Just the voice you would imagine – one we all know and remember so well – chiming, “Hi!” and patiently listening to me recount the lifelong odyssey leading me to that moment.

“You see, Ms. L’Engle,” I rambled, “A Wrinkle in Time changed my entire worldview as a child, and I studied the Italian renaissance overseas where a discovery of Giotto’s painting yielded similar breakthroughs.  And when I discovered this synthesis of beauty, art and faith in your book The Glorious Impossible, I had to call.  I’ve been reading it recently to my children – not realizing you had written that powerful narrative to accompany the art – when something awoke in me, insisting this be shared with many more people in a new way.  Ms. L’Engle, I’d like to come to New York to speak with you about producing a theatrical presentation of The Glorious Impossible, one that we could share with audiences everywhere.  Would you perhaps agree to see me?”

We know what she said, because she was so remarkably present for others, open to possibility.  (This is a trait shared by humans through the ages who have developed a higher calling, a higher consciousness.  God exists there in the moment, free from the guilt of the past’s missed opportunities and the future’s anxieties.)  “Of course.  When can you come?”

That first trip was postponed, but the vision persisted until a year later we met at one of her writer’s workshops at Holy Cross Monastery up on the Hudson.  My multimedia program was complete, her text edited to accommodate a musical score and an hour long production of Giotto’s painting.  We sat after dinner with the monks and workshop participants in the monastery library when I asked Madeleine to read, allowing me to rest a hand on her arm to signal when to stop and start the narrative.  It was a divine moment at the conclusion as she leapt to her feet to hug me and declare, “We must do this many more times together.”

What followed were trips to British Columbia (the Sorrento Centre), Ontario (for the Windsor diocesan convention), New York (St. Paul’s Catholic), Kanuga in North Carolina, Palm Beach, Florida and other places around North America to tell the story of the life of Jesus in a way that celebrates God’s imparting of artistic genius.  Despite almost two generations of age differential, Madeleine and I became close along the way.

I learned so much from her – how to remain open to infinite possibility, how to be truly present for others.  I remember one time, standing in the pouring rain outside her cabin at Kanuga, when she asked me about a mutual friend.  Madeleine stopped and focused her eyes intently upon my reply, totally unaffected by the rain, in no hurry whatsoever to hear truly how they were doing.  She taught me again in that moment.

There were other times to learn and absorb – over spaghetti at Crosswicks, potluck at her New York apartment – to celebrate the power of music, philosophy and of spirited conversation.  Even that next to last time visiting her at Rose Haven Assisted Living, when I caught her in a good mood, joyously exclaiming, “Randy!” upon entering the room.  Recounting with her a recent trip to Italy, she insisted we plan to go together.  Over wine and cheese outside, that loving twinkle remained evident.

That’s what she did best, teach us about love.  Though the religion of my childhood was more about guilt and shame, Madeleine L’Engle shattered that prism to reveal one of a universe bound together in divine love.  I strive to see that always, and to thank her for so ably showing it to me.

The symbiosis between human beings and the wild animals surrounding them is complex.  Humans hunted them and were hunted by them.  Their life-giving and life-threatening attributes inspired reverence and awe.  Take a moment to ponder the animated power of Chauvet, the clear authority of its artistry and shading.  Is it any wonder Picasso exclaimed, “all else since is decadence” upon studying paleolithic art of his native Spain?

Recently discovered and verified through carbon dating, the art of Chauvet is among the first set of images to have appeared on our island home.  Try to imagine it above the flickering light of a feeble flame, perhaps rendered in stolen moments in flight from a cave bear.  Its innate spirituality is what experts believe delineated us from the moot Neanderthal species, a uniquely Cro-Magnon seed of transcendent thinking beyond one’s self and own predicament.

This raw creative talent is what our friend Marcus Borg terms a “thin place” where the human reaches toward the divine.  Might we look upon the incarnation of a Middle Eastern baby who grew wise and resolute, touching generations of spiritual pilgrims, as the ultimate expression of divine creativity?  Jesus of Nazareth tended to ask questions, to probe, to break rules and to envision beyond the horizon a new creation.

30,000 years is a long creative testimony.  So is 2,000.  We create.  God creates in us and with us.  May we genuflect to the birth of art and proclaim, “Hosanna, to the Son of David!”

Some have called GladdeningLight’s premise syncretism, a betrayal of one’s faith in the hopes of reconciliation and union from disparate beliefs.  Rather, our premise is one of respect for ideas that in turn breeds understanding.  Gandhi gives us a beautiful example of aspiration sought from an inquisitive nature.  This diminutive eastern man from an obscure Indian village is enthralled by the westerner Tolstoy’s treatise on nonviolence (The Kingdom of God is Within You), hence Martin Luther King who changed our brothers and sisters for all time.

