Mothering Art
Guest post from SPU student, Lara Musser, reflecting on her participation in a recent art installation on campus entitled, "Paradigm Shift," based on the gospel of Mark.
What has been your interaction with the art installation in Martin Square? Have you spent time looking at it? Have noticed other people walking through it? Have you wondered about its meaning or had conversations about it?
One of my favorite parts of Mark’s gospel is the way Jesus’ arrival on the scene of 1st century Palestine affects every person who encounters him and affects them differently. The presence of Jesus Christ in Mark prompts many paradigm-shifting encounters. I love the way Jesus loves outsiders who sometimes have the most poignant things to say about him and that Mark’s account of Jesus feels chaotic but masterfully planned. For those who encounter Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, things are not what one would expect.
On the team that designed and built the installation, I am the only student who has never taken a formal art class. Art has a distinct way of intimidating me. Thus, it is understandable that I had a bit of a difficult time contributing to the artistic process. I avoided saying anything that might betray my artistic ignorance. Perhaps this is a feeling you resonate with—fearing that the meaning of the installation will be over your head. It is a feeling quite familiar in the Gospel of Mark.
From that intimidation, I focused my artistic experience on meaning. I now relate this experience to that of a parent. I helped create something that is from me but utterly independent from me. During the process, I wanted a clear concise meaning for the installation: a thesis statement to solve the question of meaning. But just as a mother prepares for the birth of her child with hopes and intentions for who that child will become, she cannot control every aspect of her child’s becoming. Instead of tight fisted control, she must open-handedly embrace the mystery of her child becoming independent. I, like the mother, am learning that what I labored over for weeks has become its own entity where meaning cannot be dictated by the hopes and intentions of the artists but rather, new meaning is discovered with each new encounter. Even as one of the artists the layers of unintended meaning I have discovered since the completion of the installation surprises me.
The process of creating Paradigm-Shift has provoked a paradigm-shift within me just as Christ caused paradigm shifts within many who encounter him. I hope that you would risk engaging Paradigm-Shift with the Gospel of Mark in hand so that you might physically experience the way something can prompt a paradigm-shift that reverberates Christ.
Student Reflection
Guest post from SPU student, Amanda Hough, reflecting on her participation in a recent art installation on campus entitled, "Paradigm Shift," based on the gospel of Mark.
In our weekly discussions approaching the construction of “Paradigm Shift,” the seven of us had many decisions to make about what sort of experience we wanted our audience to have, and importantly, what implications that experience would have about the book of Mark. One of the most significant decisions we discussed and made as a team centered on this question: “Do we want it to be a journey or a destination?” Did we want this reflective piece to have a destination, an obvious point of completion after which the viewer would turn around and leave? Or did we want a sense of journey, an ambiguity of whether the end had been reached and whether there even was one at all? We opted, unanimously and rather quickly, for the latter. In my reflections since the completion of the project, this aspect stands out to me and speaks to my life and faith loudly.
In the construction process, as I attempted to line up each block just right and get each screw in precisely the right spot, my perfectionist tendencies were quickly exposed. I love having an end in sight, a clear distinction of where I stand, a to-do list to check off. The past year I have been learning that what is sometimes most frustrating about life is also what makes it most beautiful– it is a journey. Maybe this is not something that everyone has to make him or herself consciously aware of, but I did. We enter in with our individual context and baggage, we walk through slowly, we speed up, we get lost in the crowd, we encounter, we grow, we heal, we move on, we look back, we learn. Sometimes we are unsure of where we are in the process or whether we are doing anything right at all. Christ is not someone we encounter only to check off our to-do list. In Mark we watch Jesus himself constantly moving from one place to the next, inspiring awe, faith and sometimes fear, but the people who encountered him weren’t content with that. They entered into the journey.
“Paradigm Shift” provides me, personally, with a space that allows comfort and beauty in ambiguity. As I stood within the installation’s enclosed semicircle, I heard two girls as they exited the piece and smiled:
“I think we went in the wrong way.”
“Did we?”
“I don’t know.”
What is This Thing?
A second guest post from SPU professor, Dr. Brian Bantum, reflecting on his participation in a recent art installation ("Paradigm Shift") on campus based on the gospel of Mark.
Hopefully, those who are a part of the Seattle Pacific University community have had an opportunity to see and walk through the installation in Martin Square. Many of you might have asked yourself a simple question, “What is this thing?!”
I might reply to you, “This is an installation that was part of a group’s reflection on the Gospel of Mark.” But this answer doesn’t necessarily give you any more information. Why? Because an answer to this question, “what is it?” is not simply a question about the installation, but also about art and about the Bible.
What is art? What are the Christian Scriptures? Do these questions have anything to do with one another? The relationship between art and Christian Scriptures depends somewhat on how you define Christian Scriptures. For many, Scripture is a veritable “answer book,” an encyclopedia of living that points us to the answers of our daily and lifelong questions. If understood this way, art that is done in conversation with Scripture is simply material that expresses some underlying idea. Put differently, art is a riddle to be “figured out,” deciphered so that we can get to the real meaning.
