Bulletin Board of the Brain » Bravery

Kj — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:52:53 +0000

We’re On The InterWebs!

Kj — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:56:10 +0000

Here’s my 9 & 1/2 minutes on my Twilight & Evangelical culture research. Click here or on the links below to see more MHGS MDiv Integrative Project Presentations.

MDiv Integrative Projects – Kj Swanson from Mars Hill Graduate School on Vimeo.

When You Visit A Tattoo Parlor Alone…

Kj — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 08:28:22 +0000

…it’s inevitable you’ll end up playing Monopoly on your phone while your skin is purposefully wounded.

Otherwise known as…I went to get my tattoo touched up (pretty standard for foot tattoos to need touch ups), and I passed the time taking video of the experience.

Yay for Matt Sawdon and the crew at Sunken Ship Tattoos in Everett. 5 stars for atmosphere, and 5 stars for the sweet tattooing. If all goes well, I hope to see you again before graduation Dot Dot Dot

Life on Venus

Kj — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 07:27:50 +0000

This is part of my last assignment for my last spring of seminary/grad school. It’s an image showing my current theological space. I’ve been inhabiting a different planet for some time now. I could call it Planet Lent/Holy Week/Resurrection. I could call it Planet People In My Room Late At Night. Or Planet Not-Submarine.

But the easiest term has been Venus.

Voices, faces, words, stories, prayers, tears, hands, gratitude, perseverance, sunrises, full moons, icons, incarnation, conversations, photographs, papers, books, songs, hot fudge sundaes, embraces, car rides, questions, histories, movie theatres, women, men, beloved friends.

Six weeks left…I wish I could fit all of your faces on this page.

…and yes, Sofa Square made it into my theological space collage. I love you Sofa Square.

Time to Talk Twilight

Kj — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:31:29 +0000

For about eight minutes, at least.

Anyone in Seattle who’s interested, some of us from my MDiv cohort will be presenting our Integrative Projects

Wednesday, April 7th at MHGS from 3-5.

You would be most welcome.

Ah…the Pleasures of Juxtaposition

Kj — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:41:46 +0000

From Joshua, the consummate minimalist

Living in Lent

Kj — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:44:22 +0000

Historically, Lent is both a time of preparation and a time of longing. In the early church, it was a time to prepare for baptism, which in the midst of intense persecution meant preparing for death. You underwent a spiritual death and rebirth so that you no longer had to fear physical death. In Lent, we also reflect on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness, where, as he prepared to begin his ministry, he was tempted in the midst of privation, loneliness and hunger.

Culturally, if you’re at all familiar with Lent, it now tends to mean giving up stuff you like because God maybe wants you to. While there’s always room to reflect on what might be worth letting go of or putting aside for a time in order to place more value on something else, this type of Lenten practice rarely engages my heart or soul. It tends to play into the lies and darkness I’m already struggling to weed out—keeps me focused on myself instead of growing in relationship with God or others.

This year, my Lenten journey began with a day of blessing and being blessed. Ash Wednesday, a day largely associated with mourning and sorrow, was to me, Full and Alive. It was a friend who crossed my forehead with ashes, and I was able to do the same for another dear friend. As I moved throughout my day, the faces of those around me reflected back the solid black lines that marked me as well. We marked each other as we had been marked, have been marked, are being marked.

I was so thankful Joshua posted his camera-phone self-portrait on Ash Wednesday, because it captured for me how much that day (which involved confessional art, heart-to-heart conversations and late night bonfires) was about the faces of the people I love and with whom I have been journeying.

Without going into the specifics of my chosen Lenten practice, I can say that it has far more to do with engaging life than pondering death. For me, it’s probably the bigger challenge. This year, my Lenten colors are not shadow.

“Facebook, Roadside Attractions and the Atonement” or “Vince on the Cross”

Kj — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:52:45 +0000

I was allowing myself to be distracted by Facebook one day, following friend’s links haphazardly to see what quizzes they’d scored 83% on or what pictures they took on their vacations. One link trail took me to a photo album of a friend from high school. No doubt it was the photo album title, “Holy Land USA” that drew my eye. I clicked through photos of Vince and his traveling companion at what was clearly an obscure, low budget and creepily earnest American roadside attraction depicting biblical locations such as Herod’s palace, along with awkward statuary and hillside messages from the gospels. It was an ironic kitsch-lover’s dream. I admired Vince’s bravery/whimsy for marching onto such strange territory. Personally, it would freak me out, or at least, I’d be afraid to be seen laughing at it…or taking it seriously.

