Cure-ations
The Holy Art of Creating Order, Beauty, and Healing
Are you a curator? One who gathers and tracks the gold in people, images, words, and stories? Does the hunt require you to subscribe, open and delete scads of emails with unwanted news and solicitors?
Why do some of us bother?
For me, it’s a way of feeding sunlight to the soul. Also, In the digital age, I find I need to take a level of responsibility for keeping my inner houses in order.
Who knew that modern people would be curatorial maestro’s?
The word curate comes from the Latin curatus–care—and is also reflected in an old and holy call. A curate is a minister with pastoral responsibility. Hmmmm.
For me, curation carries the added power to cure. Words and images are living vessels. When my body entrains to the healing beauty that surfaces amidst the chaotic storms of visual, audial, and written material, all is not lost.
So–cure-ation. That’s what led me to the Art and Theology blog and Victoria Emily Jones’s post of a quote this week, where Catherine of Sienna’s words blew fresh through my soul.
If it is beauty you want, I [God] am beauty. If you want goodness, I am goodness, for I am supremely good. I am wisdom. I am kind; I am compassionate; I am the just and merciful God. I am generous, not miserly. I give to those who ask of me, open to those who knock in truth, and answer those who call out to me. I am not ungrateful but grateful and mindful to reward those who will toil for me, for the glory and praise of my name. I am joyful, and I keep the soul who clothes herself in my will in supreme joy. I am that supreme providence who never betrays my servants’ hope in me in soul or body.
How can people see me feeding and nurturing the worm within the dry wood, pasturing the brute beasts, nourishing the fish in the sea, all the animals on the earth and the birds in the air, commanding the sun to shine on the plants and the dew to fertilize the soil, and not believe that I nourish them as well, my creatures made in my image and likeness? As a matter of fact, all this is done by my goodness to serve them. No matter where they turn, spiritually and materially, they will find nothing but my deep burning charity and the greatest, gentle, true, perfect providence.
—Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, chap. 141, trans. Suzanne Noffke, in Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue (The Classics of Western Spirituality) (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 290
Somatic life! I bow to it- the sprained ankle, back spasm, the grief inherited from my mother’s body, and the virus that turned me into a sow bug. I don’t cherish my suffering but I do dance with it.
Haven’t I wished that wisdom could protect me from life? The angels laugh over that idea as they point to saints, artists, and healers who so exquisitely partnered with dis-ease. Catherine of Siena, our writer above, suffered from an extreme form of holy fasting, a condition classified as anorexia mirabilis. Still, Divine Beauty did not escape her. Perhaps that’s the point.
And, centuries later, her vision made its way to me. Oh! Cure-ation!
This was followed by a torrent of tears released by the writing of Diana Butler Bass's substack, The Cottage. Diana is a church historian who wrote BEYOND Christianity: After Religion. She invited readers to review the epic statistical changes in the Church during the last two hard decades and the litany of lightning-rod moments that showcase an era of deconstruction. There it all was in black and white in plain view. It’s been really, really hard.
I have a bittersweet relationship with Christianity. I taught dance and theology in a seminary for twenty years and flirted heavily with becoming a full professor before giving it up for InterPlay. I’m also in a lifelong, intimate conversation with ancestral DNA and the followers of Christ. There is love there, not hate. But, the sorrow and gut-wrenching painful truths of our times dismembered any faith I have in what we know as religion. The skeletons are everywhere.
Still, my cloudburst of tears felt like a cure. There is a gift in looking back with others at what we are coming through. Truth heals.
A few other cure-ations I relished.
Susan Magsamen moved me to think and hope that the power of the arts could truly be gathering gravitas in this podcast with Dhru Purohit—the Mind-Blowing Science of How Art (and Nature) Can Transform the Body and Heal the Brain.
Rob Brezny moved me with his writing about Conversing with Spirits this week. Especially an excerpt from his newsletter where he tells the story of Hillary Clinton being facilitated by Jean Houston to imagine a global village. Imagination is how we artists and mystics converse with Presence and pay it forward.
I can’t believe how lucky I was to meet Penny Sisto at a Spiritual Directors International event years ago. She is much more than a fabric artist and mystic. She is a world soul, although I don’t know what that means. I recently found a youtube of her walking to her meditation space in Kentucky and showing us the inside of her studio. Enjoy!
The Tapestry Penny sent me for my 60th birthday.. Heron Dance is a painterly, poetic sweet spot born of Rod MacIver. The soft landing for me came on May 17th’s Pause for Beauty.
Cure-ation!! Love moves like that. It charms us, and if we catch it and pass it along, the field blooms and is happy.
Are there groups, writers, or artists who keep the wind in your sails? Especially ones that are not in the limelight? I’d love to receive the harvest that is moving you. Please do share whenever you can.
Thank you for this cure-action!
It is important truth. Sigh! At least she ends with the David Korton question. What will future generations call these two decades? May it be the Great Turning! Or if it is Unraveling, may those who weave be blessed, fruitful, and multiply!
A book Canoeing the Mountains was helpful for me in the last years of my service in local congregations. It started off saying Christendom is dead. The beginning of that death was marked in the 1970s - when I was in high school. Even then, my call to ministry looked nothing like local church. But, the institution allowed little room for my vision at the time.
Thank you Cynthia for sharing your curations. Love the surprise in encountering the root meaning of that word. There are so many jewels out there, all so compelling. To relieve myself from being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of what's available, I say to myself, "Feed the monkey one banana at a time". These days, I am enjoying Monisha Mittal's Divine Revelations Dance Chapel's newsletters.