Components of Culture 2: Arts

I have renamed this blog, "Pastor Craig's ConSpiritu Blog" for a very specific reason. I have adopted the name "ConSpiritu" as a symbolic shorthand for talking about the collaborative creation of culture. ConSpiritu exists for me in an imaginal realm at the moment, as a container or, better yet, a crucible for awaiting the right ingredients, i.e., collaborators, to be brought together and catalyzed into creating various cultural artifacts and events. 

Here in the second decade of the new millennium, there are overwhelming indications that we are not only on the verge of undergoing sweeping cultural changes but that it is imperative that we undertake the work of intentionally changing culture. There is potential and great impending need for this to happen.  

Deep Ecologist and Systems Theoretician Joanna Macy refers to this time as the Great Turning - a time in which our society reorients its priorities and behaviors in order to live sustainably and harmoniously, with one another and with the environment. This is the work of ConSpiritu.  It is the work of creating a culture that seeks the welfare of all members of the global community – human and non-human as well.  It requires a working methodology that is interdisciplinary and collaborative.  It involves spiritual formation, worship, active and passive learning styles, the arts, discussion groups, intentional communities, social activism, and more.  

The vision of ConSpiritu is of collaboration between environmentalists and farmers, activists and artists, spiritual and religious leaders and earnest seekers, academics and laborers, performers and other producers of culture.  ConSpiritu is designed to catalyze the synergistic creativity of collaboration.  The goal will be to transform society through the creation of culture – a culture that is economically and environmentally sustainable, spiritually active, and socially engaged.

The work of ConSpiritu exists at the intersection of our groundedness in the Earth, the profound interconnectivity and purposefulness of Spirit, the vivifying creativity of the Arts, and the life-enhancing cohesion of Social Justice. 

Another way to understand culture is to consider it as the world created by means of human imagination.  The arts are the expressive mode of human imagination and are central to the formation of human cultures or worlds. The imagination functions by constructing worlds within the inner consciousness, and the various artforms externalize that world and transform it from being a private world into being a public world.  

For example, the performing arts extend the work of the imagination in its function of creating worlds.  Performance brings what begins as an inward phenomenon within the imagination out into the sensory and physical world through the medium of the body, and thus affects the activity of placing the body into the imaginary world.  By placing the body into a world which had hitherto existed only in the imagination, that which was imagined becomes real, in the sense of existing in an external physical realm which can in turn be experienced by numbers of people who will validate the reality of the experience. 

Performance moves within the interfaces of these inner and outer realms.  By placing the bodies of performers (and by extension, or by vicarious participation, the bodies of audience members) into the realm constructed by those same bodies from out of the imaginal realm,  that imaginal realm becomes real, or better yet, realized or actualized.  Performance as a form of embodied imagination is precisely that place-time in which perceptions, psychological states, knowledge and understanding are shared communally and where persons can enter into states in which the transformation of relationships within and between persons or persons and other entities is made possible. 

Performance as embodied imagination can play an important role in the transformation of society.  The liminality of performance creates the conditions wherein the possibilities for transformation obtain.  The perceptual and sensory apparatus of the human body make it possible for persons to step outside of their received and accustomed experience of the world in order to consider other possible arrangement and relationships within and beyond human society.  

Other artforms create worlds in a similar fashion, although performance can be understood to create worlds in “real time.”  The work of ConSpiritu is to explore the socially transformative and culturally creative possibilities inherent within the arts.