when leo met lichtenstein

A few weeks ago, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine about the relative merits of Leonardo DaVinci and Roy Lichtenstein. It got me thinking--what would happen if those two artists got together...

doctor

haunted

portrait

woman

illumination

leisure

the last supper

a woman's hand

spring art work from art etc...

Here's a sample of some of the art work our kids and youth have been creating this spring. For more pics, click here .

matt bingham, I owe you one

I was browsing through a thrift store cd section this week when I came upon an old Tori Amos cd (Under the Pink, in case you were wondering). Now, I must sheepishly confess, when Tori Amos first hit it big, I didn’t pay too much attention to her. I was around 14, and I was too busy discovering the Beatles and Janis Joplin to listen to anything written after about 1973. But when I found this cd, I thought to myself, hmm, I remember a post of Matt Bingham’s from like, a hundred years ago, where he said he was a fan of Tori’s. Seeing as how Matty B’s musical choices have never yet steered me wrong (and the cd was only $3.29), I decided I may as well get it. So I popped it in my cd player when I got home and started cleaning my house. I didn’t get very far. Before long I was sitting on the floor, reading the lyrics, and essentially frozen in awe of this unbelievable sound. When Matt said that her voice gets inside your head, he wasn’t kidding. ‘bells for her’ has been haunting me for a week now (and that’s a good thing!). Her arrangements are unlike anything I’ve ever heard. The imagery she uses is wild and vague, and yet it makes sense in some crazy beautiful way. And you’ve never heard anyone play the piano until you hear “cornflake girl”. Yes, she’s blunt, to put it mildly (‘icicle’ will probably make you cringe). But she’s honest, and she makes me think (a lot!). So thanks, Matty B., for introducing me to someone who already feels like an old friend—I owe you one, man.

dust in the sunlight

I was sitting on a bench with someone the other day when he pointed out that you could see the dust in the sunlight. He said he finds it interesting that there's all this stuff floating around that we can't see until the light hits it in a certain way. I thought it was a great metaphor--sometimes there is so much stuff floating around inside of us that nobody sees, that we don't even know is there, until the light hits it in a certain way--until somebody shines a light on it. And then suddenly that's all you can see. And it seems to surround you, and you wonder how you never saw it before--and maybe you wonder how you get out of it so you can breathe again.

jaded

This weekend I accidently created a piece about relationships. It's a somewhat jaded commentary, but it looks more negative than it actually is. Judging from the piece, it may look as though I'm bitter about something, but I'm really not! I just found some red tissue paper and a magazine and this is what came out.

life as a persian king

I find it interesting how little we’ve talked about the actual story of Esther during our study of this book. The narrative keeps bringing up unexpected tangents. This week, our little question sheet said the following: “Persian kings lived in isolation from the real world. It was unlawful to be unhappy in the king’s presence and service”. So we were, of course, feeling a little indignant to the self-centered king when Mo asked us if we, in the West, are just like Persian kings, refusing to allow any unhappiness in our presence, content to turn a blind eye to things like genocide? We see pictures of Darfur on the news and say “My gosh, isn’t anyone going to stop this?” And then we find the remote between the cushions of the couch and start flipping channels—oh look, the Simpsons is on.

in between thoughts

I know I don’t usually go so long between posts, but I’ve been quite busy making very bad decisions over the last few days.

The Ethics of the Lie

Is it ever ethical to tell a lie? Is there actually a difference between a lie and half-truth? For all you overanalyzers who are now wondering ‘is she lying to me about something?’, rest assured, I’m not! This was a question that came up at Mo and Barb’s Bible Study on Monday night, and it’s been sticking with me a bit this week. I know some people say it’s never okay to lie—a lie is a sin, and a sin-is a sin-is a sin. So does that mean that Gentile families who hid Jews during the Holocaust were sinning when they told the SS Officers that there were no Jews in the house? And if that was okay, does that mean there’s a hierarchy of sin? If not, can something like that be ethical and sinful at the same time? When it comes to a situation like this, is there a difference between ‘ethically okay’ and ‘theologically okay’?

My Favourite Up-and-Coming Artist

My favourite up-and-coming artist has piece hanging at the Kelowna Art Gallery right now--her name is Joanna Suderman, and you can see some of her work on her daughter of a king site. That's her drawing of a violin up there--did I mention she just recently turned 16? And oh yeah, she's my cousin.

my secret life as a valley girl

okay, I don't have a secret life as a valley girl. But I got my hair cut today, and the hairdresser blowdried my hair straight, so I kinda look like a valley girl now. Hopefully that will pass as soon as I wash it and the nappy-head returns.

