the church and postmodern culture: conversation

The Liturgical Turn: Toward a Theology of Birth / An Advent Meditation

Joseph.  I’ve always found him extremely fascinating.  I guess that’s partly due to the fact that we’re told so little about him.  We know he was incredibly obedient to God.  He was present for Mary’s pregnancy, Jesus’ birth and childhood, but once Jesus grows up, he’s strangely absent.  The traditional reason is that he simply passed away.  Other renderings have him moving on to another wife and having other children in order to keep Mary pure.  Or perhaps in the end, his own doubt about the truthfulness of the virgin birth caught up with him.  Even in iconography, Joseph is sometimes rendered as a deeply troubled soul.  Rublev’s version of The Nativity has Joseph being fed lies about Mary’s virginity by Satan, here depicted as a withered old man.  We don’t why, but we know that he doesn’t play much of a role in the later part of Jesus’ life. 

But what role did he play in Jesus’ early life; specifically in the beginning?  As I was meditating on the story of the first Advent, I was struck by what’s left unsaid within the birth narrative.  Particularly, the lack of detail about the birth itself.  Now I admit that probably is best left unsaid.  Birth is messy, painful, and doesn’t really make for good storytelling.  So the silence comes at no surprise.   But we do know where. We know that Jesus was born in a place where animals are keep.  This raises the question in my mind about who else was present?  Was it simply Mary and Joseph?  What about midwives?  There’s one apocryphal story that puts a midwife named Salome on the scene.  But who knows?

Even if Joseph was able to find a midwife at the last minute, and one that would be willing to follow him to a cave, Joseph would still be much more involved in the Mary’s labor and delivery than most fathers today.  Contrast Joseph’s story with the fact that most fathers aren’t usually even present at the moment of birth of their children.  That’s usually because they would either choose to stay in the waiting room until the OB tells them it’s all over, or because they aren’t permitted in the delivery room due to hospital policy (in recent years these policies have relaxed considerably).  I think this is where my fondness for Joseph lies. 

I’m the father of four children, two of which were born at home, one in a birthing center, and one in the hospital.  My wife, herself a certified Doula, delivered all four “naturally.” I was her labor coach for all of them.  In our house, pregnancy and birth is a passion, not just for our own, but other mothers as well. We have a passion for helping women labor well.  Laboring well involves many factors.  One factor that  contributes to this is the husband’s involvement.  

Birth is a time of great silence and separation.  What women experience cannot be shared by or communicated to men.  We can’t even pretend to understand labor pain. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be a faithful, supporting presence. 

Nor can we understand the immense rush of joy (oxitocin) that a woman experiences when she holds her seconds-born child in her arms.  That, we can only watch in amazement. 

Since there were no medical lawyers to conjure up absurd laws keeping Joseph waiting outside, I hope Joseph was fully involved in supporting Mary as she brought forth the savior of the world.  Unfortunately we aren’t are given any details.  Had we been, I believe that the church wouldn’t be so anemic in it’s theology of birth.  

What I mean is this: the church and her theologians have had a lot of great things to say about life, death, contraception, abortion, sex, IVF, etc.  We have the language and the ethics for making babies, not killing them, and helping them die well when they’ve grown old.  However, the church is completely silent about the nine months after conception, and even more (if that’s possible) silent about the hours of labor leading to the moment of birth. 

I believe this silence has been a major reason for the medicalization of the birth.  Now, before I get a whole bunch of hateful comments, let me explain that I’m not against “hospital births” as opposed to “home births.”  My wife and I are outspoken advocates for the latter, but we have seen and experienced the necessity of the former.  Where I believe our society is failing women (and their partners) is in making them believe in the normalcy of medicine’s role in birth.   In the last few years, the number one reason for hospital admittance has been labor and delivery.  The problem, however, is that pregnancy is not a sickness that needs to be cured.  It is not a disease, nor is the pain that is experienced a suffering that needs to be remedied. 

Most of all, under “low risk” circumstances, labor and delivery is not a process that needs intervention.  There are times when intervention is needed, and I’m glad that medicine can do what it can do, and do it well.  But too often the “cascade of interventions” happens unnecessarily.  But doctors and hospitals work on a time-table that doesn’t always sync with nature's processes. Moreover, they are the ones who believe they wield ultimate power and have most fully bought into modernity’s ideology of complete control. 

Again, I’m grateful for hospitals, but one of the main reasons that I personally am an advocate for  homebirths, in particular, is the community that it allows to be created.  Birth is an incredibly intimate experience and one which revolves completely around the needs of the mother.  In our experience, Laura had complete control over everything.  The few of us that were present, by her own invitation, were able to give her full support, love, and comfort. Most of all, since I was able to play an important role in her process, I believe our marriage is stronger because  of it.   

There’s more that needs to be said on this topic and I’m currently working on a series of essays that I hope will begin to break the church’s silence on the issue.  The church needs a theology of birth.  The church needs to find a language that helps women labor well.  It needs this not because I want most women to have homebirths.  That’s not the ultimate goal.  But because birth is an important moment in a woman’s life, and the church has no idea what role it plays in her discipleship.  Birth is a milestone in a couple’s marriage, and the church lacks a theology of marriage strong enough to give voice to the husband’s role in the process.   

Most of all, because God himself “became incarnate from the Virgin Mary.”  What that means is that pregnancy, labor, and delivery have been redeemed.  {That which is not assumed is not sanctified}

This is why I wish the Bible would have been more detailed, especially about Joseph.  I can speculate that Joseph would have set the example for husbands to follow in how to support his wife while she gives birth.  This Advent season, apart from Christ, Joseph is the one character who has most caught my attention.

And now a word from Monty Python:  

The Liturgical Turn: Worshiping Among The Chaos

Earlier this week, David Gelernter posted a really good article over at Big Questions Online that caught my attention. It did so because I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine, who works as an aerodynamicist for a major NASCAR team, that centered on the relationship of entropy to eschatology.  That is, if the world is subject to disorder and decay (Romans 8:20, yes I understand that there is much more to that verse) then what does that mean for the new creation? 

