3/18/18 “Tattoos, Impressions, and Encryption” by Brian Crisp
Text: Jeremiah 31:31-34
There were many social norms in our household that were taught by example. “Please” and “thank you” operated as both niceties and roots of proper sentences; “Yes ma’am” was used so frequently that as a small child I thought it a common name given to all females; and cloth napkins lent themselves to exact folds before finding respite on laps during meals. When such lessons would forsake inference for words, the importance was palpable for both teacher and pupil. Of course, I was always the student while tutelage fell primarily to the matriarchs in my family with my grandmother being the conveyor of the most strident wisdom. She possessed a three-fold plan for good living that she regularly imparted:
1. Never set foot in a bowling alley;
2. Never get a tattoo; and
3. If you must smoke, then please be seated because smoking and walking
the street should never mix.
Well, one out of three may not be my best score. My freshman moments at Wake Forest compromised the rule about smoking and street walking, and working at Pullen with the female-athletes-turned-ministers quickly ushered me into a bowling alley. Yet, my grandmother would be pleased that no matter the depths of my shenanigans or the severity of my conniving, I have never had a tattoo.
Now, please do not think I harbor any aesthetic or theological ill towards tattoos or the bodies on which they reside. In fact, I admire them, and I often find myself examining the colorful sleeves of women and men who courageously draw themselves with filigree and shadows. Tattoos make impressions as they denote bodies that are creative, empowered, formidable, expressive, memorialized, and bold. Tattoos epitomize ultimate autonomy as the body is inked with no interference by social norms, familial habits, or governmental oversight. If it were not for the pain (a phenomenon I avoid as much as possible), then I would embrace the opportunity to visually and bodily capture life freely and in its everyday moments.
My mornings begin with a perusal of humans trying to capture life’s everyday moments in visual arts, and recently I have been drawn to a group of French artists who defied the academy and the government to represent a different view of the world. In 1874, Cèzanne, Degas, Renoir, Monet and others began to loosen their brush strokes and ties to exact representation to experiment with capturing an essence of life that deliberately defied exact depiction. The critics were enraged, dismissing the work as incomplete, inferior outlines of life. One of these critics penned a derogatory review that referred to the group as ”impressionists.” These painters, unwavering in their production, adopted the term as an identifier of their style and their collective exhibitions. This group was not merely a bunch of rebel rousers coopting language for sheer defiance. No, they were visionaries and were convinced that art could do more than depict the idealized perfection of elite society. Their new perception strived to capture small moments of life imbued with intensity and emotion and the ultimate reality.
Such mysteries are the preferred prophetic subjects of painters and architects who defiantly and boldly try to capture and articulate the inexplicable. Architects, with mathematics and innovation, transform sacred knowledge into structures of worship made of nautilus sanctuaries and spiraling domes that openly embrace the clouds and stars. These are great pronouncements on the connection between the elements—air and ground; water and land; sky and earth. In my own daily musings, my attention is captured by a photograph featuring a modern grocery store that sits adjacent to a monumental European cathedral from the Middle Ages. People are bustling to and from the glass storefront carrying fruits, cheeses, and breads while this daunting monolithic church sits empty and foreboding on a hill. The world has evolved and progressed while this buttressed building has become an empty facade where church is a relic of another age and not seen as a force for social good. There is a very palpable sense that religion is more esoteric than practical; more superstition than enlightenment; more blindness than revelation; more cynicism than hope; and more fear than love; more emptying that fulfilling.
Parallel are the thoughts of Jeremiah, that cantankerous Hebrew prophet who after surviving captivity and colonization became known for examining the outward shell of the Jewish faith. Jeremiah was distraught that his culture was splintered and assimilated, and he was dismayed that his faith was relegated to written words and public performances that placed the spectacle of religion before the welfare of the people. Frustrated, he shouted, and I am paraphrasing, “Hey! You all have the written law and the traditions and you have these grand ceremonies and you want another temple, heck, you want the right words, and that’s all you all want? Stop that! Enough!” Jeremiah seemed to know the difference between preservation of religion and the practice of faith. True faith, he postures, is a covenant written on your heart.
