Goldenwood Founder David Kim writes: “The title of Makoto Fujimura’s latest book, Art + Faith, might lead some to believe that this book is written primarily for the artist or art enthusiast. To make this conclusion, however, would keep many from reading what is one of the most important faith and work books written to date. Fujimura addresses a critically under-represented perspective of the faith and work movement through his interjection of a ‘theology of making.’ Drawing from rich biblical and theological streams, Fujimura helps us see a distinctive alternative that challenges the pragmatism that overwhelmingly characterizes our approach to work today. In this new paradigm of ‘slow work,’ the brokenness we experience becomes the unexpected starting place for the ‘New Newness’ to break into our world. If digested slowly, Art + Faith will turn workers into makers whose imaginations have been captivated by the New Creation that is to come.”
On Tuesday, January 19, 2021, Goldenwood hosted artist Makoto Fujimura for a rich discussion with David around the need for a whole new approach to our work–new wineskins into which the Spirit might pour forth His fruitfulness, reviving this world with love.
Video without Q&A:
Complete Audio with Q&A:
Complete Transcript with Q&A:
Amilee Watkins: Hello everyone, welcome. We’re so glad to have you here. It’s so wonderful to see you all coming in from everywhere. Welcome. We’re thrilled to have so many familiar faces joining us tonight, as well as many of you who are joining us for the very first time. For those of you who I haven’t yet met, my name is Amilee Watkins, and I’m one of the co-founders of Goldenwood.
Goldenwood exists to cultivate a new vision for work–more concretely, our vision is to see work revived by love. And this calling has felt even more pressing in light of all that we are facing right now, in a year of unprecedented disruption and upheaval, amidst a global pandemic, through a series of national crises, on top of dramatic shifts in our work and our family lives. So how do we even think about beginning to work towards the new? How might we reimagine and remake this world as we walk forward in 2021?
Tonight, we’re so grateful to be able to host this important and timely conversation in response to these questions of our weary souls this year. Briefly, before I introduce our speakers, I want to provide just a few video instructions to hopefully allow you to more fully engage tonight…
We will have time for Q&A after the conversation this evening, so please send in any questions to me in the chat throughout the course of the evening. And after the conversation between David and Mako, we’ll have a time of moderated Q&A. Again, you can feel free to send those in at any point this evening. So now it is my privilege to introduce our speakers for this evening.
Makoto Fujimura is a leading contemporary artist whose process driven refractive slow art has been described by David Brooks of New York Times as a “small rebellion against the quickening of time.” Mako’s art has been featured widely in galleries and museums around the world. He’s also an arts advocate, writer and a speaker who is recognized worldwide as a cultural influencer. As a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts from 2003 to 2009, Mako served as an international advocate for the arts, speaking with decision makers and advising governmental policies on the arts. His highly anticipated book, Art + Faith: A Theology of Making, has been described by poet Christian Wiman as “a real tonic for our atomized time.”
David Kim is the CEO and co-founder of Goldenwood. Over the past several decades, David has trained, consulted and counseled hundreds of leaders and organizations in developing a robust, meaningful integration of faith and work. His past experiences as Vice President of Faith & Work at Redeemer City to City, Executive Director of the Center for Faith & Work and Director of the Gotham Fellowship at Redeemer Presbyterian, and as editor of the NIV Faith and Work Bible have given him a breadth of exposure to the challenges of integrating faith and work. His expertise as a key thought leader in the faith and work space has been well established having addressed prominent institutions and churches around the world. David continues to pioneer effective means by which individuals and organizations can grow towards a dynamic lived spirituality that expresses God’s glory into the world.
Please join me in welcoming David and Mako.
David Kim: Thank you, Amilee. It’s great to be here with you all. If you ever wondered what it’s like to be in a Zoom call with an artist and what background they would bring, Mako, you certainly didn’t disappoint us tonight. Thank you for being with us. I’m looking forward to our conversation and I think it’s prescient that, in some ways, we’re on the eve of a new inauguration and I think as we started 2021, all of us, were really looking forward to putting last year behind us and entering into the new. But as we know, on January 6, our world again turned upside down in many ways. And so tonight’s conversation I think is so timely as we think about what it looks like to enter into these new wineskins. When I think about the passage–I want to read you that passage from the Gospel of Mark, “No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and the worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins, for new wine is for fresh wine skins.”
And in that passage, the people, particularly the Pharisees could not fit [Christ] into their preconceived patterns and expectations. And those who tried to, who found themselves trying to mix the old and the new, found themselves suffering quite a bit. So today, we want to think about what does it mean to allow the new wine of the work of the gospel–the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit to enter into our lives? So tonight’s conversation is going to focus on what it is that the Spirit brings into our lives. And how do we begin to understand some of these old wineskins that perhaps keep us from experiencing the fullness of what the Spirit intends for our lives and our world? And how does that begin to help us understand these new wineskins that Christ is trying to create all around us?
This book, Art + Faith, as I picked it up and started reading, it didn’t take me very long to figure out that this was not just about art and faith, it’s really about all of life. And even more narrowly, in some ways, it’s about work. I found this to be so refreshing as I saw that this was addressing a huge piece of what I see missing in the faith and work arena, which is kind of the spirit in which we enter into our work. And what Mako has beautifully provided for us is almost a new paradigm. This book, just as a warning, for those of you who have not read it, really needs to be read slowly. Because unless you begin to marinate in it a bit, you’re not going to really appreciate the paradigm that slowly begins to form. So we’re really excited to have Mako with us tonight and to be able for him to share some of the insights that are found in this book, and perhaps even more than that.
I just want to begin with my first question to Mako which is to help us understand your own personal life context, because every work of art, this book included, is certainly a reflection of your own life. So help us see some of the connections in the past that helped you create this masterful book here.
Makoto Fujimura: Thank you, David. And it’s so great to be part of this conversation, and I’m so honored to be invited to speak into the context of work and faith which–I did not intend to write a work and faith book. So when you said that this is quite useful for this conversation, I was really pleased.