I finally learned my lesson and stopped going to the posh salon downtown. Why I ever started going there, I'll never know--they're really expensive and kinda snooty, but they lure you in with their "I'm so cool and you could be too" ambiance. But after two chin-length hair cuts when I asked for shoulder-length, I decided that they were a little too cool for me. So, after work today, I walked three doors down to my local beauty shop (yes, we still call them that in our little Dean Heights Shopping Centre), and an hour later I walked out with my self-image intact. Plus I got to know Carly the Hair-Dresser-Gal, an artist who wants to study psychology and has actually been to the Place a few times. All in all, a pretty good way to spend an afternoon. So no more visits to posh salons for me--the local beauty/barber shop is where it's at, folks.

How Randy (thankfully) Ruined My Week

I had a plan. I had the rest of this year all planned out for our youth Bible Study. And then I heard Randy’s sermon on Sunday, and I knew my plan was toast. For those of you who missed it, it was about community (click here for the transcript--it's well worth the read).

To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t get it out of my head. This fixation was made even worse with the remembrance of an online conversation between Ron Cole and James Kingsley about this same topic (check that one out here ). Re-reading this conversation, and re-reading Randy’s sermon, made me, well, a little uncomfortable. Randy, James, and Ron were making me ask myself if I was really participating in true community. And more than that, they were making me ask myself whether I was, as James would say, really “uncovering” community in our youth ministry, or if I was just contributing to the status quo.

So I took a good hard look at what’s been happening in our youth ministry—or, more accurately, what hasn’t been happening. The phrase that kept coming back to me was this: what kind of community are we to be? I stole one of Ron’s phrases to help me contemplate that question: the re-telling of who we are. How does our story shape us?

Several years ago our youth chose a verse that we would centre our ministry around: “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.” (Ephesians 2:19-20 NIV).
I went back to that verse, asking how it shapes who we are.

…fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household…
-A community where togetherness abounds, because we are family
-A community that holds each other accountable, because we are family
-A community where new people are welcomed, because we are family
-A community that prays for each other, because we are family
-A community that prays for our global neighbourhood, because we are family

…built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets…
-A community that gathers around the Word of the Lord like a campfire
-A community that learns from those who have gone before

…with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone…
-A community where the good news of Jesus is at the centre of who we are

Is this who we are? To a certain extent. But I’m not willing to settle for “sort of”. I’ve heard people say that you can’t experience true community in a ‘youth group’—that they will always be cliquey, always be exclusionary. I can’t believe that’s true, or I may as well pack it in right now. So Randy, James, and Ron, thank you for ruining my week, because the apple cart needed an upset.

A Stomach Churning Morning

There is only one station that my boss will allow us to listen to at the Pie Shop. In fact, we listen to it whether we want to or not—CBC Radio One is compulsory listening at Robertshaw Pies. So this morning, I was mindlessly making my lemon tart mix when I hear the topics for today on the program “The Current”. One of those topics was described with the following teaser: “What happens when a new breed of church mixes salvation and salesmanship to put posteriors in pews”? That’s right, we’ve hit the big time, folks: today’s topic was church marketing. The first part of the story was about a particular church in Ontario, a Mennonite church at that, which, in the eyes of many, seems to have a particularly marketing-based feel to its services. Not knowing the church particularly well (although I have been to its sister church in Winnipeg) I can’t really comment on it. The second part of the story was an interview with an actual church marketer (is anyone else a little green at the thought of that being a real thing?). This marketer said that what’s really going to grab people is “experience-based marketing”. We should be selling the experience of church, because, as he puts it, “it’s not just what you sell, but how you sell it.” So who should the church look to for guidance in this area? His two suggestions were Disney and Starbucks, two of the great experience-based marketing geniuses. Starbucks sells ambience—it sells ‘cool’. And when you go to Disneyland, you’re “buying a smile on [your] child’s face.” So when it comes to churches, you’re buying an experience you’re looking for from religion. If there was ever any doubt that consumerism has invaded the church, those doubts should be long gone.

As if that didn’t make me queasy enough, then came the main tagline: that, if you have a good product, “the product will sell itself…marketing is most successful when the product delivers on the promise it makes”. The product—by that, I’m assuming we’re referring to Jesus, right? So if we ‘sell’ Jesus, and if He ‘delivers’, then we hop in the shower and they leave the money on the nightstand and everyone goes home happy, right?

I’m going to get in so much trouble for this post.

To hear the story, visit http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2006/200605/20060502.html