Anyway, Gelernter argues that “the rituals we perform teach [us] more than the Second Law [of Thermodynamics]: they teach us to defy the Second Law.” It does this by having a constant theme in the midst of a seemingly shapeless system.  That theme, in both Jewish and Christian liturgies, is separation.  He argues that separation defies nature by defying death.  Which I take, for him, is the great equilibrium toward which all chaos runs. 

It’s a really good post, but I’d like to go further by saying that worship / liturgy / ritual is much more than simply drawing a defiant line in the sand.  In worship we participate in the overcoming of chaos; the new creation in the making. 

 

The liturgical theologian Aidan Kavanagh argues that in worship we are regularly brought to the “edge of chaos” resulting in “deep change” in the lives of the participants.  These changes or “adjustments” are sometimes obvious and sometimes imperceptible, but the fact is that the worshiping community leaves differently than it was before.  Like the Spirit that brought form out of chaos, through baptism brings new life out of chaos, the Spirit brings a new creation through worship.  This is what happens when God “recreates the World not by making new things but by making all things new.”[1] In fact this is the task of the Church and what happens ultimately in liturgy.           

Kavanagh goes on to suggest that before modernity, cities used to be places of “transactions with ultimate reality.” They were places where ideas were formed and arts were made.  With the coming of secularization, the city became profaned and no longer seen in reference to the world.  The church, he suggests, offers a different view of humanity, the world, and the city.  Kavanagh suggests that the Church because of its liturgy is the “central workshop of the human City, a City which under grace has already begun to mutate by fits and starts into the City-of-God-in-the-making, the focal point of the world made new in Christ Jesus.”[2]  In other words, it is both the Church and the world that have been redeemed by Christ.  The church’s task is that of the reconciliation, which God did through Christ between Him and the created world. And more so, to be the embodiment in the world of the world to come, of the Kingdom, of the new and final age. What he calls the “church doing world” or enacting a “normal” world as opposed the abnormality of a chaotic world. I would argue that the normal world is not subject to chaos, (but I could be convinced otherwise).

In Political Worship, Oxford theologian, Bernd Wannenwetsch takes up this notion of the church offering a redeemed world through its liturgy. He suggests that through the liturgy we see a “double becoming of the world.”[3]. The first is the negative becoming, distinguishing the world in a post-lapsarian sense from a good creation, and recognizes itself as that which does not worship God.[4] The second, is a positive becoming of the world, which follows from the first and has real political significance.  Insofar as worship shows the world its sinfulness, it “simultaneously makes it possible for the world to find a different kind of self-understanding, a new identity.”[5]  This new understanding is that the world is bound to the church’s worship as that which produces it.  It causes the world to rightly order itself in order to make space for the church to be the church.  Without doing so the world ceases to be itself.  He notes that this does not cause the world to become the church, but allows it to become “the world which is no longer hostile to God and now reflects the Creator’s original will.”[6] 

There are differences between Kavanagh and Wannenwetsch.  The former wants to say that the ‘world’ that is done is the church’s worship, whereas the latter wants to talk about the ontological world and its reordering that “springs” from the worship. For my purposes, I think they both help us see a fuller picture of what is going on when a (specifically Christian) community worships. It witnesses and participates in the new creation which (among other things) overcomes chaos with goodness and order. 

I suppose it could be argued that order and chaos don’t necessary equal goodness and badness respectively.  But in response to Gelernter, if chaos is defied in liturgy, why not go further and show how it is overcome it?  Perhaps it comes down to the difference between a Jewish and Christian eschatology?

---

[1] Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, p. 50.

[2] Ibid., p. 42. 

[3] Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christians, trans. Margret Kohl (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2003), p. 247.

[4] Ibid., p. 248.

[5] Ibid., p. 249.

[6] Ibid.

Ecclesiology as a Rival "Ascetic" of Desire

(I have edited this post realising my most of the content was pre-mature, and please forgive any consternation this causes.  And apologies where the comments do not align with this truncated version)

Within my PhD work I have ben trying to understand how capitalist markets affect Christian identity formation.  Within the work of Bernd Wannenwetsch, William Cavanaugh, Reinhard Hütter, Daniel Bell, Vincent Miller, Stephen Long etc, I have come to three understandings about how late capitalist markets function:

1) The market is a form of "ascetic" practice, disciplining our bodies and inducting us with habits and practices in contrast with ecclesial practices.

2) The market then sets up patters of desire through these ascetic practices in contrast to the church in its ecclesial forms and worship and orients us around desire.

3) That comes together in embodiment and social relationship, and individually around desire, of how the market makes a false form of universal communion.

Cavanaugh, Miller, Wannenwetsch et al, have set up an inherently conflictual and rival relationship between the church and the market.  Within these accounts the problem is they present an over dichotomized account.

What ways might we respond to this?  One way I would suggest is a more nuanced reading, and Augustinian reading of the condition of modernity as a saeculum.  
 
A large question I am asking is if an Augustinian reformed account of a missional ecclesiology in relation to capitalism can be made. 

Music in Worship: A Discussion

Since it’s been rather quite around here lately, allow me to take advantage of open-source thinking and pose a couple questions. 

What is the role that music plays in worship?

and….

Is there a difference between playing music in a worship setting as opposed to other settings?

To elaborate a little:  It is certainly the case that the church can gather for worship, perform the liturgy, without music.   For example, there is Morning Prayer according to the Book of Common Prayer.  Yet, for the most part, music is and has been an integral part of Christian worship from the beginning. 

The second question comes after a discussion I had at a gathering of local worship leaders.  We were discussing playing songs written for worship in public settings like bars and cafes.  Shortly after that, I was rereading Jamie Smith’s “Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism.”  In his last chapter describing a postmodern liturgy, he notes the use of U2’s “40.”  A great example, I thought, of a song that can be played in worship and has certainly been played in a variety of other venues.  Is there a (significant) difference?

Thoughts?
 

The Liturgical Turn: Public Display of Worship

It’s easy to become overly connected to place.  It seems better to stay in Egypt instead of making the journey to the Promise Land because there’s a desert in between.   It’s easier because it’s comfortable, familiar, and controlled.  None of which are necessarily bad per se, but they can and most often do lead to complacency, which results in a liturgical solipsism that leaving one closed off to otherness. 

