Making Edits
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, August 1, 2010


Readings: From “Checkpoints” by John McPhee
Queries by Mark Belletini

Message: Making Edits

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

So there we were,
my sister and I,
at the Art Institute of Chicago,
and we happened to catch the Matisse show that was happening then.
Did any of you see it too?

It was kinda interesting –
a lot of spectral analysis and reconstruction,
designed to show how Matisse changed his paintings over time,
added and took away,
how he moved from impressionism, into which he was born,
to the era of cubism, which overtook his career.

There were plenty of famous paintings in the exhibit,
including The Bathers,
but the one that struck me was a little one –
the Studio, Quay of Saint-Michel,
which is reproduced on your handout.
Yes, there is a handout for this sermon.

I thought about using the projector,
but the forecast was for sun and the projector we now own
isn’t bright enough,
and I wanted to make sure you saw these paintings.
So this is the middle one on the top row.
And I noted, even before I read that little plaque on the side,
that Matisse had removed the grillwork.
You see the window, with the river and the bridge?
I remembered the same window from earlier in the exhibit –
Interior with a Bowl with Red Fish,
and it was closed off with this iron grill,
which Matisse originally painted in Studio,
but then painted over, turned into the river.
You can see how it is blurry,
as he worked out the black paint into the blue.

Something in the preacher’s sense tickled the back of my mind.
I thought, that’s interesting.
What is this world which stretches out past these walls and windows,
and goes on far, far past the horizon?
A song? A puzzle? A home? A challenge?

And what is the room that the painter paints in?
Is it a fortress, or is it a vista?

And what is our life?
How do we make choices about our life,
what it means, how we approach it?

I thought of these two paintings,
and wondered about my own life, and yours:
do we paint the grillwork?
Or do we intentionally remove it,
say, ah, even though there is actual grillwork
between me and the river,
I choose, in how I make meaning,
to take it out.
To paint the world,
to make the world,
without it.
Open.

Look, I’ve always been slightly troubled
by the common notion
that the chains that hold us are our own,
that we have the key to our freedom,
that the barriers to our fullness of life
are ones we have built.

I’m troubled by that notion because for too many folks,
it isn’t true.
The slaves held in 3 foot tall crawl spaces,
bound by iron to the sides of the ship,
rolling with the waves of the middle passage –
they didn’t have the key to their own freedom.
That’s just the most prominent of thousands of examples.
We’re not all Matisse’s painting in our Paris Apartments
overlooking the Siene.

Likewise, I’m unhappy with the notion,
presented often in so-called New Age thinking, -
like the book the secret, for example –
that if just change our attitude,
then all we wish for will come to us.

It’s just another prosperity gospel,
if you ask me,
and I’m not a fan of the prosperity gospel.

But . . . but – attitude matters.
What we see matters.
How we present our reality matters.
Sometimes, life is horrible and unfair.
Sometimes bad things happen,
for no good reason.
But sometimes, we have the power to describe our own life,
to design the contours of our existence.
Do you choose to paint the grillwork,
or do you choose to paint over it?

Do you choose to say,
nothing good can come of this,
I will always be unhappy,
things can never change,
what’s the point?


We’ve all said those things, haven’t we?
We do.
And what usually happens?
Well, we are usually right.
Sometimes we get surprised,
but usually, if we think we can’t,
we can’t.
If we think it won’t, it doesn’t.

Or do we choose to say,
I am free to make my own choices?
I will try something new,
and I bet it will be wonderful.
This relationship can be stronger.
I can reach out to another.
I can stand up for justice,
and it might make a difference –
even if doesn’t change the world,
it might change me,
and that’s worth it?

Because this is what this about.
Look, the grillwork doesn’t go away
just because Matisse doesn’t paint it,
the second time around.
It’s still there.
But he changes.
He opens up himself to the world.

I heard an interview the other day with Sally Ride,
the first American woman to go into space,
and she said,
“Maybe I wasn’t paying attention,
but nobody ever told me that I couldn’t
so I did.”
I’m sure, in fact, folks did tell her she couldn’t.
She choose not to pay attention.
The barriers were still there,
she just chose not to see them.

Life is about a way of seeing –
this isn’t just about optimism or pessimism,
those simplistic questions
about glasses and how much water is in them.
This is about a religious question:
when we look at the world,
what do we see?

