Art and Spirituality: Sarah Clarke from CMS

Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose.

I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

C: I’m really delighted this episode to be joined by Sarah Clark from the Church Mission Society.

Thank you ever so much for joining us, Sarah.

Do you want to just introduce yourself?

S: Yeah, I'm Sarah Clark.
I lead the undergraduate program at CMS, so we train people doing their degrees, undergraduates and masters and DTHs in theology, ministry and mission.
And my specialism, or at least what my doctorate is in, is philosophical and theological aesthetics.
That's the area that I care about, I think.

C: Okay. So do you want to give us a bit of a definition of that?

S: Oh, such a difficult thing.
I should not have said anything.

Really, the thing I look at, so aesthetic, you walk down the high street or, you know, down the main street in any town and you see things that say beauty and aesthetics or dentists and aesthetics.
We've kind of reduced this word aesthetics or indeed beauty to sort of what people look like.

But aesthetics really kind of covers a plethora of different things.
And so it's the sort of feeling, it's the mystery, that sort of non-tangible things that we can't quite grasp hold of.

And I look at through what we might think of as the ‘thing’ beauty.

So what is that experience that we have of beauty and why is it important?
So you'll experience beauty through the arts. You could think of it as being awe and wonder, so the top of a mountain or being at the cinema and the hairs go up on the back of your neck. What is that experience?

And where that sort of lands itself in my job, is how do we think of the creative or art as part of a spiritual journey? And why is art or the expression of art and creativity a really important thing?

And with art funding disappearing at the fast rate that it's going, I am actually really passionate about this thing, beauty and art, which I think is paramount to what it means to be a human being.

C: Yeah.
Christianity has had quite a mixed relationship with that, hasn't it?
In that in the pre-Reformation there was a lot of art and it was absolutely central and then it was kind of not allowed.

I'm wondering what the legacy of that period of time when all of the art was removed from churches.
Do you think that we still have the legacy of that now?
Do you notice it?

S: Yeah, I think, well as art in the late 19th century shifted into a kind of secular space, so it got separated from God.

So beauty got separated from God, the kind of artistic expression, which has always had a problem because we understand what it means to put things into words, but art is less tangible, can't get hold of it.

And so whereas it was used in many points in history to convey gospel to those who were illiterate, where words couldn't be used, art came and stepped in, or it was a way of displaying glorification, but then you got yourself into a muddle about this idea of the transcendent and actually you have removed something about who God is. You've diminished him in some respect to say he's shown up here.

So there's always been this fight and also art has kind of been seen as audacious or frivolous in how do you care for the poor.
So there's always this balance which has gone on within Christianity and fights that go backwards and forwards and ideas of idolatry, etc., etc.
And iconography has caused quite a lot of problems within that.

But I think one of the biggest shifts of where we are in the church today was shifting art has shifted itself out of a God space, out of being rooted within Christianity into a secular space, and then your experience of it becomes sublime, and sublime is not a theological term.

And so when you shift into that, the church then saw it as other, and then it's up to the same kind of corruption that anything else would be that's in the secular world.

So then how do we let it back in again?
Well, we can only let it back into the church as long as it's so obviously is about God.

So unless it's a painting of Jesus, it's not welcome.

You can have music that sounds like U2, but it's got to be Matt Redman singing about the glorification of God and how he's coming down to save us.

So it can only be redeemed with full explicit Christian content.

And then you also have this subset of a person called a Christian artist, which I don't even know what to do with that idea. Like what does that even mean?
Like you're an artist, you're not an artist.

And so this idea of Christian artist is this kind of warped idea of the redemption of the creative to make it acceptable to church.

So we are living out of the divorce of arts from Christianity rather than a legacy of the arts being so included within Christianity.

Does that make sense?

C: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
There is always a tendency, isn't there, to have a kind of a sacred secular divide.

S: Absolutely.

C: I think what you're saying is that that is really, really very much exemplified in our relationship to the arts.

