Loom Stories Around the Hearth-Fire

Vesperisms S3 E4: A talk from the Loom Conference, North Carolina, July 2022

Close your eyes. I’m going to tell you a story. Let everything around you in the room fall away. The desk supporting your computer falls away. Your earbuds disappear. The screen dissolves into the floor and you hear my voice in the room coming from my actual person, not a speaker in a device or hanging from the ceiling. We are, instead, together in a circle, sitting on low benches, listening, shuffling, breathing, clearing throats. Through your eyelids you see the glow, not the cold blue of the phone screen or light bulbs, but the warm light of a hearth-fire.

In the shadows cast by the fire, children move about softly at their parents’ feet. A baby suckles, a toddler babbles. An elderly woman softly shushes a squirmy grandchild and points to the storyteller, and the child focuses in on the voice as the story begins.

“Deep in the forest, there was a small hut…”

The adults listening, you know the story. You’ve always known it. There wasn’t a time you can remember hearing it for the first time, because it was probably whispered into you at the breast—in fact, you heard its rhythms in the womb, and you repeated in make-believe games with your friends, and it was woven into your school lessons, and you wrote it in your journal because it made its way into your night-dreams.

You and I have held this story in our bodies, as part of the fiber that makes up the yarn that is woven into the tapestry of our cultures, that weaves seamlessly into adjacent cultures to our left and right, to the north and south, that sails across oceans and picks up the thread on distant shores until the whole earth is covered in this richly colored story, and we come to understand that similar hearth-fires have sat at the center of story-gatherings since the first human breathed in the stardust, and passed it to the next person, and on and on until you and I are breathing in the same stardust and passing it to each other even today.

Around the hearth-fires, the storytellers have taught a thousand generations how to pick up the threads, sit together at the loom and weave themselves into the tapestry. The storyteller recites a long stanza, and the people join in on the refrain. And so the babies learn the rhythms as they learn their mothers’ heartbeats, as they learn the whish of the fiber, of the warp and woof, stanza, refrain, stanza, refrain, for hours in the firelight.

Nothing is new under the sun, you see. There are no new stories. There are no new songs or paintings or dances.

But because they are not new does not mean they are not unique. Because the only thing that is new is you…is the child sitting next to you…is the storyteller of your generation, in your village, the way this fire dances on this floor, the way this smoke curls through this thatch. This is the first time you are hearing this storyteller tell this story this way. And in this way, the creation of the story is one of a kind.

But something has happened. Along the passage of the story from generation to generation, the threads began to catch on sharp things. Sometimes by accident. But some who used to gather at their grandparents’ feet began to notice that if they picked up a stone, or a knife, or a sharp word, they could cut the threads, and that it was mesmerizing to watch the tapestry unravel. Here was something new. Here was something that had not happened before. And what happened, a child wondered as he came of age, if he took two ends of different threads and began to knot them together in new combinations? To tell the story of the knot instead of the story of the weave?

This child began to tell knot-stories around the hearth-fire. It had elements that were familiar, things the grandmothers and grandfathers recognized, but the passageways and endings were disjointed, confusing. The babies and squirmy children couldn’t tell the difference. The youth found the stories interesting and new, and began to think the elders were simply going senile and didn’t know the stories as well as they did. Grandparents who had earned the memory of the vista by climbing mountains and seeing the whole tapestry from the heights as it stretched across the waters to the utter horizon, these grandparents were derided and sequestered into old-age homes where there were no babies to hold, and eventually, generation replaced generation as the old stories faded into such obscurity, that their logic no longer made sense, their symbols were too esoteric, and their heroes seemed like creatures from a different species.

That is where we are now. Now we find ourselves covered with threadbare blankets, and the fires have gone out. The rooms where generations gathered are empty, skeletal, or, if they still stand at all, turned into luxury condos. The only semblance of hearth-fire is a bluish screen attached to a side wall, and there is only one person sitting by it: the self. The storyteller is a stranger on the screen, holding the frayed ends of disparate yarns, growing visibly panicked as she tries to match them together to tell the stories of (k)nots.

