volume six number two FALL 2014
BODY & SOUL
volume six number two : fall 2014 Columns 14 Contemplative Activism Phileena Heuertz
Art 9, 51, & 52
Matthew Whitney
16 Jeremiah's Vision of Shalom Vince Bantu
Features 22 Crazy, Mixed-Up Redemption Lori Ventola
Matthew Whitney is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and practicing pedestrian. He lives and works in Seattle, Washington, and enjoys going for walks with his family. www.matthewwhitney.com.
10 & 45
Clint Reid
30 Birth: The Conspiracy of Body and Soul
Clint Reid, of the Tillman Project, is a designer, an illustrator, a coffee drinker, a bicycle rider, an occasional screen printer, an over-analyzer, a beard grower, a music lover, an enthusiastic dad and husband, a worrier and a lister-of-things. www.tillmanproject.com
33 Infertility: On Compassion, Boundaries, and Faith
15 You Are Also Pschye
Lydia Wylie-Kellerman
Sarah Asay
36 Theology on the Long Run Ragan Sutterfield
44 Forgiveness Set Him Free Mike Kelley
46 Community Canvas Josh Rockett
50 Bury the Dead Laurel Dykstra
53 The Lord’s Supper Valerie Anderson
55 The Body Industrial Complex Trudy Smith
60 All the Candy You Can Eat Anthony Easton
Poetry by Scott Cairns 8 Speculation along the Way 19 Draw Near 25 Erotikos Logos
Carolyn Pyfrom
Carolyn Pyfrom studied painting at the Florence Academy of Art, Troy University, and Obirin University, Tokyo, Japan. She divides her time painting between rural Alabama, where she grew up, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she also teaches one day a week at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. www.carolynpyfrom.com
20, 32, & 58
John Freeman
John trained as an artist and a teacher. He taught in a number of Australian educational institutions for over a decade before venturing into the commercial environment. As a Christian image maker, John attempts to re-tell The Story in a modern idiom and synthesized through his own life experiences.
26 Resurrection Kari Gale
Kari Gale is a watercolor artist from Portland, Oregon who loves illustration and telling stories with pictures. Her latest passion is sketching in her journal, documenting life as it unfolds, and learning to see the beauty in the everyday. www.karigale.com
41 Man
Taylor Poole
Taylor Pool is a photographer from Wichita, Kansas but currently living in NĂźrnberg, Germany. He uses medium format film to capture his subjects and their stories. www.piratepool.com
Departments
54 Rosie
63 Reviews Books on the embodied way of Jesus.
Samantha Ornellas is a fine artist that grew up in South Africa and now lives in Nashville, Tennessee. She uses a self-taught realist painting technique, with surrealism influences, to capture the human story with emotion and clarity. www.samornellas.com.
67 Notes From Scattered Pilgrims
Sam Ornellas
News and photos from our conspiring communities.
Find more stories, a study guide for this issue, and our blog of word & image at conspiremag.com
Conspire magazine celebrates creativity, connection, and faith amongst a growing network of subversive friends. Plot Goodness. Conspire is a publication of co-conspiring communities that has been published in the past by The Simple Way. If you are interested in joining a conversation about continuing to publish Conspire, send an email to editors@conspiremagazine.com. front cover photo by Taylor Poole back cover: This Is My Body (Which Is For You) by Brianna Kelly, an experimental musician and mixed-media artist living in intentional Christian community in Cincinnati. All poetry in this issue is by Scott Cairns, Professor of English at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Spirituality and Health, The Christian Century, among other publications and the author of numerous books. His memoir, Slow Pilgrim, will be published by Wipf & Stock in 2014. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.
Our deep appreciation to the many artists, writers, and coconspirators who offer their work for this issue as a gift. Conspire would not exist without the many people listed below, most of whom work as volunteers. Developers Shane Claiborne Darin Petersen Publisher The Simple Way Executive Editor Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove Managing Editor John Pattison Poetry Editor Michael Toy Art Director Beth Rhodes
Accounting Manager Erica Mouliner Video Guru Dan Brearly Editorial Team Becca Griffin Megan Jackson Richard Pendleton Shana Scudder Editorial Advisory Committee Chris Smith Study Guide Designer Jason Williams
CONSP!RE origin: from Old French conspirer, from Latin conspirare ‘agree, plot.’ From con- ‘together with’ + spirare ‘breathe.’
We are breathing together, plotting goodness.
Volume 6, Number 2—Fall 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Simple Way. All rights reserved.