Welcome to my Princeton studio and you see two monumental pieces behind me, “Walking on Water”. This year we commemorate the 10th anniversary of 3/11/2011 disaster in Japan. And then I began this series called “Walking on Water”. It’s an elegy to the victims of that event, but it’s also a question, “Can we walk on water?” I’m using pulverized minerals such as, I have a little piece here of Lapis, which has been pulverized by hand and mixed with animal skin glue—very coarse sand-like pigments, so they will refract prismatically. Just as my book needs to be read slow, my art has literally been called “slow art”. And it’s something that will take a little bit of time for your eyes to adjust and to see the rainbow-like prismatic light. So even though what you might see on screen is this blue azurite color, if you were to sit in front of my paintings for a while, you’ll be able to see this prismatic light, which is little prisms, literally, so you’re seeing hues and changes of how the light works.
I was born in Boston. My father was a well-known researcher, pioneer in speech and hearing science and acoustics research. Much of what we get to do on Zoom and Alexa and Siri are a result of his early peer research done at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, also at Tokyo University and Ohio State. So I traveled all over as a child being born in Boston when my father was doing his postdoc work with Noam Chomsky on generative grammar theory. And we then went to Sweden. My earliest visual memory is of Sweden, and then to Japan. And then back to U.S.—middle school, high school…I went to Bucknell University, where I decided that I would try to make it as an artist, such a crazy thought. And yet, it was compelling. And it was definitely what I would later understand as God’s calling. At the time, I was not a Christian. And yet, I had enormous interest in the Bible. So it was through many of the literature classes that I took at Bucknell, notably Milton, Shakespeare and Blake—William Blake, a romantic poet—through whose writings I came to understand the gospel later in my life. So it’s an interesting journey. But one that sets up this book well, because this book is about God the artist, and I even claim that God is the only true artist, in the sense that God created something out of nothing, ex nihilo creation.
This book is, in many ways, an interesting book to consider when you’re trying to define terms. Even as I was preparing for this, David, you know, I was researching the understanding of how the new wineskin passage was interpreted in the past. And I was reading and to my surprise, not much has been written, except that Calvin wrote that new wineskin is fasting twice a week. So, kind of a legalistic answer to the legalistic problem. But you know, I define newness, as I write in the book, from the passage where “in Christ we are a new creation”, so therefore that word “new” is kainos. And kainos, I translate, is not neos, it is not newness as in flashy newness–an iPhone coming out every two years or whatever. This is newness that is new. So it is “new newness”, that is, a paradigmatic shift from what we consider to be new. So that’s what the resurrection is. Fundamentally, it defies all definitions. It’s not Lazarus’ temporary resurrection where he would have to go through death again; this is a fundamental new life. And this is where N.T. Wright’s theology has affected me deeply on his discourse on resurrection, that we are completely new. It’s not even like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. It’s literally a new DNA of what DNA is. So, we have to kind of separate out perhaps previously understood definitions to understand the gospel. I call this “a journey into the New” with a capital “N”.
But my life you know, having been in several countries, several cultures, several languages, and having experienced this in-betweenness, in the margins of cultures, always feeling like a misfit, actually has helped this understanding. What if artists, who are often border-stalkers, you know, stalking the borders of cultures, could see the New, perhaps better than the tribal leaders who are within the walls, the protected walls? And as I read the Bible, even the first time I read Scripture and what Jesus said and did, I identified with Jesus of Nazareth, because he was a border stalker. He was always kind of going outside of his comfort zones–and bringing his disciples outside the walls of the normative tribal conversations. And I saw in him, as did William Blake and as did Vincent van Gogh, here’s a supreme artist, who was able to not just break away from the traditional boundaries, but to inject something new into the old—right, so this wineskin idea—to even bring his disciples, his sheep outside of the gates. So the John 10 passage does not make sense if it is inside the gates. It only makes sense because he’s talking about wolves and dangerous weather, that the one sheep will get lost and that he will leave the 99 behind to rescue this one sheep (which is me). It doesn’t make sense if the sheep were not completely outside of the realm of safety.
When I traveled in Israel, I realized that the shepherds were guiding their sheep into the highlands where it is indeed dangerous, there’s no protection for them. But the shepherd’s rod is the only thing that protects the sheep. And that picture to me looked more like, you know, the art world—the “wild” art world of Brooklyn, or New York City in the 90s, the Chelsea scene—where churches had a very difficult time understanding the “borderlands”, than perhaps inside the safety of a megachurch. And how we treat culture is, the outside is bad, the inside should be protected, and we have been fighting culture wars because of that.
I hope that gives you a little bit of a backdrop.
David: Thank you for all that. And I think this idea of the “New Newness”, I want to stay there a little bit longer, because the quote that you have in your book where you’re referencing C.S. Lewis, and how we are winged horses and churches are helping us run faster when they should be teaching us how to fly… I love that image. Can you begin to opine a bit more on this “New Newness”? We’ve talked about this kind of generative love, this kind of abundance, and I’d love for us just to sit there a little bit longer to see how different this New Newness is, because I don’t want us to mistaken this thinking, “Oh, this is just innovation talk.” I think this goes beyond innovation talk. There’s something qualitatively different that you’re trying to bring out.
Mako: Right. So C.S. Lewis in “Mere Christianity” talks about discipleship being often teaching horses to jump higher and higher on the hurdles of moralism, where really Christianity is God giving us wings. And I use that example when I speak to younger artists because when you logically pursue those thoughts, you end up with really interesting outcomes. One is that if you are developing your wings, first of all, you will look awfully awkward. You, first of all, you don’t belong to the group that doesn’t have wings and they’re trying to jump higher and higher. And they will look at you funny and make fun of you perhaps, but you have to, you must use your wings in order for the wings to grow. So where is the place where young artists, you know, where young Christians can learn to use their wings? Well, it has to be a place where the person is allowed to fail over and over, in order to exercise those wings! This is what artists are good at doing, not because they want to, but because they’re forced to. We are told “no” every time we try to do something, so we grew up with that idea that, you know, everything is a “no”, except that I am called to this so I’m gonna do it anyways. And you hit against your own challenges and and the society’s boundaries, and you’re failing all the time. And many times artists grow up very angry because they don’t have a place where those things are nurtured or, you know, accepted as part of the journey.