But somewhere, deep in the forest, there is a small hut. And in the center of the floor, there is a fire. Two or three are gathered around it, warming themselves in its realness. And together, they are weaving on a loom, as threads of gold glint in the firelight.

* * *

Here, on a podcast about artistic thinking, there are things I don’t need to explain. 

I had a profound spiritual awakening while I was in high school. It was an arts high school in New York, and there were other believers there, so it was an environment where both art and faith felt comfortable, and there was no conflict. But as I began to enter the professional world as both an illustrator and musician, I encountered more and more people who saw this irreparable divide between two opposing entities they called “art” and “faith”. It seemed a fairly simple question to answer, and I thought that twenty years ago, after a lot of discussions and seminars with artists who talked openly about how not a problem this was for them, that maybe we had put this whole topic to bed. But that seems not to be the case. Like a kid discovering his parents’ old Nirvana t-shirt, this generation seems to be picking up the thread of that debate off of a dusty floor as though it’s never been had before. And so I find myself wondering if the artists are alright. And they’re not. And I’m wondering if I can help.

Of all those stories that we picked up through the culture or through our families of origin, we think we know one very well: the story of Christianity. In America, we may think—or others may think that we think—that Jesus was a blond and blue-eyed hippie who sailed a slave ship and his last name was Christ and if we aren’t good little boys and girls, he’ll make crabby adults slap our hands with rulers and send us to bed without supper and maybe even send us to hell while we aren’t looking. And it’ll be even worse for you if you’re an artist and want to draw things that aren’t roaring lions draped in American flags, or sing about unrequited love instead of your desire to be an angel sitting on a cloud playing a harp. And again, that may not be what you think, but it is at least what people think you think, and there may be part of you that’s come to believe them.

And of course, that is a story worth rejecting. And artists have every right to reject it. Because it’s not true. The threads in the tapestry of the story of humanity have been cut, frayed, knotted, yanked apart, glued together and pulled apart again. Not only have we believed a lie about the gospel, we’ve been lied to about what being an artist is.

What if I told you that far from being a white man’s religion brought to Africa by oppressive colonialists trying to keep their captives docile, or worse, “gifted” by benevolent slaveholders,  that Christianity—and Judaism before it—was indigenous not only to the land of Israel in the Middle East, but also to Africa? Egypt, Ethiopia, all of North Africa but also the kingdom of Nubia?  That many of the earliest church fathers, the writers of creeds, the martyrs, the desert fathers, the protectors of orphans and widows, stalwarts in the face of the colonial oppression of Rome, were African, were dark-skinned like Jesus, and that Christianity had already spread to West Africa a thousand years before the first European colonialist struck the first demonic bargain to sell fellow human beings into slavery across the ocean?

And what if I furthermore told you that the whole of Western art history found its roots in a common style of realistic painting that adorned the mummies of Egyptian citizens—not in the medieval castles and monasteries of Europe or the palaces of the Medici family?

And that one of the first things Christians did—under persecution, in hiding—was to paint pictures, and they did it in the artistic tradition of their time? You see, what was new wasn’t the method or technique, but the revelation of the story—that God had entered the world in a human body. Human. In a body—one with senses—touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing. The same senses the artist uses to absorb the world around us. The same senses that we’ve learned, though practice, to be attuned to so much more sensitively that the people around us that they sometimes think we’re from another planet.

This ancient Greco-Roman and North African style of painting has a method. It begins from a seamless ocean of a single color, and little by little, as the artist hovers over the water, the image emerges, from darkness to light, until the full radiance of the image is shown.

Legend has it that the first icon was a life-portrait of Mary, the mother of Jesus, painted by Luke at the house of the apostle John, who she lived with—and if we think about portrait painting as a common practice like we’ve seen, with a particular tradition and method, it makes sense that this could have happened, and not been a revolutionary or miraculous thing, either. Another legend is that there was an image of Jesus made by himself. In this story, King Abgar of Edessa, a kingdom in modern day Turkey, sent an artist to paint a portrait of him, and instead, Jesus took a cloth and imprinted his face on it. Whether this is true or not, it spurred a tradition of copying these paintings throughout centuries, each iconographer putting their mark on it by virtue of the uniqueness of their individual eye and hand. You can see the lineage between the artistic ancestor, the mummy portrait, and its descendent in the most famous icon of Jesus, the Pantocrator, in the monastery of St. Catherine, located in the Sinai peninsula.