True faith will be a covenant written on your heart. Now before we have some romantic notion about the heart and our faith, we should be careful not to imprint a very anglicized notion on this ancient Hebrew text. In more direct terms, let’s not whitewash the proclamation. No, this is not the melancholy and nostalgia of Blake and Keats. The heart to the ancient prophet would have been the seat of physical, emotional and intellectual life, and these three modes of living combine to cause moral and spiritual reasoning. The Persians pronounced regularly of those who made decisions detrimental to the wellbeing of the community, “This brut is without heart!” And in our own sacred texts, when he pronounces that the Babylonian dictator has the heart of a beast, Daniel recognizes the difference between the hearts of creatures without reason and abilities and the hearts of those shaped in the divine image.( Daniel 13: 16) Surely Jeremiah was attuned to the Proverb that cautioned to, “Keep your heart with all diligence; for out of it births the issues of life.” (Proverbs 4:23)
Don’t we wish that this Proverb, instead of the manipulation of written guidelines, governed the hearts of people in power? In our world, you can be at the top of your rabbinical class in Torah and beloved by all at your Bar Mitzvah, and grow up to be a predatory lender and take all your friends to the cleaner because you have the law in the book but not in your heart. You can be the president and be a serial sexual abuser and consistent liar while giving righteous sermons on the stump for us all to be a more moral and great nation, not like our past president whose one wife and two daughters were somehow a moral affront and stain on our collective character. You can be the son of a beloved bible-preaching Evangelical and ignore the sacred mandate to welcome the stranger in preference of vilifying Muslims, Latinx people, and the LGBTQIA+ community. Like many senators, you can profess to be a devout Christian and proclaim our nation to be built on Judeo-Christian values, but completely ignore the clear meaning of the sixth commandment to collect millions of dollars in campaign money from the National Rifle Association.
These ways that religion has been used to “know God,” as penned by Jeremiah, have been more concerned with a preservation of power than a life-transforming faith open to all people. Religion has codified its systems of beliefs; dogmatized a canon of literature; and succinctly and neatly defined its deity. Words and phrases, those beautiful tools of poets and orators, have been used as weapons to form creeds, and those creeds have caused violence because they draw staunch lines in the sand and then demand to know on which side people stand. Religion requires a perfect score in a confirmation class, an arsenal of scriptural proof texting, and a heft of obligatory deeds. Faith is lessened to rote recitation and calculated measures, and God becomes reduced to a bland, boring, and meaningless name.
This is the problem with providing a name to any entity be it noun or verb. Once the phenomenon is named then its nature is limited and ultimately demeaned. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the modern philosopher fascinated with language, famously penned, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Taking Wittgenstein and Jeremiah, I am curious if we have restrained the sacred with finite vocabularies. Diminishing the sacred with an overused name creates a stasis that immediately assigns a familiar and contrived category. Conceptual schemes are made concrete, identification is made mundane, definitions are limited, and further attention and contemplation is halted. With such unfathomable ideas explained, all those wanting to reshape or reimagine a new and fresh meaning are deemed heretical, apostate, or atheist. Maybe this is why the ancients were hesitant to say or write the name of the divine. Not because they were afraid that such an utterance would lead to death, but that the real demise would be not recognizing the ultimate wonder and elemental beauty and beatific mystery that resides in, among, around, and between all living creatures.
“Truly seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” Listen to that again. “Truly seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” Robert Irwin, the visionary artist of the twentieth century, borrowed ideas from the French Poet, Paul Varléy, in crafting this aphorism about seeing. Irwin understands the active nature of seeing and how diligent we must be to protect our ability to vision our world. Seeing—a continual tending and crafting and searching and wrestling and reconfiguring and reexamining and experiencing—is a verb that transcends the ordinary and refuses to get lost in everyday conventions. As faithful people, we cannot afford to quickly dismiss with the glib or a glance the divine because underestimating the holy found outside each of us only diminishes the hallowed image contained in every one of us. Let me say that again, underestimating the holy found outside each of us only diminishes the hallowed image contained in every one of us.
When we engage in such seeing then we may become discontented with our language to describe and capture this ultimate mystery understanding that words such as “lord” or “he” or “she” or “God” create framed and shut doors instead of wide and open portals. We may have to search outside our hymnals and go beyond our canons to create, like those Impressionist painters, ways to capture small moments of life imbued with intensity and emotion and the ultimate mystery. In discussing this aspect of God Talk this week, I was reminded of the critical need in our world for such generative seeing. In a world filled with violence and negativity and injustices, we are called to build sanctuary. Our sacred knowledge and holy mysteries should inspire us to be architects of literal and metaphorical sanctuaries in and outside of the church for deep meaning making, contemplation, and exploration for the potential of all people and, more importantly, the possibility of authentic community. And in this we discover, like Jeremiah, that we are not concerned with the naming, but with that deep knowing.
Jeremiah proclaims:
Listen up! Pay Attention! The days are really coming, I will put my teachings within their innermost beings, and write it on their hearts; and I will be theirs and they shall be mine.
No longer will they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know God,” for they will all know, from the least to the greatest.
