Still processing the Idolatry of God retreat Anne and I went on in Belfast some weeks ago now.
One of the things that always ‘troubles’ me after attending events such as this is feeling of what to do with it all.
As Dylan sang in Ballad of a Thin Man:
You try so hard but you don’t understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because, something is happening here
And you don’t know what it is
Do you? Mr Jones
Along with a lot of theorising and thelogising , some people shared some practical ways in which we could confront, embrace and accept our brokenness, our humanness. Spaces, if you will, in which we leave ourselves at the door and attempt to see who we are in and through the eyes of the other.
John Hardt introduced us to something he is involved with in Pennsylvania http://brokenliturgy.com. Broken Liturgy is described as ‘an hour of immersive song, word, touch, and movement’. Less contemplative, perhaps, and more discussive is Jay Bakker’s ‘Revolution’, you can read about it here: http://www.revolutionnyc.com/about/. And, finally, we attended a transformance art piece from ‘Ikon’ in Belfast (though they are also available in New York as well). Ikon was pretty much where this latest chapter in Peter Rollins life began. Again you can read about it here: http://ikonbelfast.wordpress.com/about/
This blog started out to tell the story of a group we created, some years ago now, in which we attempted to turn some stones, lift some lids and ask some questions. If you care to look back through the archives you can read more about that. I want, now, to concentrate on the future.
Last year we put on an event at Inspire, predominantly with the young people, called Conspire. What I am thinking now is using that name to form a new collective that can do the transformance art pieces, that can create broken spaces and that can allow people to ask the questions we all have. That may seem a little ambitious and it could be that in trying to cover all bases we end up not quite hitting the mark with any of them.
Oh well it won’t the first time that has happened.
We are starting with the joke about the 2 fish swimming along. Another fish passes them and asks, ‘how’s the water today?’, the 2 fish look somewhat bemused at one another and swim away. One of the fish then turns to the other and says, ‘What’s water?’
What is the ‘water’ we are ‘swimming’ in and are we aware of what it is doing to us?
So we have a name, a venue and a joke, pretty much there I’d say.