S: Yeah, completely.
And also, you know, it's a complicated conversation.

You know, there was periods of time where in industrialisation, where art kind of exploded as a sort of an escape in some sort of an attempt to reclaim beauty in its mysterious nature, which was disappearing with the rise of science.

And so we have lost, you know, Charles Taylor would talk about we're in a time of disenchantment.

So we have lost a sense of the mystery and the enchantment.
So if you lose those things, and art speaks to those things, then art has no place.

But we're even seeing that now in the secular space.

So I don't think that is just a Christian issue.

C: No, no, but it has been a Christian issue.
I'm just wondering what the connection is between art and the sort of the academic sphere that you're in, and how students are able to express their learning and their understanding.

You talked about words, we know what to do with words, don't we?
As you were saying, and they're much more easily controlled, because it's much easier to see whether somebody's got the right answer.

And so the way that academia has assessed things and understood things and expressed things becomes kind of the normal way of doing it.

So I'm just wondering about some of your students who might be coming from slightly less academic background, whether there is space to do some of their expressing of what they're learning in alternative artistic ways, or whether that is sort of still a work in progress, really.

S: It’s still a massive work in progress. Yeah, so they can do it in my module on art and theology, but nowhere else.

So whenever you do creative stuff, how's it quantifiable in our new market?
How would you know what a 70% is? And it's always equivalent of a thousand words.

Like I've just had a student who's written an original piece of music to trace the beginnings of Genesis. So when was creation, when was the kind of creativity first birthed? And it's a really phenomenal piece of work. It's only about five minutes long.

And, you know, I'm likely to give him a really good grade for that. I'm going to have to write a justification to the moderator.

C: That’s really interesting. So you can give it that grade, so long as you put some words in place to explain it.

S: Yeah, because, you know, I used to be an interior designer, graphic designer, and I know what it means to get a brief.

There is no equivalent within academia, within, you know, this type of academia that has that creative brief, because the creative brief sets the tone, sets the parameters, and then you work out how they marked against those parameters.

But the syllabus that we have to mark them against in the learning outcomes doesn't correlate to the idea of brief.

C: Yeah, yeah.
I had a conversation a number of years ago with a guy who was going for training for the Anglican ministry from a very sort of, not from an academic background, and somebody with dyslexia who found all of that stuff quite difficult.

And he was saying how much he struggled on the course, but there was one module where he was allowed to do something creative and he created something in wood.
And he talked about how that was the space where he really felt that sense of connection and being understood and affirmation.
And he enjoyed that one. All of the essays and things he really, really struggled with.

S: Yeah.

C: So it was interesting.

S: Yeah.
And there's an incredible amount you could say.

But I mean, you know, I did my postgraduate studies at Regent College in Vancouver, which really promotes the Christian imagination and Christian arts.

One of my assignments, I did it from an artistic point of view. And it was seated at the table with all my enemies. And I had all of these dummies set up around a dinner table, and they were all my own personal enemies on the faces. And it took three people to mark it, because they had to work out how to unpack it.
And I remember feeling this sense of, because I'm dyslexic as well, I had learned so much more through doing that.

C: It sounds like for you, once you are speaking artistically, you're speaking in your heart language.
So the learning becomes very, very natural.
Whereas if you've got to translate that into words that are difficult and awkward and don't do what you want them to, then that the learning, almost the learning gets lost in the process to a degree.

S: Yes, because you're spending too much time trying to articulate to the point where you get so immersed in that you've forgotten what point you're trying to make over here.
And also, I see this a lot with the pioneers, because in practice, a lot of them are instant reflectors.

So they're out there doing their practice, reflecting almost in the moment.

If they're setting up an event, they could go in with a kind of outline of what the event is.

When they turn up, they didn't expect this group of people to get here and they realised their event doesn’t really suit this group of people.

So they changed the narrative. They changed maybe even some of the elements of the event in the moment, in real time. And then they come to write a theological reflection. And it was deeply theological what they were doing.
But unless they're with a notebook, they don't know what they reflected on.