From the least to the greatest, they will all know. We will all know. From the smallest moments in life to the monumental moments that shape us, it will be written on our hearts. From the most deep depressions to the most joyous celebrations; from our miscarriages and our cancers and our HIV status and our addictions to our caressing and comfort and caregiving; from being kicked out of denominational affiliations to welcoming those who are continually kicked out; from securing our dream job to commemorating our retirement to mourning the loss of those we love to just making it through the mundane nature of a Tuesday, we_will_all_know. To be clear, I am neither saying this divinity is a redemptive suffering nor is it the cause of punitive judgment. Nor am I professing that this same phenomenon rewards our goodness with prosperity as if it is keeping brackets more suitable for March Madness than for humanity. No, what I am proclaiming is that in the least and the greatest we will here that clarion call that continually asks, “Am I my sister’s keeper, am I my brother’s keeper?” Is that not the essence of the covenant? Can I comfort and care; listen and learn; advocate and accompany? Can I offer encouragement and healing? Can my heart birth the issues of life? Can I do my part?
The answers will be encrypted upon us, and what is imprinted on our hearts—that great seat of emotion, volition, and intellect — will swell in us like, as Jeremiah (and subsequently the Clark Sisters in 1979) proclaimed, “fire shut up in our bones.” And let us pray we have the courage to set it loose in our lives, in our community, and in our world. This beatific vision will cause us to move beyond our pews, our borders, and our words. It will not be content with just any language but it will ever-search for new and welcoming images that create room for all people. All people. And to institutions and governments and powers that prioritize naming over this knowing, we collectively say, “Enough!”
We saw that this week when students across this city and across this country walked out of their schools, demanding that their education not be compromised and threatened by gun violence. Where one governor called this act, “Shameful,” I would say these students were engaged in a deep seeing and knowing that went well beyond rules and regulations and what was encrypted on their hearts would not allow them to be silent. The matriarchs in my family, known for their implicit and explicit rules, also moved well beyond these words into their heart encryption as I watched them take in women abandoned by husbands and society; I saw them care for developmentally-delayed adults often unwanted and unattended by the community; and I saw them fearlessly chase grown men who had callously spit forth racial slurs out of the yard not tolerating such hate in their homes. And I have watched the amazing people of this congregation, move from their hearts, time and time again to show up on Jones Street and show up for our guests at Round Table. You have risked and sacrificed denominational ties because you could see the sacred worth of people not immersed in baptismal waters, not able to profess a canon of beliefs, or not able to suspend their doubts. You have crossed aisles and borders to take the hands of people of different races, faiths, sexual orientations, and gender identities. And you continue to provide sanctuary, literally, for those the world wants to cast aside. To paraphrase Martin Buber, you are a covenant- making, covenant-breaking, and covenant-re-making people.
That is the power of knowing and seeing over just straight forwardly naming. It awakens a faith that doesn’t just simply follow rules, but actively creates the world anew. It doesn’t with a strained nostalgia wish for the way things used to be, but courageously births a new heaven on this new earth. It is like those beautiful and admirable tattoos encrypted on our hearts, and it simultaneously grounds our being of beings while sending us daringly to the margins of this world. It encrypts us indelibly with a social justice that encompasses a deep and unwavering compassion; it imprints us with an unfathomable communal caring that is ripe with collective action; and it instills in us all a faith that draws us into the public square with a deep and sacred awareness of ourselves and others. It transforms us into prophets and visionaries convinced that we, as the poet Emily Dickens professes, can spread wide our hands and craft a paradise.
A few weeks ago, Charles and I were in Savannah and had the opportunity to work with mostly African-American middle-school students enrolled in the Deep Center for Creative Writing. Deep was founded to combat the devastating effects of poverty on literacy, and we were asked to combine our mutual love for words and images in an exploration of communal writing. To begin the conversation we selected portraits from the early 14th century through 2018 to mirror the idea that such visual prophets were trying to capture thoughts and feelings about life that may be beyond a simple representation. With each slide, we were delighted at the astute insight these eleven students provided as they commented on color, composition, mood, and intention. These young people talked about life with all of its creativity and disparity; its subtlety and boldness; its simplicity and complications; and its frivolity and rejection. The exchange of ideas was so fluid that the lines separating teacher and pupil were erased and, in the vacuum created, we were all just people trying to make meaning in the world. When the last slide flashed on the screen its flora and foliage colorfully bordered a strong and welcoming presidential portrait of a person whose skin resembled the glorious hues of the students’ complexions; a hush settled into all of our eyes and over our bodies. In that wonderful transcendent moment we could taste the unimaginable and the unfathomable; we could see the mystery and magnificence; we could feel the potential and possibility; and there we all sat stilly, quietly, and knowingly. Hearts had been encrypted, covenants had been remade, and no one said a word.