I’m speaking from experience.  Recently my church moved from a comfortable little chapel to the local YMCA.  Before, we gathered for worshiped in a comfortable, familiar, and controlled place, but now we’re in a place where it is anything but familiar. We have an hour’s worth of set up to do before the service and need to have everything out of the gym before noon.   The move itself was a planned move on the part of us in leadership in order in to move us from the edges of society closer to the heart of community happenings. 

Reflecting on the fact that we now worship in a community gymnasium is pretty exciting to me because it’s a great way to be missional and to let certain aspects of the nature of worship flourish which have a tendency to be forgotten.

Let me explain it this way (please forgive the possible stream-of-consciousness thought that may follow).  Sometimes, like the woman at the well, it’s easy to get hung up on where we worship (although important) and miss why we worship and what we’re actually doing when we worship.

Alexander Schmemann, in For The Life of the World, wrote that “it is only in worship that [humanity] has the source and the possibility of that knowledge which is communion, and of that communion which fulfills itself as true knowledge: knowledge of God and therefore knowledge of the world – communion with God and therefore communion with all that exists” (p. 120). Worship, according to Schmemann, is our essential relationship with the rest of humanity and shows the world to be essentially “sacramental” insofar as it expresses God’s “revelation, presence, and power.”  In other words, the world in essence is an “epiphany of God” and is expressed as such through worship. 

Because worship shows the world to be sacramental, we therefore need things of the world in our worship. Schmemann writes, “We need water and oil, bread and wine in order to be in communion with God and to know Him.  Yet conversely … it is this communion with God by means of ‘matter’ that reveals the true meaning of ‘matter,’ i.e. of the world itself.” (p.121).  In the liturgical act material things receive their true nature and destiny.  For example, it is in baptism that water fulfills its proper function. 

The Lutheran liturgical theologian, Gordon Lathrop, has a similar discussion of the use of “things” in worship.  In his book, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology, he notes that there are certain things that are needed in order to have a church.  People, he states, are the primary objects, because the church is essentially an assembly, but not an assembly for assembly’s sake.  He writes, “People gather around something, they gather to do something” (p. 87).  What they gather to do is to enact the faith, read the scriptures, and receive the sacraments. The tradition suggests that to ‘have church’ there must be water, bread and wine.  However, simply having these is not enough, they must be set in motion, used, and made to do something specific.  In a little longer passage he explains,“People do not gather at water only, but at a bath, and a bath interpreted by words and by other things set next to the bathing … People do not gather to a book, but to that book opened, read, and turned into current address to this assembly.  Nor do they gather to bread and wine or cup and plate, but to a meal, to the prayer and the sharing of food that make up common eating.” (p. 89).

Lathrop intentionally uses terms like bath and meal instead of Eucharist and baptism. He believes that these terms show that these are things set out in order to fulfill humanity’s needs.  Humans need cleanliness and they need food. They also need relationship and this is why Lathrop prefers the term “things”.  He tells us that things are not simply static objects that exist in an independent, self-sustaining manner.  Instead he draws on an Old Norse understanding of the term that defines things as “objects in relationships” (p. 90).  In this way people, objects, and words are all “things” because they all need others in order to simply be and they rightly become things when they are put to motion.

Lathrop also suggests that in the meeting (i.e. church), these things also awaken our imaginations by proposing to us that the world has a center. That is, Christ is our center and he forces us to imagine a world in which there is peace and not chaos.  This is important insofar as it directs our attention outward.  We come to the central things of the worship and they refocus us out to the world.

The central things of bread and wine suggest to the worshippers the fact of locality and community.  These things are made from things grown from the earth which are then harvested and made into something life sustaining.  There is a mystery here in that nobody caused the grains to grow. Therefore, the very existence of the grains comes not from human will, but from elsewhere, from God.  Lathrop suggests that the bread is made in order to be shared. Because of this, bread can invoke hope for a peaceful and ordered world.  It therefore points outward to the rest of the world in which people die because of lack of bread and gives hope, that when used within the meeting and blessed to become a sacrament of Christ, that one day it will be eaten at a feast in which in which all will be fed abundantly. 

Wine, in this way, as a part of that same blessing, suggests both feast and community.  Wine must be shared.  If hoarded and possessed as a commodity it only leads to drunkenness, which is a misuse of the drink.  However when properly shared, it brings joy to all and gives the community a sense of transcendence.  Lathrop explains that wine does more than just quench our thirst.  He writes, “The slight inebriation it causes can moderate our inhibitions, enable our communal speech, and encourage our shared joy.  It has come to be associated with a spirit of festivity; the psalmist calls it  ‘wine to gladden the human heart’ (Ps. 104:15).  But then we have a symbol of near-intoxication that suggests transcendence and communal hopes for a larger feast than this festival can contain.” (p. 92). Actually, I think he overstates the case, but I really like that quote!

The setting in motion of bread and wine is the space of the Eucharist.  Insofar as they are used for this purpose, their created destinies are brought to their proper telos.  The water, when blessed and used in baptism brings about the sacramental potential of the water.  It communicates God’s grace and places the person into the Body of Christ (church). In the same way, the bread and wine, when blessed communicates the body and blood of Christ to the one who is already the Body of Christ.  The feast makes community.

In the liturgy people use things and in the use of those things they are brought to their fulfillment as sacraments of God’s grace and revelation. This brings me to, Aiden Kavanagh, who, following Schmemann, says, in his important book On Liturgical Theology that this is what happens when God “recreates the World not by making new things but by making all things new.” (p. 50). In fact this is the task of the Church and what, he believes, ultimately happens in liturgy. 

Kavanagh has this great discussion in which he suggests that before modernity, cities used to be places of “transactions with ultimate reality.” They were places were ideas were formed and arts were made.  With the coming of secularization, the city became profaned because it was no longer seen in reference to the world.  The church he suggests offers a different view of humanity, the world, and the city.  Kavanagh suggests that the Church, because of its liturgy is the “central workshop of the human City, a City which under grace has already begun to mutate by fits and starts into the City-of-God-in-the-making, the focal point of the world made new in Christ Jesus.” (p. 42). In other words, it is both the Church and the world that have been redeemed by Christ.  The church’s task is that of reconciliation, which God did through Christ between Him and the created world.  Thus, Kavanagh criticizes the Church for moving beyond the center of the city where it can no longer witness to this reconciliation.  This is a thoroughly modern thing to do. 

