[Dialogue] 9/09/2021, Progressing Spirit: Matthew Fox: Jennifer Hereth, an Artist-Prophet For Our Times; Spong Revisited

Thu Sep 9 08:31:43 PDT 2021

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Jennifer Hereth,
an Artist-Prophet For Our Times
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|  Essay by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
September 9, 2021
I remember my class on twelfth century spirituality taught by the late and great Pere M. D. Chenu, o.p., in the Institut catholique de Paris in 1968.  I recall how he would bring large picture books of Cathedrals with their sculpture and stained glass to class and say, “there’s no way of understanding twelfth century spirituality without understanding its art.” 

Today I ask a question: “Is it possible to understand 21st century spirituality without looking at today’s art?”  And if so, to whom should we turn?

I highly recommend turning to artist/activist Jennifer Hereth who, during the recent pandemic enclosure time, looked back at her life’s work as an artist and teacher of art and activist who has visited Syrian refugee centers and Sri Lanka war-torn villages as well as the rugged streets of Chicago where she lives to gift us with a spiritual testament for our times.  She calls her book An Artist Responds to Political Injustice and it is a true Testament to our troubled times.  Not only her paintings and project, but her stories and telling of the process that moves her to act and paint is included.

There is art theater, as when she heard on arriving at her class at the College of Dupage one Monday morning that 147 college students had been slaughtered by rebels in Kenya in the courtyard of their college on the previous Saturday.  What to do about it?  Together, she and her students decided to organize a “die-in,” a participatory performance.  One hundred forty seven students and staff lay down in their college’s posh theater lobby, each with a number on their chest.  As a drummer kept the beat, Jennifer called out each number solemnly.  A Sacred ritual indeed.     

How to respond to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and congress’s ultimately refusing to pass any gun violence protections?  Hereth painted a stained glass church window with two guns lying together in the form of a cross amidst bulls eyes and bullets and blood.  The title of the painting?  “My Gun is my God.”  A blunt naming the idolatry that rules a big chunk of our culture.

How to speak to human trafficking?  Hereth painted a picture titled “Children are required to have sex 20 to 25 times a day” and paints a victim’s face along with 25 men, many of them old and out of shape, with their penises erect, lining up in a kind of “counting line” that “keeps track of the daily sexual partners this little girl has to endure, like a prisoner would keep track of the day in prison” on his prison wall. 

In response to the news that young girls were being sold by their fathers as suicide bombers, she pictured the suicide bomber-sold-girls on a series of baby bibs and onesies. 

In response to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, she created a series of artworks titled “White Lies Madder” which refers to the little “white lies” white people tell themselves to avoid the truth of continued and systemic racism in our county.  One painting depicts a black man in a graduate hat in a prison uniform with this caption: “The Tales white people tell themselves so they don’t have to listen to the truth of black reality in America.”  Truths such as the fact that while some young black people do graduate from college, many still go to prison. 

When the truth came out about the American government holding babies in cages, she responded as a mother herself: “Think how hard it is to let a stranger hold your baby”—much less take them away from you.  Her response happened when she found a pile of discarded wooden painting frames and with her college students created a series of small cages.  Each student spent time in the cages.  “Some of the young men could barely fit inside.  No one liked being caged.”  They presented a performance piece of it in the lobby of the school, but college administrators were not pleased with the cages on display in a public spot and complained that they were “ugly”!  Noted Jennifer, “Yes, caging humans is ugly.”  They moved the cages to an art hallway further away and created a performance that was filmed by the school newspaper.  It consisted of connecting the cages with wrapping paper and yellow police tape while people were in them.  The caution tape was written in Spanish, “Cuidado, Caution, a warning.” 

One of Hereth’s most talked about and utilized pieces was a series of 88 cards called Teenage Archetype Card Deck: 88 Cards for Therapists & Teachers. The cards have been translated into Russian and utilized in inner city settings in America and around the world.  Hereth lectured on them at Xian University in China and students responded by creating their own rap songs about the themes that they raise.  The purpose of the cards is to evoke conversation around the pictured archetype.  Adults dealing with teen-agers in therapy have employed it as a unique tool that gets young people to talk about their feelings. 

