We\u2019re sitting in the sanctuary of All Saints Church, in a circle of dim light.\u00a0 It\u2019s morning and we\u2019ve finished doing yoga and put the mats away, and now Fabricia is talking.\u00a0 There is a theme for this first day, as there will be for most of the days of the camp – connection and community.\u00a0 How do we set our egos and need for attention aside, and become truly attentive to the people around us?\u00a0 Artists are famous for their temperaments, their fragile egos.\u00a0 The permission to even engage in art is hard won, the talents that can make a person an artist are extolled as individual and unique.\u00a0 Most people observe and understand the world without feeling a compelling need for expression, but for artists the world isn\u2019t quite real unless its been filtered through their imaginations.\u00a0 As I listen to Fabricia, I feel a touch of fear and a great deal of wonder.\u00a0 Is it really possible to make art in a community, art that surrenders individual vision to an interpersonal ethic?\u00a0 Art that imitates the self-sacrificing love of Christ?\u00a0 The first thing we need to learn, Fab tells us, is that an artist who loves is an artist who gives away her best work to other people.<\/p>\n

There are thirteen of us sitting on the sanctuary carpet, nine girls and four adults.\u00a0 I\u2019m here with my daughter, who has just finished fifth grade.\u00a0 On this first morning we\u2019re shy of each other.\u00a0 Some of us know each other, but we\u2019re not a community yet.\u00a0 We move from the sanctuary to the social hall, which has been transformed into our studio for the week.\u00a0 Fab gathers us around her and shows us how to make prints with an array of wooden stamps that she\u2019s constructed and collected.\u00a0 There are trays with colored printer\u2019s ink laid out at eight tables, and we take white or black pieces of paper, roll the ink onto the stamps, and print patterns, moving from table to table, color to color, building up images.\u00a0 We are aware of each other\u2019s movements, we often have to stop and wait for someone to finish with the color we need, but our primary focus is on our own work, the vibrant, stamped images on the page.\u00a0 We make multiple prints, setting them out to dry and cleaning the stamps with baby wipes, which we also set-out to dry.\u00a0 These look like tie-dyes, with myriad colors smeared across them.\u00a0 When we have finished with this hour of print-making, Fab provides the object lesson.\u00a0 We will pick our two favorite prints, she tells us.\u00a0 One of them we will give away, and one of them we will display in the art show at the end of the week.\u00a0 The print we give away will be cut into 2\u201d x 2\u201d squares, distributed throughout the community, and used to make mosaics at the end of the week.\u00a0 An artist who loves, she reminds us, is an artist who gives away her best work to other people.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s early afternoon on the next day, and we\u2019re in the sanctuary again.\u00a0 We\u2019ve spent the morning creating designs of the tree of life and then cutting them into linoleum blocks.\u00a0 We will print these designs onto the tie-dyed baby wipes from the day before, because in Fab\u2019s artistic process nothing is lost and any object can be transformed into art.\u00a0 Now we are singing, and Brianna is leading us.\u00a0 The day before she taught us to sing in a round, and then asked us to improvise within our parts.\u00a0 Today she\u2019s spread us throughout the church, and as we sing we move from our separate places to form a circle around a candle that\u2019s set in the center of the carpet.\u00a0 Some of the children have followed the sound of their own voices into wild disharmonies, and Brianna calls us all back to the center, to the simplicity of the song.\u00a0 We have to listen to each other, she tells us.\u00a0 If we each pursue our own melodies, the music\u2019s beauty is lost.\u00a0 This balance between individuality and community, between improvisation and harmony, is hard for all of us.\u00a0 But singing together gives us a chance to practice it.<\/p>\n

Fab tells me that we are engaging in spiritual direction through art, that art is a means of attaining wisdom, and not an end in itself.\u00a0 We are all talented, smart, and clever.\u00a0 But are we wise?\u00a0 I am the only man in the group, and I find myself wondering about the kind of wisdom that Fab is extolling.\u00a0 Much of it is other-directed, founded on the idea that wisdom comes from surrendering some part of oneself for the good of a community.\u00a0 A large part of me agrees with this, and I am enjoying the way that we practice this idea as we make art.\u00a0 But I also have a strong distrust of communities.\u00a0 I\u2019ve felt manipulated by communities in the past.\u00a0 Worse, I\u2019ve felt that many of the communities I\u2019ve been a part of have had little interest in me as an artist, or, if interested, have wanted me to use my talents to further some community goal that\u2019s based in needs and traditions that I don\u2019t share.\u00a0 I\u2019ve rarely experienced a community that simply rejoiced in the gifts and talents of its members, and was willing to be shaped by those gifts and talents.\u00a0 Is this distrust a male attitude, part of my socialization since boyhood?\u00a0 Or is it a cultural attitude that effects both genders?<\/p>\n

