This fall, Renee Bourdeaux draws on her expertise in psychological research and her experience as a college professor to offer tips on building strong relationships with academic colleagues. In addition to applying her academic knowledge, each week Renee will also offer a prayer and a practical exercise to help build community in academic settings. Read Post 1 here. [Read more…] about Collegial Connections, Week Two: Meeting Connections
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Collegial Connections, Week One: Hallway Connections
This fall, Renee Bourdeaux draws on her expertise in communications and her experience as a college professor to offer tips on building strong relationships with academic colleagues. Stay tuned for three posts exploring connections with fellow academics in your department and university. In addition to applying her academic knowledge, each week Renee will also offer a prayer and a practical exercise to help readers build community in academic settings. [Read more…] about Collegial Connections, Week One: Hallway Connections
Why I Write (Writing As a Spiritual Discipline Series)
We resume our Writing As a Spiritual Discipline series with a post by Anna Gissing, editor at InterVarsity Press and previous editor of The Well. Browse Anna’s other work for ESN here, including one of our most read posts, Grading As a Spiritual Practice. To explore other pieces in the Writing As a Spiritual Discipline series, click here.
I’m not one of those writers who has always known I wanted to write. I don’t have childhood journals, and I didn’t write my first novel as a teen. (In fact, I still haven’t written one).
Nor am I one of those people for whom writing bubbles up inside of me and I have to write to find release.
Yet, I do write.
I believe that we are all part of a huge story that God is writing—that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. I believe that oft-cited quote by Kuyper: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’â€
But I sometimes forget what I believe. It’s easy for those ideas to stay tucked away in my head somewhere, like sweaters packed in mothballs, waiting for the right time to be brought out.
Writing helps me remember. For me, writing helps me to connect what I’m reading or experiencing with this epic story of God. When I write, I make time to reflect on the ways God is at work in my individual circumstances, in my community, and in the world.
I write to figure out how to practice what I believe—to learn how to live a holistic life where the spiritual part isn’t shoved into one box away from the files for parenting, work, and advocacy. I write to discern how to respond to life amidst the cacophony of voices around me.
If I don’t force myself to write, I can bypass some of this reflective work. I find myself thinking about but not practicing my faith. And I believe that faith takes practice.
Writing is a discipline. This work of integrating my faith into all of life takes intentionality. And my reflective writing can get shoved down to the bottom of the list if I’m not careful. When kids are hungry and the house is a mess, who has time to write?
Writing feels risky—what if it’s not good? What if it’s inelegant, superficial, or— heaven forbid—grammatically incorrect? It’s tempting to just go read another book.
Because I battle perfectionism, deadlines are my friends. If I didn’t have external accountability to write, I’m not sure I’d ever do it. It’s always easier to critique than to construct, and I’d pick holes in someone else’s writing all day if I didn’t have to write myself.
Those who have asked me to write and have given me deadlines have been gifts of God to me. They have pushed me to practice this spiritual discipline of connecting my head to my heart, my books to my life, my story to God’s story. They have helped me to remember what I believe.
Letter to My Self, Starting Graduate School
Historian Ryan Wilkinson, PhD finished and starting a tenure track job in the fall, writes a letter to himself at the beginning of graduate school. We hope it’s a great encouragement, wherever you are on your academic journey.Â
Dear Me,
Well, congratulations—you’re going to graduate school!
So—this is your future self, writing from a decade ahead to let you know that you’ll have a lot of fun. On the other hand . . . it won’t all be easy. Hmmm? What do I mean?
Well, let me give you some examples. You’re going to spend an entire Spring Break working on a seminar presentation, and then discover that everything you did all week was wrong. Oh, and there’s the time when you’ll lose a month’s research to malware. You’ll get a paper back with three words of feedback: “Very disappointing, Ryan!†A professor will suggest that a misplaced diacritic accent in a foreign-language citation halfway through a paper casts doubt on your fitness for this career path. Your first article will be rejected when you first submit it. You’ll spend years noticing other students outperforming you, getting grants and jobs and praise sooner than you, and just seeming smarter than you. When it’s all over, you’ll spend years on the tenure-track market, wondering if it will all pay off.
Now, hang on; it’s going to be ok.
Many of these disasters will turn out for your benefit. You will have professional triumphs, and they will tend to grow out of earlier problems. You will do good work, and you will be proud of it. You will publish. You will accept a tenure-track job. But make no mistake: this path is not for the faint of heart. Think long and hard about why you’re doing this. There are plenty of things you could do instead, and you’ll need to know why you should keep going. A decade from now, you’ll be smarter, and you’ll be done, but you won’t be any more valuable than you are today—and you won’t be any more valuable than the bus driver who brought you in this morning. Graduate school will not make you significant.
The good news is that you don’t need it to. On the other hand, I’m really glad you chose this path. If you give up prematurely, you’ll be hearing more from me—and I won’t sound as friendly! The path ahead is a gift and a treasure worth all the pain. It’s the right path for you; you can even think of it as a kind of priestly service.