Plenty of ink has been spilt criticizing suburban ecclesiology and I really don’t intended to follow that discussion here. But I do think that Kavanagh is right to suggest that the church was never meant to be abstracted from the center of the city.  Kavanagh shows that in its earliest stages, Christian liturgy began in the earliest hours of the day and carried on throughout the day, throughout the entire city.  It never stayed in one place, showing that the liturgy was for everyone.  It was a full public liturgy that was meant to show that the church in its liturgy “manifested in its deepest nature in the human civitas as the presence, the embodiment in the world of the World to come, of the Kingdom, of the new and final age. It was the church of Jesus Christ being most overtly itself before God in the world on humanity’s human stage.” (p.57). Kavanagh calls this the church doing the world.  That is, the church enacting the redeemed world, which doesn’t stay to itself, but shows the world that it too has been redeemed and therefore calls it to worship its creator and redeemer which it does not yet worship.

Although worship can happen anywhere, worship in a public gymnasium seems to be a great to live into the words of these guys; bringing the sacred into the common, or better yet, setting the common in motion to manifest the sacred.

The Liturgical Turn: Mr. Jones and Me

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got together with some friends and attended a local community gathering.  After finding a parking space, we made the trek to the front door where we pasted by the greeters and were kindly shown to our seats by the ushers.  This place had everything you would expect, the lights, cameras, sound, stage.  There wasn’t a bad seat in the house.  Then the curtain opened, the band kicked in, the guy with the mic had everyone stand up. Within seconds everyone’s hands were raised and we were all enraptured by the music. 

No, we didn’t visit a megachurch (or any church for that matter).  It was my favorite of all cultural liturgies: a concert.  That which, due to the existence of children and Ticketmaster, I don’t get to enjoy as often as I used to.   This was a birthday present and I got to see one of my favorite bands, Counting Crows.  I’ve been impressed by them every time I’ve seen them in concert.  They are an incredibly tight band that knows how to play off of each other well.  Even though their lead singer and songwriter Adam Duritz has his fair-share of critics, I think he’s a great performer. That’s because he can do two things really well.  One is that he knows how to connect with the crowd really well and in a fairly short amount of time.  The other is that he knows how make his songs “work”.  By that I mean, he’s good at leading the band through them in such a way that his emotions are expressed while drawing the audience into those emotions at the same time.  If we do a little observation, then we can see that this is what makes any musician a good performer.  Bono, Sting, etc. all do this very, very well, even if in differing ways. 

However, what disturbed me a little about the show was how often I found myself taking mental notes.  Not in the way that every musician takes notes when they go to a show, but I found myself thinking of how to put some those notes to work next Sunday morning.  You see, every ‘contemporary worship leader’ out there would give just about anything for that kind response from their congregations.  Even though the best of us know that we're not performing per se and that “response” takes different forms (just like pastors should know that even if nobody complements them on the sermon that it, hopefully, was still edifying for the congregation) there is still something to be said for those times when the whole place is “lifting up holy hands” lost in worship. 

That kind of worship (along with its ‘worship leaders’) however does have its critics.  Perhaps rightly so.  Too often going to church does feel like going to concert.  In fact, my wife recently showed me a blog post of someone who extolling the greatness of their new church actually said “It’s the cleanest concert I’ve ever been too.” Maybe she’s right. If someone took a picture of a Counting Crows concert and a praise band in the middle of a ‘worship set’ more than likely there wouldn’t be much difference (except for the lack of pot and beer – hopefully!)

Believe it or not, I don’t want to be overly critical here.  Even for all the problems of over-zealous, rock-star worship leaders who employ common stage tricks to whip their audience, I mean, congregation into an emotional frenzy, I don’t think that means the church needs to stay with stuffy liturgies and out-dated hymnals.  Now, I’m all for prayer books and hymnals, but I don’t want to discount ‘contemporary worship songs’ either (for lack of a better word).  Even though, the idea of emotional response (a common argument against contemporary worship) for its own sake should raise concerns, I’m convinced more than ever that the church should be the forerunner in redeeming the “emotional response” and using excellent music to do so.  At the Counting Crows show people were singing, dancing, raising hands, clapping, etc. – all of which are gestures of praise that can be found throughout the Scriptures, especially in the Psalms.   

If these gestures can be found in secular liturgies such as concerts, how much more should be they be found in our worship? Especially among those of us who worship the God who became incarnate and redeems God’s creation.  Jeremy Begbie in “Resounding Truth” argues that if Christ became fully incarnate, then even human emotions have been redeemed.  Our praise and worship should inspire an emotional response that should manifest itself in a variety of bodily gestures – clapping, raised hands, kneeling, dancing.  Why? Because we worship the God who created us to be bodily and desires that we worship holistically – mind, heart, and strength. 

That’s one issue I have with the traditional hymns that I love so much.  I feel as if they are too embedded in modernity.  What I mean is that, even though theology and doctrine are so wonderfully portrayed through them, they are incredibly textual.  Hopefully this isn’t unfair, but I worry that the logocentrism of hymns might reinforce aspects of modernity that we’re trying so hard to move past.  Hymns are written in such a way that lyrics become the most important aspect of the song.  That’s not a bad thing.  Where I see the problem is that its tendency is to reduce the beauty of the melody and rhythm to secondary importance at best.  In a sense, we’re back to tired old dualisms – the cerebral over the material, rationality over emotional, truth over beauty. 

I don’t want to belabor that point, only to say that for all they’re worth, hymns aren’t infallible.  Particularly, because they probably stifle holistic worship more then they act as a catalyst for it.  Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.  

At the end of the day, Counting Crows, convinced me not to fear inviting an emotional response in worship.  In fact, I need to get better at creating space within my church’s liturgy for the entire range of human responses to manifest themselves if the Spirit see fit. Part of that comes in selecting songs that do include both solid lyrics and beautiful melodies and rhythms.  The other is simply encouraging freedom in worship.  Not that everyone’s response has to or can be the same, but I have found it interesting the people feel comfortable responding to music at an arena in a way they don’t feel comfortable at church - even though it’s the same song they’re singing.  

The Liturgical Turn: Music In A Time Of Mourning

Life always takes a series of unexpected turns.  And seeing how way leads on to way, I suspect that I’ll later return to my original intention of delving deeper into an interaction with William Desmond’s metaphysics and liturgy (which began with my previous post).  For now I’m going to change directions slightly and share with you something that I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks. 