Just shortly after the Pantocrator was painted, a fever of image-destruction broke out in both the Christian and Muslim worlds. It took almost a hundred years to restore the use of images in churches. People were willing to pay with their lives for the use of images in Christian worship. Far from idolatry, icons were considered windows into the greater spiritual reality, and an expression of the incarnation itself. And when a new story cut itself loose from the tapestry of images in the form of the Reformation, it ushered in a new era: without a place to point our eyes, we turned inward to worship of self, and entered a new kind of iconoclasm that we artists in the 21st century are still dealing with, picking up the cut ends of the tapestry and trying to tell a story of nots.

Does any of this sound familiar to you as an artist? Don’t you realize that what you do as an artist is open windows and doors onto the greater reality that you already perceive with your senses and with your intuition, day in and day out? We open those windows for people to let fresh air in, or to shine light onto hidden things, or to allow for emotional connection and expression that they might not otherwise have access to? If we are properly oriented and attuned—if we are woven into that tapestry—we do nothing less than build bridges between heaven and earth.

But if not—if we’ve cut those threads or are just holding a handful of frayed yarn and clumsily tied together knots, we feel confused, disoriented, and we easily succumb to the myth of the “new”, the myth of the “genius”, the myth of the solitary artist, isolated, making love to an invisible muse, waiting for fickle inspiration to cut the skies open, so we can emerge into the bright lights of fame and fortune. No wonder we feel deadened. No wonder we feel this manufactured competition between these entities we’ve named “art” and “faith”. All it is is a competition between self and self, huddled alone over the artificial light of a pocket device designed to tell nothing but the stories of (k)nots.

When we learn and honor the tradition of art throughout history, and especially church history, we realize that it’s our own time that’s the anomaly. Modernity, not the church, is what has been so incredibly destructive to us as artists—we’ve lost our story, our myth, our woven-ness into what has always been part of the human experience, which is making beauty, telling the truth, expressing ourselves in the material, honoring the body, living a life of incarnation under the One who did it first—the Word made Flesh.

What hearth-fire do we gather around today? Some have argued that the glow of the phone or the TV is a modern replacement for the campfire, in an era where heat comes radiating from the walls or baseboards on automatic thermostats. But do we “gather” around the phone? No. It only enforces our alone-ness. It only highlights our detachment. And the video streamed on a TV or laptop tells us a pre-packaged story of knots. Can we extinguish the lesser flame—I mean, really, can we extinguish the lesser flame, so that we can rekindle the higher reality together? Can we recognize that the lesser flame is impossible to see by, that the best it can give us is merely the weak light that highlights the shredded fringes of our rags?

There is a greater light. Those of you who have felt pulled in the direction of deconstruction, I want to tell you that that’s not the only option open to you if you’re feeling disoriented and disappointed. Follow the thread back in time to the ancientness of a Judean hillside, to brown feet in the dust, to a carpenter traveling to tell us the stories we’ve felt resonating in us, but didn’t dare to believe could be true. There are expressions of our faith that go old, that go deep. You don’t need to leave. You don’t need to starve in the desert. You don’t need to get tied up in knots. You just need to follow someone to the hearth-fire, and maybe sit at a grandmother’s feet and listen.

Far from being a competitor, our ancient faith is what re-weaves us into the tapestry of humanity. There is nothing wrong with the story. The discontent we feel comes from the fact that we were not made to carry the chaos of 7 billion cut threads. The new myth of the artist collapses under its own weight outside of the communion of saints, the communion of makers that is our birthright. The dance of the hearth-fire was the element that held our visual attention so the storyteller’s words could penetrate the imagination. But it does no good to tell these stories alone. The fire on the altar still burns at the heart of the gathered people of God, in our midst as we tell and retell the stories to each other, in the little hut in the dark forest: the church, where we sing together the stanza, the refrain, the warp and the woof of the tapestry of Christ, the storyteller.