Among the archetypes depicted are these: Broken; Outsider; Sissy; Jock; Emo; Illusionist; Phoenix: Wise One; Sisyphus; and many more.  When the card deck was published in the Ukraine, Jennifer traveled there and gave a workshop on the use of the card deck to thirty-five therapists.  Teaching the cards in grade schools, high schools, colleges and to adults in many cultures, she concludes that “this is a good tie to emphasize global or universal thinking.”  88  Archetypes are that kind of thing.

All profits from the sale of the cards go to the Bessie Coleman Fly Girls and Boys foundation, a Denver based non profit committed to helping minority girls and boys become airline pilots.  The profession is very underrepresented when it comes to people of color and learning to fly can be very expensive.   

I have often maintained that there is a profound connection between art and justice and art and spirituality.  Indeed, “art as meditation” has been a required course in every program I have created in my master and doctor of ministry degrees over a 45 year period beginning at Mundelein College in Chicago and then at Holy Names College in Oakland and then at my University of Creation Spirituality and the YELLAWE program for inner city teen agers in Oakland.  I have also included it in numerous workshops and retreats over the years. 

I fully concur with Hildegard of Bingen that “there is wisdom in all creative works” and with Walter Bruggemann in his classic work on The Prophetic Imagination and with M.C. Richards in her classic work, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person.  I have hired literally hundreds of artists over the years to teach art as meditation and with powerful results.  Indeed, both M. C. Richards and, in full transparency Jennifer Hereth, have been part of my faculty.  Whether artists teach movement as meditation or mask-making or clay or sculpting or painting or chanting or Tai Chi or massage or singing or circle dancing or any other art as meditation form, the balance and dialectic between the rational brain and the intuitive brain bring depth and insight to the students.  It also prepares them to be both prophets and mystics with an alive spirituality.   

Many artists I have hired have thanked me for bringing their vocation in tune with their deepest values and spiritual practice.  One, who taught movement as meditation, said to me one day, “this is the first time in my life that I have been able to teach and be completely truthful about my work with my students because it is the first time I am able to use the word ‘spirituality’ in my work.  Few schools allow you to use that term but it is what all my art and vocation is about.”

Art as meditation is indeed the “way of the prophets” and Jennifer Hereth’s life and work confirms it.  I hope all ministers, teachers and therapists study her brilliant book, as An Artist Responds to Political Justice, and respond in their own way with their own imagination and their own students, parishioners or clients. 

One of the first things the fascist Pinochet did on becoming dictator was to fill the stadium with “enemies” he rounded up including artists and musicians.  When the most famous folk singer in the country led the prisoners in the stadium with his guitar, Pinochet’s soldiers guarding the stadium took him aside and broke his ten fingers; when he could no longer play but sang anyway and the stadium with him, they proceeded to cut his tongue out as well.  Then he stood up and swayed to music sung by others in the stands and the thousands stood up and swayed with him.

There is a reason why fundamentalist christofascists who won a school board victory in New Hampshire a number of years ago, put out the word that as their first decree, “henceforth the word ‘imagination’ must never again be used in a public-school classroom.”

Long live prophetic artists!

* See Jennifer Hereth, An Artist Responds to Political Injustice (Charleston, S.C., Palmetto Publishing, 2020), pp. 36f., 56f., 48f., 39, 75-79.

~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox

Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 35 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 74 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship (called The Cosmic Mass). His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Among his books are A Way To God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey; Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times; Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; Order of the Sacred Earth; The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times; and Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic – And Beyond. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox.

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Question & Answer

Q: By Hugh

I just finished Bishop Spong’s book arguing for Matthew as 1st century synagogue liturgy. I found the arguments very suggestive and in some cases quite persuasive (I have never been a literalist). Accepting that the Gospel accounts of events in Jesus and the disciples’ lives are nonhistorical creations intended to reach Jews in a traditional Jewish liturgical framework,  what *did* Jesus do and say that made the God’s presence in human life so clear to his followers, that it was worth teaching about in synagogues 50 years later? Are there particular nuggets from the Gospels that seem more likely to be “based on a true story?

A: By Dr. Carl Krieg

Dear Hugh,

In many ways I feel unqualified to answer your question, which is an excellent one. Although I have read about Bishop Spong’s thoughts on Matthew I have not read the book, so on that you know much more that I do.

The heart of your question pertains to the person of Jesus, what he said and what he did and how that impacted the disciples. I think it is very important to differentiate between the first disciples and the second generation converts who later joined the nascent community. What happened when Jesus met and gathered those who first followed him? What were the elements of those encounters? We really don’t know. My own guess is that they saw in him both what it meant to be a fully human being and they also experienced through him who God was. It was not that he did or said anything in particular, but who he was. He was a whole person in whom the disciples could see who they really were and could become. Because Jesus was not self-centered the divine could shine through him, and so the disciples discovered not only who they were but also who God was. [For a more detailed analysis, I refer you to my article Jesus and the Void, in progressingspirit.com.] The written gospels, all of which appear in the second half of the century, do not offer reliable first hand accounts of these “callings”. Indeed, they do not even mention the fact that there were women in the group probably equal in number to the men. 

It is difficult if not impossible to find those “nuggets” that would explain the power of Jesus’ person. Everyone would love to know what Jesus actually said and did. Even a scholarly gathering like the Jesus Seminar had to cast ballots on the probability of authenticity. We just don’t know. What we do know is that a small community followed him, and that despite the fact that Jesus was crucified, they were convinced that he was alive again in their midst, and that is what excited them and compelled them to tell the story.

But then matters changed.  As the disciples died a new generation of followers arose and the thinking and organization of the “Way” changed dramatically.  The written gospels took shape in different locales with different purposes, and so also did other Christian writings of the same period. Much of that writing makes it  painfully obvious that a reaction to the revolutionary impetus of Jesus and his disciples had set in. If Jesus had manifested equality of caring and sharing in the community of friends, much of the later writing rejects that vision, epitomized in the warning of 1 Timothy that slaves obey masters, women obey men, the church obey the bishops, and everyone obey the rulers. Not what Jesus had in mind.

Allow me to add some speculative suspicion.  It does not seem to me that any “belief” at all about Jesus was the first reaction of the disciples. They did not believe anything about Jesus. They experienced him, and that is quite different from “believing in”. My guess, contrary to common opinion, is that they did not even originally believe that he was the messiah, even though messianism was rampant. We might then ask when and why messianic conceptualization was applied to Jesus? It seems to me, and this is my speculative suspicion, that when the rich and powerful, who oppressed the poor for their own greedy benefit, saw that the Jesus movement revolution was not going away, they interjected and guided any belief that would transform the impetus for justice now to justice in the future, epitomized in a future returning messiah. I refer you here to my article Biblical Billionaires and the Taming of Jesus, Progressingspirit.com. 

~ Dr. Carl Krieg

Read and share online here

About the Author
Dr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC and PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith and The Void and the Vision. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife Margaret in Norwich, VT.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Examining the Story of the Cross, Part VI: The Enigma Called Judas

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
April 14, 2011
The anti-hero of the Christian story in general and of the crucifixion story in particular is one who is known as Judas Iscariot. Scorn and ridicule have been heaped on this figure over the centuries of Christian history. Much anti-Semitism has flowed from the depiction of this character. No one anywhere names his or her child “Judas.” The name itself has become the synonym for betrayal, for being stabbed in the back. The phrase “thirty pieces of silver” is referred to in print time and time again in the context of other incidents of traitorous behavior. When Judas is depicted in Christian art he is portrayed in dark and sinister tones. Events in western Christian history from the Inquisition in the 14th century to the expulsion of the Jews from or the ghettoizing of Jews in almost every country of Europe at one time or another, to Martin Luther’s call for the burning of synagogues, to the violence and killing frenzy of the Holocaust in the 20th century are all rooted substantially in the biblical portrait of Judas and through him applied to all Jewish people. It does not escape notice that the name Judas is identical with the name Judah, by which the entire Jewish nation was called, Judas being simply a Greek spelling of that name. Given this history, what can we then say about the literal biblical character known as Judas Iscariot? Can 21st century people, employing the critical tools of biblical and historical scholarship now available to us, cast light on this figure? I think we can.

The first questions we need to raise are very basic. Is Judas actually a person of history or is he a mythical character, a symbol that the original writers and hearers of the gospels would have understood, but whose meaning escaped later non-Jewish readers? To begin to answer these questions, I turn first to the record regarding this figure in the New Testament itself and see what light a critical study of those various books might say about this major character in the Jesus drama, which the gospel writers were creating forty to seventy year after the crucifixion.

I begin with the earliest Christian writings that we possess the authentic epistles of Paul, all of which can be dated between 51 at the earliest and 64 at the latest. This makes them just 21 to 34 years after the crucifixion, which makes these Pauline writings the closest writing we have to the historical events surrounding the crucifixion. They are also one or two decades before the first gospel (Mark) was written and four to five decades before the last gospel (John) was completed. So our first task is to examine what Paul, the original New Testament writer, had to say about Judas Iscariot. The answer surprises many. Paul said nothing about Judas. Not a single, solitary mention of his name! Pressing deeper we ask if Paul says anything about an act of betrayal. The answer to that question is vague, since it depends on how one Greek word is translated. In I Corinthians, written in the mid-fifties (54-56) Paul says in chapter 11, “On the night that Jesus was handed over, he took bread.” Paul then proceeds to relate the story of the institution of the Christian Eucharist, known as “The Lord’s Supper.” Note three things about this single reference. First, there is no indication in his text whatsoever that Paul identified the meal with a Passover meal. This identification would come later only when the gospels were written. Second, the word used in this single text is properly translated “handed over” not “betrayed,” which means that the idea of betrayal was based on a later, harsher rendering of that word. In the Pauline text by itself here is no indication that this “handing over” constituted an overt act of betrayal. At the very least it is not as strong a word as people have assumed in Christian history Thirdly, there is no sense in this original reference to the handing over of Jesus that it was the work of one of ‘the twelve.” So the first question we face is what do these omissions mean? Could Paul simply have assumed the truth of what came to be thought of as the “traditional view” of betrayal without actually mentioning them? That would be in the category of possible but not probable! An act as painful and scandalous as betrayal at the hands of one of the twelve would be hard to ignore. If such a tradition were known could it possibly have been omitted? I do not think so ,which leads me to suggest that it was not known.

Recall that Paul was a student of the law as well as an educated rabbi and a rigid observer of Jewish liturgical forms. The words “handed over” are quite passive and do not seem to imply a planned act of traitorous behavior such as that described in the gospel accounts where Judas has contact with the Temple authorities well in advance of the act and even agrees on the amount of the payment that he is to receive for his cooperation. The clinching argument for me is that Paul, just four chapters later in the same epistle, describes the resurrection appearances by saying: “He (Jesus) first appeared to Cephas (Peter) and then to the twelve.” Note “the twelve!” Judas is still present. Could the traitor still be part of the intimate band of disciples if he had brought about the death of their leader? That is to me inconceivable! So, I conclude that in the writings of Paul there is no hint that one of the twelve was the traitor, which means that the Judas story has to be a story that developed after Paul’s time and is thus not an original part of the tradition. Recall that thirty years later Matthew would say that Jesus appeared only to “the eleven.” All of these data point to the probability that betrayal at the hands of one of the twelve named Judas was not a fact of history, but an interpretive addition to a developing tradition.

When Paul was forced later to defend his own apostleship, an activity that permeates his authentic writing, would it not have helped his cause to refer to the defection of one of the twelve, to bolster his apostolic claim as one whom he said “was born out of due time?”

Having filed these first seeds of doubt, based on contemporary biblical insight, I now turn to the gospels and trace in them the development of the story of Judas. Lining up the gospels in the order in which they were written and focusing only on what each gospel says about Judas, we discover that between Mark, dated in the early 70’s, and John dated in the late 90’s, the figure of Judas grows more and more evil. Judas is mentioned for the first time in written history in chapter three where Mark introduces the twelve and identifies Judas as the one who betrayed him. It is of interest to note that both Luke and John tell us of another one of the twelve who is named “Judas,” but who is not Iscariot. It appears that a good Judas is also in the Christian memory in the 1st century. When Mark first describes Judas‘ traitorous act, he does so in a fairly low key fashion. In this first gospel Mark mentions no bribe and no stated motive; he does say, however that Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss at midnight. Then Judas disappears from Mark’s story and is never mentioned again.

Matthew, the second gospel to be written (82-85), builds on Mark’s story, but he now supplies the motive, a bribe of thirty pieces of silver. Matthew goes on to tell us that Judas repented and hurled the thirty pieces of silver back into the Temple and then went and hanged himself. The Judas story is clearly growing. Luke, writing about a decade after Matthew, explains Judas’ actions as having been done at the impulse of “the devil.” John, writing between 95-100, suggests that Judas was a thief and that he would do anything for money. John also says that when Judas left the upper room to do the dastardly deed, he walked out of light into darkness. At that moment “it was night.” says the Fourth Gospel. As the years go by Judas grows darker.

Next, we take all of the biographical details found in gospels about Judas and search the Hebrew Scriptures about other traitors in Jewish history to see if we can see any literary connections. The result of this search is that every detail attributed to Judas in the gospels is present in earlier stories of traitors in the Hebrew Scriptures.

First we look at the Genesis story of Joseph being “handed over” by his brothers, a band of twelve, to be sold into slavery in Egypt. The brother who decided to receive money for this deed was named Judah. I do not think that is coincidental. In the David cycle of stories in the book of II Samuel the king was called “The Lord’s Anointed,” the same word that would later be translated “messiah.” He was betrayed by a man named Ahithophel, who also broke bread with King David around the table just as Judas was portrayed as doing at the last supper in the gospel narratives. This same Ahithophel, when he recognized the consequences of his actions, was said to have hanged himself. That detail is added to the Judas story by Matthew. The idea of being betrayed with a kiss is also found in the David cycle of stories when Joab, David’s military Chief of Staff was replaced after Absalom’s rebellion by a man named Amasa, Joab sought out his successor under the guise of congratulating him. When he found him, he drew Amasa by the beard to give him the kiss of friendship only to disembowel him simultaneously with a dagger. Mark has Judas kiss Jesus in the Garden to fulfill a signal given to the Chief Priests. Luke, writing in the book of Acts, suggests that Judas died not by hanging, but by falling down and having “all his bowels gush out.” Is the literary fate of the betrayed Amasa at work here?

Finally, in Zechariah 9-14, the Shepherd King of Israel is betrayed to those who are traders in the Temple for thirty pieces of silver, which was then later thrown back into the Temple, just as Matthew says Judas did with his thirty pieces of silver.

A study of Hebrew sources reveals Judas as a composite of Old Testament traitors described in the Bible. Perhaps Paul did not know about the Judas story because it had not yet been developed. The Judas story grows darker as the years go by because not being history it is still being created. Every detail in the gospel portrait of Judas can be found in earlier biblical traitor stories. Is it then not possible that Judas is a literary figure, a corporate symbol developed for an interpretive purpose to serve some apologetic Christian need? I think this conclusion is both possible and probable. What purpose would such a story serve? I will turn to that question next week and seek to address it then.

~  John Shelby Spong
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