Office Space!

With gratitude to the generous folks at Haller Lake Baptist and the hard work of friends who had extra paint lying around- I now have somewhere to go to work! Still Needed: bookshelves, couch, coffee table.

Bizarre Holiday Bazaar

This Friday, myself and some friends will be doing this with Church of the Beloved. I'll be selling some smaller illustrations and prints. It's a great place to find quality, local and affordable art for Christmas gifts. Come on out.

Being and Utility

Perhaps it was Max Weber who first made the connection between the development of capitalism and the puritan work ethic in his 1905 classic text. The links he draws feel obvious to me and I believe that today, the reverse influence of capitalist culture back upon the church is also true. The more we "run" churches like businesses, the more cues we begin to take (unchecked) from the corporate world. How should we organize without rigidity? How do we program without using eachother? How do we strategize without loosing sight of faces? How do we hire, fire, promote and demote within a worshiping community, called beloved by God? How do we encourage eachother to live into our spiritual gifitings without defining people by their utility? Are we more than simply cogs in the Kingdom of God? These are some thoughts on my mind these days that connected with these words by Moltmann in which I experience comfort and rest.
“When a man sees the meaning of life only in being useful and used, he necessarily gets caught in the crisis of living, when illness or sorrow makes everything including himself seem useless… Whoever lays hold of the joy which embraces the creator and his own existence also gets rid of the dreadful question of existence: For what? …We are evidently supposed to be busy with something, as if our existence were justified or rendered beautiful by this. The opposite is true: Our existence is justified and made beautiful before we are able to do or fail to do anything." - Moltmann (Theology of Play, 1972)

worship in a violent world

one important thing my studies at mhgs have taught me is to read outside of my tradition. i'm finding that more than often i am surprised and benefit greatly from the various perspectives and angles on things. currently i'm reading james allison's undergoing god and was very much drawn in by his second chapter, called "worship in a violent world." it was originally a talk he gave and the full transcript is here if you want to read it (recommended). in the chapter prior, allison does some groundwork to cast a vision of God as "I Am"- a God who is not "over and against" other gods, who is not merely "one of the gods." this removes all anxiousness, competition and violence from his theology, replacing it with an invitation into deep rest, into the being of God. his vision for worship flows out of this: "Christian worship is predicated on the understanding that there is nothing left to achieve." (40) allison contrasts True Worship to the nuremberg ralleys of nazi germany- which in structure and intent look frightenly like most modernday worship services (and this is something he never says flat out, but the similarities are obvious)- and this is a form of worship he calls "dangerous and dehumanizing." these are some quotes that jumped out at me:

• "...Any given liturgical action, act of worship, is something to help us on the way, it is not an end in itself. If you like, it is designed to be learned as a discipline to help us inhabit more fully the creative life story, which we are gradually and peacefully receiving, of leaving the world of 'worship', the world of principalities and powers. Unlike [worship as we have come to know it], it is not designed to take us outside our ordinary life, but to enable us to dwell more freely and creatively within it, a lifelong therapy for distorted desire." (39)

• "Any liturgical act is a staging post in a journey, and should point towards the dwelling within that journey. It is an induction into a more fully inhabited, more conscious, and freer creation of that journey, which is itself the bringing about of the Kingdom of God on earth, not a temporary excision from the journey in order to engage in something ecstatic." (40)

• "When people tell me that they find Mass boring, I want to say to them: it's supposed to be boring, or at least seriously underwhelming. It's a long term education in becoming un-excited, since only that will enable us to dwell in a quiet bliss which doesn't abstract from our present or our surroundings or our neighbour, but which increases our attention, our presence and our appreciation for what is around us. The build up to a sacrifice is exciting, the dwelling in gratitude that the sacrifice has already happened, and that we've been forgiven for and through it is, in terms of excitement, a long drawn-out let-down." (45-46)

