Makoto Fujimura: Prophet of the Arts

Thursday evening, I had a Beer & Theology event on my calendar. Lingering in the back of my mind, like a whisper, was a tug of something else. I was not sure what it was. I had heard at some time in the past that Makoto Fujimura was coming to town to share a message about his new book Culture Care. Coming in time just for Christmas! Culture generativity rather than war. Incarnation rather than fragmentation. Art not Drones.  

Fujimura, I had heard (without recalling the exact date), was speaking at The Trust. A grand structure in downtown Lancaster, with high ceilings, ornate decoration, and heavy chiseled stone for walls. A former bank, it had set mostly empty for years besides a portion of the structure being used as a quilt museum. The icon on The Trust is a representation of the ceiling design. I had pondered earlier where the icon had come from until I peered up and connected the images. A bankrupt bank. Telling. Lancaster Bible College has recently resurrected the structure. These bones shall not only live, but dance, speak, paint, and sing. Amen! LBC has come along way out of the backwaters of Fundieland. One can be orthodox without being a hot-headed pinhead with a pot belly these days.   

Lancastrians as a whole don't appreciate the "Witnessification" of local culture. Quilt-centric. That is, basing our entire story on the Harrison Ford film and the Amish, as if this area is a living freak show of religious inbred separatists. A safari. The local tourist agency killed the theme by its unimaginative repetition of the marketing ploy for decades to attract outsiders to pour their cash into the coffers. Bankrupt indeed. There is much beauty in the Amish yet also a dark side. How their posture represents the "In But Not Of" biblical imperative of Jesus is suspect. There are reasons for this, primarily the persecution of Anabaptists by everyone since its inception as a sect. 

The element that make Lancaster fascinating is that the old and new are merging and colliding, sometimes with concussive fracturing like when a horse in buggy on a back-road gets in an accident with an SUV. Recently, Whole Foods announced that it will be building a local store, cheering the hearts of each upward mobile health conscious (and sometimes pretentious) individual, that Lancaster has arrived into the 21st century. As a couple of friends pointed out on Facebook, the location is a former farm. I made a comment that I have a Whole Foods in my backyard, where I have a garden, where I grow the magical organic superfood kale. How novel, I have a garden. Recently, I have winterized my little plot of land, hoping to grow vegetables year-round. Radical!

A friend recently commented that I soon will be packing a gun as if I am becoming a Survivalist. Quite the opposite. I am beating my swords into plowshares, not that I have guns and ammo anyway. Even though I am the most conservative person politically I know, I am also an avid NPR listener, public school educator, and pretty much live and let live. A walking paradox, Law and Grace. Neither side subtracts from the other, it is more a multiplication. Although if a groundhog penetrates my grounds I might just chop it in half with a shovel.   

In my listening of NPR radio last week, I was reminded that Makoto (he is now following me on Twitter so I feel as it I can call him by his first name), was coming to town and now I had the exact date. Well, it was the same night as Beer & Theology. I ditched Beer &Theology right quick without a second thought. The crowd that attends is really mixed with a lot of locals who aren't very cosmopolitan. But trying to be with mixed results. 

Some dude at the last Beer & Theology had the temerity last time to dismiss school counselors after I informed him what I do for a living--after he inquired. I was quite ready to call him a moron and leave it at that but I held my tongue and took the hit and his stupid cackles. That very day I had been in the middle of a criminal investigation where one of my students had been threatened with a gun and robbed the previous evening by a former student. So, I was in no mood to hear a smart-ass spout off about the uselessness of my job. I could have shredded his smart-assness to ribbons. I know some school counselors suck but that should not be a determination of everyone in my profession. So, I still was burdened about the whole interaction and planned to address it with him after a month of cooling my jets. Now, I have another month. 

Perhaps a profession even more dissed than school counseling and teaching is that of the artist. The unenlightened say things like "You can't eat art, can you?" as if something that cannot be consumed and crapped out the backside is useless, non-utilitarian, and downright a waste. But, as Makoto noted in his talk on Thursday, "Art Feeds The Soul." He retold a story of how as a financially poor new husband he had scolded his wife for buying flowers rather than food. And she had replied with the comment of art feeding the soul. As an artist, his wife prophesied to the prophet. Nathan to David as it were.  

The materialist scoffs at the existence of soul, postulating that only matter matters. Jesus states that "What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?" makes me conclude if a person thinks that humanity has no soul, then by implication, the world becomes the only object to gain. The soul is irrelevant and thus that person is already lost even if they gain more than they lose world-wise. 

Fujimura and his family lived within three block of the Twin Towers when 9-1-1 happened. The rubble and loss of life preaches about the insecurity of riches. A smoldering ruin of matter. And a moral judgment on the terrorists is impossible unless one holds a morality that transcends matter. If lightening strikes a tree to the ground, we may weep, but that is the way of nature, wrong place, wrong time type of deal. When a plane hits a building, the analogy of matter destroying matter is pretty irrelevant if morality and soul issues are not factored in. Weep if you want over the wood, and be called a fool. Weep over the destruction of people, and it suggests that our tears are welling up from a place outside of the Periodic Chart. Our tears are like fallen leaves of eternal trees, both tragic and beautiful.  

As I have been teaching my College & Career Class with my commensurate nagging cough that I can't seem to shake--the whole enterprise is weighing on me--I am attempting to do something different. To make the issues of the soul central. It is not a coercive intention, where I want to checkmate the kids on the chessboard of the classroom and me as the Grandmaster to a set of beliefs that they parrot rather than embrace. Modern educators and students cut a deal often these days. Let us stick to content and not deep questions. Let us stay out of the deep end and instead walk through work sheets, multiple-choice, and other inorganic regurgitation of facts and figures. STEM baby, with no roots and tree. Just the quantitative. Must be measured! The kids have been trained to not want to own the content and process of learning. I asked them yesterday how many of the other teachers in the building expect them to co-lead the class and one particularly bright student--a girl of enormous intelligence and insight--said 5%. The kids resent the leash and have been restrained by the leash yet they now rely on it to walk and not run. They do what they are told at my school outwardly for the most part, but inwardly are elsewhere. 

Another young lady in the class gave me her college essay to read and critique and I found it fascinating and sad that she clearly lives in two worlds where she has an "Academic" self that is engaged in a competition with her peers for good grades and high marks and her "Social" self where she feels free and has fun. As if the Academic and Social world cannot be connected by the soul. Instead, they are different lands with different rules and different goals. The essay is more telling than we might imagine. Learning is something you have to do, not want to do. The Social life is something that you want to do, but cannot do in school.  A double-face that makes Janus looks whole*. 

In a Makoto inspired moment, yesterday I brought these fallen and colorful leaves to class. The two days prior I had provided the students candy (a Halloween leftover with a hundred pieces in stock due to not a single kiddie coming to my house for Trick & Treating) that they consumed during the showing of the film Everybody's Fine. Leaves for candy, soul food. They are probably thinking me a fool. And if that be a fool, then let it me be a fool.       

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus (/ˈdʒeɪnəs/; Latin: Ianus, pronounced [ˈjaː.nus]) is the god of beginnings and transitions,^[1] and thereby of gates, doors, doorways, passages and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. The Romans named the month of January (Ianuarius) in his honor. Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The doors of his temple were open in time of war, and closed to mark the peace. As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and in his association with Portunus, a similar harbor and gateway god, he was concerned with travelling, trading and shipping. (Wikipedia)