William Sloan Coffin

“Credo,” published 2004

In the Middle East there are two ancient bodies of water. Both are fed by the Jordan River. In one, fish play and roots find sustenance. In the other, there is no splash of fish, no sound of bird, no leaf around. The difference is not in the Jordan, for it empties into both. But in the Sea of Galilee, for every drop taken in, one goes out. It gives and lives. The other gives nothing. And it is called the Dead Sea.

by neil_ryan

Jesse Norman

Opera singer, Oberlin

Art brings us together as a family…

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Maria Popova

From “Brain Pickings,” February 12, 2017

“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence,” Toni Morrison wrote in her electrifying piece on the artist’s duty at times of crisis. That refusal can take many forms, but at its richest, it is more than mere resistance — it is, rather, a commitment on behalf of the artist to serve not only truth but beauty by remaining in contact with the timeless and the eternal; to fortify us against the urgencies of a turbulent present and embolden us to transcend our primal reflex of fear, so that we may lift not only our spirits but the whole of our consciousness and continue to evolve toward a more humane humanity. This has always been the duty of the artist, and fragments of it can be found in every single work of art that has endured and has helped humanity endure over millennia of tumult. James Baldwin captured this memorably in his beautiful essay on the poet’s role in a divided society: “It is said that [Shakespeare’s] time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.”

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Hisham Matar

“On literature and the arts,” (1970), printed in New York Times, March 17, 2017

The most magical moments in reading occur not when I encounter something unknown but when I happen upon myself, when I read a sentence that perfectly describes something I have known or felt all along. I am reminded then that I am really no different from anyone else.

 

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self. These occurrences aren’t merely amusing or disorientating or interesting experiments in “virtual reality.” They are moments of genuine expansion. They are at the heart of our humanity. Our future depends on them.

 

Just as a river leads to the sea — the particular in great literature has always flowed to the universal. Literature [including plays] is the greatest argument for the universalist instinct, and this is why literature is intransigent about its liberty. It refuses to be enrolled, regardless of how noble or urgent the project. It cannot be governed or dictated to. It is by instinct interested in conflicting empathies, in men and women who are running into their own hearts, in doubt and contradictions. Which is why, without even intending to, and like a moon to the night, it disrupts the totalitarian narrative. What it reveals about our human nature is central to the conversation today.

by neil_ryan

Our Unique Mission

Adapted from Henri Nouwen’s Bread for the Journey

So many terrible things happen every day that we start wondering whether the few things we do ourselves make any sense. When people are starving, when wars are waging, when refugees are fleeing, when countless people in our cities have no home, we can feel overwhelmed. Thinking about these things can paralyze and depress us.

 

Here the word mission becomes important. We are not meant to save the whole world, solve all problems, and help all people. But we have our unique mission here and now, and if we keep our focus on it, we will discover that our faithfulness to our mission is the most healing response to the illnesses of our time. Drama, art, music that bring people together in community will help heal the scattered parts of our minds and hearts.

by neil_ryan

Pianist Jason Cutmore

From an article in “Clavier Companion,” January/February 2017

The highest in human thought and utterance plays an important role in contemporary society as a sort of spiritual and intellectual ballast ~ as a counterbalance to the forces in modern life that would keep us mentally enchained to the easy consumption of the trivial and the material.

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Thomas Berry

from Creative Energy

It is my hope that all the children, the children of the deer and the wolf, the whale and other marine forms of life; the children of the osprey and the bluebird and the butterfly; the children of the oak and the pine and the dogwood; the children all together with the human children will go into the future in oneness "as a single sacred community." ... The human is less a being on the earth or in the universe than a dimension of the earth and indeed of the universe itself. We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable. Nor do we think of these as isolated from our own individual being or from the human community. We have no existence except within the earth and within the universe.

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Andy Warhol

Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

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Maria Popova

From “Brain Pickings,” July 9, 2017

In the realm of art … we can fulfill our expectations only by learning which authors disappoint and which authors offer the true nourishment  for the soul. We find out who the good writers are, and then we look or  wait for their next book. Such writers — living or dead, whatever genre they write in, critically fashionable or not, academically approved or not — are those who not only meet our expectations but surpass them. That is the gift the great storytellers have. They tell the same stories over and over (how many stories are there?), but when they tell them they are new, they are news, they renew us, they show us the world made new.

 

So people seek the irreproducible moment, the brief, fragile community of story told among people gathered together in one place. So children gather at the library to be read to: look at the little circle of faces, blazing with intensity. So the writer on a book tour, reading in the bookstore, and her group of listeners reenact the ancient ritual of the teller at the center of the circle. The living response has enabled that voice to speak. Teller and listener, each fulfills the other’s expectations. The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.

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Maria Popova

From “Brain Pickings,” September 17,2017

In art, we depict our ideals and, in depicting them, we challenge ourselves to face the gap between aspiration and actuality, which in turn challenges us to stretch ourselves and close that gap. “All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation,” young Susan Sontag wrote in her diary, and the object of that contemplation, directly or obliquely, is precisely that discomfiting disconnect between the ideal and the real that drives us to strive for reform. Art, argued the Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren, “is the process by which, in imagining itself and the relation of individuals to one another and to it, a society comes to understand itself, and by understanding, discover its possibilities of growth.”

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