And so I’ve considered what I do in advocating for artists that, you know, I want to give them a safe space to fail. And the logical consequence of having wings is that you have to fly. Where are you going to fly to? You need a map, right, you need a map of new creation, as it were, that doesn’t exist. We don’t know until we fly what the topography is. So we have to constantly [take] note, and who are we going to share this with? I have until recently felt like I was flying solo, because I couldn’t find a zone, you know, a mate to fly with and my marriage to Haejin has created this, this two-winged picture where we are flying with Beauty and Justice, flying together. But you know, this is a kind of isolation that many creative people find themselves in.
Now, you can apply this, as you know, to anyone who is in the workplace who is a follower of Christ. Since we are created uniquely in the kingdom of God, we have a unique role to play, and that means we don’t fit necessarily the conventional patterns. So spiritual formation has to be catered to the individual, the growth patterns of the person, rather than the formula that we are often given. And I think that goes back to what you were talking about with old wineskins in that industrial efficiency and pragmatism, utilitarian pragmatism, has created all these patterns that people are supposed to grow into. And yet those, by large measures, they fail to address the most fundamental reality of this New Newness. They cannot, by definition, capture the New Newness because the patterns that are formed are coming out of the conventional ways of interpreting Scripture, or the easier way to handle, you know, the more convergent way, let’s say, to handle a very pluralistic, complex landscape. So we really don’t have many ways that we can talk about the New Newness and spiritual formation because the old ways are fundamentally limited to creating convergent homogeneous communities.
David: Yeah, you’re bringing up a lot of interesting points in thinking about how does newness come into the world, and how has convention, in some ways, kept us from experiencing that newness? And I think one of the conventions, whether in the church or outside of the church, is really, you know, how we deal with our brokenness and suffering. Because that becomes something that we feel really limits us, meaning, it’s the thing that we try to run away from, avoid at all costs, you know, hide if we have it, so that we present to the world and to those around us this kind of projection of strength, of “we have it all together”. And, what I loved about your book is that as we experience discipleship with Christ, that the entry point into this Newness is through the brokenness. I think that is such a critical piece. And I think that’s why I say this is one of the most important books written in the faith and work space, because as we try to renew the world around us through our work, we don’t recognize that if you’re going to follow Jesus, he says, they persecuted me, they’re going to persecute you; that suffering is really part of the journey that we’re on. Let me just read one quote, I think that encapsulates this, that captured my mind in the very first chapter: “What if we began to live our lives generatively facing our darkness? What if we all began to trust our intuition and the Holy Spirit’s whispers, remove our masks of self-defense, and create into our true identities hidden in Christ beyond the darkness?” Can you elaborate on the role of suffering and pain and brokenness with respect to the means by which this Newness is created into the world?
Mako: Yeah, one fundamental Biblical reality that we should remember when we discuss newness is that Christ’s wounds, you know, the nail marks, are still with him in New Creation. It is through his wounds that we are healed. And it is through literally the wounds or cracks that we see this new light. Now, when we think about that, that’s a remarkable, out-of-the-box way that we have to encounter Christ every day, in the post-resurrection journey. You know, Thomas is invited to touch the wounds, but he doesn’t, right, he worships because that’s the proper response. But when you think about, when you extend that metaphor of brokenness, and these suffering marks being carried into the New Creation, that must mean in some way that our brokenness too is replaced, certainly, tears are wiped away, but the wounds still remain.
And when I thought about that, I thought about a time when, in order to come home—to my loft three blocks away from where the towers used to stand before 9/11—after 9/11, I had to face Ground Zero every day, intentionally, to go home. I had to bring my kids home from school holding their hands facing Ground Zero. And that discipline forced me to think about, what does it mean to face your own “ground zero” in your life and your own darkness, your own traumas. And it became kind of a liturgical pattern in my life to constantly think about facing your darkness, facing your worst fears, facing everything that you want to run away from, you know, you want to shield your children from. But because of 10 years that I spent doing that, I think I developed this kind of a liturgy… and my work, as you can see, in some ways exists because of the traumas of the world—9/11, 3/11, Columbine—so many things that I have been responding to through my work. Now, I would like to get to a point where I’m celebrating the feast of God, not just the traumas. So through these wounds, we want to get to the other side. And I have a chapter on Kintsugi, the venerable art form of tea we can talk about, which is a fine way to talk about how we inject the new through the brokenness.
David: I’m going to save the Kintsugi conversation. We have a retreat coming up this weekend and we’re going to be focusing on that concept the whole weekend, so for those who are coming to our retreat, I want to save that for the weekend. But I think I want to just emphasize, how do we begin to change our paradigm because we are so instinctively wired to see pain a certain way? And, you know, none of us want to experience pain and yet, there’s something so powerful because we all experience it, especially in light of this past year with probably some of the most painful moments, as we hit some of these mile markers of 400,000 dead in America. I mean, there’s so much pain in our world and into the pain, I think your book really brings a little bit of clarity as to the power of the gospel to say it’s not just in spite of pain, but that God will actually use the pain to bring something new into the world. And I’d love for you to kind of just unpack that even further, because it’s hard for us in the workplace, you know, we experience brokenness and pain in different ways, but we don’t always connect that as God’s invitation to this kind of deeper awakening in ourselves and also through that awakening, the ability for the Spirit to use us to make something in the world that shines this newness into the brokenness.