P.O. Box 14668 Philadelphia, PA 19134, 215-423-3598 ext. 109
www.conspiremag.com
Speculation along the Way "The roaring alongside he takes for granted." —from “Sandpiper” by Elizabeth Bishop
When of a given evening, say, an evening laced with storm clouds skirting distance parsed by slanting light, or when the thickening air of an August afternoon by the late approach of just such a storm turns suddenly thin and cool, and the familiar roaring for the moment made especially unmistakable by distant thunder may seem oddly to be answered from within—that’s how it feels, anyway—and when, of a moment, that roaring couples as well with sudden calm—interior, exterior, it hardly matters—in that fortunate incursion whereby the roar itself is suddenly interred, you might startle to having had a taste of what will pass as prayer, or a taste, at the very least, of how fraught, how laden the visible is, even as you work to find a likely figure for its uncanny agency. Sure, I’m making this up as I go, hoping—even as I go—to be finally getting somewhere. And maybe I am. Maybe I’m taking you along. Let’s say it’s so, and say however late the hour we now commence. [from Idiot Psalms, originally published in Image: Art, Faith, Mystery]
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Aftermath by Matthew Whitney oil and acrylic on canvas 36” x 26”
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Birth: The Conspiracy of Soul and Body By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann It was unseasonably warm as I carefully stepped onto the next wrung, balancing the extra weight and size. My body called me into those trees as I deliberately and gently trimmed the small, sucker branches. First the apple tree, then the peach, then the plum. Being past my due date, I knew I probably shouldn’t be on a ladder, but I kept climbing higher and higher. I felt the breeze on my cheeks and breathed in the smell of spring. While I clipped away, the fiddle and the accordion played. What a beautiful world and community this child would soon come into. I have never been a body person. My being has always felt rooted in my mind and heart, using my body only as a tool to accomplish what I need. I have been grateful for my body, but it is not who I am. And I certainly don’t want others to see me as my body. In a world filled with sexism, I would prefer to hide my body and be given respect for the workings of my mind and the depths of my spirit. But then I gave birth. I was brought face-to-face with my own narrow mindedness. I had not only been living with a harmful understanding of my own personhood but I had limited God. As I prepared for labor, I heard story after story of the ways our minds 6 CONSP!RE
can interfere with birth. I knew I was capable of that. I spent those months trying to honor my body and learning to trust it. Looking towards the moment when I would work to calm my mind and make way for my body to do what it knew how to do. My mind knew nothing about giving birth. This baby relied upon me to trust my body. I marveled at the mystery and miracle that a human being could be growing inside me. Spirit and body worked tirelessly in creating each hair and fingernail, painting the lips I would soon love to watch smile. God was in the workings of my body. As the contractions began, I felt the deep ache pulling at my cervix, calling it to open. I calmed my mind. I breathed long, slow breaths. Taking in the pain. Feeling the child at hand. Often with gentle, loving reminders from my partner, I kept breathing. I kept grounded in the work that was happening within me. I repeated in those breaths: “Be still and know that I am God.” The hours dragged on, counted out in four-and-a-half minute segments. Moments of normalcy followed by pain and breath and then normalcy and then pain and breath and then normalcy. For a while, we sang. Songs of my childhood. Chants calling forth this child into the world: We all came to welcome you, we all came to your birth. We all came to welcome you, to welcome you to earth.
I was there to love you. I was there to love you. To give my body for your quick and easy entrance here Through heaven’s open door. Again and again we sang. “I was there to love you. To give my body for your quick and easy entrance here.” My voice cracked and I stopped singing with tears running down by cheeks. Part pain. Part exhaustion. But mostly at finally understanding the words. This was the greatest act of love I could ever give anyone. I was giving my body for this child. A wise friend once said to me, “It wasn’t until I gave birth that I understood ‘This is my body broken for you.’” Isaac was born in a great leap. His whole body emerged in one final push—head to toe. And then…the great breath. Inhale and exhale. I will never forget it. It was the most beautiful breath I have ever taken. He was here. It was over. My soul and body breathed as one. Con-spire—“to breathe together.” Giving birth was long, slow, painful, wet, bloody, hard to the point of breaking, ordinary, earthly, beautiful, miraculous, lonely, loving, communal, awkward, and awesome. I touched a deep power that runs within me and all women. A history and force that lives in our bones. The place where body and soul are one. Where God dwells. Conspiring even now.