The group that designed and built this installation began with the book of Mark. We read through it several times over the summer, reflected upon specific parts, prayed diligently and gathered together in September to share the ideas, impressions and passages that we saw, felt, and read. What we discovered was not only a variety of similar themes, but also that these themes were understood in different ways. We grabbed onto hope in similar places, but for different reasons. It could be said that the “answers” we saw, put different questions to us that we then had to re-approach the text with.
In the process of talking and reflecting we came to find that the book of Mark was not a puzzle to be figured out, but a living thing that seemed difficult to pin down, that brought us into something, encountered us with someone. This idea of encountering is another way of thinking about what Scripture is. Scripture is, itself, something that arose out of a people’s attempts to understand and share the significance of an event, of a person. In many ways, we could say that the gospel of Mark arises out of an encounter. While written after Jesus’ death, the book attempts to make sense of his life, death and resurrection and re-encounter people with Jesus’ life.
This process of narrating Jesus’ life was not the singular task of one man, but a communal process of stitching together various stories, teachings, and accounts of this man’s life in order to faithfully tell who Jesus was and what he means for the world. What our group came to find was that this communal process of discerning our encounter with the gospel of Mark was not much different. The patching together of observations, connections, impressions, and themes all served to create a space where Jesus and his work could begin to be discerned and lived within.
If Christian Scriptures are about proclaiming this encounter of God and the world, about giving voice to a community’s discerning of what they saw in this particular man Christ, perhaps we can also begin to see the connections, in fact the necessity of art as we interpret the Word of God. In art, the visual (the aural too) work to encounter the viewer with beauty or pain, anguish or peace, or all of them together. Art confronts the viewer with something about the world and ultimately requires the viewer to ask something of themselves and their place in the world.
When we read Scripture we might come to find its truthfulness more profoundly when we stop seeking from it “answers” and become open to the encounter beckons us to. This truth of this installation (or Mark?) is not to be puzzled out or deciphered, but comes only when one sits with, looks upon, prays with, not once or twice, but returns again and again each time spotting new shadows, seeing new lines, listening for the shifts of sound. But even more its truthfulness comes when we are not satisfied with our perceptions or lines of vision, but offer them to one another and allow ourselves to be surprised in the process.
Introduction to “Paradigm Shift”
Guest Post from SPU Professor, Brian Bantum, reflecting on his participation in a recent art installation on campus entitled, "Paradigm Shift."
The book of Mark opens not with Jesus, but with John the Baptist. John was one who heralded the coming of something new. John himself declared this not from the center of Judaic power, but from the wilderness. Beginning with the witness of John the Baptist, the gospel of Mark leads us into the frenetic and powerful ministry of Jesus, into the wondrous and unmistakable presence of a man who seemingly came out of nowhere, and could simply not be ignored.
From June to December, Professor of Art, Roger Feldman and I (Brian Bantum, Professor of Theology) with five students (Esther Cho, Kaelyn Handsel, Mandy Hough, Tracey Ige, and Lara Musser) ventured into this world of Mark with the aim of encountering the Christ of Mark as well as to express that encounter to the community of Seattle Pacific University. The culmination of this process, an art installation entitled, “Paradigm Shift“ now sits in the middle of Martin Square.
What will follow in the coming weeks is a series of reflections about the installation by those of us who participated in its creation, from reflecting on the book of Mark, to prayerfully sharing themes, conceiving shapes, and thinking about what it means to “stand” inside the gospel of Mark. In these posts it is not our intention to give “the meaning” of the installation. While the installation certainly represents certain ideas that we, as a group struggled with in our communal readings, we are also struck by a troubling and incredible reality. We are all continuing to learn from this installation as we walk through the space, look at it from different vantage points, and see it in varying light. In doing so, we begin to see both the gospel and the installation in new and surprising ways. Perhaps most disconcerting as well as miraculous, the installation is now speaking without us and to us as the people who built it.
It is our hope that the community might be drawn into this process of reflection, that we might learn from what you see and that we might all gain better insight into the God that Mark witnesses to in those blessed pages. Above all, we hope that the installation stands as an invitation. It is an invitation into an encounter, it is an invitation into the wonder that Mark attests to, that God became flesh.
Next week: “What is this thing?”
Why Deborah Makes All the Difference in the Women in Ministry Debate
Another guest post from our current Lectio writer, Dr. Nijay Gupta:
When it comes to the issue of whether woman can and should be in leadership (and/or teaching positions) in the church, there are two obvious views – either the Bible says they can and should, or it demands that they can’t and shouldn’t. For many people, the matter simply comes down to quoting verses from the Bible. The Bible clearly says… [Can I make a suggestion? Let’s stop beginning debates this way!]
For some, you simply need to turn to the apostle Paul. Doesn’t he write “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man” (1 Tim 2:12)?
What does this tell us? It seems to say that women have been given a general command to refrain from seeking positions of authority and instruction in the church. What is the rationale? Paul continues,
For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor (1 Tim 2:13-14)
Now, if Paul were simply trying to communicate that he universally does not permit women to teach and have authority, and that he still values and supports women in general, it would be odd to use this kind of rationale. It seems like Paul is saying that because Eve was deceived (having something to do with being created second), she is unqualified to teach because her intelligence, wisdom, or shrewdness (call it whatever you will) does not reach the same height as Adam. [I am going to argue that this is rubbish, but I am trying to go along with a certain reading of this text for a reason.]