Mako: Yeah. Thanks for that. When you have to face Ground Zero every day, you begin to think in terms of certainly your own trauma and your own journey into the darkness, but also what is the opportunity that unique experience will bring you to or force you to reckon with? And as an artist, you know, you’re almost trained to do this because again, being an artist is very difficult to make it work, you know, the enormous challenges in society to do what I do, let alone justifying it to myself, it’s hard enough, right? But, what I had to do was to try to fly, to use my wings, and fail many times. But when I started to fly, I realized that I was flying, not just so that I can see the landscape, but so that I can tell the other horses what I see, you know, like, there’s danger ahead, or there’s abundance ahead, or whatever that may be, right? So, these setbacks become opportunities for me to understand both myself and how I may be able to lead others into the nourishment of abundance.
And so part of the thinking here, I think this will become very clear when we’re doing Kintsugi—First of all, for people who are hoping to participate in this, they will have to find something broken in, in their homes or in their apartments or whatever. And the number one problem in doing Kintsugi workshops in the U.S. is that people say “I don’t have anything broken, I throw everything away if it breaks.” Because the Western mindset is, taken in addition to consumer mentality, is that if you have imperfect things you throw it away and buy a new one, right? And, even if you are fractured in some way, you are traumatized, you hide it, that’s what we do. We try to hide it the best we can so we look normal. Right? And, that in itself is a problem when we are faced with Christ with wounds. In order to be Thomas facing Christ with wounds, we have to throw that away. We need to be worshiping through Christ’s wounds, brokenness. And that’s because it exposes us, it exposes our pain, it exposes our trauma.
I had a trauma counselor who attended our first Kintsugi workshop in Pasadena. And after three hours of mending the broken ceramics with this Japan lacquer and gold, she said, I need to take my all of my trauma therapy clients through this process, because it takes six months for my clients to even acknowledge that they cannot run away from their trauma, that they can’t erase it, they can’t just put it in the past and move on. It’s going to be there. If they can realize that, then the real therapy can begin. What Kintsugi does, when you’re practicing Kintsugi, first of all, you have to look for broken things. And people say well, I can’t find anything. Well, that’s not true. There are plenty of things in your cupboard that have chipped, you just don’t see them. There are plenty of coffee mugs with hairline fractures, you just don’t notice them. It’s when stress comes you start to notice because it will break, but it’s already there. And I learned this myself and I’m the same way, you know, I think there’s nothing broken. I’m running around trying to find broken ceramics to Kintsugi, and the more I have done Kintsugi, the more I notice. I get highly sensitized to broken things. Not just, you know, coffee mugs, but people, situations, the brokenness of the world. It’s kind of dangerous because you can get trapped in it too. But, at the same time this sensitization is what we need to be able to face down darkness because we have been trained to ignore those things, to pretend like there’s nothing broken around us.
Now, tonight for the eve of the inauguration, President Elect Biden had a singer, a gospel singer, sing “Broken Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. And people were like, “Wow, that’s not a hymn. Why? Why?” And it’s absolutely right that we have that song as part of our anthem towards what is new, hopefully. Because hallelujahs are broken! We know that. But we sing as though it’s not there, the fractures aren’t there, right, we try to ignore them. And part of the triumphalism of our generation, the praise generation, is to kind of have this escapist mentality from our own darkness and trauma, the fractures that are causing this nation to split apart in fighting culture wars. All these things are part of the brokenness and if we want to move forward, we have to start to recognize that, you know, the conspiracy theorists, and, you know, the liberal senators, you know, are having this kind of same reaction to the wounds that we carry. All of our hallelujahs are broken. So there is a profound reality that we can share today if we can look for each other’s chips and brokenness and hairline fractures, and we can begin to move forward into the process of healing that can happen. As the trauma counselor said, until we can do that, the therapy can’t begin.
David: That’s so good. Yeah, I think what you’re articulating really helps solidify this idea of new wineskin, the old wineskin where the pattern of strength is the thing that creates the newness versus the new wineskin which is that it’s actually the thing that is ubiquitous in this world—brokenness, again, the things that we’re always so desperately trying to hide, trying to run from, trying to avoid—that these are the opportunities to be able to experience this fellowship with Christ. Something that seems wasteful, I think about the nard being poured out, that this is a waste. The world looks at it and says, why are you spending time with Christ? You know, that’s just a myth, a fairy tale. But in that wastefulness, there’s something profound in the newness that comes out and that this newness is not just about, again, I don’t want people to hear innovation and new companies, as much as there’s a newness in us.
And I want to read a quote here, that I’d love for you to elaborate on, on page 65: “Whatever Adam and Eve would have created, it would not have been to fix the world, which did not yet need fixing, but to make a gratuitous gesture of love. Even after the Fall, work was not cursed, but was a way to make toward the New Creation.” And again, I think it was one of those pivotal sentences to chew on from a theology of work, or a faith and work perspective, to say God is trying to create a world of gratuitous gestures of love. So when we think about the New that God is breaking into the world, it’s not always a new process or a new company, but it is really a new human that is able to be empowered by this love who actually can do so much more than creating innovative products and companies. And again, with a telos, a direction of New Creation. So I’d love for you to kind of unpack that further.
Mako: So the funny thing about this is that if you’re trying to create something new, the propensity is to try to create that by improving the past, right? So we identify certain things or certain needs, and that in itself is not really new. It depends on what is being fixed, right? So, probably the best way to say this is—I explained this paradigm shift—I was speaking to the Dean of Engineering at the school that I went to, Bucknell University. And he said, you know, five years ago or ten years ago when we got these undergrads to come into the school of engineering at Bucknell University, they had to really train themselves to create a new bridge. Right? So you’re talking about a convergent task, you know, you have to master certain things and then you have to be able to, when you graduate, get a job, which is good, and you create this new bridge. But now, he said, (and I’m paraphrasing here) “I can’t do that anymore because the freshmen coming in, if I train him or her that way, in four years, they will be replaced by machines.” So I said, “What do you do?” He said, “Well, I have to have them experience the arts, I have to have them experience theater, this collaborative, very difficult process of creating something new, you know, write poetry, understand dance, the limitation of the body.” Because you’re not training them to convergent tasks, which machines can do and replace you very quickly. You’re training them to be divergent, to think generatively, nimbly about. So you’re not asking them to create a new bridge, you’re asking them to ask “What is a bridge?” So a new bridge comes out of this notion that, you know, I’m not going to build anything new out of the old. This new bridge comes out of this notion that I need to rethink what a bridge is, right?