Our good friend Diane McPhail — artist, counselor and spiritual director — tells the story of creativity awakening within single-cell creatures of the sea.  Eons ago, this primordial matter at the surface of the oceans of the earth thrived on the light and warmth of the sun.  As a by-product of photosynthesis, the atmosphere began to take on oxygen, choking life and incinerating cells in sparks of external fire.  Then an amazing thing occurred.  Rather than be destroyed, mitochondria emerged independently at the sub-cellular level – inherited from ancient source DNA – and began to “learn” to captivate the oxygen, burning it from within.  The result was atmospheric balance, a miracle of evolution and our eventual walk from the waters.

As humans, we have inherited this mitochondria that in a way is not ours, but rather God’s ancient cosmic source matter independent of our own personal make-up.  It is passed along from mother to child bonded in our own strands of DNA as God’s energy complementing our personalities.  When the Holy Spirit awakens our creativity within, the divine spark feeds off these companion strands within us, breathing and feeding upon the mitochondrial captivation to bring our inner souls to light and life.

This is how art is borne from within.  When the artist is stirred to creativity by these divine impulses, God is at work.  Whether conscious or not, God tenders the fire of our souls with a white hot poker to awaken our senses.  The end result often feels not quite “ours,” as if another source was involved in the imaginative process of turning over to our companion creator the manner of our art.  It’s magical, yet not magic.  We dance with the God of our souls to bring to divine light and life the working miracles of our own creativity.

Artist Diane McPhail will be appearing alongside other artists and theologian Marcus Borg at GladdeningLight’s Lovefest, February 4-6, 2011 in Winter Park, Florida.  More at www.Lovefest2011.org.

Lord, for thy tender mercy’s sake, lay not our sins to our charge,
but forgive that is past,
and give us grace to amend our sinful lives.
To decline from sin and incline to virtue,
that we may walk in a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore.

The opportunity to make sense of a church service came rarely to me as a child.  When it did, it was usually in the context of song, in the harmonizing of hymns.  These were occasional pearls sprinkled among the standard rota of guilt, judgment and substitutionary atonement.  Our Church of Christ in Mississippi was proud of its a cappella singing in between its bible-thumping, and I was momentarily transported when given the chance to float an alto harmony into a beautiful hymn like Fairest Lord Jesus.

I dreamt of the angelic voices from the boys choir in Vienna, far off and unreachable.  As an adult, I had little knowledge of the breadth of this marvelous polyphony until hearing the Tallis Scholars for the first time.  I nearly drove off the road, I can remember it so clearly, the soaring straight tone of sixteen voices committed to each pitch and rhythmic line, weaving in & out of one another in a blend of multiple melodies.  Most of their work is from the English church and Catholic traditions of southern Europe from the sixteenth century — Spain, Italy and Portugal.

Amid the early fits & starts of my spiritual growth, choir played an essential role in squaring me toward the godhead.  Tears were shed singing Palestrina, and anthems like Lord, for Thy Tender Mercy’s Sake by Farrant and If Ye Love Me by Tallis.  In addition to the music, there were kindred spirits in choir, a sense of community and shared experience.  The way polyphony is delivered in a blended sound complements community.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve always preferred it to operatic arias or cantoring.  The space that emerges from the organic balance of choral singing evokes the Holy Spirit moving within the group.

Give a listen to the Dale Warland Singers, Westminster Cathedral Choir, the Voices of Ascension, the Cambridge Singers, the Huelgas Ensemble, The Sixteen, the Cambridge Singers — especially during the high holy seasons of Lent, Advent & Christmastide.  Their unwavering tones amid majestic cavernous spaces will transport you to the altar of God.

The December 1953 Premiere Issue, Marilyn Monroe

Mary, the maiden who said, “Yes” is elevated to propriety and transcendence for good reason.  The Holy Spirit spoke to her as a vessel for God.  Frightened, awestruck, tingling with forbearance, Mary perceived the aura of God upon her who came to envelop the womb and bless the seed within it.

Does this make Mary divine?  Or without sin?  I think not.

The profundity of Luke’s tale resonates so well because Mary was one of us.  This roots the incarnation of Jesus in our humanity, renders him an infant son who cried real tears clinging to his mother and father in the wake of life’s cruel turns.  Jesus paid attention to the rabbis around him, and grew into knowledge and presence to become the creative Christ of our making.  While Mary took pride in her son, she could not at the same time become God alongside him.

It is my position that the supernatural persona we place upon the Virgin Mother of God robs her of personality and strength.  Instead, we are left with a polychrome icon who greets us in gentle perfection at the altar.  If we exalt this feminine model, we begin to see our women in the light of unattainable glory, placing them upon a pedestal that manifests itself in the virgin bride and the homecoming queen and the blond anchor on FoxNews and the fetching girl playmate next door.

No woman can become fully human attempting to sustain such a model.  See how far Marilyn fell on account of the demands we placed upon her.  Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII elevated nineteenth century mariology, purified from the original blemish of Adam’s sin, to the highest heights in spite of modern science suggesting, “If Mary had complete x & y chromosomes, from where did the male ones come?”  The Vatican has a way of circling the wagons when threatened with truth.