But towards the end of the photo album, one image caught me off guard. Amidst the goofy images of hillside dioramas and “Holy Land” signage, was Vince—on a cross. His arms outstretched, head hanging calmly, sunlight casting a divine glow onto his shoulders: Vince pulled off a surprisingly skillful portrait of the crucified Christ.

Friends’ comments below the photo jokingly celebrated Vince’s irreverent boldness. One’s person’s comment, “Kinda amazing that you fit it so perfectly, eh?”, struck me as more truthful than they may have realized. Something about Vince on a cross felt truthful in a profound way. To consider both the US’s current “Roman Empire” status and the power exhibited by conservative Christian political and cultural leaders these days, its really not a far stretch of the imagination to see a young gay man on a cross, and think “Yep, he fits.”

Seeing Vince on the cross immediately made me think of the writings of James Alison, a theologian whose writing on the atonement has had a profound effect on me over the past year. In Undergoing God, he writes, “The ideal ambassador for Christ would be one who could put words to the experience of undergoing the place of shame and invite others to inhabit that space by showing that it is possible to inhabit it non-toxically.” As an openly gay man, Alison explores Christ’s crucifixion as a disarming event against violence and shame, more than a God-decreed sacrifice. He writes that Jesus:

“is also ‘victim’ in the modern, ethical sense, an entirely innocent person who was killed so as to assuage the wrath of people who needed a victim in order to keep their system going. And it was because he voluntarily chose to occupy this space of being a ‘victim’ in the modern sense that he brought to an end sacrifice. Indeed it is perfectly possible to say that his giving himself up to death wasn’t a sacrifice at all in the traditional sense of the word, but rather, by showing that at the root of what we call ‘sacrifice’ there is a simple, mendacious mechanism of murder, that is, by revealing that there is nothing holy at all in all our mechanisms for creating victims, [Jesus] brought the world of sacrifice to an end.”

By occupying the place of shame and ultimately, overcoming the mechanisms of shame and violence, Jesus revealed the absurdity of that system. It is this willingness to survive and overcome the place of shame that brings to mind both the beauty and frailty of this image of a young gay man on the cross. Instead of the typical loincloth and crown of thorns, the man on this cross wears sunglasses, a plastic band bracelet and designer jeans. Without forcing Vince to represent gay men everywhere, there is something humbling and awakening about his Christ-like posture there on a cross at a roadside attraction—humbling because it is indeed the very posture so many gay men have been forced into by our culture and largely, by the church. Humbling and awakening also when I think of the gay men in my life who have exemplified Christ’s love, strength and integrity in the face of rejection from families, internal doubt and cultural marginalization and stereotyping.

But I find hope in Alison’s understanding of Christ as the one who takes over the place of shame and violence so others no longer have to—that it is not God who required sacrifice, but us. Jesus walked into the space of our hate and showed us our folly. Alison says: “My thesis is that Christianity is a priestly religion that understands that it is God’s overcoming of our violence by substituting himself for the victim of our typical sacrifices that opens up our being able to enjoy the fullness of creation as if death were not.”

Both Christ on the cross and Vince on the cross are reminders to me of how foolishly I demand victims for my own violence and sacrifice others to cover my own shame, when ultimately, God would have me set down both violence and shame and choose instead to stand with Christ on behalf of those who’ve been forced into the place of shame and have suffered at the hands of violence. The cross should not be a symbol of sacrifice God required, but instead, a proclamation from God, saying, “No more”. Vince may remind us of those who “fit” on the cross, but it’s us, not God, who put him there. Will we say “No more”?

Adolescent Heroines and the Unexpected Epiphanies They Bring

Kj — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:23:49 +0000

Last Friday, six pages into Suzanne Collins Hunger Games, I had a revelation: I spent my entire adolescence reading about adults. I didn’t read The Chronicles of Narnia until my junior year of college. I read Little Women soon after. Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quartet was a college graduation gift I gave myself. A week and a half ago I finished Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. For some reason, be it lack of exposure or a subconscious resistance to reading “young adult” literature as a young adult, I don’t think I read a single book with a teenage protagonist in my teenage years, except a stray book here and there assigned by English teachers.

