Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Learning to Pay Attention

This is part one of a two part series on art and theology.  

Last Thursday, I joined Instagram.

I'm not really sure why I did it because I use Facebook to share my pictures and Twitter to participate in instantaneous communication.  Being on Instagram seemed a little excessive to me.  

Yet, even though I've only Instagramed one picture (as of writing this), having Instagram on my phone helps me start paying attention to things.  I'm able to start noticing things that I see every day and frame them in such a way that they say something.

#nofilter
This picture, for example.  Every night I walk my dog and I usually notice the moon, stars, clouds, etc.. But when I took the picture, I was paying attention to just how the clouds interacted with the light of the moon.  I was paying attention to how the moonlight created shadows with the branches of the trees.  I was paying attention to something that I see every day.

I've noticed this happens with many photographs that appear on Instagram.  There are tons of pictures of food, pets, family, friends, trash, and so on.  Sometimes it seem foolish or ridiculous.  When I would see these photos on Facebook, my first thought was, "Nobody cares what you had for lunch today!"

Not anymore.

Instagram's greatest strength is that everyone can become a photographer.  Everyone can take an ordinary object and frame it in such a way that people to notice it.  That people pay attention to it.  That people truly see it.

Frederick Buechner, in his book Whistling in the Dark, says that this about art.
Literature, painting, music - the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot.  In a world that for the most part steers clear of the idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.

Stop.  Look.  Listen.

Three simple commands.  Why do we have such a hard time with them?

We pause, but rarely stop.  We look, but seldom see.  We hear, but hardly listen.

We need artists from all walks of life to shout, "Look over here!  See what great mystery is present! Listen to the holy rhythms of life!"

About a month ago, I stumbled on to the blog done by the NY Graffiti artist Banksy.  While not strictly legal (as evidenced by some of the posts related to being pursued by the NYPD) I admire what this mysterious artist is trying to do.  An anonymous figure quitely encouraging people to stop, look, and listen to the life of the city; to see something in a new and exciting way that might have scared them before.
Check out more of Bansky's work here.

This piece tells a story.  It is shouting at us to see this man waiting for his lover by the club door.  We don't know why he's waiting.  We don't know who he is.  And yet, in this waiting man we are able to see more than just the man.  We see his love.  We see his grief over the absence of his lover.  We see parts of ourselves in this work that we can relate to.

And yet, people walk by this beautiful story without a second glance day after day.

I'm not sure I would have noticed it if I hadn't come across it online. I'm not sure I would pay it any attention.  I would have passed it by without a second glance. I needed a "frame" to encourage me to stop, look, and listen.

Instagram and Banksy's Graffiti give us opportunities to stop, look, and listen to the extraordinary aspects of our lives that are extraordinary only because of their ordinariness.

Too often we let these extraordinary moments go by without noting them.

Holy moments of creation slip by without a second glance.

We expect God to swoop down with a smartphone and Instagram these moments for us.  We want God to put a frame around what God has done.  And we do get these experiences occasionally.  We have moments where we see God's presence in nature - in our "mountaintop experiences."

And yet.

I have a sneaking suspicion that God works more like our Graffiti artist, Banksy.  God is subtly working within creation to quietly encourage us to stop, look, and listen.

It's never anything fancy or "loud" but it's quiet, subtle, and simple.

And yet.
Its quietness draws us in, closer and closer.
Its subtlety allows it to speak to us time and time again.
Its simplicity allows us to see this message of creation again and again and again, everywhere we go.

So it's up to us to frame some of these quiet moments for one another.  It's up to us to shout on their behalf.  It's up to us to ask people to stop, look, and listen to these holy moments where God has created beautiful works of art that have been passed without a second glance time and time again.









No comments:

Post a Comment