Does Paul intend to say that women should not teach because they lack a certain kind of intellectual capacity suitable for that task?
I think that, based on what seems to be going on in the context of the letter, there is a particular reason why Paul makes this command. The mentioning of Eve is not a way of making the teaching universalized based on gender, but to point out that Eve was hasty in responding to the snake, when Adam was clearly better informed of the situation (which has nothing to do with his gender, but everything to do with the fact that he probably received the commands and prohibitions about the trees before Eve was created and, thus, should have responded to the serpent, not Eve, because he had first-hand knowledge). So, given the false teaching Paul is concerned about in the Ephesian churches, he is discouraging women who want to usurp power from men, because they need to get their facts straight before acting on second-hand information. [My goal is not to get into the nettle of what 1 Timothy 2:12-15 is about, but to use it as an entry point into a discussion of women and their capacity to lead in the church. However, for a good approach to this matter from a conservative scholar who does not think it prohibits women from teaching in the church, see Ben Witherington’s Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, pp. 228ff.]
What can we say, then, about the intelligence and leadership capabilities of women according to Scripture? Some would have us put women in their rightful place so that creation-established balance can be maintained. Here is where I think Deborah makes all the difference.
In a time and place where women were not considered to be suitable for leadership (the Ancient Near East in the time of Israel’s settling into the land of Canaan), with Deborah we have a woman who was already serving as leader and judge over Israel (Judges 4:4). Could this have been a bad thing? Could it be that Deborah shouldn’t have been the national judge? Perhaps, but the “Song of Deborah” (Judges 5) seems to affirm the leadership of Deborah (see 5:7; also 5:12). She is hailed as “motherly protector in Israel” (5:7). Did Israel worry about a woman leading the nation in this way? If women were considered more gullible, why would God take this kind of risk?
What is more, she served as a competent adjudicator of civil matters as “the Israelites went up to her to have their disputes decided” (4:5). Who else before this time in Israel had such a role? We do not know for sure, but the language used of Deborah strongly resembles the imagery of Moses in Exodus 18:13.
Now, someone might say that Deborah was not a real “judge” because she didn’t lead in battle, but Barak did. However, Deborah was the one that “summoned” Barak in the first place and she went with Barak. She formed a partnership and they worked together. Some scholars reason that this shouldn’t have happened either. My friend Daniel Kirk (who does affirm women in church leadership, but finds the character Deborah insignificant on this subject) makes this argument.
The fight into which she [Deborah] ends up leading the people is a fight that should have been waged by Barak. When he is too afraid to go out and fight, she says she will go with him. But in consequence of, literally, hiding behind the skirts of Deborah, Barak will not gain honor from his victory: “for YHWH will hand Sisera over to a woman” (Judges 4:9). See (http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/09/26/does-deborah-help/)
While I admire Kirk’s attention to detail, I think that there is one key point he is missing: the “Song of Deborah” (again Judges 5) gives us a healthy interpretive lens through which to view the events of Judges 4 – and I don’t think we get any sense that Deborah was butting into Barak’s business. In fact, the fact that both Deborah and Barak sing this song implies (to me) that their partnership did the trick. Even if Barak had a lack of faith (by asking Deborah along), that doesn’t say anything about the appropriateness or quality of Deborah’s leadership.
Kirk makes another argument – the shrewdness and wisdom of women in Joshua and Judges is meant to shame the downfall of the Israelite men, not to make an argument in favor of gender equality. I think Kirk is right. In fact, I agree with Old Testament scholar Daniel Block who writes
The biblical author was obviously interested in women’s affairs and achievements, but in the final analysis Deborah and Jael are not heroic figures because of their revisionist challenges to prevailing social structures; they are heroines because of what they accomplish as agents of the divine agenda, which in this instance has less to do with overthrowing oppressive patriarchs than the role they play in Yahweh’s overthrowing oppressive Canaanites. (Judges, Ruth [NAC 6; Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1999], 186)
I don’t think Judges promotes gender equality as a primary point. However, Deborah makes all the difference by implication. She is a reliable prophet (who speaks from the wisdom of God), and a trustworthy teacher – as the Song of Deborah proves. In a sense, she becomes one of the “authors” of Scripture (with her teaching inscribed into Judges 5), and by implication an authoritative evangelist through her testimony.
I have met women who have said that, when they got up to preach, men (and sometimes other women) got up and walked out, offended by a “woman leader” in the church. I wonder how the Israelites felt about Deborah. Did anyone walk out on her? Did anyone condemn her for speaking on behalf of God? Did anyone encourage her to take more interest in her domestic duties? We don’t know. What we do know is that it was the Lord’s will to use her as a leader of God’s people to deliver them (with Barak’s help as general). Judges does not offer a command to promote women, but it only takes one example like Deborah to show that women are just as capable in leadership as men. Leadership did not suppress Deborah’s femininity, but gave her an important setting to be “motherly protector” (5:7).