This past month has been a very interesting month for my church because we experienced together a time of great joy and a time of sadness.  In the middle of July we participated in a missions project with World Vision, which was the first time my church had done anything like this in its life together.  The day after we returned from the Appalachian mountains, while the excitement for seeing the Holy Spirit’s power move in the life of our church was still fresh, the husband of one of the team members suffered a fatal heart attack.  Excitement quickly turned to mourning. 

Even though I’ve been leading music in church for a while now, this was the first funeral I’d ever had to plan for and, quite frankly, I wasn’t really too sure what to do.  The funeral liturgy in the Book of Common is a beautiful liturgy whose theology of resurrection, hope, and future glory says all there is to say.  So along with asking “what songs do we sing while we’re all grieving”, I was also asking “why sing at all?” 

In searching for answers, I was reminded of the work of Eleanor Stubley.  Stubley is a phenomenologist, musicologist and professor of music at McGill University whose work focuses on the importance of the body in musical performance as well as the disjunction between the performers’ experience of music and the theorists’ description of it.  She believes that if we are going to formulate an adequate account of music’s meaning then we need to take the experience of the physical act of music-making seriously.  In a sense, making music constitutes a fundamentally different manner of being that she describes as the “transformative powers of musical performance.” The body’s role in musical performance is more than being the machine that executes the sound. The body is that which communicates to and senses the world around it allowing for the performance of music to take place.

Anyone who has ever played in a band or sang in a choir knows that all the participants are acutely aware of what everyone else is doing.  This is essential for matching pitch, harmonizing, following changes and dynamics.  It produces what Stubley calls a “symbiotic tuning” which affects the mind, body, voice, instruments and, in turn, the actions of the others around. This creates a continuing dialectic as performers play off of each other.  As the music progresses there is bond that is created.  The existence of that bond is most keenly felt (negatively) when one of the performers falters or the whole performance suddenly stops.  We all know how awkward the moment is when we’re singing along with the radio and the power goes out or we’re playing in a band and the bandleader cuts everyone off suddenly (I’m notorious at this in rehearsals).  It’s a shocking experience that feels like one’s state of mind has just been shattered.  This is why in performing music together there is a trust that forms and is needed to sustain the flow of sound. 

In thinking about Stubley’s work, I was reminded of the unique experience of music. It’s almost sacramental (and some argue that it is). Baptism places one in the body of Christ, the Eucharist continual feeds us with the sustaining grace of Christ’s body and blood.  Singing together, which Christians always do when gathered, also creates a sense of the church as a body.  It makes us present to each other in a profound way. I suppose this is the answer to my question “why sing while we’re mourning?”  Because the music can say more and do more than words alone.  When we sing we communicate and create a togetherness.  All suffering causes alienation.  Therefore what we need in a time of mourning is not just words of comfort (sometimes we don’t need them right away), but the physical presence of others.  Singing together overcomes alienation because it makes us uniquely present to one another in a way that little else can.      

*For a good explanation of Eleanor Stubley’s work see:  Philosophical Perspectives on Music by Wayne D. Bowman (Oxford Press, 1998)

Smoking to the Glory of God?

I had hoped to begin an introductory post today to what will be a regular series by me under the title 'ecclesia res publica'.  However swine flu has been working its way through my household, and instead I offer this post, that I have drafted in contribution to another blog series.

Christine Sine sent me an invitation to write (alongside so many other wonderful writers) in response to a question she posed about Spiritual practices.  If I can summarize Christine’s question (no doubt very badly), and premise for the series, she asked why do most people experience God outside church in the world, whilst Christians see only prayer, bible study, and going to church as spiritual practices, for knowing and experiencing the death and resurrection of Jesus?

It was a good question for me, in that it bothered me and got me thinking.  In particular, how tragic it is if the bible, church and prayer become self referencing static mediators of the gospel, with no connection to the real world.  But also, how equally tragic and a measure of gospel paucity, if spiritual practices, are about experiences of God in the world, with no framing by the canonical-linguistic grammar of the gospel, prayer, and Christian community.  Both are as bad as each other, or perhaps at least lead to a question, what are the nature of spiritual practices, and how are they connected to the world, and church, and scripture?

Otherwise without some understanding of that, it’s easy to accept the opening premise at face value as fact, and in response as a Christian to reach for what I do in the world as ‘a spiritual practice’. That is to respond by listing what I do in the world, outside of the bible , prayer, and church, as where I meet God.  It’s to locate spiritual practices on those terms, and that’s something I’m uncomfortable with.  Just as I am uncomfortable with collapsing ‘spiritual practices’ into bible study, prayer and going to church.

I can easily reach for how having turned 40 years old this year, I became a cliche, and I decided to get a motor bike.  I can describe how the training process in the UK, with four separate tests and requisite training, have been forming me as a biker.  How I for the first time have a hobby away from my work, and the pressures of Church community.  How a ride through the english pastoral countryside, clears my mind, connects me to creation, and how close to God I feel compared to going to Church.  And if I were to imagine that Christians who see spiritual practices as solely the domain of prayer, bible and going to church, were to ask me, how can you ride a motorbike as a spiritual practice, my reply might be like that of Charles Spurgeon, when asked how could he smoke cigars?  That I do it to the glory of God.

But I misrepresent Spurgeon, and do him a disservice, as do many Christians, when we use his most wonderful aphorism, as a thin veneer, to baptise everything we do as a ‘spiritual practice’.  For if I justify all I do as being done to the glory of God, everything is a spiritual discipline, perhaps apart from going to Church, prayer and the bible.

So how might we begin to respond to this separation of ‘spiritual practices’ from church community, the bible and prayer?  How did we arrive at this separation, and how might we begin to frame this theologically, to understand the nature of ‘spiritual practices’ and how they form us as human beings before God?

One reading of St Augustine¹, would provide an understanding of the human condition, in which we have not fallen from God, but we have fallen from ourselves, into ourselves.  For Augustine, humanity has not fallen out of perfection, but rather out of Creation, into the condition of privation, isolation, and withdrawal.  Sin is not a fall from God, but the fall from ourselves, otherwise we could not exist as human beings.  While our response to this condition is further retreat, into isolation from others, and forming life around ourselves, redemption is the move back into Creation and presence with God and others.  While Augustine is often critiqued as being world denying, he can be seen as providing just the opposite, with a theology of engagement with the world.