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann is a writer and activist. A native Detroiter, she lives in the Jeanie Wylie Community focused on urban agriculture, immigrant rights, and nonviolence. She is the Program Coordinator for Word and World: A People’s School, an experiment in alternative theological education, bridging the gulf between the seminary, the sanctuary, and the street. CONSP!RE 7
8 CONSP!RE Newborn Child by John Freeman acrylic on canvas 66 cm x 84 cm
Infertility: On Compassion, Boundaries, and Faith by Sarah Asay
Infertility. What a brutal and sad word. If it were a color, it would be grey. It sounds so definite, so empty. And yet, my Father takes grey things and gives them color. He takes dust and creates beauty. My husband and I have been married for nearly eight years. Thus far, we have been unable to have biological children. In my mind (and in reality) this is so linked with my physical pain that it is impossible for me to separate the two. I have a condition called endometriosis, which affects an estimated 170 million women. When I sit down to think about my life, and about being unable to bear children (see how far out of my way I go to avoid
that word—infertile), the lessons from endometriosis and childlessness are intermingled. I have gained so much though. While I would never choose this path, I would not undo the past, because dear to me is the beautiful grace I have known. I have also learned a few things. I’ve learned to be sensitive. I have heard it said: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle,” and I think, “Yes! People should be kind to me! I’m in pain, and I don’t have a baby yet!” But chronic pain and infertility have taught me to think larger than myself. If something
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Taylor Pool is a photographer from Wichita, Kansas but is currently living in Nürnberg, Germany. He uses medium format film to capture his subjects and their stories. African and European portraits and street photography are his main subjects. These images are from his series"MAN" that focuses on how culture can define what men are. Every culture and country requires men to be something different from, but also similar to, the next. All of these photos were made with a Mamiya RZ67 and flash system. view more of Taylor's work at www.piratepool.com
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by Josh Rockett
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T
he Bibles the men brought to the Dupage County Juvenile Detention Center were titled “Free on the Inside.” They were marketed as “easy to understand” and promised to provide content relevant to the inmates. The well-meaning Bible study leaders thought that reading a handful of pages would fix the kids’ lives. They expected the scripture to work alone, failing to invest in or listen to the residents. It was Therapeutic Deism According to the Gospel of John. The leaders thought that if the inside could be fixed the outside would be fixed as well. If the soul is free the body will be too. After all, these leaders thought the kids were in a detention center because something was wrong with them. Having a personal relationship with Jesus would fix everything. During one Bible study about Jesus’s calling of the disciples, a resident said, “So Jesus was an O.G.” “A what?” an older man asked. “He was a leader,” said the resident. “He had goons.” Confused, the man slid a Bible closer to the resident, closed with prayer, and left feeling good about himself. The detention center defined its inmates by their uniform dress (blue pants, maroon sweatshirts) and their designated letter and number. My radio would ring out, “Can you get I-8 some toilet paper?” Sure. The external was well attended to. The kids were
formable objects, not whole beings. They were part of a dehumanizing system that was ignorant of their individuality and humanity, making them utterly forgettable. Straight lines, perfectly made beds, cold brick walls and slamming metal doors—outward signs of discipline and structure. If you can control the outside you can forget about the inside. The disunited spaces in this environment acted as tectonic plates that caused seismic shifts of both soul and body. Anger, frustration, and aggression would shake out from within, producing acts of rage and intensity in the body. Once I held a body down after it threw a chair at another detention officer. I felt the body’s tension and heart rate. I whispered to our souls, “Breathe. Breathe.” Our two bodies prayerfully breathed together in unison. Detention is a factory that makes itself feel good. But the living, breathing kids of Dupage County refused to let the staff become part of the assembly line. They were inspiring, and in the spaces where they could escape the separation of inside and outside, peace and grace transcended. I witnessed this most clearly in the art room and in the community service program. In these spaces of creation, the unity of body and soul flourished. Clay, paper, yarn and canvas came alive in the art room. As their art teacher, I required only one CONSP!RE 13
Laurie, I knew you the least but you are probably the hardest to write to. We told jokes at your memorial at the women’s centre–bad jokes, the kind you told: “What’s a thumb tack?” “I don’t know, what?” “A Smartie with a hard-on.” And a long complicated one about a flea transferred from host to host in the hair on various body parts of animal film stars and country and western singers. Everybody knew you, you walked around the neighbourhood like a politician, joking, throwing fake punches and telling stories, you got some kind of response from everyone. A walk around the block could take an hour. You spent some of your last days at the Tent Village during the anti-olympics protest tending the sacred fire, talking, singing, telling jokes. I was there too, some. But damn it was cold, February, and wet. And you so skinny from what you used to be. Human interaction must have kept you warm, cause the fire was small, the coffee lukewarm and there was no fat on you. I don’t know how you did it. I don’t know how your girlfriend is doing, or the little ones, you were smart, I think, to move them out of this part of town. I miss you. We never talked a lot, just a “hey” and the butch nod, but I was so glad you were in the world. When I saw you, I would think, “yeah.” Fat, loud, laughing, in everybody’s face, making no apology for any part of your self. Nothing about you curled up, or hidden. Taking up space like you deserved it. I was mad when you died. So mad. Afterward, I was praying and I dared Jesus to show up. “Where the hell are you Jesus, when women keep dying all around me? You better have something to say for yourself.” I was walking around in the rain, bare-headed and crying, Laurie, when Jesus finally showed up it was you. And you were laughing. Jesus is a drug user, Indian, dyke with AIDS and her girlfriend sells sex— Joke’s on me! Because really, who can I tell about when Jesus came to me, without sounding like I picked through every stereotype I could think of for the ones that would piss off religious conservatives the most? Good joke, Laurie. I’m leaving this letter with some tobacco in the empty lot where the tent city was. An excerpt from Bury the Dead: Stories of Death and Dying, Resistance and Discipleship, edited by Laurel Dykstra. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. www.wipfandstock.com Laurel Dykstra is Assistant Curate at St. Catherine’s Anglican Church in North Vancouver.