So that gets to a point where we think about innovation, we think about technology, we think about work—first of all, work is not a curse, as many Christians preach. It is a blessing. What is cursed is the ground, you know, and the acceptance of the lie, but work itself is part of God’s way of reminding us of our limitations. And then, realizing that with faith, we have wings. So that allows us to fly above the problems rather than trying to jump over them. Right?
Therefore, if we can get over the idea that we’re going to innovate out of our problems and fix the world, then, you know, because we’re not returning to Eden. We’re building the City of God together. God is inviting us to create New into this New Creation. So it’s Eden City, really, the New Eden. And somehow, God wants us to participate in this project, and God doesn’t want to even start the project without us. He sacrificed His own Son so that we can enter into this new relationship with the Creator, and be invited into this amazing new work that we can only do after post-resurrection journey, through Pentecost, through Ascension, through beyond, right? What are we being sent into? It is a new mission, New Earth, New Heaven; we don’t go to heaven, heaven comes to us. Inject the earth with something fundamentally different that Christ’s body already possesses. And, as Tom Wright notes, pointed out by my wife Haejin, Christ remains human, God remains human. He doesn’t just disappear and become God, he remains human. That is a profound reality of the New Creation. And therefore we are marked for this journey of splendor, this journey of hope, faced with Ground Zero, faced with fractures everywhere, faced with limited resources, zero sum game in front of us. And yet, like all artists, we are all artists of the Kingdom. So we can fly, we can learn to fly together and that is the fundamental nature of our New Work, whether you’re a plumber or an accountant, we are able to partake in creation of the New through what we do because we have a different vantage point.
David: I think what you’re saying reminds me of one of the sermons by Edwards, his “Charity and its Fruit” series, that “Heaven is a place of love”. Jesus says, “A new command I give to you, love one another as I have loved you,” and that idea that newness is being qualified by love. That’s a big part of Goldenwood’s vision, we want “to revive work with love”. And it’s hard to explain that to people because it feels mushy, like, you just want to create happy clappy workplaces? Is that what your vision is? And no, no, that’s not it, you’re missing the point. But that whenever we experience love in the workplace, how much does that revive us? How much does that humanize us? And how much does that make not only your work more pleasant, but it’s almost like it gives us the expansiveness to think about this larger newness that can enter into our world. So I think this is really important for us to hear. I’d love to continue the conversation but I also want to give time for some questions to come in. And I know Amilee said at the beginning that we’d be giving some time for that.
Mako: Let me just respond to that and then we can take some questions. Love transgresses against transgression. Love breaks boundaries because love exudes an extravagance and delight. So the way I post this is, you know, when we are at the end of our lives, looking back to what we’ve done in our lives, if we have the fortunate opportunity to do so, we’re not going to remember the stress of resume building at all, I don’t think. You know, we’re not gonna say here’s my car, or the three cars I have in my garage, here is my home and the mortgage that I paid off. No, no, what we’re gonna remember are those moments, intangible moments, where we had that something connect with the universe, something connect with each other. I will never forget what my daughter, when she was nine, told me as I was walking back with her toward Ground Zero. Those conversations you remember. And you ask yourself, is any of that utilitarian? Right? Is that conversation something that you can package and market and sell? Is it transactional? No! It’s absolutely gratuitous! There is no reason why my daughter could have said what she said without love. And there is no reason why I will remember it. And so what are we made off? Right? The material that we are made of? We are made of love, that’s what remains.
So, why are we—in our work place, and in our home, it’s like the hardest thing to see, that the most important things that we would treasure, that we will go to our deathbed with, are the things that you cannot market, you cannot put on your resume. And therefore, fundamentally, when God says God is love, that’s what remains too. Right? It’s intangible. Marva Dawn said, “worship is a royal waste of time.” And so this is what we remember because it is counter to the normative survival, Darwinian survival. So we get to be loved, and to love, and to understand that what holds the universe together is not this utility of thinking that we are needed by God to do something, as important as that may be, but it’s simply because God loves us and looks at us with delight.
David: Amen. Well with that, we’re going to see if Amilee has anything she’d like to ask.
Amilee: Yes, hi, thanks to you both. We do, we have some great questions. I’m going to ask Kyle if you wouldn’t mind coming on and asking your question first.
Kyle: Yes, it’s so nice to see you. Thank you for this. I’m really intrigued by the point about that it’s the ground that’s cursed and not the work. And I wonder if you could unpack that more?
Mako: Well, David, do you want to go?
David: I defer to you. Go for it.
Mako: Well, I think that’s a common misconception. I have heard that many times. I even believed that for a long time. And David Miller, a friend of mine, of Avodah Institute of Princeton, reminds me all the time work is not cursed. You know? And, biblically, it’s true. It’s not. God doesn’t curse work at all. There’s sweat involved in working the soil. And we know that when we garden. But you know, there is some delight that is in us and for us and for our communities that brings in the New Creation, but a sheer practice of inhabiting—but doing it well and doing it beautifully—that liberates us from our bondage to decay in the same way that God liberates us through Christ.
David: I would just say I think that’s why I love this idea of a theology of making, because I think when we hear the word “work”, it is connected to toil. So when we hear work, you have to work at it, it can, at least in the way we colloquially use that word, you know, work almost by definition is toil. Whereas, when you think of “making”, you know, the first line of the Apostle’s creed, “Maker of heaven and earth,” this is God’s attribute. And to be able to say, we as people created in His image, we are now called to make. And when we make something that’s kind of in the genre often of either art or hobbies; it’s the things that bring us delight. And so I do love this idea of a theology of making because it creates a different conceptual space, even though we’re talking about the same thing, at least from a biblical perspective, working and making, but I think what making really highlights is the way that Christ has brought renewal, so that he’s reversed the curse. And I think of all the passages—like John 15 of becoming more fruitful—that are addressing the curse, because if the land was cursed, it was less productive, less fruitful, given the amount of energies we were putting in. And now here’s Christ saying with the Spirit, you’re going to be abundant, you’re going to be fruitful. And it’s His way of saying He’s going to remove the curse from the ground, so that even in a fallen world, our work will generate that kind of productivity and fruitfulness into the world.
