Wednesday, June 15, 2011

inachevee de Constantinople

green tea w/ apples, almonds, roses.  fruit, nuts, and flowers.  who thought these would go so well together?




my sr. year at Otis was an epic season.  that's when I was convicted that I was born to be part of a movement in the arts and culture of significant proportions.  little did I know that that truth would take an extra 8 years to realize.
 
I grew as an artist, believing that "good" art always spoke openly about the Gospel and that all those that did not was of less sophisticated origins.  moreover, I was taught, through modeling, that the pinnacle of inspiration for art comes from the kind of theology that one learns from books and the verbal teachings of ministry leaders.  naturally this caused me to cling as hard as possible to the leaders around me.

i recall a particularly celebratory moment after my very first mission trip to thailand, a place and a people with whom i fell in love.  our team had been back home for a month and was eager to have a reunion.  we took a delightful stroll on 3rd street promenade and had lunch.  i ordered a glass of delicious pinot gris and expected to have a wonderful afternoon with my beloved spiritual family.  instead, the following few hours became more awkward than a string of christopher walken scenes.  it wasn't until the following day that i realized that it was because i was drinking alcohol.

so any time an experience with my friends, the taste of a dessert, a fight with my parents, or a great pair of boots in a window would inspire me, I tried hard to suppress it with mental applications of God's Word.  I fought hard the attraction toward exploring ideas or situations that many of my brothers and sisters would label as "liberal."  I was the most conservative liberal you'd ever meet. 


however eventually, that self-suppression took its toll on a core part of me--my creativity.  before i knew it, i was sapped of all that was passionate, intriguing, or generative about me.  and it took another year or two to figure out what had happened.  and by that time, i was already a bitter and confused product of ignorance and pride.  it took all that for me to realistically examine the truth about creativity and aesthetics.


i won't say that all such explorations should yield the same results or be conducted the same way, or even have the same motives.  however, i suspect that genuine confrontation of what it means to create and how creation happens will at least graze the notion that mankind requires variation and regeneration.  for me, the existence of things like species of animals and plants with which humans have no contact and a part of the female anatomy that has no other purpose other than that of pleasure kept me from denying that God values aesthetics.


this meant that the experience of exercising my senses could actually ADD to my growth and maturity, rather than distracting from it.  and once that was made clear, through not only examination of the world, but supported by God's Word (Exodus 16:31, Psalm 34:8, Hebrews 4:13), i was able to truly live freely, as i was designed to be.

indeed, who ever thought that these would go so well together: a deep meditation on sex and death, a season of dread and emptiness, and finally a spiritual cleansing and growth.  fun stuff, no?

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