Self-portrait :: Story Cycle :: Worth Remembering

Well, I am down for the count with this cold/flu everyone has. So instead of watching TV from bed, I worked on an art project that the Wicker Park Grace Art Forum peeps have been encouraging me to do.

I’ve shared at the Forum some work I’ve done with collage and digital manipulation of photos, and I shared a really interesting book with the group about self-portraits. So Virginia said I should make one.  This is more than one, though, it’s a story cycle told all through one photo, digitally edited to show different elements of the story.

One of the things I love to do with my iPhone is use the many photo apps to apply various filters to photos I take on the phone. I was playing around with this and started naming the photos based on what emotion I thought the altered image portrayed. After collecting about eight of these, I realized they could tell a story if I put them in the right order.

That got me excited! So I began creating more images and imagining a general plot-line that could be used. The plot changed based on the images that came out of the process. I ended up with 71 images, all derived from one self-portrait photo I took with my iPhone.

“The process” includes applying filters on top of filtered images. Some of the iPhone apps also crop and resize or put borders around the images. This all becomes part of the diversity of image which tells the story.

You can read the story and see the images here. Self-portrait :: Story Cycle :: Worth Remembering You can also watch it as a slide show. Be sure to “Show Info” along the top, so you get the words of the story. This obscures one of the eyes in a couple of significant images, but it creates a nice effect of showing the images transform from one to the next. I think I’ll try to make a nicer slide show of this piece.

Working on art like this is a process of making something beautiful and moving which I find healing. I made a healing portrait of a friend by using some of these digital alteration techniques, and surrounded his face with words of inspiration and hope.

Making that piece for my friend reminded me of Sybil MacBeth’s book called Praying in Color. I was praying in color for his healing when I made that, and I think I was praying in color for my healing when I made this Story Cycle. I called mine, “Worth Remembering.”

Mid-night Tweets (Micro-blogging)

It’s the middle of the night.Woke up thinking of all the ways I am imperfect. But this is the nature of being human, right? Have to forgive.
about 15 hours ago from Twitterrific

This is why we need each other to love each other.To say that we are *good enough* to be loved.Every mistake feels like an abyss.Compassion.
about 15 hours ago from Twitterrific

I am doing the best I can. What I’m doing is good enough for God to love me. I am loved, not because of what I do, but because of who I am.
about 14 hours ago from Twitterrific

This is important. I am loved not because of what I do, but because of who I am. I am God’s beloved.God sees the world like this, I believe.
about 14 hours ago from Twitterrific

Ok. Now I think I can go back to sleep. God loves you, too, you know. Not because of what you do, but because of who you are. God’s beloved.
about 14 hours ago from Twitterrific

God’s love is not contingent. It is unconditional.
about 14 hours ago from Twitterrific

Patterns of Hope

I was very disturbed to read in the news a couple of weeks ago about a Census worker found murdered in Kentucky. (You can google it. It’s gruesome.) The white census worker was found hanging from a tree in a graveyard. And this week an African American friend of mine told me that there is a noose hanging from the tree at the house next door to where she and her African husband are guests in Texas. They are there to teach and preach at a local church about the work they do helping homeless kids living on the city streets in Durban, South Africa.

These kinds of news frighten me, I admit it. And it makes me afraid of fear, because I believe that these expressions of violence spring from fear, extreme fear. I think they spring from alienation and isolation. I think they spring from people not knowing each other and not trusting each other and denying the humanity of other human beings.

And I suspect that the perpetrators of such crimes and threats of violence have had their own humanity undermined in some way. Something has created a deep vulnerability and fear in them.

How do we confront fear? How do we overcome it? It seems to me helpful for us to understand the fear inside ourselves so that we can better address and neutralize the fear in our culture. So as a first step, I try to understand how fear works in me.

When I hear these frightful stories I am at risk of falling into a pit of despair and powerlessness. I can get overwhelmed and feel afraid. There are moments when that happens to me. I fall into fear. But I know that that is exactly how fear wins. That is how fear can begin to rule the day.

So instead of surrendering to fear, I am looking for patterns of hope that are also out there in the world and present in my life. There is more than fear. There is also love and courage which springs from love. There is commitment and generosity. There is responsibility and creativity. There is community and our capacity to strengthen community.

To remember to look for and to share the patterns of hope, I started a trending topic on Twitter called #patternsofhope. I’m hoping that others will also add to it. We all need help finding the patterns that antidote fear. We also need encouragement to create new patterns. We can do it. We already are.

I love the YMCA!

Thanks to the good influence of my summer roommate, Rachel, I joined the Logan Square Y in August. (It’s called the McCormick Tribune Y, though it’s in Logan Square.) Rachel taught me some basics with free weights and I also quickly grew attached to a bike which works like a video game. You watch a screen which shows a scenic bike path that you bike along on. So far I have enjoyed the 3.3 mile coastal ride a number of times. I know it’s a little dorky, but, it motivates me!

