LSTC: Community Features: Senior Art Show

		“Art in our Seminary...” From "The Door" (for the week beginning February 27, 2006) By Sarah Olson

		In the coming weeks of Lent, the Chapel lobby will be filled with the art of members of our community, pieces collected together by the senior class for an art show. The show is entitled *“on the way : pilgrImages.”* We are seeking to name, visually, the pilgrImages that we take in our lives of faith.
		The art show, while being a great opportunity to celebrate the gifts of our community and hopefully to raise some money for the senior class gift of Greening the Chapel, also seeks to bring the presence of the creative and artistic into our theological studies and life of faith. It is intentional that the art is in the Chapel Lobby, for the images are not distinct from our life of worship or from our journey of faith. Rather, art is deeply woven into our lives of faith and through our work as theologians. Weavers understand that cloth is made from the tension of the warp and the weft, yarns in two directions; tensions in different ways, used to form symbol, warmth, and art. Lutherans like to talk about dialectic. We are both saint and sinner. We proclaim law and gospel. We live in the world of already and not yet. We confess God as both immanent and transcendent. It is into this dialectic, the warp and the weft held in tension, that I have made sense of the transformative power of art. Art weaves us into the tension of these dialectics, to hold us in the midst of both the transcendence and the immanence of God. In attending to the immanence, art pulls us into the earth, to the very place where we find ourselves; it speaks the truth of the present reality. “Art can reveal what we are groping to understand, what we know deep within us but are unable to express. The power of revelation is one of art’s distinctive features” (Janet R. Walton, Art and Worship, 77). In encountering art – in being encountered by art – we are challenged to see things new, for our paradigms to be shifted. We focus on the immanent reality of God and the reality of the world around us. Art exposes God in our midst, the Holy in strange and new places, with a new face, that we might have eyes to see a glimpse of God’s presence and activity around us. Art also exposes the broken reality, the ways we fail to live as God’s people, revealing injustice, oppression, and the demonic in our midst. Art, in ugliness and beauty, speaks truth to the immanent reality of God. While moving us to a deeper connection of the reality, art also pushes us into the mystery of God, to be grasped by God’s transcendence. Artistic expression, in various modes and processes, point us to God who is just beyond, to be caught in the mystery, to be faithfully pulled into the expansiveness of God which cannot be held. Through art, we learn that we must always use the particular in representation of the universal, always metaphor, symbol and story. Art teaches us to take off our shoes, to know transcendence which teaches us to imagine, to vision a world which is bigger, deeper and more intimate that we can comprehend. It is this “mystery – the life of Jesus- [which] convinces us that compassion is connected with transcendence” (Walton, 57). We are challenged to catch a hopeful vision of a dream beyond our view, to dare to visualize a God’s reign among us, to embody and hopefully claim God’s abundance, justice and compassion. Art dares us to have faith. Art weaves together the immanent and transcendent, the now and not yet. We move beyond the limited scope of our rationality, engaging our whole beings in the just beyond, being pushed to the margins and awareness of incarnation and mystery. As it makes connections, art weaves the warp and weft of our reality and beyond, to uncover truth while envisioning a future, both already and not yet. Art weaves together opposing tensions which capture us, teach us, and move us. We practice art in creative process, and in worship we practice ourselves into being, or maybe perhaps we are mediums for God who in creative process, practices us into being. You are invited to join us in this creative process, to be encountered by the images created by your community, to dare to enter into the transcendent and immanent of God through art, and to be transformed.

		For more information about Community Life at LSTC contact: Dean of Community Office: Room 325 Phone: (773) 256-0756
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