• "...if the True Worship of the True God looks like the worship of a god, or if they look more like each other than unlike, then we have fooled ourselves... In short we have been lazy, and settled for more of the same with a different name." (35)

the season of "bright sadness"

yesterday was ash wednesday on the western church's calendar and marked the beginning of the season of lent. having come from traditions that didn't mark the calendar beyond christmas and easter, my wife and i have over the last five years had desire to make meaning and tradition around such rhythms. lent is often referred to as "spring time of the soul" but this year i connect more with the orthodox way of describing it as the season of "bright sadness." this phrase holds the tensions well of what it means to name death and have hope. of what it means for me to be struggling with depression a profound sense of disconnect with my heart while at the same time to be expecting the birth of our 3rd child and the conclusion of what has felt like an eternal masters degree program- both occurring shortly after easter this year.
the 40 days is evocative of israel's time wandering in the desert. more directly it is a practice in reference to Christ's period of fasting and temptation in the desert. if anything is to be said about deserts- and ask any desert fathers or mothers you know- is that they are the beginning place for spiritual formation and direction. it was a place for israel and Christ himself to bring into practice a full dependence on the Father.
in efforts to return to moderation, i've given up coffee, sugar and music amongst other things over the years. the presence of desire is supposed to be re-directed to focus on God. what i love is that grace is built into the lenten rhythm- the sundays don't count in the 40 days, and are to be celebrated as mini-easters, feast days where fasts can be broken- they are pauses or windows in time. (if you intend to fast somehow, meredith, a friend and former classmate who now pastors on the east coast, recently wrote this brief and helpful article on fasting, full of good reminders.)
i rarely blog this many words, but all this to say that this year, in a way that feels more true that other years, i can say that i need what lent offers- and i hope to enter it in community with a degree of intentionality my life has been laking of late. how will you mark lent this year? how will you anticipate, remember and live into the narrative of holy week?

Grünewald Guild

our faith community did a "love experiment" this fall- we linked groups of people up in a chain where you receive an act of love and in turn give to the next person. these acts were intended to be extravagant and intentional with the hope of fostering an ethos of love in the community. it ran the danger of feeling contrived, but i guess anything can be if people aren't engaged in the idea. well, it turned out in my group that everyone got really into it.












i had the gift of receiving an amazing weekend away at the Grünewald Guild, an artist retreat center nested in the cascade mountains, in the Leavenworth area (the place is amazing: staffed by angels practicing the hospitality of heaven). our friend hannah worked hard with ruth to set the whole thing up without me knowing and timing it for the weekend after finals. on my way out i pondered why it was that being out amongst the trees in nature is so profoundly centering for me and many others. the simple thought that followed was simply because trees don't handle life the way i handle life. so i decided to put ink to that concept while i was up in the woods: what would it look like to see trees handling life the way i handle life? it was a playful and reflective way to contemplate my unhealthy patterns of relating to self and others- patterns that lead me to places of desperately needing to retreat into the woods to recollect amongst the trees.








"differentiation", "self harm", "anxiety" & "self care" in the "trees handling life like i handle life" series. copyright, phil nellis: winter 2008 at grünewald guild.

"Hope for a Tree Cut Down"

Some highly creative and generous friends over at Church of the Beloved have recorded a fantastic set of music that stands in the spiritual and musical traditions of Sufjan, Colbalt Season and Over the Rhine- it evokes similar worshipful and emotive responses for me.


This is an exemplary demonstration of contextual, local and indigenous worship that has come out of a faith community that is in touch with their creativity:

Hey. This music is free for you.
Of course it was a lot of hard work and cost a lot of money for us to make this album. But for you, it’s free, because we have been shocked by God’s grace… that is to say, God’s gift; because we are discovering what our community’s gifts are; And because we want to give. - Ryan Marsh, Beloved Architect

holy weak

did this little art project for
easter morning at wits end church.

witsendchurch.org

our lovely and quirky little faith community is entering cyberspace on a serious level for the first time... we launched this baby only yesterday. swing by and check us out!
(thanks to Nathan at Storyboard Solutions for putting it together!)