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Buried by Matthew Whitney oil and acrylic on canvas 42” x 30”
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Rosie by Sam Ornellas acryllic on canvas 45"x67"
I
’ve seen the massive banners advertising expensive whitening cream hung on the walls of houses in rural Laotian villages, where brown people spend their lives getting browner under the sun as they toil away in their fields. I’ve seen those same oppressive whitening cream ads looming over the Asian slum where I live. My beautiful neighbors sit helplessly under those billboards, lamenting their brown skin, assuming that their “ugly color” must be a defect caused by dirty water or some other aspect of their poverty. They stare up into what seems to be the good life: wealthy, successful women wearing fashionable, modern clothes and sitting in comfortable surroundings. All of that glamor and success is connected to being fair-skinned. Beauty is equated with the features of another race entirely—my race.
These women assume that as a representative of that other world of glamor and paleness called America, I must be living the dream. I try to explain that over there, the make-up and facial cream companies still have to make a profit, so they tell us light-skinned people other things to make sure we don’t feel pretty either. My neighbors are shocked to learn that women in my culture buy bronzers and even lay out under the sun or artificial lights to make their skin a deep, beautiful brown! They also wonder at my revelation that women in the West want to be as thin as possible. My neighbors are always encouraging me to eat more so that I’ll get “nice and fat.” I tell them I think we’re all crazy, buying those lies when they’ve just been made up by advertisers to goad us into spending more money. Didn’t God make all CONSP!RE 17
All The Candy You Can Eat The Eucharistic Potential of Felix Gonzalez-Torres by Anthony Easton
T
wo friends of mine visited the Art Institute of Chicago on the same day within just hours of each other. That same day, both friends emailed me to discuss the same piece of art. This isn’t that unusual actually. I spend a lot of time with artists and curators, and a lot of time talking about art— mostly a rarified form of shoptalk, a commentary on how a piece was interesting because of this idea or that tradition, or how it played into or against a work that had been done before. But the conversation with my friends visiting Chicago was uncommon for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it was more about what they felt than about what they thought. The other unusual thing was the disparate backgrounds of my two friends. Rachel has an MFA from a prestigious West Coast school. She shows art regularly in the United States and
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Canada. At the time, she was exhibiting at an apartment in Chicago, a show curated by two people who spent time at Yale. And the apartment was at the Drake, one of the most exclusive addresses in America. My other friend, Josh, is the son of a Lutheran minister, and he himself is a Lutheran organist and choir director. He lives with his wife and two children in a small suburb of Chicago. His wife and kids were with him at the Art Institute. The artwork was a pile of spilled candy produced by Cuban American Queer artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Gonzalez-Torres constructed nine such piles to explore the nature of AIDS. Each candy spill was the weight of someone he loved. Some were the weight of he and his own lover, Ross Laycock, together. Others were just the weight of Ross. The piles of candy are meant to be taken, piece by piece, and eaten by those who view the art.
The installation in Chicago was Laycock’s healthy weight. As viewers take the individually-wrapped pieces of candy, the pile slowly shrinks. One would think that the candy would disappear, wasting away like physical death. But the candy is replenished. Gonzalez-Torres specified which Chicago company should make the candy, as long as the company existed. Then Laycock died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1991. Felix died of AIDS in 1996, and the original candy company died too. Nevertheless, there is still a pile of candy in a gallery in Chicago that people I love can tell me about. They bring me candy from this pile and I can eat it. I was worried about Josh’s kids when they saw this piece. I was worried that they wouldn’t understand wasting, or death, or politics, or the plague, or bodies, or about all of the other adult things that occur in this work—how
the wrapper on the candy was like a condom, for example. I was worried they wouldn’t have the gravitas to see the work like Rachel saw it or like I saw it. But Josh’s wife sat down and read the work and answered the kids’ questions. There was a pile of candy, and it was free candy, and it was complicated candy. It reminded me of the gospels: “Jesus said, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’” The candy was to be eaten. The tension between joy and sorrow, of eating and what was being eaten, was literally palatable. Gonzales-Torres had inhabited Cuba’s revolutionary atheism and its exiles desire for traditional religion. This particular art piece can be read through a trend in his artwork—reciprocity, community building, gift giving—big spectacles in foreign places that might have failed at the small and humble goals that they lived with. There were
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