But I do think it's really interesting.

Whereas if I then said, do a piece of art about this, I bet you they could do it.

Because it would be hands on, they could visualise it, bring all the pieces together that they're thinking that they've acted out.
But shifting that into the words makes it purely in the left side of the brain, and they've got rid of everything that was on the right.

C: Mmm That's really interesting.
That reflective space is really valuable, isn't it?

When I was chatting to Rob Rogers, he was talking about as a practitioner, the fact that actually having some time at CMS gave him the opportunity to reflect on his practice, which was really, really valuable.

So the reflection is really good at that opportunity to sort of step back, and understand what you're doing in a different way. And then bring that learning back into the space of practice, I think is really, really key.

But it's kind of how you help people to do that.

When we were talking before, Sarah, you were talking about some research that you'd done that had been sparked by actually seeing people's spiritual connection with art.

Do you want to share a bit about that?

S: Yeah, so one of our modules is community development.
And part of that, we went to visit community developers in Stoke-on-Trent.

And Stoke-on-Trent has got this rich history of pottery and art.

But there's this weird remnant of it there as the pottery and I'm like, this probably isn't very fair to Stokies to talk about it in this way. But a lot of that industry went out the door.
And then people don't feel a sense of pride in what they're doing because their pride's left.

But that artistry still hangs around, you can still feel, I can't explain it properly, but it's that feeling, you can feel creativity and the artistic endeavor or inspiration in the place.

C: I’ll just share with you, I had a friend who she and her husband were pastoring a church in one of the council estates at Stoke.
She's an artist but has grown up in that kind of environment.

And so acknowledging the importance of her own art took a while, but they put on an art exhibition in their church.

And suddenly from this council estate, people started turning up with art that they had completely unexpectedly.

And I went and saw it, it was the most moving thing.

And you would not, if you walked along those streets, you would not expect there to be all of this art in Abbey Hulton in these council houses, but they had all turned up and there was masses of it, absolutely masses of it.

S: That doesn't surprise me.

C: So you're right, it's in the air.

S: Yeah. And we went to this project and it was women who, I think it was women that had been abused or been in some sort of domestic violence or had been working in prostitution, it was a collection.

But basically it was women that had been downtrodden in some way or another as a result of being women.

And they had this art project going on.
And when you walked in there, I had met a couple of those women beforehand and felt the deprivation of their spirit. But when I went there and I saw them involved in art, I could feel the elevation of their spirit.

So I can't explain it again. It's one of those kind of mysterious non-tangibles of art, but there was something of that, and it may not work in any other place.

And also I heard a story of this woman who as kind of the matriarch of the family, nobody in her family had ever had a job. And there was just years on years of lack of self-worth and they were just about survival. And they went to this thing in Stoke and there was a quartet there and she'd never seen live instruments.
And she'd carried the weight, horrible stories of suffering, of prison sentences, of all sorts of different things. And she'd had to hold all that together. And when she heard this quartet wept.
And that sounds so minimal, but she was a grandmother or great grandmother.
And there she was singing an instrument that played for the first time and it made her into tears. And she wept and wept, not just a little bit of tears, but wept and wept.

And I think to me, there's something about that experience of the arts that cuts through, that cuts through to spirits and it goes across all different backgrounds and experiences.

C: Yeah. Yeah.
So where did that lead you to next?

S: So that's what's on the inquiry of just realising how phenomenally important the arts is, how we consider life, how we think about ourselves spiritually.
And ironically, now I teach at a mission organisation on ministry and mission, but it's something that I've always kind of veered off that.

But what I want people to do is to come into an experience with the Creator, with the Trinity.

And there is something about the arts that brings people into that relationship, whether it's known or unknown.

And it connects to the spirit, the mind and the body, holistic.

And my investigation, my inquiry, what is it about the arts that takes people into those places?

And it took me on my own journey as well for my own spirituality.