Let me try to get at this by way of process theology –
in process theology and process philosophy,
thinkers like Whitehead and Hartshorne and the rest,
they talk about two poles of existence:
actuality, what is, and possibility, what could be.
We finite creatures live in actuality,
in this moment of time and space,
as we are.
But we feel the lure of possibility,
like an ebbing tide at our toes,
pulling us towards something else,
something better and larger.
Process thinkers who are theists describe this lure as the work of a panentheistic God,
process thinkers who are non-theists describe this lure as the universe itself,
or our own best self.

Doesn’t matter what you call it.
The point is that possibility tugs at us.
It invites us to see new possibilities.
It says, hey, I wonder what this painting would look like
if I turned the grillwork into the river?
I wonder what my life would be like
if I took that leap of faith,
if I tried something new?

This is religion, as Vincent Silliman put it in our responsive reading:
a voice of renewing challenge to the best we have and may be,
a call to generous action,
a dissatisfaction with things as they are,
sorrow that opens us to sympathy,
the wonder and lure
- a lure – of that which is only partly known,
a discovering of opportunity,
holding before our eyes a prospect of the better life for humanity,
which each may help to make actual.

This is process humanism –
that we feel the lure of the better world,
and we try to make it actual.

And this is what I mean when I say life is about a way of seeing –
seeing what could be,
what might come to pass.

It is singing, my spirit’s burning low,
but worship is not too late,
and healing is possible,
and turning from self-pity toward that healing.

Healing from loss
is about seeing the possible,
that life can be better than this,
not right away, not with some magic spell,
but through time and love and the spirit of love.

Serving justice is about seeing the possible –
if enough of us stand on the side of love,
and tell the truth, and tell our friends,
and speak up,
we can change hearts, and replace fear with hope.

Living beautifully is about seeing the possible –
that we can have relationships of beauty
and live in harmony with the way of things,
and make beauty even when our view is blocked
by wrought iron grillwork.

My sister and I left the Matisse exhibit
to see the rest of the museum.
She, seeing the place for the first time;
me, seeing it again
and thinking about this theme of how we edit our lives,
about the choices we make about what we present and how we see.

I am reading the little plaque next to a painting I have seen many times,

At the Moulin Rouge by Toulouse-Lautrec.
I put this on your handout too,
it’s the one in the top right corner.

And the plaque said something that I hadn’t noticed before –
that after Toulouse-Lautrec finished it,
it wouldn’t sell.
Eventually his agent,
who was trying to make the commission, of course,
decided that the reason he couldn’t sell it was that it was too outrageous –
and that what was outrageous was the American singer,
May Milton,
who was depicted under the blue lights, garish as can be,
on the right side of the painting.
So he cut her out.
If you take your hand and make an L shape,
and put it over the painting,
you can see the modified version.

Pretty different, huh?

Well, this version didn’t sell either,
and Toulouse-Lautrec eventually reattached the original portions.
If you see the paining in person in Chicago,
you can see the lines where the cuts were made and then seamed.

And my preaching sense tickled again.
I thought, ah, here is a theme.

How many times?
How many times have I held back part of myself,
for fear nobody would buy it.
How many times have I cut myself off from my full outrageous self?

Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor,
and I have professional obligations which I respect greatly.
Not every outrageous impulse is a good one.
But we need to be honest to ourselves,
to honor and celebrate all that is our life.

That garish singer, she is the paining.
She is what makes this At the Moulin Rouge
and not “at some anonymous social hall.”
She’s real, she’s beautiful –
she is the famous club,
and the painting doesn’t work without her.
I want to thank Jack for playing Nature Boy,
a song which was used in the movie
Moulin Rouge – indeed, sung in the movie by John Leguizamo , who was playing the part of Herni de Toulouse-Lautrec.
The movie and the painting
both capture that marvelous wonder,
that extravaganza, spectacular-spectacular
that was this place at that time.

What about you?
What are you hiding that you should let out?
What closet are you stuck in?
Whose approval are you trying to get
by limiting who you are?
Is it worth it? Really worth it, to your soul?

What outrageous and beautiful thing would you do,
would you be,
if you could?

How might you live in the fullness of you life,
celebrating all that is your life?
If the clouds and the sun,
in their game of hide-and-seek,
asked you, why aren’t you playing with us,
what would you answer?

