Beryl Korot: "Dachau, 1974" | Art21 "Exclusive"

Here is yet another video that I think would be great to use in my classroom. The example of this artist and her video might be a great way to introduce the idea of creating art about the past, art about creating awareness, or other more deep or controversal topics. I like this interaction she talks about between the past and the present-- what an interesting idea to speak about Dachau in the present rather than its past when the past is truly quite powerful.

TODAY? Today I feel release. freed. Unemcombered. Untangled. Unembedded. Yet not removed. Not unconnected. Not alone. Release. Answers in the unanswered. I have all the words I need. All the vision I need. All the hope I need. All the love, all the self, all the security I need. All of my beauty is my own, found only in who I've been made.

Today I am free. Not weightless, but changed. The yoke is easy not because it is light but because we've been given all the power we need. Not denied, but given up. Honest and yet chosing. You do not take my life from me, but I willingly give it up.

Today I woke with hope. I've been opening my eyes to the sunlight, ears to birds, heart to the sound of the Father saying, "Wait only on me." I am learning, word by word, how to become silent. I am learning again the meaning of the word, "listen." I am learning again the feeling of the word "trust." I am learning again the touch of sustain me. I am learning the walk of OBEY. obey obey obey obey.

We wait in hope for the Lord.

"Do not let your hearts be troubled," Jesus said to the fearful ones, "Trust in God. Trust also in me. In my father's house there are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you may also be where I am...

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you wuld know my father as well. From now on, you do know him and you have seen him.. And I wil do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the father. you may ask for anything in my name and I will do it... The world cannot accept [the Spirit of Truth] because is neither sees him or knows him. But you know him for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you. before long, the world wil lnot see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you will also live... But the counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid."

--John 14

There is a beautiful freedom in knowing that we are held in the hand of the one that will never let us go. There is a beautiful peace and confidence in knowing that we may let go of everything, lay it all upon the altar, light it, raise the knife, let every scrap of our treasure fall to the ground, to offer even the best, the first-fruits without denying their goodness knowing that we can only be filled by the peace and goodness of even simply being emptied of all. Emptied. The cup poured out. Waiting silently to be refilled. Listening for the next word, the new word, awaiting the green leaf, the blossom of new season. We walk forward, endowed with power and strength, each step we take laden with the infinite, unknowable love of our Father. Oh how good and beautiful to find the freedom, the strength, the power to break through the fog that continues to tempt us to cling to that which does not last. We continue to walk through until we enter the clearing in which we remember He who has been walking beside us all along.

"Shepherd, we need to hear your voice, no matter what you might say."-- Todd Agnew

I've been thinking a lot about the necessity for silence recently. I am all too tempted to say too much, to put things out into the great void that probably do more harm than good. In my compulsion to find answers, I say things that I don't mean. And the truth is that I am longing for something farther outside of myself. I am waiting to hear a truth that I have not yet known. Longing for a truth that is beyond me. I was struck tonight by a few words Dallas Willard had on the subject of silence as a spiritual discipline. Take a moment and consider what he has to say:

"We find complete silence shocking because it leaves the impression that nothing is happening... Silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life. It reminds us of death, which will cut us off from this world and leave only us and God. And in that quiet, what if there turns out to be very little to 'just us and God'? Think what it says about the inward emptiness of our lives if we must always turn on the tape player or radio to make sure something is happening around us.

... Practice in not speaking can at least give us enough control over what we say that our tongues do not 'go off' automatically. This discipline provides us with a certain inner distance that gives us time to consider our words fully and the presence of mind to control what we say and when we say it.

Such practive also helps us to listen and to observe to pay attention to people. how rarely are we ever truly listened to, and how deep is our need to be heard. I wonder how much wrath in human life is a result of not being heard... 'we need to pay less attention to what people are trying to tell us and more to what they tell us without trying.'

Why do we insist on talking as much as we do? We run off at the mouth because we are inwardly uneasy about what others think of us. Eberhard Arnold observes: 'People who love one another can be silent together.' But when we're with those we feel less secure with, we use words to 'adjust' our appearance and elicit thier approval. Oterhwise, we fear our virtures might not be properly 'understood.' In not speaking, we resign how we appear (dare I say how we are?) to God. And that is hard. Why should we worry about others' opionions of us when God is for us and Jesus Christ is on his right hand, pleading our interests (Romans 8:31-34)? But we do."

