theology of expression

I was listening to Minnesota Public Radio (the Current, 89.3 fm in the Cities) on the way home from work a couple weeks ago and the dj was talking about why some of the most original music comes out of Minnesota. Certainly he has some bias, but it was interesting listening to him analyze a few different reasons offered by some for our (supposed) creativity. Was it the winter? Probably not especially, although the depressing winter months can be a great incubator for creativity, he mused.

Although this was interesting, what caught my attention most was that he paired creativity with personal expression. When we create something original and unique we are sharing ourselves with the world and offering our own voice to it. Tattoos and other body art as well have long been considered as forms of personal expression, which...now that I think about it...really makes me wonder if that is the reason body art is still a rather esoteric practice not entirely accepted by dominant society in America. I think the case could be made that more people now than ever are exploring body art, but the stigma is still there. Think about music as well. The aforementioned dj works for a station that plays very unpopular, unique, original, and often local music. Occasionally there are some songs that crossover between the Current and mainline stations, but for the most part their music will never be anywhere near a top 40 list.

I think there is a connection to be made here to body art. The dominant culture, for all the shrift we pay to originality and independence and personal expression, puts incredibly restrictive boundaries on such things. Popular music is for the most part limited to the same bands year after year and literally the same songs day after day, sometimes just an hour or two between repetition on mainstream stations. The decay of time of course demands that new bands and musicians will become popular, and gradually over the decades sounds have changed...but in reality the music which we call popular is just a small sampling of what is actually being created on a daily and weekly basis, and mainstream stations, by limiting their playlists to what is currently popular, act as blinders. With body art the dominant culture is even more restrictive, many workplaces allowing nothing more than earrings or conventional jewelry to be displayed.

And think about where most of us work? The vast majority of us are cogs in the Capitalist industrialist machine in which originality is implicitly, if not expressly, forbidden for fear that genuine individuality will hinder the march of economic progress. For the most part, we are allotted our off time for leisure and very limited space at the workplace...usually just for pictures to be set or funny cartoons to be posted. If we work retail or something similar with not even a small desk or cubicle to call our own our room for expression is even more limited. I suggest, quite contrary to the establishmentarian god which is usually mistaken to be the Christian god (particularly in America), that Trinity opens space for us to be expressive, to reveal ourselves in all of our wondrous uniquenesses.

Every creature, already and simply as such, is related to its creator. The individuality of each creature means that the relation of each to God is unique. This is intensified with human creatures, whose brains have a mutually constitutive relation with language, art, worship, tool-making, and self-consciousness. This means that we are more suited to develop unique personalities and distinctions; likes and dislikes; as well as reflect upon our experiences in unique ways. God is the origin and condition of our special particularities described above, and as such is the font of our individuality and creativity.

In addition to this, moreover, it is God who calls us to self-expression, quite often in direct contrast to the social and cultural customs which would squelch our creativity. We can see this in the historically close connection between art and oppression. African slaves developed unprecedented genres of music out of their experiences of captivity and suffering. It is also no surprise that artistic people tend to be the most eccentric and misunderstood. They, like entire groups of oppressed people the world over, are voicing themselves, publicly yearning to differentiate themselves from the dominant and so often homogenizing milieus in which they live.

This, I propose, is an inherently theological activity. The God who reveals Itself in the Bible is not at first recognized as the God of the Universe, but only as the local deity of the band of Israel. Already in his intensified wooing of human creatures YHWH begins with a particular community. The advent of Jesus as well is understood at first as the fulfilling of promises to this same people. Only as we are "grafted on" to their family through Jesus does the salvific significance of his incarnation become offered to all creation. Precisely so, then, does the call to creativity and expression to every human person have a distinctively Christian importance; for in the man Jesus and his unique relation to the one he called Father we have a prototype of expressiveness, a firstfruits. That we are subsequently called to share in this unique relation does not at all entail that we are to be in no way different from Jesus. On the contrary, he was the man that he was as the altogether particular man that he was, a first century Palestinian Jew, for starters. That our call to walk in the way of Jesus includes both our own cultural, social, and personal distinctiveness and communion with him and all others means that the separation of particular and universal are transcended in relation to him; the subversion/deconstruction of all categoricality.

Should you break the mold and get that tattoo, write that poem, make that movie, write that song, paint that image, get that piercing? I don't know. Maybe I could give you an opinion on it. But I want to hear your voice...the world needs to know you who you are. Maybe if all else fails and you still don't know, and you're still afraid...consider Jesus.