instead too often feel an emptiness or a pain that can=t be soothed, only numbed by distractions or addictions. This soul-deadening path we are pushed to travel in our society makes many of us depressed, or anxious, or even B as an Illinois senator recently pointed out B it makes us bitter.
And bitterness does keep us from being open to all creation and from being creators ourselves. It causes us to cling to habitual crutches rather than open our hands to generous, creative ways of being.
What is the good news we might offer? A Powell Davies, Unitarian preacher of
last century, said: ALet the heart be open to pain; let it be stretched by it. Y
An open heart never grows bitter. . This is a door to life.@
The door to Life, the invitation to growth - Open hearts, courageous stretching, creative participation B the liberating way of being! Bitterness begone! When we feel the power to be able to spread light and colors, ideas and sounds around us in new ways, using our alive imaginations to bring into BEING a beloved vision of a just community.
The good news is: Our spirits can be made whole, open to joys and sorrows, to all the seasons of our lives, when we are co-creators, co-artists with the interdependent web, joining in a communion of creativity B with nature and with other people.
When I walked into this room this morning, and saw the beauty of the colors and the sounds that Art created here, I was reminded - We need to be invited to the Communion of Creativity. And the good news is not just the power of Creativity, but also that the invitation is for ALL people.
This communion of creativity reminds us of our power to be participants and it creates the sanctuary, the HOME of space and time and intention for this to happen.
When we feel alone in the universe, when we feel disconnected, when we have lost the inner muse and our house feels cold and our gardens barren; when Life is hard and joyless and burdensome Y come to the Sanctuary of this community, of your own heart B open your eyes and ears and rediscover that spirit which has been there all along - the creative KNOWING that YOU are alive and powerful as the artist of your life.
This church has been for 60 years B and may it be ever more so B a home, a sanctuary, where we together and all who come here can find the muse which has been waiting for us all along B the muse of creative participation and being artists of life. Let it be always said of each of us, and of this congregation B that ART LIVES HERE.
Amen
______________________
*James Baldwin, No Name in the Street. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1972
* Rollo May, The Courage to Create. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975.
*James Luther Adams, On Being Human Religiously: Selected Essays in Religion and Society (Max L. Stackhouse,ed.). Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.