As I read him, Augustine is not world-denying but world-affirming, and it is not that we have too little; it is that we are overwhelmed by the plenitude of Creation, we end up loving love itself, desiring desire, and become lost to ourselves, isolated from God and each other.  Augustine does not want us to love the world more, but rather change how we love it.  As evidenced in his own life and ministry and teaching, we see Augustine encouraging Christians to move deeper into the world and its affairs.  

For Augustine, the Christian life in response to this problem, and human condition, was one of ascesis, of re-training our desire and longings with, towards their proper orientation, and ends, that enable us to participate in the redemption of creation, by Jesus.  Within this crude summary of Augustine, we might see that ‘spiritual practices’ are those things that are located within this ascesis, that which leads to re-training and re-directing of our desire towards their god redeemed ends.

Or in response to my own question posed at the start of this post, I might see that prayer, church, and the bible that does not form us in engagement in the world, is as bad a process of ascesis as spiritual practices that move us too deeply into the world and become disconnected from the church, prayer and the bible.

I can ride my motorbike as a spiritual practice and meet Jesus.  I can offer God my motorbike riding within his re-training me from someone within a fallen self identity as a workaholic, into someone who can find his identity in the sheer indulgence of the enjoyment riding through God’s creation.  Or it can become an ecclesiology for one, having more in common with the problem of my isolation from God and others, and idol of my own making that forms me around my own isolated desires and disconnection from others.  A substitute for real ‘spiritual practice’, justified around my own fallen desires and ends, rather than those learned and practiced within the community of God’s people.

Everything can be a ‘spiritual practice’, but not everything is a ‘spiritual practice’.  It is the ends, the means, and the formation that takes place within our activities that determines what is ‘spiritual’.  Charles Spurgeon new this well I think, which is why when Christians questioned his smoking to the Glory of God’, his reply in a letter to the Telegraph Newspaper was:

 ‘"The expression 'smoking to the glory of God,' standing alone, has an ill sound, and I do not justify it; but in the sense in which I employed it, I still stand to it. No Christian should do anything in which he cannot glorify God—and this may be done, according to Scripture, in eating and drinking and the common actions of life.

 

When I have found intense pain relieved, a weary brain soothed, and calm, refreshing sleep obtained by a cigar, I have felt grateful to God and have blessed His name; this is what I meant, and by no means did I use sacred words triflingly. If through smoking I had wasted an hour of my time—if I had stinted my gifts to the poor—if I had rendered my mind less vigorous—I trust I should see my fault and turn from it; but he who charges me with these things shall have no answer but my forgiveness.” (http://www.spurgeon.org/misc/cigars.htm)

^{1 For example see, Cavanaugh, William T. Torture and Eucharist : Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.}

________. Theopolitical Imagination. London ; New York: T & T Clark, 2002.

Gregory, Eric

nd the Order of Love : An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Hütter, Reinhard. Suffering Divine Things : Theology as Church Practice. Grand Rapids, Mich. ; Cambridge: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000.

Mathewes, Charles T. A Theology of Public Life Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Miller, Vincent Jude. Consuming Religion : Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. New York: Continuum, 2003.

O'Donovan, Oliver. Resurrection and Moral Order : An Outline for Evangelical Ethics. 2nd ed. ed. Leicester: Apollas, 1994.

________. The Desire of the Nations : Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1999 [printing]), 1999.

Schweiker, William, and Charles T. Mathewes. Having : Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life. Grand Rapids, Mich. ; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004.

Wannenwetsch, Bernd. Political Worship : Ethics for Christian Citizens Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

The Liturgical Turn: Worship and the Between

I was reminded recently of one of my loves – really big words.   I know it can be a little pretentious to use certain terms in dialog or writing when there are perfectly good colloquial words that say the same thing.  But let’s face it philosophers and theologians aren’t the only ones who do this.  Every field, whether professional or academic, has terms that are specific to them and stand in need of clarification to the rest of us. When I’m working on the car with my dad, there are plenty of terms that he uses which need to be defined for me (such as ‘flux capacitor’ – ok, I wish). Of course my dad can simply point to the part of the engine in question or my doctor can simply describe the surgical procedure in order to clarify my confusion.  

But maybe that gets to part of my point.  I find it rather interesting that there seems to be less reaction to, say, a doctor using a technical term than to a theologian.  Could it be that technical terms used in auto mechanics or medicine seem to have more practicality attached to them as opposed to theological or philosophical terms?  I would be one to argue that every idea has practical (as in praxis) outworkings, but, if not, at least I’ve given a disclaimer for the use of a philosophical term that rather fond of – metaxological. 

You’re impressed, I’m sure.  The metaxological, besides being a beautiful term that just rolls off the tongue, is a metaphysical understanding associated with the philosopher William Desmond.  In an essay entitled “Neither Servility nor Sovereignty: Between Metaphysics and Politics,” in Theology and the Political: The New Debate he describes a metaxological metaphysical perspective as one in which “there is more to be said” (p. 160).  He derives this understanding from the double meaning of the Greek meta as ‘beyond’ and also as ‘in the midst’ allowing him to locate reality in the metaxu or ‘the between’.  This allows us not to get trapped in the ontological violence of radical immanence or univocity because it affords the experience of objects, people, and communal entities as more than the experience of raw materiality.  Instead it allows us to perceive materiality with an opening up to the ‘something more’ that is beyond it. Moreover it causes us to find ourselves needing to traverse the porous boundaries, not only between transcendence and immanence, but between others as other. In other words it gives us an understanding of trees, rocks, humans, etc. as more than they naturally are but also reveals the fact that immanent reality exists within transcendence thereby acknowledging boundaries that we believe to be solid are really rather porous (a word he likes to use).

