Ignatius reads in bed during recovery from his injury, print by Peter Paul Rubens
I have been asking myself since the start of the pandemic, how can one be contemplative in the midst of crisis? It is a question that any busy person might have that becomes larger when daily experience includes emotional and physical stress.
Dreams are one way—particularly vivid ones may force us to contemplate, suddenly awakening us to forces within we did not know were there or had been suppressing. Dreams that seem linked to vocation are the ones I remember. When I understood my vocation to be pointing to contemplation, my dreams began to contain wild animals. Last week my dream had a lion, but it feels more accurate to a contemplative mindset to say that the lion had me. It still does.
How can a waking person be contemplative in the midst of crisis? The answer “Through art,” comes readily. Poetry or fiction such as the Chronicles of Narnia are like dreams. Much of art is born of or within crisis. This was part of my reasoning behind my suggestion we read Art + Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura for the current season of the Dean’s Forum. I did not know the book centers on the idea of brokenness transformed, exemplified by the life, death, and new life of Christ and by Kintsugi tea ware in which shards of broken vessels are joined with lacquer and gold—transformed and newly treasured.
While waiting for the Forum to begin, I read Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church by Barbara A. Holmes in anticipation of Holmes’s latest book which is now out, Crisis Contemplation. I appreciate her work in identifying contemplative practice, not only within the Black and Africana church, but also within the variety of religious experience that is Christian worship in America.
Holmes describes how Africana contemplation happens in community with word and sound in contradistinction to Eurocentric models of contemplation and contemplative prayer which tend to center on silence and private reflection, e.g., “Centering Prayer.” (I think that the art of our Cathedral interior and its liturgy also holds contemplative space in community—not unlike what I have felt in Black churches that hold a tradition of contemplation.)
Holmes is herself a poet. She coined a word, “griosh,” to mean Afrocentric midrash (“midrash” being the Jewish tradition of interrogating the silences in God’s word) and “griot” which is the word which refers to African storytellers, the sh in griosh being the “symbolic marker of the hush arbors where Christian diaspora faith perspectives were honed.” (94)
She writes that hush arbors were where “deep in the hollows, under dense brush, the contemplatives gathered. They cleared soft places in the dirt so that they could kneel in comfort during the long prayers and songs.” According to Holmes, “Although slaves particularized this practice, there were also brush arbors that served whites.” (59)
Enslaved people had to hush and not be found, often keeping a large kettle to catch their prayers. Creative, contemplative prayer was protected to bless those under threat of torture and death as they sought God’s wisdom and developed their theology and methods of biblical interpretation.
Holmes writes, “Like lectio divina, griosh is a contemplative reading of Holy Scriptures, a method of interpreting the incomprehensible situation of slavery. I have no doubt that it will be equally efficacious in the incomprehensible situation of post modernity.” (95) She mourns the loss of contemplation in church to the cult of celebrity preaching.
In her chapter titled, “In the Beginning: the Spirit Broods,” Holmes writes in griosh mode:
“When Genesis begins, the earth is a pulsating womb that shelters deep waters and undifferentiated powers of light and dark. Then the Spirit broods and blows, and in accordance with divine purpose expressed as “Let there be,” goodness is declared. Goodness is not superimposed on the cosmos. In the beginning, “good” is offered as potential. It is the word, the orality of God, that differentiates and orders natural phenomena into integrative categories in preparation for the beginnings of an earth community.” (96)
In Art + Faith, Fujimura also seeks to offer something to post modernity from his culture and his training in traditional Japanese painting called Nihonga, and Kintsugi, seen through the lens of his conversion to Christianity. Throughout the book, Fujimura connects Creation and the New Creation, depicting us and what we make as living inside the relationship between the two.
In the third chapter, in the section, “The Beauty and Mercy of Co-creation” Fujimura writes a parable of a father who is an architect watching his child make a sand castle at the beach. The father rejoices in the creation. The tide washes the child’s castle away, and years later the child is amazed to see his design in a permanent structure that the father himself built…..
“…..A new reality that surpassed the creative capacity of a child on the beach…..the castle would not—could not—have been built unless the child had initiated building it, even though that child never assumed it would be permanent. The lesson here is that God takes far more seriously than we do what we make, even in ‘inconsequential play’ and every day realities can be enduring materials through which the New Creation is to be made.” (36)
Fujimura and Holmes have advanced degrees and have read theology, and while this lends to their authority to lead others, this is not what gives them license to creatively contemplate faith—it is Christ who gives them this authority, just as Christ gave it to His disciples. Like the New Testament writers, Fujimura and Holmes are able to see and articulate how, within the theologies of their cultures of origin, Christ was always present and waiting, just as the Bible says, “He was in the beginning” (John 1:2) and “Behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor 6:2)