a trip to the art museum.

While my friend Nick from out of town was visiting me this week, I took a trip to the Nelson Adkins. I've probably been there a dozen times before, but each visit is different. It's like seeing it with new eyes. Something different always speaks to me, or something the same speaks to me again in a new way.

I know so many people who really don't like art. Modern art especially. They see a Rothko or a Picasso, and they shutter. But I entreat you, please don't say, "Oh please, I could do that! That isn't art!" First of all, you didn't do it. You probably never thought about how color itself is art. Or how obscure, sloppy shapes could say something about ourselves or our society. And even if you thought to try, would you know how to put it on canvas? Painting is difficult. Even to make a solid color or a splattered canvas demands technique for the colors to gain depth and texture. Look closer. It's not as simple as you think. Secondly (and more importantly), the point of art isn't to jump to judging if its good or bad. Let it draw you in. Let it speak. What is it saying, what is it asking? What does it make you feel? You don't have to like it. It may make you feel disgust, or anger, or worst of all, just plain boredom. For all your efforts, you may still come away thinking, "I don't understand what they are trying to do."

I'm not asking everyone to love all art. I don't love all art. But I think each of us should challenge ourselves to be open to that which is different from what we know. We should come to it, and bring our whole selves, opening our eyes and our emotions to it. To converse and dialogue with it, to really look, instead of judging first. There is such opportunity to be changed, to be made into more than what we already were.

Art teaches endlessly, effortlessly. It evokes emotions, thoughts, ideas and passions that I almost forget I am capable of. It causes me to pause, in a life where I don't pause nearly often enough. It humbles me with its beauty and power. I feel small beside it and also large, filled with its beauty and power, all at the same time.

Art it full of such vitality. It isn't just about being on a wall in a gallery or museum; and it certainly isn't about a $5000 price tag. Oldenburg wrote, "I am for art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. I am for art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art with the chance of a starting point of zero. I am for an art that embroils itself with the every day crap and still comes out on top. I am for an art that imitates the human, that IS the human. I am for art that takes its form from the lines of life itself. That twists and extends and accumulates and splits and drips and is heavy and course and blunt and old and sweet and stupid as life itself. I am for an art of underwear and taxi-cabs. I am for an art of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete. I am for the majestic art of dog-turds rising like cathedrals."

It seems to me that this isn't only talking about art. Reading this, I think: I am for Christianity that doesn't sit on its ass in church pews. I am for religious people who don't think of their own holiness all day and worry about seeming religious, but who humbly serve with love and power beyond their wildest imaginations. I am for Christianity that embroils itself with the every day people, the dirty and the difficult, and is only more beautiful because of it. I want to see a church in a state of extreme entanglement in the world. I am for seeing the divine not just in a worship service or in a building, but in human faces, human words, human actions. I am for faith that is life changing, that shakes me, that makes me look twice at the ordinary. A Church so active, so entangled with the living, that it can't help but take new shapes, cast new visions, twisting, extending, splitting and connecting in ways never dreamed of. I want a church that finds God everywhere, that builds God's kingdom in the thrown away, that sees beauty in the excrement. That makes the poor, broken, dirty, forgotten places into places of worship.

I am for church that makes me feel the way I do when I see art: startled, vulnerable, new, alive, open to richer possibilities...