A short(ish) summary of my labour of love
I remember wondering what on earth I would do with myself once I submitted my dissertation, because it took up so much creative energy and time. I had visions of reading piles of books and writing little articles in between shifts at the coffee shop, but in the two months since submitting, I’ve done very little in comparison to producing a dissertation, and it feels glorious. I’ve enjoyed a summer holiday pace of life, extended coffee breaks and meals with friends, processed the end of my time as a masters student, and yes, more reading (in the sun of course). I also had the chance to present a short version of my dissertation to my college, in preparation for presenting it at the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry conference in July. Very exciting, I feel like a real academic!
Lastly, my time in the past couple months has been filled with turning my attention to what’s next, the ever-present question for a recent grad: youth ministry. After years of training and preparing, and now an extra theology degree thrown in, I feel so ready to pursue full-time youth ministry. I’m waiting with open hands for God to reveal the next step, but in the meantime, I wanted to share some of my dissertation. I have so many more questions I want to explore, but this work gave me a lovely sense of completion. I doubt very many will want to read the 20,000 word version, and only a very few more would read the 5,000 word presentation, so here is a few paragraphs summarizing my work.
I grew up immersed in books and stories. I know the transformational power of books, especially fantasy, because I was transformed by the experience of entering another world through reading. Although asking me to pick my favorite book is an impossible question to answer, I can confidently say none captured me as fully, or made me long so deeply for the feeling of something else as the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. These stories of the fantastic and magical “baptised my imagination,” to use Lewis’s words, and invited me to enter a world suspended in time, returning me to my reality with fresh vision and wonder. I know now that what I experienced was a taste for the radiance of transcendental Beauty so that I saw Beauty in other experiences in my familiar world. As I now consider youth ministry practices, I desire to create space for youth to be captured by Beauty through aesthetic experience, which baptises their imaginations so that they may desire, know, and love God more deeply and participate in what I have termed ‘the Beautiful Life’ – the life for which we are created.
The Beautiful Life is life according to the symphony God has written and is writing. It is the way of the Gospel as Jesus taught and embodied it. We know it by a sense of unity and completion, harmony and order, and freedom and creativity, as it brings to light that which is hidden. It is joy from the promise of the fulfilment of all desires. In this life, we dwell with God and worship him in creative action, as we respond to his love. As we anticipate this life, we are drawn to aesthetic experiences that broaden and embody our vision of the Beautiful Life.
Before introducing aesthetic experience into youth ministry practice, we need to first understand how Beauty captures the imagination. I argue that the kingdom of God cannot be grasped by reason unless it has first touched the imagination because it communicates primarily through parable, metaphor, and images, and it is by the imagination that we ascribe meaning to metaphors and images. Imagination is the faculty by which we create metaphors to relate what is known to what is unknown, and back again. This means I want to use ‘theopoetics,’ a type of theological discourse, in faith formation to apprehend God and his work as a movement toward understanding and transformed living.
Imagination is the light by which we see what is already there, though we had not seen it before. The Christian faith claims that what is already there, the possible within the actual, is the life of the kingdom revealed by the embodied parable of Jesus. He is the root-metaphor for the kingdom, and the form of Beauty. The incarnation means our apprehension of God is not only abstract; Christ made Beauty’s communication personal by becoming a person himself, giving us concrete forma so that we apprehend God in the incarnation and create beauty from our delight in him. In his incarnation, death, and resurrection, the theodrama of Christ’s movement revealed the pattern of the Beautiful Life.
We can experience patterns of the Beautiful Life worked out in the eucatastrophe of fairytales. ‘Eucatastrophe’ is Tolkien’s word for the Consolation of a happy ending in fairytales, while ‘Dycatastrophe’ is his word for sorrow and failure. According to Tolkien, from dycatastrophe comes eucatastrophe: defeat is not the final word in either fairytales or the story of our lives. Victory comes in a “sudden joyous ‘turn.’ (See “On Fairy-Stories”) Applied to spiritual formation, this guides us in understanding God’s presence as eucatastrophic movement in our lives as we imagine the world as it could be, beautifully sung according to the shape of his kingdom, which we know because of Christ’s communication of Beauty.