Dallas Willard, "The Spirit of the Disciplines," 164-165

What is to be done with this heavy heart
More full of questions to the answers
than answers to the questions
Imagine rain clouds
socks full of water
hanging there
heavy heavy heavy

Oh, to be full of the weight of life
To be fierce with reality,
As I've heard it said.
I do not quite know what this means
but today I don't feel fierce
I just feel reality
in all of its cloudy weight
Gray and strange

My arms are out front
I am wading through
Searching for the forest
Among the trees

I am looking for the grip
That will allow me to let go
The words to name
The hurt
the confusion
I am looking for the phrase
to fit all of the questions
that only resound
tones of hurt
and uncertainty
C D E

What
what
what

how
how
how

why
why
why

How did we get here
When did I walk through this door
How could I have known
Why did I choose
How will I find the road
beneath my feet
again

Today the clouds hang
heavy and full
I wonder when
They will drop
How will they gush?
I wait
wait
wait

wait for the release
wait for the day when
the thirsty ground is quenched
Will the crops yet grow?
Or will this famine hang with us
forever
forever
forever.

There is the branch
Hanging
bent under the weight
Leaves unaware
at peace
glad just to be together

I want to be that leaf
simply waiting
for the gentle pour of rain
drop after gentle drop
My branch is bent
But my leaf finds
companionship enough.

Peter Rollins at Baylor University from Peter Rollins on Vimeo.

first there was the dawn
and i couldn't sing a song to you
then there came the rain
but i couldn't seem to blame you

sometimes it rains
sometimes it snows on you
sometimes it sleets
sometimes it defeats you


it's quiet on dark nights
and you must give up the fight before long
trust is not a game
that naive stupid people play in youth


sometimes it rains
sometimes it floods you
sometimes you bleed
sometimes you just need to make it through
make it through


you will always hurt
you will always sting
you're my badlands
my grand canyon
my empty stream
you're my reservation
my second place consolation
my devastation
a thorn
a pang
a deep dark heartache
my greatest fear
a lonely tear
hopelessness
an empty caress
an earthquake
a broken plate
lost innocence
a cheap defense
my delusion
my confusion
a cancer
a wrong answer
a lost game
fickle as fame
a bad critique
a glass that leaks
a fallen leaf
talk too shallow
ground that's fallow
fatal attraction
nuclear reaction
false resurrection
thrown election
you're my silence
my violence
you're a sad song
you're a long, you're a long, you're a long way from home you're a long, long, long, long way from home
you
you will always hurt
you will always sting
cause you won't let go of everything
until you're quiet one dark night
and you give up the fight you've fought so long
and find that trust is not a game
that naive stupid people play in youth
and you let it rain
you let it flood
you let it drive out all the pain of love

-- you will always hurt, Waterdeep

Pour it out

"Sometimes expectations sell us short. Sometimes the expected simply pales in comparison to the unexpected. You've got to wonder why we cling to our expectations, because the expected is just the beginning, the unexpected is what changes our lives."

-- unknown

I find myself, these days, skating the fine line between intentionality and surrender. I am learning to navigate the spaces between investing and waiting, choosing and accepting, speaking and listening. I have found in myself the tendency to want to walk around naming everything. I pride myself in having all of the answers, always knowing what to say and always knowing what to do. "Don't worry.. I've got it all under control. There is no mess here."

But I am finding that I must come to terms with the reality that I often do not have the answers I think I do, and I do not have the answers I even want to have. I want to say I am a master of myself, I know myself well, I am smart and I know how to handle life. I am entering a space, however, where not everything makes sense, where the words are actually too far beyond me even to pretend that I've grasped them. There is a mystery about my life and I often find myself sitting down to write and only finding the words "I don't know..." flowing from my pen. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I've been avoiding these three little words for a while now. I've been pushing them away, telling myself all I need to do is read a little more, write a little more, find someone who can tell me the answer, or at least how to feel or what to do; I tell myself that this whisper of "I don't know..." is only a matter of time. And perhaps it is only a matter of time. Or maybe it is forever. I suppose the nature of such a reality is indefinite. That is what makes it the mystery that it is. That's why the only real choice is simply to say aloud, "I don't know."

I believe strongly that our lives, in large part, are only a sum of our choices. Every moment is a choice-- how will I spend this hour, how will I invest my energies, what risks am I willing to take, and how many fears am I going to give into, whether intentional or no. We decide what our lives will be. We choose to walk forward or remain seated. We choose to seek help or remain isolated. We choose to speak or remain silent.