C: One of the things that occurred to me as you were speaking is that at some level it feels quite important that the art that somebody is creating is allowed to speak for itself without going back to the beginning of our conversation, without that having kind of requirement before you start creating of, well, this needs to be a picture of Jesus or this needs to be overtly spiritual.
And if it becomes overtly spiritual, then great.

But it feels like to kind of what you were describing in that woman's response was a very, you could say a very right brain kind of response, but it's sort of coming from deep within, isn't it?
It's very much, very much of connection.

And if you start putting frames around that, well, this needs to be Christian art, then that feels like it would pollute that space to some extent.

S: Yeah, very much so.
I mean, it was a very Renaissance idea that we're all creative.

And, you know, indeed, I have taught that. We're all created because we're made in the image of creation. I think that we do all respond to creativity.

There is something deep within all of us that responds to creativity.

And if we got rid of, you know, all the art funding's disappearing, and we are systematising, really putting boundaries around the outcome of art.

So the University of the Arts in London is being consistently accused of really putting boundaries around what art is, you know, and that puts all these boundaries around what art is.

And I say, you know, as myself as an artist, you know, what's your style? Is this copied from somebody’s? And I'm just saying, leave me be, you know, yes, maybe give me a few things.
But creativity is by its very nature, it's experimental, and it's individual, and it's an expression of learning. You come into one bit of creativity, and it shifts you to another place.

You know, this all feeds back to me to Adam, like when we were given the earth, Adam and Eve, you know, we've screwed up what it means to look after the earth and have this dominion over it. But what if we're asked to cultivate it and join with it?

And I think art's very similar.
You cultivate and join in with this creative process.
And so you don't know where that's going to go or where it's going to move.
And we have been so keen on backbeat and categorising and squashing, that I'm not surprised the art funding has disappeared, because we've gotten to value it as it is.

And, you know, with that story of your friends in Stoke kind of stands out to me because these people that wouldn't be perceived by the galleries as people who were artists, and yet they're bringing their art.

Well, who says they can't do art?

C: Yeah, if we're understanding that we have an innate connection to the creative, then we can trust that people will meet the divine in the context of the creative.

S: Absolutely they will. Absolutely they will.
And quite which aspects of the Trinity that you meet, we are participating in that which our creative put out there for us.

C: Yeah, yeah.
You don't need to be able to draw a sunset to be moved by it.

S: Indeed. Absolutely.

C: Yeah.
So what did you discover about how people connect through art?

S: Watching students. There's an exercise I do in my module every year. And every year, there's more than one student cries.

And I think when we're moved by the arts, that there is a Professor Dick in the Netherlands, he said the body doesn't differentiate how it learns.

And so I think when you watch people engage with the arts or have an experience of the arts, even if they're not visibly moved by it, there'll be something that they've taken and inhabited that they didn't have before.

C: Yeah.

S: I think even the way we lay out the arts these days, you don't give any people the space to be able to inhabit the art.

They get trundled around thinking that they've got to have come up with some intellectual response to what they're seeing, some educational experience of what it is they're seeing.

Or we think if we've experienced, we've got to have known it ourselves.

But what I think I see within people is they're met on a number of different levels, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physically.

C: John O'Donoghue, one of the things that he speaks about is that sense that when we encounter beauty, there is both a coming alive and a surrender that happens at the same time.

It's a beautiful description of what it can feel like.

S: Yes, you're right.
He is one of my favourite people to speak about beauty.

And even when you read his blessings, you see that that thing goes on in his blessing as well.

That you have this kind of your eyes are opened, but you also surrender.

C: Yeah, one of my very early podcasts, I talked about beauty and spirituality.
And that was kind of John O'Donoghue, my ponderings having read some of his stuff.

You were beginning to talk about where your journey, your spiritual journey has gone in connection to this.

S: Yes. And I think when I look back now, I mean, I became a Christian when I was 26.
And your zeal for Christianity after that is, you know, it's kind of off the charts.

And within two weeks of becoming a Christian, I left my job as an interior designer and went to work for Tearfund and then went off to serve the poor in all the countries around the world.