Now, I get that you don’t fully understand that yet. In fact, I know that you’ve been wrestling pretty deeply with doubt, even though you rarely admit it. You have a lot of questions about God and the Christian life. Frankly, you’ll find even more questions here. In coming years, your training will expose you to some disturbing things—things difficult to reconcile with old beliefs. That’s ok. You have questions; go ahead and ask them. God is big enough to handle them. Proceed carefully, and prayerfully, but don’t fear new ideas. Sometimes, you’re just going to have to be ok not having things figured out.
I think this may surprise you, but in the next decade you will find answers—answers that satisfy you deeply, that enrich and revitalize your trust in God. A decade from now, the biblical gospel looks bigger, more beautiful, more complex (sometimes, more terrifying), more powerful, more reliable, and more relevant than you know today.
In the coming years, you’ll have access to one of the world’s great theological libraries. Use it. Anabaptists and Arminians and Calvinists; Catholics and Eastern Orthodox; agnostics, atheists, etc., etc. They’re all in there. I’m going to challenge you now to engage your faith with the same level of rigor and energy that you pour into your academic studies. You won’t regret it.
But intellectual enrichment can be dangerous without balance. The only way to thrive in graduate school is to thrive as a human being. Ask God for wisdom. Stay in fellowship, no matter what. Engage the church off-campus; this will help correct the limits of academic vision, which are very real. Serve others. Cultivate hobbies, without guilt. Maintain spiritual disciplines. Take time to tend your heart in every season. Spend time silent and alone, and listen to yourself. Ask yourself what you really want in life, and take your honest answers seriously. You think that silence, rest, prayer, and reading scripture are duties; you’re going to learn that they are instead the way to cultivate the life you actually want. When you let business get in their way for long, you will always diminish yourself.
Look for God in your discipline, too. It offers insight into how God has ordered the story of his creation. As a historian, you’ll see the beauty of human culture in ways you never expected. You’ll see the scope of evil and suffering more clearly than ever before. Reading over two millennia of history in depth as you prepare for your general exams, you’ll choke on the horrors that men routinely visit on each other. You’ll weep—yes, weep—over the tyranny of death. You’ll learn to fear more deeply. But God’s remedy will loom larger, and give you courage. You’ll read the judgments and promises of the prophets with a new and urgent hunger.
Not all of your insights into suffering will be vicarious. For several more years, you’re still going to struggle routinely with deep anxiety. For several more years, you and your wife will bear the sorrow of childlessness. You will have children—wonderful children—but you’ll also face unusually severe sleep deprivation. You’ll wonder how to comfort your wife after a miscarriage during the busy first week of a teaching semester. And you’ll grapple for years with wounds that other people’s sinful choices carved into your family. In the coming decade, your heart will sometimes break more painfully than you ever believed it would.
But listen: don’t be afraid of the future.
A decade from now, you are happy and often joyful, weathered but okay with it, going places but somewhat content with sitting still. Christ values you and he will not abandon you. Life is going to hurt sometimes, and sometimes your graduate studies will only add to the pain. But you will learn and grow and become more whole through it all.
Put each thing in its proper place. Graduate school is a gift, and it will shape you, but it must not define or own you. Be present with yourself. Serve your family; strive for excellence in your work. Take lots of healthy risks. Be honest and vulnerable, and don’t be afraid to suffer or to fail. As you face the future, there is only one guarantee—but it is more than enough:
Christ will be with you in everything, and it will be well.
Image courtesy of Kaz at Pixabay.com
Making the Second City Church Lenten Cross
Sculptor and art professor Theodore Prescott describes a collaborative Lenten project he led for a congregation in the city of Harrisburg, PA. We hope it provides rich reflection for readers as Holy Week begins. The project will also be featured in the forthcoming InterVarsity Press book Contemporary Art and the Church: A Conversation Between Two Worlds.Â
I professed faith in Christ in 1970, right as I was completing my M.F.A. in sculpture. I was living in Baltimore, where I studied at the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The results of my conversion were mixed. My behavior certainly changed in some positive ways, but artistically I was stymied. I could not find any contemporary role models. The friends I told about my profession generally expressed incredulity, and a few responded with some eye rolling. I asked the director of Rinehart if he knew of any Christians at MICA. He thought a bit, and then said that there might be one in the Art Education program. Since I was looking for “artists”, not educators, I never followed up on that, which is a little ironic in light of my subsequent career. Finally, through a college friend, I learned of an artist who was a Christian studying in Philadelphia, and drove up to meet him. All of this illustrates how the terrain between contemporary art and the Christian faith seemed like a vast unmapped wilderness for me.Â
