Reminder: Next week is the second Monday of the month, which means a
Goblin-to-Go story. Send suggested “ingredients” for the story! If this is new
to you, check out “Jesus Told Stories” from May 6, 2013: http://familyfaithincyberspace.blogspot.com/2013/05/jesus-told-stories.html
Once again I’m writing from 38,000 feet airborne, returning
home from a conference on the intersection of art and faith put on by Image magazine. Poets, painters,
playwrights, mystics and musicians, photographers, novelists and essayists all gathered
in Santa Fe for a week of workshops, worship, and performance, interwoven with
ongoing conversations about creativity and Christianity.
Living for a week in a community of Christian artists was
extraordinary on many levels, but what lodged in my heart were the stories of
those who had grown up in what they sometimes called the “black and white
world” of fundamentalism but who, through encounters with music or a book or a
poem or a film or a friend, suddenly saw the wideness of God’s mercy and the interconnectedness
of all life. As Fr. Richard Rohr
says, they realized that “Everything belongs.” Suddenly their lives pulsated
with color, with possibility, with ambiguity, with doubt that fueled a deeper
faith. And from this awakening came creative outpourings, as
though the only response to the glory of God was to seek ways to express it.
Their stories reinforced my own sense that engaging children
in creative pastimes is a deeply Christian endeavor, one that makes them
co-creators of the world they inhabit. Creativity is incarnational. My own
instructor, Jeffrey Overstreet, spoke of how we all “carry eternity in our
hearts” and so are able to recognize the holy in the most unlikely places –
such as the film clip he showed us of Spiderman….
So spend time this week making up stories, building sand
castles or block cities, dancing to music, putting on a puppet show, playing
with play dough – baking bread. And next week, we’ll create a story together.
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