So interior design wasn't Christian, which, you know, it’s so daft. But if I look back now, I think I could have joined all the pieces together. And I've been around council estates, and I used to do a lot of voluntary work. And I think now somebody gave me a jug of money, I'd love to go back and meet with councils and say to them, let's paint these places or designed to add beauty in to give people pride.

Why would you have pride in something that's great and looks like a prison?

C: I’m wondering, in that moment of kind of new Christian enthusiasm, when you left your design job, whether in the process of doing that, you found yourself leaving behind some of that creative person that you were?

S: Yes, I did lose something and whichever job I'm in, I try and bring my creative side back in.
And before I did interior design, I was a visual merchandiser for Next. When I got to the end of a project, I did always feel a bit flat.

But it didn't have a depth, if that makes sense.
So I definitely need to bring my left and right brain together.

That does need to be the academic for me with the art and creativity, which is what I've recognised. And I went into theological training and kind of discovering through reading Thomas Merton that if God is anything, he is love. And so therefore, if we are anything, we are love.

He is the event love. And so we are the event love.

And through kind of getting into being an artist, and because I've always been an artist, if I want to find my being, stop trying to find it. But just get in creation and do art because this is who you are.

And as you discover more about who you are, you will discover more about the creator because you're made in his image.

And so this moving into embracing the arts without question and creation without inhibition, I'm trusting that through the literature that I read, that my spirit is going to respond to the arts and creation, and that my spirit will respond to connecting God's obedience.

So the obedience is not to force myself to do those things.

The obedience is to be to let this period of time be. So there was communication going on, and experience going on in a different way. So then in this last month, this shift has been to an attentiveness to subtle changes in my spirit.

Why am I doing?
Because if God is anything, God says, you know, "Come be yourself before me."
And to really find out to be made in the image of God, to find your own sense of being, is to be more yourself, not less.
And there is an acknowledgement of these deep works that God is doing in me that I don't have words for.

C: So the art and the creative and nature are places where you feel much more at home and more yourself?

S: Yes.
And I submitted to them as the truest side of my nature.
As a dyslexic, in order to understand anything, I have to work really, really, really, really hard.
Once I work out the principles, I then don't have to work that hard.

Whereas the arts, no effort is required. You know, I'm coming home to myself.

C: Yes, that's a phrase that's been in my mind as you've been talking, that kind of sense of coming home.

S: When I'm doing creativity, you could probably have a herd of elephants going through the room and I may not notice.

C: Yes, you're completely in the flow.

S: Absolutely immersed, especially if I'm playing the cello.

C: It sounds like there was a part of you that you hadn't connected with when you were working before you became a Christian. So the kind of the artistic side of things was definitely there.
But then there was a connection or something that you encountered that you met that was really, really crucial at that moment of becoming a Christian.

But then there have been pieces of yourself that you've ended up leaving behind in kind of doing the good Christian journey with all of that enthusiasm.

S: Yeah, very much so.
Yeah, I mean, I was reading Teresa of Avila and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for two weeks after becoming a Christian. So I've always been inquisitive, I've always wanted to know why.
And I've always wanted to have deep conversations.

But I think, you know, in Tearfund, it's very on the conservative evangelical, at least it was when I worked there. And so you did shift away from the art.
And, you know, the kind of belief that I was taught that was that a Christian job was working for a para-church organisation or the church, you didn't have so called secular jobs.

C: Absolutely, absolutely.
Which comes back to that conversation that we had about music right at the beginning.
You know, what is a Christian artist?
Well, we are artists created in the image of God.

S: Yes.

C: It’s interesting that actually the spirituality that you were drawn to very early on, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Teresa of Avila is very kind of contemplative, right brain, heart led stuff, isn't it?

S: Yeah.