After a few years of seeking to understand the relationship between faith and art intellectually—during which time I was not making things—I began to produce sculpture again. I have never considered myself a “Christian artist” in the sense of always using discernibly Christian imagery to inform an audience about the faith. But the Christian faith offers the artist a treasure house of imagery and ideas to work with, so relatively early on I chose to make some crosses. My choice was partly because the cross was—and still is—such a cultural cliché, and therefore almost invisible. Someone should write a book about how a symbol with almost infinite richness and depth devolved into a cultural cipher. Walker Percy noted a parallel phenomenon with Christian words, writing that “the old words of grace are worn smooth as poker chips.” So I set out to make crosses that drew on the language and imagery of contemporary art, with the goal of gaining some artistic insight. Most of the crosses I’ve sold have ended up in art collections, not in churches. The Second City Lenten Cross is an exception.Â
Second City Church is an old church, located in the small, struggling city of Harrisburg PA. Its origins stretch back to the 19th century, but its current character was formed by the union of a youngish homeless PCA congregation with an oldish UCC congregation that had a church building. The pastor, Peter Rowan learned of a cross I had made in 1996, All My Sins, and thought it might be the basis for a congregational meditation during Lent. For that cross I began by writing down all of the personal sins of “thought, word and deed” that I could remember. That took me about a month. While it wasn’t an exhaustive list, it was long enough and dark enough to be thoroughly depressing. By the end of that month I understood viscerally C. S. Lewis’s description of his feelings while writing Screwtape. I then transcribed that list to sheets of a very heavy and durable art paper, writing with a thick permanent ink marker. After finishing, I quickly chopped the papers into many tiny bits lest they be read by someone.Â
During that time of remembering I was also making molds for four forms that could be assembled into a cruciform image. I had engaged a glass artist to work with me, and when the molds were completed we met at a glass studio, and she blew hollow glass forms into the molds. I then quickly poured my confetti-like paper bits into each glass form. Glass is blown at about 2000 degrees F, so the paper ignited immediately. Once all the paper was inside, the forms were slumped shut and annealed, during which time the remaining burning paper blackened much of the interior of the glass forms. Â
Materials (or substances) and processes are two preoccupations or interests for many contemporary artists. For me, both carry poetic resonances that are rich with potential faith associations. Here, a fiery consumption of my transgressions—“the handwriting of ordinances against us” (Col. 2:14)—through the process of making that cruciform image seemed to speak of Christ’s work in a fresh way. But I was surprised by the resemblance of the finished cross to medieval reliquaries, which connected it to historic Christian imagery and practice.Â
Peter Rowan believed that seeing and helping to make a cross like All My Sins might provide the church with a unique way to meditate on the meaning of Lent, so he asked me to create a cross for the congregation that would coincide with a series of sermons during Lent (2016) based on “The Seven Deadly Sins”. The resulting cross would be filled with the congregation’s written sins, and be placed in the church upon its completion. Neither of us was sure of what to expect. Participation was voluntary. After explaining to the congregation how I made the 1996 cross, we gave out heavy art paper, and permanent markers. About three weeks later we set up some paper shredders in the church social hall, and after the service people shredded their written sins. A few people expressed concern about their paper’s privacy, and seemed relieved when they placed it in the maw of the shredder. I’d guess about 75 people participated.Â
Roughly 50 people signed up to attend the glass blowing, so that they could personally put their paper in the hot glass forms. They came to the glass studio in shifts. Some came as families, with parents and children participating together. The glass artist, Rafe Henin, was intrigued by the communal and participatory nature of the event. People stood watching the forms being made, asking questions, and chatting together until it was time to put their sins in a form. It took about 10 hours to complete all of the forms.
I had made the forms for the molds out of apple limbs that had been peeled and simplified. I arranged them to suggest a crucified figure. Doing this connected our sin with Christ’s body, or as I Peter 2:24 says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree…” In her recent and widely praised The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2015) Fleming Rutledge argues against seeing the empty cross as the “real” meaning of our faith, as though the crucifixion was just an episode on the way to the glory of the resurrection that empty crosses are meant to signify. She ends her chapter “The Primacy of the Cross” with this summary: “….the crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.”Â
It took several months before I had completed fitting and anchoring the glass forms into a panel that was painted with an intense red. After framing we installed it in the church social hall. Having looked at it there for about 6 months now, I can see that its imagery inhabits that ambiguous space between a cross and a crucifix that I aimed for. It can be “read” either way. Artistically it is definitely a child of this moment, with a pathetic affect to its demeanor. As a cross it is wobbly and inexact, looking back to primitive representations of the cross. As a crucifix it lacks the nobility and classicism of so many Renaissance depictions of the crucifixion, or the expressive anguish of many medieval and modern ones. Is pathos the right “tone” for the cross?Â
I can’t answer that. The cross is too deep and multivalent to have just one “true” aesthetic sensibility. But, I have been struck by the Second City Lenten Cross’s unintended resonance with one of Fleming Rutledge’s major concerns. She argues persuasively that we—especially in the American church—have lost sight of the “scandal” of the cross, in which there is no beauty, no naturally attractive religious message to help us improve ourselves. That seems about right for a cross that is literally full of the dead sins of people in Second City Church.Â
Images courtesy of Theodore Prescott