Lent: Hoping to See
Lent has arrived. It didn't sneak up me. I've been watching its approach the way we used to watch storm fronts come rolling in. "Dread" may be too strong a word, but my anticipation of "giving something up" has been shadowy. Fasting has not gone well the past twelve months, and doubt about my ability to keep the simplest vow to God made me wonder if I wouldn't abandon Lent altogether this year. Then yesterday afternoon, like the first blast of cold air ahead of the front, my throat started tickling, and by nightfall, I felt lousy enough to head to bed early, nursing my achy body and stuffy head.
But this morning, still feeling lousy, I rolled out of bed knowing that I was embracing the Lenten season after all. This year's sacrifice is one of my staples, and suddenly, as I start to write this, Jesus[base '] warning about secrecy insinuates itself into my head, and I think I'll just keep it to myself. The point is, Lent is one of the more challenging times of the year, especially if there's much to repent. Nonetheless, I'm thankful for it, thankful that these six weeks roll around each year to call me to a deeper place. This year, I hope to answer.
I've appropriated a story of Jesus over the past couple of days. Toward the end of Matthew 10, a blind man makes a lot of noise hoping to catch Jesus' attention. Jesus calls the man to come to him, and then asks the famous question, "What do you want me to do for you?" The blind man's reply is just what you'd expect: "I want to see."
For an artist, there is nothing more important than this: to see. Our work begins with our contact with the tangible world through our five senses, "see" here being an analog for all five senses. Beginning with sensory contact, art grows out of the synergy created as we reach out and touch the world alive to our sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell. As we encounter these sense impressions, we then bring the experience inside our skin, where it is delivered via the imagination to our thinking faculties, where such experience is transformed into idea and image, memory and hope, creativity and warning. Such thinking then informs our next encounter with the sensory world, which then folds back into our unseen selves, only to be spun out again and again in a never-ending process called consciousness.
But along the way, something akin to erosion sets in. Our experience dulls down, sense impressions are felt as if through a thick glove so that nothing has the edge of freshness. We've seen it all, felt it all, done it all. The highs of yesterday goad us into upping the ante for tomorrow, and soon we are bloated on empty stimulation, wondering why favorite foods don't taste as good, favorite stories don't move us anymore, and favorite intimacies hold little interest. Meaning gets lost, and pretty soon, we're just hanging on until the ride's over.
Simply put: we go blind, sometimes even in our hearts.
When books about creativity are pitched at adults it's usually in the context of this learned blindness. The recovery/rediscovery of sight (read creative living) is not something for artists--it strikes me as a core need for all of us. Something has gone missing from our lives. The old Wordsworth poem says "The things which I have seen, I now can see no more."
During Lent, as I go about the daily task, I"m hoping to spend lots of time talking to God. And when He asks what I"m there for, and what I want him to do for me, I know what my answer's going to be.
...I want to see...
7:55:06 AM 
