406 - Creative Arts and Christian Renewal: A Symposium

Creative Arts and Christian Renewal: A Symposium
By the Thomas More Association
and the Department of Library Science
Rosary College, Chicago, Ill. June 9-10, 1967.

When Edward Albee's play The Delicate Balance was featured in a news and picture magazine, the photographer posed four characters in the play on a see-saw, with husband and wife on the fulcrum. The caption explained (one hoped wryly) that this balance did not appear on the stage, but the reviewer hoped, by the presentation, to clarify Albee's theme, title, and communication.

Another kind of delicate balance was achieved this past summer when the Thomas More Association presented a symposium on "Creative Arts and Christian Renewal," June 9 and 10, at Rosary College, River Forest (a suburb of Chicago). The staging suggested the delicate balance; speakers voiced it, and the participating audience both echoed and re-created it.

On stage-for each session-were the panelists: Daniel Berrigan, S.J., poet, essayist, and theologian; Philip Scharper, executive editor of Sheed and Ward; Sister Mary Corita, I.H.M., artist whose "pop art" serigraphs have been shown from Greenwich Village galleries to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; Gabriel Fielding, British novelist and physician; Brian Friel, Irish short story writer and dramatist. The Most Rev. John J. Wright, Bishop of Pittsburgh, was chairman of all sessions. The Bishop would be the first to admit that he added a splendid weight to the fulcrum; he was a superb challenger, a witty commentator, and a "balancer" capable of mocking the balance.

Sister Candida, O.P., President of the College, welcomed the guests-varying in number from 600 to 1000, according to speaker-to the Symposium with the wish that they might find and hold Socrates' thought, voiced at an earlier symposium, "Love the everlasting possession of the good." There was much "good" held in delicate balance of thought and counter-thought, between artist and artist, and artist with audience.

His face worn and grooved with the intensity of his concern for every human person, especially every person suffering through war in Viet Nam, Father Daniel Berrigan spoke like Jeremiah in a suburb.

Art, he said, has a holy and historic function. Art gives insights. Because we are in crisis after crisis, we are no longer able to glide over, or to learn to live with problems. We must, instead, learn to understand them and work them out. Art may help us.

But on the scales of art and faith are weights which draw them both down. A sign of unfaith is the appalling lack of joy, and the supreme unfaithfulness is the dealing of death in the presence of the living God.

407 - Creative Arts and Christian Renewal: A Symposium

Father Berrigan asked the church to speak out bravely, in art and in all things. Terrible things happen, he said, when it does not. In art we have atrocities like the National Shrine in Washington.

What Father Berrigan offered as hope was the truth that the Holy Spirit was promised to man. He dreamed of a day when theologians would be moral and artists capable of anger. In that day, he believed, the Spirit would prevail.

For him, it was the young-the twenty to thirty group-who seem to be "real," ready for the Spirit. The young people have found a way. They are grabbing the historical moment and riding with it. They know we must break down before we can build up. Because we are in the first half of that process, life today is difficult.

When Father Berrigan was asked, in the question period, "What is an artist?" he said, "I don't know. Maybe at a golden jubilee one has a better chance of seeing what it all means. It's about as difficult to say what life is … I don't know."

Saturday morning opened with a concelebrated mass. Twenty priests stood about the altar on the auditorium stage; each held his hand toward the bread and wine; each spoke the words of consecration; each offered the gift and was also given the gift. It was a great corporate action of the whole assembly.

Yet something of the steadily questioning attitude of the participants toward the entire symposium was revealed later in the day when someone in the audience complained sharply that at a meeting of artists speaking on their art to the people of God, no effort had been made to incorporate art into the liturgical action. Not much applause supported the censure. Perhaps one can presume that most of the worshipers enriched by the simplicity of the communal action did not feel impoverished by a lack of splendor.

Philip Scharper spoke on Saturday morning. The "good" he shared was twofold: a looking back at art in Christianity to see what could be learned from the past; a looking ahead in time to speculate on art and Christianity in the twenty-first century. Gaming, Mr. Scharper said, was a way in which businessmen sometimes let loose their imaginations to create hypotheses which-if accepted as possibilities-would demand creative answers. In imagination, then, he approached the twenty-first century-life lived in a global village. The peace of the global village would have been won in the 1970's when great powers accepted the reality that nuclear war would mean the extermination of man, and that the only war that would help would be a war on want and disease. The global village that would evolve would be crowded with six billion people, dominantly brown and yellow and non-Christian.