I chose to consider Tolkien, Lewis, and MacDonald partly because reading them was formational for me, and partly because I think they understood something about the power of beauty in a story. Beauty is inherent to the worlds of both Narnia and Middle Earth, which are created through song. Characters in The Lord of the Rings especially, but also in Narnia and MacDonald’s fairytales, often fight their enemies and find hope by singing and noticing beauty and light in the darkest of places. Beauty is powerful for both the characters in fairytales, and for readers, because it is the beauty of other worlds that enchant us, and then reenchant us to see our own worlds in a new light. Lewis’s own life is an example of this: reading MacDonald’s Phantastes was instrumental to his own faith because it ‘baptized his imagination.’ Lewis understood the power of fairytales for knowing God, and this truth is made more evident in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories,” which concludes with the fact that the gospel, the evangelium, is the greatest fairy-story told, with the greatest eucatastrophe erupting from the greatest dycatastrophe. The story pauses on the cross, beholding it for a breathless moment, but it does not stop there. The resurrection, and its invitation for us to follow Christ into death and life again, casts the cross in a new light, which makes all things known as beautiful.
All of this brings me to my suggested model of youth ministry that attempts to cultivate poetic spiritual formation. Poetic spiritual formation seeks to baptise the imagination, so that youth catch a vision of God’s kingdom through engaging with aesthetic experiences. We are attempting to create a framework by which youth can go on to build their embodied theology, which is worshipful in both contemplation and action. My desire is to create a program for youth ministry that uses 3 elements: contemplation, conversation and creation
Contemplation seeks to derive pure enjoyment from the object’s beauty, letting it wash over the imagination and noticing any emotions that arise. A sacramental theology of Beauty lends itself to cultivating the practice of contemplation as a way to know the love of God. Contemplation would function similarly to the practice of lectio divina, in that it would regard aesthetic objects as capable of revelation and therefore worthy of our undivided attention. It creates space for a rendezvous with God and his Being, since it is through Beauty that he communicates himself and captures our imagination.
Conversation help youth understand the experience and what the aesthetic object is saying about the self, God, and the world, since beautiful things inherently reveal truth. Through the art of perceiving what is beautiful, we help youth mature in their ability to perceive God. Conversation is the way we give youth language to articulate their experience in the light of the story of God’s kingdom. Though individual interpretations, perceptions, and experiences are vital in poetic spiritual formation – which values dynamic learning and creativity – it is just as vital to ask together how these revelations gained by poetic intuition align with historical, ecclesial, moral, and traditional continuity. Conversation then serves a double purpose of illuminating the experience for each other, and creating community and relationships between youth and adults, and among peer groups of youth, as youth learn to participate in the conversations and community of the larger global and historical church. Since the vision of the Beautiful Life is refracted, we rely on each other to see the whole.
Creative response is the last and vital part of poetic spiritual formation. Through poeima, or creative making toward and end, aesthetic experience takes hold as spiritual formation. Response is vital because poeima is fundamental to knowing; we cannot know a thing unless we make in response to our contemplation of it. This means we know the love of God more deeply when we create in love, knowing beauty as we create. Tolkien calls this sub-creation, but I’ll leave you to read the creation account of the Ainulinadalë in the Silmarillion and his poem “Mythopoeia” to explore that further.
Through contemplation, conversation, and creation, poetic spiritual formation can create space for youth to develop their imagination to reach higher and see through the window to a greater reality, while at the same time perceiving the greater reality within their familiar world. It baptises their imagination in such a way that their narrative comprehension of themselves moves forward in beauty to new creation, painted by the hope of a eucatastrophe.
This is such a small sample, but hopefully it gives a good picture of my fascination with Beauty and heart for youth ministry. If you really are interested in reading more about my philosophy of imagination, theology of beauty, theopoetic methodology, and exploration of the nature of fairytales, I am more than happy to send the full text!
Hopeful Wanderer 