Amilee: That’s great. Jen has our next question for us, Jen?
Jen: Hi, thank you both so much for this talk. I have been reading your book and am really, really enjoying it. You mentioned creating a safe space for artists to fail. And I wanted to ask, you know, what are the conditions in a person’s life or their environment or just even in themselves, that aid in their transformation to develop wings?
Mako: Wow, thank you. It’s an ongoing journey of discovering. You know, I’ve been involved in church planting for the last 25 years, and I don’t think I can say for sure what that looks like in a church. You know, when Leonard Cohen’s song came out “Broken Hallelujah”, I remember driving my second son to Bucknell, he went to Bucknell as well. And I just turned to him and he is someone who—and he wouldn’t mind admitting to this—who struggled with the church, who would leave way beyond the walls of the church to go looking for cultural nourishment at the margins. And I said, you know, what would a church look like if we sang this “Broken Hallelujah” as the church, like as a reality of our church? And he said, “Dad, the church will fall apart!” I said, “Well, maybe it needs to.” And he was shocked, you know, here he was, he thought he was running away. And I’m kind of in that zone myself.
And what I meant by that is, when is the last time that you were in a community where you could fully be transparent? When you could literally assume that everybody is there not to fix you or to fix each other, but simply be broken together? Right? And I asked that question over and over since then, and into my recent journey. And I think that’s the question we need to be asking. Rather than saying, “How can I fix you? How can we create programs to make you better?” I mean, those are not unimportant, I’m not against those, but they fundamentally do not…So let me put it this way. For all of the discipleship programs, individual discipleship programs that I’ve been part of, you’ve been part of, everybody’s been part of, perhaps, certainly in the 20th century it is what we have created in the church. When you ask the question, “Where is the fruit of the Spirit?” Paul’s definition of the fundamental, enduring reality of the church, is that the fruit of the Spirit of love defines your community. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control. When we look at the church today, no matter what your church may be, do we exhibit the fruit of the Spirit? And if you ask anybody out there, their answer is no, you’re the opposite. Instead of love you have hatred, instead of peace, you seem rather anxious. You know, instead of joy, you’re really, really depressed about the future. And I have to say that largely, all these individualistic efforts for us to grow as Christians, we have failed to create the fruit of the Spirit in our communities, in ourselves, in our families, with huge exceptions. There are examples that I can give you that are good examples of fruit of the Spirit communities, but they’re rare. And so, you know, part of me writing this book was to kind of flip it on its head, which artists are good at, and saying, okay, so we failed. But what’s the opportunity because we failed? What allows us to think about the New because we have been trying hard, like the horses trying to jump higher and higher?
Artists are given wings, and not just artists, David, you have been given wings, people have been given wings, and what does it mean to create that community that literally produces this fruit of love? And I think that’s what Goldenwood is trying to do and that’s why I’m so excited to be part of it. Because that is transgressive to culture. And that is going to change the work place. Right? So if you have a workplace that is full of the proof of love, even though maybe many workers are not Christians, you know, the Holy Spirit doesn’t discriminate, right? It’s not just for Christians, the Holy Spirit, and perhaps the fruit manifested should be the Christians, but the elements of the fruit, that is manifesting in the world, the stones are crying out. So the Holy Spirit’s gonna go to anybody who is open, sensitized to brokenness, and is able to be transparent about it, is able to, say, to write a song called “Broken Hallelujah,” and to say that this is us, right? To be able to bring something new into the world that we can all resonate with. And so it is possible, and I’ll throw this to you, David. How do we do this? How do we create that?
David: Well, what you just said, it reminds me when you wrote this (this jumped out at me), “What kind of church would we become if we simply allowed broken people to gather and did not try to fix them, but simply to love and behold them, contemplating the shapes that broken pieces can inspire.” And I just thought that was so beautiful. And I think along with that, wouldn’t it be great if our churches became those safe spaces? I remember a conversation we had early on at your kitchen table and sharing our brokenness. And it wasn’t two people trying to fix each other as much as it was that experience of, “Oh, I’m not alone in this,” Because as soon as you try to fix something, or fix someone, you’re already casting judgment, aren’t you? So you’re being fixed, but there’s a part of you that, you’re also, you’re not being elevated. So being able to hear then another story, you’re not getting fixed, but you’re getting something you need much more deeply. And so, I think if conversations like that could happen in our workplaces, as well as in the church, ideally, because that’s where we practice, that’s where we learn how to be open and make ourselves vulnerable and to go on long walks, where the brokenness is not just a 10 minute conversation, but hours of sharing a lot of the pain and then all of a sudden something of our humanity comes out, and it gives us new eyes to see.
Amilee: That actually is a great intro for our next question. Joshua, would you come and ask that question that you have?
Joshua: Yeah, thanks so much for the conversation. So, the invitation to fly is very compelling. And it seems like in Scripture often God says, Wait. So what roles do listening and waiting play in this being open to trauma and invitation to fly?
Mako: Yeah, well, you do have to wait a long time for your wings to grow. And you do have to rest your wings. But even, and I think about this when I’m swimming, that’s what I do to exercise, and, you know, it’s kind of in-between the strokes where you feel like you’re flying. You’re just gliding along, right? And that may be a great picture for Christians to think about waiting. Waiting is not just stoically holding back. But waiting is gliding, letting the air carry you. You don’t have to flap your wings because you’re so high up that there’s current that you can rely on. And there’s something profound about that kind of waiting, because it requires attentiveness, certainly, you have to pay attention. You have to listen to what’s happening and what’s coming. And that allows us perhaps to go much further than if we were to work hard flapping our wings.