I have found that if I ride the bike for just 10-15 minutes before weight-lifting, I’m not so sore the next few days. It’s that “warming up” concept that people talk about.

Also, if the aerobics room is empty, I like to end my workout by going in there to stretch on a yoga mat and maybe finish with a little shavasana. That’s “corpse pose” in Sanskrit and is the relaxation pose that most yoga classes end with. It gives the body time to rest and internalize the workout.

I’m trying to go to the gym three times a week, allowing my muscles to rest on the in-between days, which actually makes the weight lifting more effective. The muscles get stronger faster if you let them rest and heal.

A nice new plus is that my Y just installed a steam room in the locker room. It smells fantastically, powerfully of eucalyptus.

This will be great all through the winter. I encourage you to check up on me though, and encourage me to keep caring for myself through working out.

In just a few workouts I started feeling more grounded in my body and more alive(!) I’ll be blogging more about the exercises I’m doing, and what I’m learning and feeling along the way.

Honey, you should see my biceps! (But some of that beauty is from yoga. Yoga does make you stronger.) Currently, I am in pursuit of the tricep, as well as some leg muscles, which haven’t been as worked through the yoga.

Shawna’s live painting at Moltmann conversation

Painting by Shawna Bowman

Shawna painted this 8 x 6 foot mural during the Wednesday night session of the Moltmann conversation. It took her a couple of hours. She began during the welcome and painted all through the opening presentations and the communion service.

After it was done, it was auctioned off to participants of the conference and ended up at LaSalle Street Church, right here in Chicago! LaSalle Street Church is where Rob Clearfield also plays–he calls it his morning church. Rob, for those of you who don’t know, is the music director at Wicker Park Grace.

Hearing Moltmann, the person, in person

Listening to Moltmann today was amazing. Finally, in the third lecture, I had settled in my preferred seating place, the balcony, and had my mini-laptop working enough to type notes while he spoke.

For the first two lectures, I really couldn’t take notes because I found I had to give him all my attention. I was only able to tweet a few comments, and quickly lost my ability to tweet and listen at the same time.

He began with his life story first thing, being a prisoner of war, seeing his friends die, hearing people lament and cry out, “where is God?” His experience and his testimony is powerful and compelling.

At one point a US military chaplain gave him a bible and he began to read. In the psalms of lament, he found something that he could resonate with–especially psalm 39.

When he got to the New Testament and read Jesus’s words cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he thought, here is someone who knows my pain. And he found great consolation in that.

There is a biography (auto-biography?) about his life, and I’m sure it would be very interesting reading.

For those of you who wish you were here, I am going to include here a few snippet-like notes that I typed up while he talked. A couple of them appeared in tweets I was able to post, but we know that they will soon twitter away as the tweets pour in. Here, at least, they will remain (a residual twitter stream?)

NOTES, Thursday Morning:

God is not in control of everything. God is bearing and carrying everything.

Apathy is an illness. If a child becomes apathetic, you take him to the doctor. God is not apathetic. God is filled with pathos for creation.

God is not impassable.

Theology that is not related to life experiences and death experiences is abstract. It’s nice for play. But it’s just a play of sorts.

Life experiences are a sort of theology, of course.

I read the bible with the Expectation to meet the divine Word in human words.

I’m old enough not to be afraid to be called heretical.

In interpreting the bible, I ask myself, What sentence is closer to Christ? And my decision is clear.

If women were all the time silent, we would have no knowledge of the resurrection of Christ. (Because they were the ones to announce his resurrection.)

Phoebe was the first official of a small congregation, a co-teacher with Paul.

My wife taught me to state things, I think it is this way (instead of making an objective statement). This provokes the subjectivity in others to make up their own minds.

There is no theological dialogue in our house before breakfast.

I think postmodernism is a new kind of modernism. (another form of modernism) [this got a murmur of reaction from the crowd. what does he mean by this? The next note tries to capture what he was saying.-NS]

Universal dangers we can only meet united. We cannot break up into big narratives, small narratives. Atomic bomb, terrorism, the suicide of mankind is a possibility at all times. I don’t see why we should give up the questions we have to face. [So I think he is defining post-modernism as a kind of breaking apart/splintering?-NS]

I have been reading his book, Jesus Christ for Today’s World, and finding it stimulating and engaging. I especially am trying to engage the sections on torture.

Hello world!

Here is my first post to my new blog. I’m writing from the JoPa sponsored Theological Conversation with Jürgen Moltmann in Libertyville, IL, a suburb of Chicago.

Without much ado, I’m going to begin posting!