This being the case, I believe reading these books as an adult has had a paradigmatically different effect on me now than they would have at sixteen. Of course that’s not surprising, but what has surprised me is that I think they’ve hit me a lot harder and deeper reading at 30 instead of 15. While I dove into my (incredibly short if existent at all) winter school break hungry to read young adult fiction, I assumed it was a desire to immerse myself in tightly written narratives with fully contained worlds and mythologies. However, my first day reading Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games awoke me to the fact that maybe what I was really needing was to follow protagonists who were thirteen and sixteen. I’d like to be able to say that having been a teenager who read about the adult experience has made me into an adult who can enjoy books about the teenage experience, but I think its more accurate to say that my thirty-year-old self is trying to grapple with my conflicted adolescent past—trying to find the teenage feelings I managed to mostly evade as a teenager. Or maybe at this point in my life, about to complete graduate school, I feel like a teenager again, wondering where I’m supposed to go to finally start my real life.

Either way, spending the last three weeks with Lyra in The Golden Compass and Katniss in The Hunger Games, has unlocked spaces inside me I either did not know were there or had been carefully avoiding. It’s humbling to learn lessons from fictional teenagers, but it’s healing as well. Both Lyra and Katniss embody courageous abandon as well as deep innocence that grieve me to the extent of how foreign those things have always been to me. At the same time, they’ve reintroduced longings I had at that age that really have not changed much since then and may still be unmet. I thought I was reading to have my imagination awakened, but instead, I was forced to reflect on my reality. Like any great imaginative fiction, I found truth on the page, not fantasy.

When the first tears came 80 pages from the end of Philip Pulman’s trilogy, I had an instinctive urge to Tweet a self-deprecating joke about being jealous of fictional thirteen year olds’ ability to express their feelings, but thankfully, caught myself. Instead, I wept for the rest of the book. I don’t know if my thirteen year-old-self would have had the same response, but at thirty, maybe I finally feel able to listen to my own young girl’s voice, be sad with her, while still looking forward to all the things her life might possibly hold. I had no idea entering the world of juvenile fiction would mean entering grief. Now that I know, I have no choice but to keep reading. Hopefully Lyra and Katniss and Lucy and Jo and Meg Murray and the others will continue to be patient with me. Hopefully I will be as compassionate to myself as I am empathetic to them.

I’m Published In A Magazine! (ad)

Kj — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:40:37 +0000

If you happen to flip thorugh the latest issue of Relevant Magazine, you’ll find something that looks like a non-bifurcated version of this nestled into an article about the new face of homelessness, somewhere after the Matisyahu and Switchfoot interviews… (My ellipses are trying to connote irony, but about what, I’m not entirely sure).

MHGS marketing (Josue) has been experimenting with ads that are essays by students instead of the normal catchy image and hyperbolic quote thing. I don’t know if it works, but I guess the idea is to expereince a bit of MHGS and its students, even just at the print ad level. I appreciated the invitation.

I asked Josue what he wanted me to write about and he said “Why don’t you shoot me a few ideas” and I said “uhhhhh…a few ideas on what to write 500 words about for an ad for an interdenominational seminary/counseling graduate school to put in a progressive/Evangelical Christian magazine about pop culture? That should be…easy?”

But I shot him a few ideas and he suggested I run with the Shakespeare idea. This is literally the least I could say on the intersection of Shakespeare, hermeneutics and the gospel –so little in fact that I’m afraid it makes no sense, but Josue said it was okay, and maybe somewhere out there a twenty-something liberal-arts minded Christian gal who can’t decide between getting an MFA in Directing or trying out the seminary thing will decide to click on mhgs.edu and who knows what might happen next…(This is a rhetorical reference to myself, not a knock at Directing MFAs. I’d like one of those as well, if you have an extra one lying around)

Either way, it’s fun to sort of have an article in a magaizne (and get to toss out the word eschatoligical while also talking about the smell of popcorn). I say this a lot lately, but, Thanks Josue.

(Also-about the top image-when I realized one page was Hamlet and the other was the Book of John, I had an intertextual joy heart attack)