Do it for the Love.org

We need all the people of the rainbow,

we need the inspiration of the artists,

we need the knowledge ans skill of the scientists

we need the sun, the stars and the streets,

we need the change, all lives lived with justice, wisdom and beauty,

and the beat needs to rhyme,

Now is the time,

we Are the change

and all lives matter

and All Lives matter.

Under the banner of heaven

In graduate school I had a professor who was raised in the Mormon church. He had long since left it, but his sister remained active. The Mormons have a tradition of baptizing the dead, which is why Mormons are so interested in genealogy. Turns out my professor’s sister would stand in a pool of holy water for hours getting dunked as a baptismal proxy for as many dead people she could before becoming a hypothermic raisin. This way their souls could get to heaven. At least, this is what I was told.

Visit to Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco

As I walked in I was greeted by a small but vibrant congregation with the Jazz of Coltrane being played with Biblical verse sung on top often in a call and response type fashion.  I immediately saw my classmate Eric behind a piano playing guitar (funny because I knew he had never been there before).   The jazz of Coltrane was deep and beautiful.  I appreciated the way it had a trance like affect on me taking me deeper into the sacred.  

Silence = Death

I remember in 1985 when Rolling Stone magazine broke the real story on AIDS with its in-depth reporting in “The Plague Years.” I may have been the only 13 year-old girl in New Hampshire with a subscription to the magazine, but I knew right away that AIDS would be one of the defining issues of my lifetime. I have never had a sexual encounter outside of the age of AIDS. I don’t know anything other than its possibility. What I did know right away was that we didn’t know much and it didn’t seem like many people cared.

GLIDE’s God is an Awesome God: Some Reflections on Worship and Sacred Space

Sitting in that pew at GLIDE Memorial Church on Sunday, January 25, 2015 was a little bit like sitting at the mythological convergence of art, religion, and social transformation that our immersion class had been pouring over in word and thought all week. There, ecstatic gospel music, poignant and culturally relevant visual imagery, the poetic and prophetic words of the one and only Marvin K. White, and 100s of bodies of many shapes, sizes, colors, and genders came together in worship that was truly Spirit-filled, art-filled, and transformational.

I walk the line

Transformation through Transportation

Since our first meeting, I’ve been thinking about art and its transformative properties.  What about art changes people?  Is there something about art that transports the imagination, perhaps through the modality of faith, into whole new worlds of understanding.  Does transportation make transformation possible?  Then I thought about our experiences with public transportation this past week.  Together, we participated in the experience of moving from one place to another by faith.  We willingly boarded a shiny, silver fast-moving cylinder with the expectation that we would safely submerge and then reemerge through an underwater tunnel.  We did this again and again because we wanted to witness art.

Sacred Space: A Visit to Glide Memorial Church

The Friday before I visited Glide Church for the first time, I heard an engaging lecture by the sho-artist, Ronald Nakasone. While explaining the term “rinsho” a concept that breaks down to rin (looking) and  sho (writing) he made one of those comments that I find turning up again in my consciousness for days, even years. He said, “the task of a good line is to create space” (Nakasone 2015) . This idea came back to me, and was infused with even more meaning, the day I entered Glide, the fabled church that seems to rest at the very heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district: a colorful place in a colorful neighborhood.

Goldsworthy and Creation’s Deep Time

One aspect of the work of Goldsworthy work we saw at the Presidio today I liked was the way it plays with material as a means to access, “deep time”, as Prof. Zuber referred to the other day. Again we encounter that human intimacy with space/place. He has to create and understand his works over long periods of time – seasons even. Know the changes, and shifts, and settling that a particular space or material will go through.

Lines of Grace

On one of our first mornings, as we were traveling to San Francisco as a group, Rossitza asked me if I was seeing lines any differently after our first experiences together.  I’ve been thinking about that question repeatedly throughout the last 9 days.  I am seeing line different, and seeing “throughlines” that are running in and amidst all of our encounters.