408 - Creative Arts and Christian Renewal: A Symposium

Three out of every four persons would never have the gospel preached to them.

Mr. Scharper's imaginative thrust was powerful, non-Orwellian, and non-comforting. He asked: "How relevant would Christianity be? How relevant would the artist be?

Christians in that time would have laid aside every vestige of triumphalism and would be, indeed, the poor suffering servants of God. The artist (he said there were already some like Rouault) would paint and write of the Christian as God's servant among men. Cathedrals, "the great white whales of architecture," would be gone. The church might worship in geodesic domes that could be quickly set up, quickly moved-on a factory roof, in an office building, within the foyer of an apartment house. The Christian people would be a small community in dialogue among its members and with those outside.

Church and the artist will have to collaborate. Each should try to re-understand the incarnation: the word made man among men. The prophets, singers, dancers, poets, theologians who will walk the streets in 2000 A.D. are in our classrooms and homes now. "How," Mr. Scharper asked, "are we preparing them?"

Later, someone asked what representation of Christ would be relevant to the world of the twenty-first century. "The Christ of the beatitudes," Mr. Scharper replied gravely, "who had nowhere to lay his head."

When Sister Mary Corita, I.H.M., spoke and presented her slides in the early afternoon, she was introduced by a triple wave of expectation. The stage had been cleared and the screen lowered; the audience was seated (the largest number in attendance-about 1000-for this session); suddenly, from the first row of the balcony, from childrens' pipes in the lips of young men and women, soap bubbles floated over the auditorium. "I'm forever blowing bubbles . . . I'm forever…. Hands reached up to touch a bubble-the eternal wish to "touch and hold" a dream. Everyone smiled. Gently the bubbles floated their small rainbows over the audience.

Bishop Wright introduced Sister Corita: "Since Lady Bird Johnson has cleaned up the billboards, Sister Corita has taken them over." Sister Corita smiled at the audience, dozens of brightly colored "Come-alive" buttons clipped to her habit, and a highly colored paisley-design shopping bag at her side. Later she extracted from her shopping bag plastic containers of Joy detergent and presented them to the panelists.

College students in the front row lifted their hands to clap. Each hand was covered by a shining-smooth, brilliantly colored paper bag. "Come alive. Come alive."

Today, Sister Corita said, people are in little groups, closed up in

409 - Creative Arts and Christian Renewal: A Symposium

Saran Wrap. We have a lot to learn from TV commercials; their makers spend time, skill, money, and ingenuity for one-minute messages about detergents and floor wax. But we bury the good news. Christ used the methods and messages of his time. If he were here today, he would tell his stories on film and TV; he would sit on the grass and walk and talk with the unwashed. We have a lot to learn.

McLuhan is right. The medium is the message. Children of the TV generation understand role playing. We have to understand the audience; we must try to know what they want. All the poetry of a painting is diminished by those who do not see it. Resurrect the message. To care about communication is to care about form.

Then the lights went out, and slides of Sister Corita's serigraphs were rapidly flashed on the screen to the accompaniment of folk song and "in" music, shockingly interrupted by the agonizing sound of missiles homing in; a siren's alternating whine and wail; the harsh rap of gun fire.

The serigraphs were color-radiant, and Sister Corita's script was superimposed on painful photographic records of Viet Nam dead and dying. The words, "Come alive," mocked the dead soldier in the water of a rice paddy; the poignant lines

My brother dies,
he starves,
he is myself

hung above the crouched oriental mother who had nothing with which to feed her starving child but her own desperate love. There were others:

The first choice
of the Christian
is Christ

and

Love is here to Stay

and

The biggest need
of thee
is me.

Smooth rhythms and cacophony of sound, interlocked with the immediacy of words and pictures, pushed the slide presentation into the consciousness of the audience. When the lights came on, there was silence, then full, uninhibited applause. "Bravo!" One young man in the audience said, "Sister Corita-I love you." The audience affirmed that love.

If one asks why the audience responded so fully, the answer was in Sister Corita herself. She is a real person; she was with the young, sym-

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pathetic toward them, though she did not pretend to be their age; she was thirty years older than their twenty years, and she said it. There was nothing phony about her message. When she was asked if what she was doing was permanent, she said simply that she didn't know, but one had to give what one could give-now. And she did give. Of that everyone was aware. She had perception and talent; she made things and gave them away. She gave with joy.