The metaxological gives him a way to envision politics not bound by univocity and its attendant will to power.  Desmond notes that in the between, there are diverse forms of community that serve as intermediations of the transcendent good.  He specifically details four different communities.  The first is the family, which forms intimacy, the second is the network of utility, which focuses on economic values, the third he calls the community of erotic sovereignty whose goal is social and political power, and finally the community of agapeic service whose main service is to the neighbor and other humans. Each intermediates a form of the good and relativizes the communities underneath it.  What he means is this: the community of agapeic service will mediate the good of service to the neighbor in itself, but also calls the community of erotic sovereignty forth to rightly distribute and exercise power and justice in such a way that it avoids its temptation to tyranny. The boundaries between the communities are necessarily open to the others otherwise we would find ourselves reverting to univocity. 

Desmond describes the agapeic community as the community on the boundary of the ethical and religious, which “deals with transcendent good. It is most released to ethical care for the other as other.  It releases something of the promise of universal love of being, both in respect for the value of nature as other, and for other human beings with whom one shares the gifts of the between” (p. 169). For Desmond this community can rightly perceive the transcendence within all humans and nature.  As such it is not tempted to objectify nature for its own self-asserting utility.  It can truly show love to others and seek to do them good since it sees them as more than objects that need to be governed by power. 

But what does all this have to do with liturgy and worship?  Desmond himself near the end of his essay describes this agapeic community as one that is lived out in between the human and divine (p.177).  This plays itself out in prayer, liturgical rituals, praise, and care for others.   The agapeic community (as I read it) can become a descriptor for the Church and metaxological becomes a great term to describe the Church’s understanding of reality.  It is the understanding that is or should be formed by the continual worship of the Trinue God – the one who is wholly Other and perfect relationship. 

There is much more to be said and I’m going to pick up here with my next post in which I want to bring Desmond into conversation with specific liturgical theologians.  But here, I want to make a bit of turn and ask what are we doing to facilitate this kind of vision.  If in worship we are ‘gathered’ to encounter God and ‘sent forth’ into the service of God’s kingdom, what are some things that are happening within our churches that are forming us into “seeing the world” rightly?

I can think a three things specifically from my own experience.  One this the “opening acclamation’ from the Book of Common Prayer – “Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit / And Blessed be His Kingdom now and forever, Amen” We acknowledge that we are coming into the presence of the God who has been self-revealed as the Trinity, the second person of which become incarnate in order to bring us into union with the life of the Trinity.  What better example of transversing porous boundaries non-violently could there be? 

The next thing is directed prayer.  My church is beginning to incorporate prayer evenings into our life together.   The basic structure of which includes songs and extended times of prayer in which a leader – usually myself – gives specific topics to pray about.  I typically structure the prayer so that it starts with pure praise of God and moves progressively towards praying for those in need around us as well as vision and willingness to go and serve. 

Lastly – song selection. As a song leader, I try to be very conscience of the songs that I present to my community.  Two that I’m rather fond of that I think help to aid in this kind of formation would be “God of Justice” and “Everlasting God”.  The first calls us to service of the poor and the second gives us a vision of the everlasting faithfulness of our God who is the ‘defender of the weak’ and who ‘comforts those in need.’

So there are some of my examples.  I know should have mentioned the obvious – Word and Table, but I’m curious as to what else within the gathered time of worship seeks to form the church into a community of agapeic service? 

Derrida, Kandinsky, and the Force of Art

By Carl Raschke

Deconstruction and the Force of Language

Ever since I finished with my graduate seminar on Derrida this past spring I've been looking quite differently at what was always at stake in "post-structuralism" - what years ago we called postmodernism in philosophy before the latter word took hold.  The term "postmodernism" gained currency after Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in the mid-1980s.. In this particular seminar I had some of the best and the brightest, and a few of them in their innocent enthusiasm for exploring the giddy vastness of "Derrida-world" called my attention to some important misuses of the evolving Derridean canon that became necessary in their own right to deconstruct.

What my students showed me toward the end of the term is that we have misappropriated the fashion of "deconstructively" reading texts as some new kind of critical theory, which we regularly, and sometimes ruthlessly, apply to structures of meaning and authority as well as forms  of organization.  That would of course include the church, and the ongoing effort to "deconstruct" Christianity, or "churchianity", is one of the things I have in mind. 

We have developed the bad habit of regarding deconstruction as an active intervention, when in fact Derrida seems to use the word all along in the intransitive sense.  We confuse deconstruction with the Marxist or Freudian critique of ideology, when in fact something quite different is involved.  Deconstruction is not any kind of "work" itself, like a work of art, literature, philosophy, or theology.  It is always a "working through" of some thread within the text (which is what Derrida is always doing in each of his "books"), or of an indeterminate yet potentially fruitful insight. If I may paraphrase Derrida as closely as I can to one of his well-known remarks, the "work" of deconstruction is always, and has always been, at work within the work itself.  

What does this mean?  Put simply, deconstruction is not a methodology, or unmasking, of those ideas and assumptions which we hold dear, or by which a quotidian reverence for the "tradition" of theology and philosophy has kept us from seeing the the underlying truth. Deconstruction is no "hermeneutics of suspicion," as Paul Ricoeur once referred to critical theory. Deconstruction, insofar as it is always "at work" within the work, amounts to what in German is called a Wirkung, one common translation of which is the English word "force".

Derrida makes a lot out of the concept of "force" in his early writings, particularly those authored in the  1960s, but not translated into English until the mid-1970s.  He also revived the phrase when he launched into the question of the "religious" around 1990.  In many respects one can derive a sense of Derrida's whole life project from a careful reading of the very early essay "Force and Signification" (force et signification), published in 1963 and contained along with other essays in English translation under the title of Writing and Difference, which appeared under a University of Chicago Press imprint in 1978.. 

"Force and Signification" is a gold mine when it comes to unearthing the "roots" of deconstruction. But what is even more interesting is the way Derrida, in "inventing" deconstruction, appears early on to be re-inventing Hegel.  Now that is not at all suprising since Derrida (like most of his generation in Paris) was considerably impacted by the neo-Marxian Alexandre Kojève's seminars on Hegel. 

Deconstruction is often considered radically un-Hegelian, which in its outworkings it of course is.   But if we inspect scrupulously what Derrida is saying in this very early article we find that deconstruction seems to be curiously birthed by, though driven in an entirely different direction from, the Hegelian dialectic itself. We can glimpse the parthenogenesis of deconstruction in the highly obscure early section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit on the concept of force. We can also find it in Hegel's discussion of language in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on which Derrida comments extensively in the various essays he published in the 1960s.