David: And that reminds me of what Paul says, though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed. I think the idea of flying for me is more about kind of, well starts at least with that inner dream of what the Lord shows you that if, indeed, our suffering our pain are the entry points, outwardly speaking, it’s not that we’re flying as much as you know, internally wings are growing, the ability to hear the Lord and let Him give you visions. Because a lot of times, you don’t get to see the things that He shows us, but He’s showing you enough to say you’re a part of this. And so you might not fly in the real world but I think He at least shows you the vision of what it would look like for you to fly, and one day we will. But I think a lot of the flight for me is about the inward transformation that takes place as we hear the Lord and as we begin to realize the new that is going to one day fully break in.
Amilee: This question I’m going to read for you, for Mako, this person is asking, “Could you say more about the concept of what the new DNA is in the context of what you mentioned, Lazarus’ temporary resurrection? Could you elaborate a bit more on that?”
Mako: Yeah. So that’s, that’s really interesting. You know, in John 11, John 12, Lazarus is resurrected, but this is not a permanent resurrection. And yet, in John 12, the first few lines talk about Lazarus reclining at the table with Jesus—which is also a remarkable statement, given the fact that everybody wants him, the Pharisees want him, because he’s causing everybody to believe in Jesus, and so he has an FBI warrant on his life, and, yet, he’s not worried, right? Because he’s faced death. I mean, he was dead! And I always say that, we know more right now than Lazarus ever knew then. So we know that the permanent resurrection of Christ marks us. So why are we so anxious? Why are we so worried? Why are we not reclining at the table saying that as long as Jesus is here, I’m gonna be fine, you know? We tend to think that we have to do the fixing ourselves. So we fall into that same trap of, you know, doing something and, if I had more time, I would go into why I think some of the biblical passages’ translations bias towards industrial efficiency and doing has created some of the ways that we miss the Scripture, we miss the gospel. David?
David: I have nothing to add to that.
Amilee: We’re getting so many great questions. I’m going to pose a few more just for time. This is from Andrea, and this is for both of you. “How do you help pragmatic efficiency-driven Americans see and act on bringing about the New, in response to efficiency as conventional and not creating the new?”
David: Well, maybe I’ll go first, since I’ve had the luxury of just sitting and listening to you. I think it’s interesting where we are in our country, where we were realizing so much that we just fundamentally took for granted, and we’re seeing the cracks. And I think it really is, it’s seeing that utilitarian pragmatism doesn’t quite create the world that we all want to live in. That it’s good to a point but it’s not satisfying in terms of the world that we want to live in, as well as the kind of work we want to do. And so I think it’s just a matter of time before we begin to see the limits of our pragmatism, whether it’s the midlife crisis, or it’s, you know, what we’re seeing in the fracturing in our country, that it’s just a matter of time where we begin to see the limitations of our pragmatism. It can take us so far, but it cannot satisfy the deepest parts of who we are as people created in the image of God. And so I just say, as we look at the discontents of our heart, and the discontents of where we are as a country, it has to force us to think about, again, just how far our pragmatism can take us and our need to go beyond that and see something that really inspires us to work hard towards something that is not the status quo.
Mako: Yeah, and the word pragmatism is not a bad thing at all. You know, if you go back and read William James writings on pragmatism, they’re really gorgeous treatises on the purposefulness of humanity and how we can contribute to a better society and so forth. And in some ways, we need to get back to that because what has been hijacked is the industrial utilitarian part, right, that everything has to have, you know, these marks of purposefulness, or that this is going to be the way you become more effective as God’s ambassadors. And you know, again, if you’re talking about us finding a purpose in our lives and all that, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you know, God is not being necessarily purpose-driven when God created. God initiated something that would become purpose-driven, but God created out of love. So when we love somebody, we don’t say, why? Or what have you done for me to earn that love? No, we love somebody unconditionally. So that’s the place we need to get back to and say that, yes, all these things that we have… And also the problem is that because we have become fundamentally the most powerful agents on the earth, affecting everything through our actions, we’re not able to steward well what has been given to us, because of our drive to conquer, our drive to, you know, Manifest Destiny, to make everything fit under the efficient model of capitalism. I’m not against capitalism, but there’s something that is fundamentally biased toward this utilitarian pragmatism that literally dehumanizes us, and does not allow us to be good, beautiful stewards.
Amilee: I think this will probably be our last question here tonight. Tthis is from Geri, and it’s appropriate because it goes right along with our title tonight, “From Old to New Wineskins.” So for both of you, Geri says, “I’ve always seen the old wineskin as a legalistic worldview. Rigid rules are safe, but constricted and not freedom at all. It’s far less safe, because it breaks. The new wineskin expands and contracts with the new wine. It is expansive beyond our boundaries and limitations. How can we better recognize what is restricting us and holding us back?” So a question really getting at the heart of discernment, and I think both of you could speak really beautifully on this.
Mako: Yeah. You know, I’m always haunted, as an artist, I tend to wrestle against old wineskin. But I have to remember that Jesus loved the Pharisees. And that’s really haunting to me, that is something that I need supernatural intervention to do. I have to love the Pharisees, because they’re the ones that have kept the law, right, (and then created new ones) but fundamentally part of why Jesus came was to love the Pharisees. So how do I do that well as an artist? And part of my discipline and, hopefully the fruit of the Spirit, is to be able to do that, to face those moments when I think, you know, “This is so legalistic, this is so wrong, you need a new wineskin,” for God to remind me, for the Spirit to remind me, “No, that is a child of mine,” God says. And I need to be able to ask Jesus to look at them with pure love. At the same time, exposing the flaws and reminding them that the new wineskin is here. You no longer have to rely on that, whatever you’re relying on. But that process is a process of sanctification for me.