I think about this on the third day, as we paint portraits.\u00a0 The lesson this morning is about Jesus as the Soul Friend.\u00a0 If we are to love one another, Fab tells us, we must first learn to love ourselves.\u00a0 She breaks us into pairs and tells us that we should paint our own portrait, and then the portrait of a friend.\u00a0 She\u2019s taken photographs of us, and we work from them, staring into our own faces and then the faces of our partners.\u00a0 I find it easier to paint my partner, and I wonder if this is because I\u2019m less invested in her face than I am in my own.\u00a0 I squander time and thought on my portrait, trying to bring out my own sense of who I am.\u00a0 I decorate her portrait with tiny clay mosaic tiles that I made earlier in the week, prettifying it.\u00a0 I want to honor her, but she doesn\u2019t present a question to me in the way that my own portrait does.\u00a0 I\u2019ve made three self-portraits in my lifetime and in a way this is the hardest.\u00a0 I\u2019m not permitting myself the same ironic detachment that I usually bring to the effort.\u00a0 I\u2019m trying to love myself through daubs of paint, and wondering why I look dour, sulky, a little defensive.\u00a0 I keep working, slowly painting over these expressions, until a pleasant face emerges.\u00a0 This is the face I\u2019d like to present to the world, the wise face offered for community consumption.\u00a0 But under it lies the individual face, the first portrait that I put on the canvas, the wary face.\u00a0 I wonder which face Jesus loves best, and I suppose that Jesus loves both equally, the selves that give gladly to the good of a community and the selves that seek isolation and have difficulty trusting.\u00a0 But which self do I love more?<\/p>\n

On Thursday we stand opposite each other at a table where Fab has placed a large, square canvas with concentric circles painted on it.\u00a0 We have squeeze bottles of colored sand standing ready.\u00a0 We join hands and pray together for a moment.\u00a0 Then she takes a bottle and makes a pattern of white sand on the canvas.\u00a0 I add to her pattern with blue sand.\u00a0 We go back and forth, changing each other\u2019s work, making a mandala that spirals out from the center of the canvas to its edges.\u00a0 When the design feels finish, we look at each other and nod.\u00a0 We begin to smear it with our hands, rake it with our fingers, making new patterns as the lines of color are blended together.\u00a0 This is a movement of trust and surrender.\u00a0 We\u2019re interested in the process of making the mandalas, not in the mandalas themselves.\u00a0 At this point in the week we\u2019ve become so sure of each other within the community that our thoughts can go outwards.\u00a0 I find myself meditating on an old friend whom I\u2019ve become estranged from.\u00a0 He\u2019s written to me earlier in the week, and I\u2019ve been wondering how to respond.\u00a0 As we make and unmake the mandala, it becomes clear to me that I have to let go of the hurt I feel because of the estrangement.\u00a0 I phrase and rephrase how I\u2019ll respond to him.\u00a0 When we\u2019re done with the mandalas, I slip off and write a message to him.\u00a0 And I realize that I trust this small community of artists.\u00a0 Our work together has pushed my concerns beyond myself, and beyond our little circle of thirteen, out into the wider world.\u00a0 Anyone can make art, Fab says, whether they\u2019re an artist or not.\u00a0 And any artist can learn to make art with a new spirit and a new ethic, art that frees those who practice it and moves them beyond the narrow concerns of self, moves them towards something that feels preciously close to a state of grace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re sitting in the sanctuary of All Saints Church, in a circle of dim light.\u00a0 It\u2019s morning and we\u2019ve finished doing yoga and put the mats away, and now Fabricia is talking.\u00a0 There is a theme for this first day, as there will be for most of the days of the camp – connection and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[586,100,567],"tags":[91,168,642,321,167,154,126],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1660,"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions\/1660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/praxiscommunities.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}