C: It seems that it quite often happens to people that they have this incredible encounter with God that touches something deep.
And then in the process of trying to understand that and make sense of it and live it out, can get sucked in by a Christian culture that does not teach us how to observe and connect with where God is connecting with us.
And instead, we kind of end up sort of moving into a box and leaving bits of ourselves behind and the need to kind of come around the circle and refined those pieces.
That's really not an uncommon experience, I think.

S: No, I think you're right.
We're all made in the image of God and we all have something to bring to the situation.
And so, recognising what it means being made in the image of God means that I now have the freedom as well to pick up experience of God in all things.

Whereas I think that narrative that I'd grown up with was it's only through the church, by the church, to the church, for the church.

C: Yeah. Yeah.
And that sense that we have a different superior level of contribution that we make because we're Christians, which is not borne out by what we see in the world.

S: Yeah, exactly.
The arts is one of the key ways to mission - it’s through the creative, through the right-brain.
Margaret Wheatley in her discussions about leadership says that the future of leadership is through a much more right brain, and in fact, she calls it a feminine leadership. That actually whilst everything sits within this idea of the left-brain and all left-brain ways of doing stuff, we're not going to be holistic beings. We're not going to be integrated people.

I think that my aim is to shift into a much more balanced idea of left and right and to not think necessarily about what I've lost in art. But how do I, you know, and I'm sitting with art much more than I was before, but it's because I'm trying to regrow that muscle.

C: Just thinking about the fact that we are called to live by the spirit and not by the law, I'm wondering whether there is a bit of a correlation between the law, which is all about writing and written and rules and is easy to police from the outside.
I think that's part of the reason that art doesn't get space.
Because if you're leading a church or a community or a denomination, then words create barriers and rules and you can work out whether people are in the box that you want them to be in or not.

Whereas Jesus' description of the spirit, Jesus says that if those are born of the spirit, like the wind, that you don't know where they're going to, where they're coming from.

It's very difficult to control somebody who's working in that space, or to give them rules, or to mark their work.

S: Well, there's a great book by a guy called Gordon McKenzie, who used to be the creative director for Hallmark, called Orbiting the Giant Hairball.

And he talks about the hairball being the institution.

But he's got a great little picture in it, like half the pages pictures and the other half is written stuff.

And he talks about how you're out in space, the astronaut go out into space, you want to have a wiggly body connecting them to the spaceship because otherwise, if you go too far down that creative route, you've gone. But then God does give us boundaries, that's the point.

And you can't create outside God, the spirit does hold us to account, but in a different way, and allow ourselves to be creative and perhaps mentor one another, but not in a heavy handed way.

C: I frequently use as an anchor point that bit in Galatians, where Paul is talking about, well, how do you work out what it means to be walking with the spirit?

Well, because it has spirit like fruit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, all of those things.
Yeah, so it's not that it's an absolute free for all.
But it's about Shalom wholeness, isn't it?

S: Absolutely.

C: It’s about being who you are.

S: Like, why are we doing anything?
You know, I'm constantly saying to students, great, but what we're doing it for, if we're heading to the redemption of all things in Shalom, then think about how what we're doing heads towards that.

According to Ian McGilchrist, I think it's something horrible, that 80% of people under 30 feel like life is meaningless.
And we're left to curate our own meaning.
And I think I don't have to create my own meaning. I know what my meaning is, but I have to learn to walk into it.
Because I feel meaningless because I feel all these other things.

And even my Dark Knight of the Soul has made me feel meaningless because the meaning has been taken away from my life.

So now I have to go back to it with obedience, which is what Thomas Merton has taught me.

C: Yeah.

S: And the engagement with beauty and the arts came to me through a secular women's wilding circle. That I have found it outside of the faith, but not outside of God.
I don't believe there is an outside of God.

C: Absolutely.
So what would you want to say to people kind of at the beginning of their journey?
Like, if you could go back to Sarah, who's about to leave her interior design job and rush off with Tearfund.
And obviously, there will be ways that you will have grown and learned that you wouldn't have done if you hadn't done that. So it's not that anything's wasted.
But I wonder what you would say to her now.