David: So good. Yeah. I guess I would only add that when I think about new wineskin, I think of the person of Jesus, that old wineskins are things that make us depend upon process instead of person, and Mako writes about this at the end of his book, he talks about that we have to build on the foundation of Christ. That all of our work, and it kind of blew my mind a bit, that all of our work has to build on the foundation of Christ. Think about when you apply that to your workplace, meaning that your work has to build on the foundation of what Christ has done—the security that He provides, the identity that He provides, the sense of glory and honor that He provides—to be able to say, I am operating in the new wineskin when I am building upon the foundation of Christ, not upon past successes, not on processes, not on, you know, you can fill in the blank with all the things that we typically rely upon to give us a sense of direction, identity and purpose, to be able to come back and say, No, this world is created by Christ for Christ, and through him, all things flow. When I’m always brought back to Jesus and to who he is and how the Holy Spirit mediates that reality to me, that’s when I think we are operating in the new wineskins and we’re able to ebb and flow as our Caller calls unto us, and oftentimes asks us to shift gears. And when we don’t, because we’re relying on process, He will shift the gears for us. And it’ll often be pretty painful because he wants to take us to that place where we’re again listening to him, and we’re dependent upon him, we’re hearing him. And I say this again, I think Mako’s early chapter helps really clarify this, that God likes us creating in the darkness, just like He’s creating in the darkness. Not darkness as a place of ethical evil, as much as darkness as a place where you are dependent upon someone else. Because when you’re in the dark, you need someone who sees, [to Whom] darkness is as light, who basically can say, this is where I want you to go. And that’s when I think the new wineskins are coming, because we don’t know where He’s taking us. That’s the whole point of the New Newness. We need Him to continue to guide us so that as we trust in Him, the New Newness enters into our minds, our hearts, and hopefully will be brought out into the world through the work of our hands.
Mako: Yeah, that I Corinthians 3 passage on work building on the foundation of Christ. When you read that passage, the entire chapter, it is absolutely staggering what Paul is talking about there. We think of judgment fire as for us, and obviously it is, but he’s talking about work. He’s saying our work will be tested by fire. And we may survive, but the work may not. So it’s not what we think when we think about judgment, but it shows how important work is, right, that we have this choice of building on Christ’s foundation, or not. And it will be tested by fire and God will expose it for what it is. And I think that’s what we mean by love is, we need to love God, we need to love our neighbors, and if we build our foundation on the work of Christ, which is sacrifice, you know, for us liberation, then that’s going to translate into somehow our work, right? Even if it’s doing something that is considered to be normative on this side of eternity, becomes a supernatural gift that will build an entire world in the epochs to come. That’s what I Corinthians 3 is really talking about. And when we put those lenses on, when we began to think about it, it will not only blow our minds, but it will encourage us! Because that means any little thing, like Tom Wright says in many of his books, a kind word said to a homeless person, to somebody who cannot work, that is work that is going to be purified by fire and it builds a whole world based on what we said. Just thinking about that alone, you know, it’s something that it’d be great to follow up on because that gives us imagination toward the New Creation.
David: Yeah, I think just the idea of the old wineskin also, whenever you try to create in the new wineskin, again, you’re going to face persecution. I think about Walter Brueggemann’s “the royal consciousness” in his book, “The Prophetic Imagination”, there is the status quo that wants to protect the status quo. I mean, there are people that basically don’t want things to move towards the new because people have really benefited from the old structures and they often don’t have that prophetic imagination to see how this new will actually benefit everyone. And so I think part of bringing in the New is recognizing that with it will come not only challenge but you’ll have a target on your back in many ways. And so I think anticipating and understanding that entering into these new wineskins is not a smooth, easy process, as much as…especially if you’re kind of on the pioneering end, you will probably face the most amount of challenge and persecution because you have a lot of forces pushing back against God’s newness entering into this world. So, I just felt like to be able to show only the upside of the new wineskin and not, as I think Scripture rightly points out, you are basically pushing back against the kingdom of this world, and you will be persecuted or placed under a lot of stress and pressure when you start doing that.
Mako: Yeah, we need each other to journey into that.
David: That’s right. Yep. Amen. Well, Amilee’s going to close up with some announcements at the end here. But I just wanted to thank again, Mako, for joining us this evening, and for sharing with us his thoughts. If you haven’t gotten your copy of this book, please do. Again, I want to encourage you to read it slowly, underline, highlight, tabs, whatever you want to do. And as he’s blessed us tonight, I would love to bless him with his own words. I don’t know if that’s, you know, a way of blessing, but at the very end, he has a benediction for makers. And I’d love just to say this benediction upon all of us. Before I do, I’d love to just take a moment of stillness as we think about where we are at the cusp of a new administration, as we think about the number of lives lost, to take a moment of stillness and receive this benediction as God sends us out to be makers in His world.
[Silence]
“Let us remember that we are sons and daughters of God, the only true Artists of the Kingdom of abundance. We are God’s heirs, princesses and princes of this infinite land beyond the sea, where heaven will kiss the earth. May we steward well what the Creator King has given us, and accept God’s invitation to sanctify our imagination and creativity, even as we labor hard on this side of eternity. May our art [and work], what we make, be multiplied into the New Creation. May our poems, music, and dance be acceptable offerings for the cosmic wedding to come. May our sandcastles, created in faith, be turned into permanent grand mansions in which we will celebrate the great banquet of the table. Let us come and eat and drink at the supper of the Lamb now so that we might be empowered by this meal to go into the world to create and to make, and return to share what we have learned on this journey toward the New.” Amen.
Amilee: Well, thank you, Mako, for being with us tonight. And thank you, David, and Mako for that incredible conversation. I feel like many of us could sit with you both all night. We had a few more questions that we didn’t get to, and we’re sorry for the couple that we didn’t get to. But we did get to most of the ones that came in and so we’re grateful for that. We’ve loved having all of you with us tonight. If you have any questions you can email us at info@goldenwoodnyc.org. And again, thank you Mako, thank you David.