According to Jane Moss, the festival is trying to achieve “focus on personal interior spaces where all music starts.”  For a festival to be scheduled at all during the height of the fashionable fall season, much less a sacred one “devoted to spiritual expression and the illumination of our large interior universe,” is a bold and highly unusual move for Lincoln Center.  The “relentlessly imaginative” Moss has gathered an array of incredible artists — the Hilliard Ensemble, the Westminster Cathedral Choir, Meredith Monk, the Tallis Scholars, and other notables — for an ambitious program shaped by advising author & theologian (and GladdeningLight fave) Karen Armstrong.

All around us, there is spiritual hunger in evidence.  Some are drawn by artistic means to the secular corners toward the liminal divine.

(Note: source quotations from The New York Times)

www.lincolncenter.org/Press_Release/White_Light_Announce_PR_FINAL.pdf

www.new.lincolncenter.org/live/index.php/white-light-2010-conversations

Author Kathleen Norris appeared this past weekend at St. Philip’s Episcopal Cathedral in Atlanta.  Her books include The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, Dakota, and A Virgin of Bennington.  In my mind, Norris writes richly about the interior life in much the same way as my mentor Madeleine L’Engle, who passed away in 2007 (though perhaps not quite with Madeleine’s bold resolve).

Kathleen Norris shared a formative story from her days at Bennington when, while studying abroad in Paris, she ducked into Notre Dame fleeing a sudden rainstorm.  For Norris, these were agnostic years in college yet church still beckoned its quiet and safe sanctuary.  By chance as the weather continued outside, the cathedral organist began to rehearse anthems, at once surging through the massive cathedral pipes, the stone edifice of Notre Dame, and into the heart of Kathleen Norris.  The combination of Notre Dame’s magnificence, the heavenly acoustic splendor of the organ, and the beating of her own heart aligned.  As Norris put it in her talk, this was a mountaintop moment.  The veil of her non-belief began to lift.

I had a similar epiphany while studying in Europe.  My childhood had left me spiritually bankrupt and in existential despair.  Yet within the great churches and spaces of Italy, I began to experience firsthand the passions that once led renaissance artists to create.  My eyes were opened.  This wasn’t gilding the lily as I had been taught; here, God was at work in us and through us along the pathways of aesthetic praise.

Note: Psalm 107b, Posuit flumina, “the Lord changed deserts into pools of water.”  More on Kathleen Norris may be found at http://www.barclayagency.com/norris.html.

Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve, by William Blake

I admit I borrowed part of this heading from the prog group, Yes, and its lyricist Jon Anderson.  His Revealing Science of God begins an excursion into the world of Topographic Oceans, the band’s courageous, overreaching experiment.  We shall speak of this later.

There is a spectacular academic quarterly of spirituality, psychology and metaphysics called Parabola whose current issue is devoted to the subject of desire.  According to their website, the journal’s parent Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition is a “not-for-profit organization devoted to the dissemination and exploration of materials relating to the myths, symbols, rituals, and art of the world’s religious and cultural traditions. To this end, the Society is the publisher of Parabola Magazine.“  The editors go on to emphasize the parabolic arc as representative of humanity’s collective reach, a curving outreach as the “epitome of a quest.”  This metaphor aligns with a favorite of mine — the ancient Greek’s use of epektasis, describing the athlete straining to reach a goal that can never be attained.  Epektasis is a core paradigm of spiritual growth: we as pilgrims yearn for answers to existential questions; we desire God, yet achievement of spiritual union eludes us.

And what does God desire?  That question is explored eloquently by Geoffrey Dennis in his Parabola article, “A Song of Desire, Creation and the Yearnings of Israel’s God.”  According to Dennis, God longs for communion with creation.  Passion for relationship is evident in God’s grief as a consequence of our separation from the garden.  Unlike Aristotle’s God as Unmoved Mover, here is a God of “the Most Moved Mover.”  Dennis concludes by insisting that God imparts to us the desire to do good for one another — living in symbiosis for community — and that this is a characteristic of evolved consciousness.

There are other wonderful considerations of desire in this issue of Parabola, from St. Francis to contemporary Dharma Master Cheng Yen.  I heartily recommend them and encourage you to acquire a copy wherever magazines are sold.

Ladies of the Canyon, by Joni Mitchell

As we ponder the garden, let us consider the poetics of Joni Mitchell, “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”  There is a common tendency to lean upon the foggy lens of nostalgia in framing our past and in this case, our natural being.  Creation is messy, involving dead ends and unrealized aspirations.  But the leaf upon the branch finds light and nourishment, and leans toward the sun where its future lies.

Another line from Woodstock, “We are stardust, we are golden” lays claim to the grounding quality of our common humanity.  A college astronomy professor of mine once made me literally bolt upright in my seat by stating, “You were once part of a star.”  Yes, all of our chemical makeup at the cellular level was once hurling through space contained within the heavenly bodies.  Our DNA, our mitochondria was and is stardust, remnants of the Big Bang.

Might we come to learn to appreciate our biological communion with the cosmic structure of the universe?

“I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm
I’m going to join in a rock ‘n roll band
I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m going to try and get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I don’t know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust, billion year old carbon
We are golden, caught in the devils bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden”

© 1970 Siquomb Publishing Corp, Reprise / Warner Music