I am developing this argument in the first chapter of a new book manuscript which I began this summer, and will not venture to lay it out in all its philosophical arcana and complexity on this blog.  But the upshot is that deconstruction should not be viewed as any kind of "taking apart" of the idols of language so much as it is an ongoing, mobile disclosure of the force of language.   Every moment of deconstruction is a force-event, a reading of Derrida of course that puts him closer to Deleuze than we might be accustomed to acknowledging.  

Kandinsky and the Force of Art

But the purpose of this post is not to pursue some highly technical roadmap for revisionism regarding Derrida.  I have realized that something even more significant might be afoot in the Hegelian/Derridean/Deleuzean concept of force after reading of the French philosopher Michel Henry's  Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, just recently translated, though it was published in French much earlier.

I acquired an interest in Kandinsky's art, and theories of art, long ago.  Kandinsky, by the way, was the artist who not only set in motion the imperatives of so much of modern art, but whose radical "abstractionism" was aimed at painting the power of creativity itself.  According to Henry, in Kandinsky "'abstract' no longer refers to what is derived from the world at the end of a process of simplification or complication or at the end of the history of modern painting: instead, it refers to what was prior to the world and does not need the world in order to exist." (p. 16)  According to Kandinsky, the painter paints art's "inner necessity". 

Kandinsky's well-known On the Spiritual in Art, which came out on the eve of the First World War, lays out the theory of painting according to the composition principles of inner necessity. The representational and reflective character of the painting, which compels us to see the visible world as it is, or as we have so far missed seeing it, must give way to the invisible force of the painting per se. 

According to Henry, Kandinsky's radical abstractionism regretably failed to outlive him.  So-called "abstraction" in modern and post-modern painting does not really focus on the inner necessity of the painting, but flits around the myriad pragmatic, programmatic, ideological, material, and compositional problems the artist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has encountered - the so-called "painterly" challenges.  Even if it is neither representational or figurative, art remains "pictorial", Henry tells us. 

Kandinsky, however, wanted painting to "disclose the pictoriality" of the picture, as Henry expresses it, in its pure and dynamic interiority.  Kandinsky was a theosophist, influenced by the writings of the Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky, as were many avante-garde artists at the turn of the century and up through World War II.  Yet his project for art has stunning implications for Christian theological thinking today, especially after Derrida. It also has outsize consequences for Christian spirituality in the arts, though I like many others are reluctant to talk about "Christian art" as a whole, since the locution is really quite vapid and often connotes nothing more than the fact that certain styles, subject matters, and aesthetic methodologies find a ready audience among people who consider themselves Christians (Unfortunately, such an audience often is drawn to the uninspired, the hackneyed, or the downright kitschy).

What perhaps would a new Christian abstractionism look like?  Or at least a Christian "abstract expressionism" (since Kandinsky's abstractionism and Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism follow similar logic of the force of the painting on to the canvas)? 

In the Derrida seminar one of my students, who was an art history and philosophy double major, asked me why "deconstructionism" seemed so unlike philosophy.  I answered that Derrida might be compared to Pollock in some ways, whose paintings were so unlike what people took to be painting.  She liked that answer, because I guess it made sense to her. Pollock called his work "gestural."  The same may be said of Derrida, who even used such a word from time to time.  The gestural is the revelation of the process by which the textual or the aesthetic "construct" comes to be, something akin perhaps to what Nietzsche really meant by Wille zur Macht, the "will to power", which manifests eminently in art.  

Many in the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s were fans of Nietzsche.  Deleuze derived his own "expressionist" philosophy from his youthful engagement with the sage of Sils Maria, which came forward in his ground-breaking 1962 book Nietzsche and Philosophy.

A Christian Abstractionism?

I have a personal muse as well that I might share with you, as I push forward this somewhat complex analysis, hopefully to culminate in a book for which I have already churned out almost 20,000 words entitled Force of God.  The tentative title of the book, as an aside, takes off from Derrida's seminal essay "Force of Law," which inaugurated in many respects his so-called "religious turn." The muse is my own wife Sunny Raschke, an artist of considerable gifts who revived a long dormant professional art career about five years ago after a hiatus of several decades.

Sunny has taught me to "see" the inner necessity of what might be termed the "force of Christ" in the creative expression of a painting.  The one shown here, entitled Origin I, is currently showing in a gallery in Denison, Texas.  The painting is actually three-dimensional with a kind of relief map effect that can be achieved through the use of a novel fabric hardener, invented in the Netherlands and known as Paverpol®.  The cross-like, "gestural" form in the center of the painting was inspired by the Louis Giglio YouTube message on the protein molecule "laminin", which holds the structures of life together. 

One is reminded of the opening hymn of Colossians, where Christ is proclaimed as "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together". (Col. 1:15-17).  The force of creation is expressed in the "image" of Christ, which "holds all things together", serves to connect the myriad puzzle pieces that are singular human lives as well as the quest for God, the Infinite Origin himself, overflowing the boundaries of "two-dimensional" sight, thinking, and imagination.

Derrida discerned the messianic, the avenir, the "to come", of divine justice in the "force of law."  Can we discern the truly "originary", the protological, which is also the eschatological, the true "alpha and omega", in the force of art?  Derrida suggests early on that there is a force of art in the sense of a "force of truth" in his work of 1978 The Truth in Painting. 

In The Truth in Painting Derrida does his own deconstructive reading of Heidegger's famous essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," which binds aesthetics to ontology rather than to the "responsibility" (Derrida's term) of the artist to the force that urges him, or her, into expressive action.  For Derrida, the religious is the responsible response to the force of God in our lives, the force of response we name the "force of faith."  That is one way which we can cogently read Derrida's The Gift of Death, which serves as a memorial re-reading of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In both religion and art we confront the Kierkegaardian/Derridean "secret" of the faith response, the "inner necessity" that harbors a subtle working of what is both creative and a redemptive force - Geist, the Spirit! 

As the French novelist Andre Gide once wrote, "art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."  That perhaps is "deconstruction in a nutshell."

Notes on Paintings. (1) Top: Wassily Kandinsky, On White 2. (2)   Middle: Jackson Pollock, The Key. (3) Sunny Raschke, Origins 1.