S: I would have got a spiritual director. I mean, even that's a risk. Get somebody who's trying to push you down the whatever path.
And I look back now and I think formation spirituality circles are really powerful. I'd have perhaps joined one of those.
And I wouldn't have been hasty to make decisions. But I think the Ignatian spiritual circle helps you like the prayer circle.

It was through my spirit that I met Christ. If I look back now, I would have given myself more space and time. And I would have pushed more into the contemplative stuff.

C: The great gift of the Ignatian spirituality is that it's all about discerning what's going on within you, isn't it?
Rather than allowing somebody else or a system of thought to interpret what's going on and give it labels that might not fit it.
And the other thing that occurs to me is that probably you would have kept with a broader sense of where the spiritual is to be found.
It is everywhere.

S: Yeah, I mean, I did understand that even though I didn't add to verbalise it.
There was some profound, when I look back now, there was some profound understandings of God very early on in my faith and the real depths of experience of him.

I used to see it as needing to have the whole understanding of our faith with all the different aspects, the contemplative, the scholarly, the philosophical inquiry, all these different things.

But in the last two or three years of being in pioneering, I'm like, "Oh, no, this is opened up to far bigger than that."

There's this book called Rescuing the Gospel Back from the Cowboys written by a guy called Richard Twiss.

And you suddenly realise how God has revealed himself through the First Nations narrative, not through Christianity as its placed itself.

Saint Francis of Assisi picks up on, you know, God is in everything and even in the carrot. And yet the spirituality of the First Nations already embodied all of that.

So, you know, and then you go, "Oh, hang on a second. God shows up in all these different places.” Who’s to say God didn't turn up to the First Nations before?

C: Well, I want to say of course. Of course God was already there.

S: Absolutely. And their connection to the land when they were allowed to be themselves is exceptional.
You know, to the point when all the Westerners romped up to America and said, "It's a beautiful, bountiful world full of absolute glory."
And then they trashed it all because they disconnected from the land.

If we understand God is in the whole world that there is a divide when you understand God in all things. - And yes, you need to be careful of some stuff.
And I think I always knew that God was in all things in all places.
But I didn't inhabit that as a way to live because the church crushed it out of me.

C: Yeah. Yeah.
And because once you begin inhabiting the community of church, then other things kind of often they don't have the space because you're part of this group that sees the world in a particular way.
And so you naturally end up just sort of leaving behind some of those perspectives.

S: If you don't have conversation partners, then you don't have community around it.

C: It feels like there's a bit of a parallel.
My own experience of exploring the feminine divine.

S: Yes. Yes, yes.

C: That I have done quite a lot of that exploring and have a much, much richer understanding and connection with God as feminine as well as masculine and as well as transcendent, which has been beautiful.
But there is not a rich space of community in which to actually practice and explore that.

So I can do all of that thinking outside. I can do all of that thinking and connecting.

But if I step into the sort of the Christian community church space, people are quite uncomfortable with that. They don't know what to do with it.

I feel quite uncomfortable about bringing expression and practice that would feel very uncomfortable to everybody else. So I don't.

And then I feel it's sort of sliding away and I have to very deliberately go back out and re-find it.
And gradually that's become integrated, but it's taking a long time.
It's not a finished work.

And it feels like there is a parallel to that thing about the art and about God being in everything that you can have that understanding. And you had that through your kind of contemplative reading.

But when you are inhabiting a community that doesn't know what that's about, I mean, it partly it's all about time, isn't it?
If you're spending a lot of time within this community that doesn't see that and doesn't understand that, then you kind of have to leave that part of you at the door to an extent because it doesn't fit.

S: I think there is a real importance in trying to find a community.

C: Sometimes I think it's for a season in that you need to establish the new thing properly and then that's not in danger of disappearing.

And then you can re-engage with something where it's not because it's already established in you and there will be things within the old thing that are still useful, but they're not any longer threatening thing that's grown within you, I think.

C: That’s been really good.

Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

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