Later in the afternoon, when Gabriel Fielding spoke on "Sex and Symbolism and Modern Literature," he accepted Robert Frost's theory that every good novel is trying to be a poem, and-in his lapidary way --commented on British writers: D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh.

Symbolism, he said, had really come into focus through Joyce and Yeats, and now there was danger that the symbol would be considered more important than the thing symbolized. The artist can be trapped by his symbol and be prevented (by his concern for the symbol) from looking at reality.

In the end, for the artist, only honesty will do. But in writing about sex there is a big temptation to play to the gallery. Sex is a sure sell, and second rate works that make much of it can seem to be great, even in the opinion of the critics. For the reader, as well as for the critic, it is becoming increasingly difficult to be certain about genius.

After dinner, Brian Friel spoke. Through the earlier sessions, his appearance and his contributions had an unusual charm; his was a reticence, an unwillingness to make general statements, to be drawn into the slightest pontification. That spirit marked his delivery and communication.

We think, he said, that art should be self-supporting, always ready to entertain us, make flattering reflections of the life we lead, follow a pattern, be on hand like taxis. Art does none of these things. The arts grow and retract like waves, from theory to theory, from experiment to experiment. Flux is the only permanence; the persistence of the arts is search.

Impermanence is the only constant. Today there is isolation and loneliness for the artist; confusion for those who watch. The only concern of the dramatist is man, man in conflict with society, politics, other men, though presently there are new dramatic heroes-lesbians, prostitutes, a pope with the blood of millions of Jews on his hands.

Will it remain that way? We don't know. We do know that there is no going back, and that there will probably be further exploration of shock in drama; that the gap between commercial and serious drama will widen.

411 - Creative Arts and Christian Renewal: A Symposium

If we have had the theatre of despair, a theatre of hope already exists. It will grow. But it is not the function of the dramatist to answer. Dramatists question. They are vitally concerned with man's place in the world now. Men are crying out for the existence of something noble, something worthy. Out of this need can come the redemption of the human spirit.

In answer to a question, Mr. Friel said, "Every morning I thank God that Beckett was born, and that he wasn't twins."

There were other "balances." One of these was created by the tension, not between art and faith, but between youth and what one speaker called "the sunset years of life-after twenty-five." Questions, the applause that followed certain answers, comments (Bishop Wright encouraged comments) indicated the weight of response. The applause that rocked the hall for Sister Corita and Father Berrigan in their strong praise of youth, contrasted with a steadier, not less emphatic response, from those who lauded Gabriel Fielding and Brian Friel. Philip Scharper was the balance here-emphatic toward youth but unwilling to discard the wisdom that age gathers.

This tension was voiced when Gabriel Fielding asked-"Haven't we had youth before? Why is everybody suddenly talking about youth? I'm in awe of them. I'm frightened by them. I admire them." He was answered-partly, at least-by Sister Corita: "We are aware of youth, and youth is aware because the sophomores and juniors now in college are the first group to grow up with TV in the family-they see, and have seen, every day, the whole world, in every situation." Fielding mused that youth seemed to be taking a knife and cutting off its feet, leaving them on the carpet and trying to walk off. He feared what would come of a complete break with the past.

Father Berrigan, Sister Corita, and Philip Scharper maintained that youth was being alive and voicing its aliveness- the voice was needed and important.

Still another tension, less dominant than the youth-age tension, or perhaps caught up in it, was the conflict between those who wanted the church to move forward more rapidly in change and those who called for caution, respect for the past. Again, it was Philip Scharper who kept the balance. He emphasized the responsibility of each-now -to show authentic love and offer dialogue.

Everyone who left the symposium surely took from it ideas, questions, and problems illuminated or darkened by his particular response to faith and art. But one would have to be thoroughly insulated not to have been touched by two vital currents: first, the awareness that we are in these tensions together (Sister Corita asked, "Does anyone ever

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do anything alone?"); second, an exuberance, a feeling that one ought not only to "come alive" among the tensions, but to rejoice in being alive, rejoice in the possibility of celebrating life.

Sister Maura, S.S.N.D.
College of Notre Dame of Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland