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Generational Art

I once heard the Aussie evangelist & God Squad president “John Smith” say “if you want to understand a generation, a good place to start is by looking at its art.” He is quite adept at using songs & images from the contemporary era to open up a discussion on the meaning of life, faith, belief etc. I think that it’s one of the reasons that people either love him or loath him, in church circles anyway, & that is that he is prepared to not simply react to the contemporary culture around him, but to look at it, study it, find out what it is saying, understand it & when appropriate, speak to it. It’s a little like Paul in the Acts of the apostles when he was prepared to examine the culture of the Greeks, then use their knowledge & understanding of art & the world to open up a question about faith & belief. (Acts 17, 16 - 34)

As I prepare my thoughts to run a yr 11 retreat, I am asking you to help me do the same.

What is the art of this generation, the music, the films, the video clips, etc, saying about this generation. Do you have any specific examples of any of the above that at least help you to reflect on the world as seen through the secular eyes of our youth. How do you feel when you view contemporary reflections of the world; for example, I just saw the most recent Justin Timberlake film clip & apart from it being on the edge of soft porn I thought it made for a really sad picture how he views relationships.

I’m after specifics here, not broad brush strokes but maybe one or two song lines, images, film quotes, that add a piece to the mosaic of modern culture

Cheers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 1:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Generational Art”

Audrey Says:
February 13th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
A song that has sprung to mind is ‘Hallelujah’ by Leonard Cohen (the Jeff Buckley version being more well known). This song has been done so many times and it will always stop a person in their tracks when being played. This link shows the amount of artists that have covered or played the song live:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah_(song)

Pretty massive..

I think it’s portrayal of the concept of crying ‘Hallelujah’ is highly accurate to my generation. I was chatting with friends about faith not long ago and were all joking that most of them believe in God when the plane is crashing kinda thing. That’s when they would be on their knees. It’s pretty true for most of my generation.

‘…and it’s not a cry that you hear at night, it’s not somebody that’s seen the light, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah..’

This, I think, is where God wants us to find him. The bible doesn’t say much about striving for a cruisy life, it says quite the opposite, that in a state of richness and contentedness it is quite difficult to find God. He wants us to dare to be broken.

2 relevant poems:

call to worship

this is a holy space and a sacred time

not because god is here in any special way -
god is no different in this place
to anywhere else -
but because we are here in a special way

in this space and time
all of who we are
is welcome

so bring the broken, darkest parts of you -
the parts which strive to be beautiful
and those which are nothing but flawed -

put them next to mine

as together,
in this holy space and sacred time,
we let them be shaped
by god.

welcome to worship…
-Cheryl Lawrie-

and this one too:

confession

we are broken people.

we make lists
- written in fine script on parchment
or scrawled onto cardboard -
of explanations

stories and excuses
we use to paper over the fragility of our lives

and there is no courage
yet
to strip away the layers
we know hold us together

to shatter takes faith we do not yet have…

-Cheryl Lawrie-

Generational Art

One Response to “Generational Art”

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