The lesson I am learning is that surrender, sacrifice, sacrament, and silence are as active as all of the ways we may speak, in all the ways I may choose to walk into or give myself to a circumstance or situation or person. I wonder if perhaps making the active choice to remain silent, to wait, to hope without grasping or striving, to rest and sit in stillness are some of the hardest steps of faith we must take. There is an element of risk, of surrender, of sacrifice to standing up, taking that step to face the fears, but there still a deeper element of trust that must come from simply waiting in patience. Do I believe that the Lord is good, that he is at work, that he has not forgotten me enough to stop trying to control or manipulate?

The truth is, the way I like to be in control is to simply be able to put words to everything. I want to be able to paint a picture of everything, to make it all clear-cut, to articulate it all and bring it out into the open. I get my answer ready so that I am prepared to defend my pride, my intelligence, my whatever. But I find that perhaps trying to live our of the ability to come up with one neat statement about how things are, about how I am, about what my life is about, about where I am headed, is simply an excuse to live out of a false illusion for the sake of a self-won security. There is a frightening sense of my own frailty when I open my eyes to realize that I am still walking in the dark.

Yet I am learning to find peace in the midst of these dark valleys. I continue to walk because I know there is One who knows the whole story-- beginning to end. He has never been distracted, never missed a part of the plot because he needed to run off on another errand or simply got bored or frustrated or too busy. I am learning to hope and trust that the Father, the Creator, is continually at work under the ground, in a thousand places that I may never see or understand. I am learning to find peace in the realization that although I am impatient, although I am tempted to run ahead, to read the last page of the book, his timing is always right. That he has his best in mind for me and sometimes the process of preparing that best is long and unfathomable-- yet it is always worth it in the end. He is at work in me, and somehow in the middle of this unfathomable sea of love he has for me, he is at work for me.

Last weekend, I listened to a recent teaching from Mars Hill that continues to strike me. The topic of discussion revolved around drink offerings, about the surrender, the pouring out of that which seems like a waste in a way that recognizes the sacrament within the mystery of our lives. Bell spoke of an account recorded in all four of the gospels in which a woman enters the home where Jesus is sharing a meal and pours an entire jar of expensive perfume over the head of the Savior. The account in Matthew 26 tells the story this way:

"A woman came to him with a very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table.
When the disciples saw this they were indignant, "Why this waste?" they asked... Jesus said to them, 'Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.' "

There are parts of my life that feel like wastes. I ask, "Abba, why did you allow me to go through that? Why did I waste my time, my life, my heart on communities that only seemed to heap abuse upon me? Why did you allow me to invest my heart in places that yielded no fruit? Why did I waste so much energy on..." The list is endless. Yet, strangely enough, in this upside-down kingdom, sometimes the things we view as the greatest waste may be the most beautiful of acts. The ways in which I choose to risk everything, the times that I take the most expensive jar of perfume I can find and break it over the head of Jesus in an act of reckless risk, relentless, boundless trust are the times that Jesus says, Now, that is a faith full of beauty. This woman gave everything, indifferent to the opinions of her critics, because she recognized who Jesus was.

I am reminded of what Jesus tells the woman at the well: "If you truly knew my Father, the one who send me, you would be asking me for water." If we really knew what God was like, we would be reckless, risky in the things we ask of him. We might spend less time grasping and clutching and more time waiting and holding open our hands.

There is a time to invest and there is a time to pour it all out upon the altar. There are times to seek answers, to get to the bottom of things, and there are times to simply sit with all that remains unknown, to accept the uncertainty of my limited, human existence. There are times to wait and there are times to forge ahead. And there are certainly times when we have to actively choose to open our hands and let all the crumbs we've been clutching fall to the floor. We have to allow our hands to be emptied for a while.

I've been thinking about this idea of taking the thing that seems most precious, the investment of so much time, energy, so much of my heart and hope and pouring it out upon the altar, watching the liquid run down upon the floor, watch the lamb be engulfed in flames. I become Abraham, holding the knife high above the heart of my very son. I don't understand, yet I follow. I allow the blade to pierce my expectations, my own hopes and dreams to make room for something better. I climb the mountain, one step, one step, one step. I am learning to sacrifice the need to know the answers, even to know my very self. I place my own ideas, what I think I know, what I think I want, what I think I am meant to do, my own vision for my life, upon the altar and wait for the Lord to rain down the fire. Burn me up as I beg for the mercy of patience to endure the flames.