What I want to say is this:
your true heart is beautiful.
your full and authentic self is worthy of being seen.
I don’t want you to hide yourself under a bushel.
I want your light to shine brightly,
to go for it.
Because you are good at heart.
You are lovely,
and the world deserves you to be your full self.

Maybe that will outrage some people.
Maybe your full self will frighten others;
maybe it frightens you.
But your full self, your loving heart,
is good.
I’m not talking about offending people for the sake of offense,
and I’m not talking about doing to others however you please.
Your full authentic self,
I am theologically confident,
wishes fullness and beauty and integrity for all people,
everywhere.
But your full self is also you, uniquely unlike any other that ever was, is, or will be,
your being, your beauty, your love and spirit and mind –
bring this to the world,
we need it –
Howard Thurman put it best,
he said,
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive”

We continued to explore the museum.
Now I was on the lookout for other examples of the editing process –
when artists might have made deliberate choices
about what to show and what to hide,
how to present themselves,
their creativity to the world.

And it didn’t take long before I found it,
just a few rooms away from the Toulouse-Lautrec.
What may be the most famous painting in the whole museum,
at least for anyone who has seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . .
anyone . anyone

Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette.
I’ve only presented you with a corner of it on your handout,
because I want to talk about a detail that you couldn’t see
if I put the whole thing in –
it is a huge painting, and if you don’t know it,
you can google it at home or at the library and see the whole thing.
Or, you know, rent the movie.

The offertory that Jack played this morning,
Putting It Together,
is from the Sondheim musical,
Sundays in the park with George,
which is based on this painting.

Anyway, there on the little plaque next to the painting,
it indicates that Seurat finished the painting,
but then later decided to stretch the canvass,
and he added the border of dots –
mostly purple and other darker colors –
and had the custom white frame designed.
You can see the edge on your handout,
but it’s hard to get the full effect without seeing the painting,
with border, at full size.
That little border changes the whole painting.
Your eye travels around the edge and then gets pulled in,
back to the people on the bank,
to the dots,
to the infinity of color.
The border is a well-made edit.

It gives you a soft landing as you look to the edge of the work,
it tickles and amuses, even,
it contains – literally frames – but it doesn’t suffocate.

I suppose that the painting would still be impressive without the border.
But, reflecting on it in light of what I had already seen,
the Matisse and the Toulouse-Lautrec,
I thought about the way in which the border, the frame,
indicates meaning.
Seurat adds dots. More dots.
Were there not enough dots already?
But no, the border of dots indicates that the world is made of color,
of points of color,
and we see things as a whole,
but that have these little parts
and life is about a way of seeing,
a way of shifting your view between the whole
and the little parts,
seeing the brushstrokes with the same eye
that sees the whole work,
a way of seeing,
of seeing this act, right now, sitting in this room with these people
listening to these words,
and also, in the same moment,
experiencing possibility, the great stream of life,
your whole life, your whole world,
all there is, was, ever will be –
seeing this all at once.

And the border is a way of making meaning,
of saying,
see, this is what I mean.
This. [make frame with hands].

Are you making some borders in your life?
Not walls, but dots on a page,
a frame that says,
this is what I mean,
this is who I am,
this is what I value, what matters to me,
these are the principles and people and ways of life
I will not give up,
that I place in the center of my existence and my caring heart.

What is essential to you?
Are you willing to say so?

We make choices.
Every minute of every day.
A lot of them are habitual, but they are still choices.
And we are finite, and oppression is real,
and we do not have infinite freedom.
But we make choices –
choices about how we see the world,
whether possibility lures us,
or passes us by.
We make choices about whether we are fully ourselves in the world,
in all our outrageous beauty.
And we make choices about how we will present and frame our deepest values,
our core commitments.

These choices are edits –
additions, subtractions, additions again.

We are trying to get it right –
to live our best life,
to live well with others,
to embrace truth and beauty and love,
and we are always editing –
at our best, we are editing for good reasons –
not the agent cutting off,
but the artist re-attaching.
We are the fact-checker, trying to get it right.
And this is hard.
A writer for a national magazine,
one with a reputation for its fact-checking department,
still makes errors –
nobody ever gets it right all the time.
Nobody.

We don’t get to start in the beginning,
and work our way up the exercises,
learning the motions,
we start, instead, as Adrianne Rich said in our chalice lighting,
in the middle of the movement already sounding as we are born.

We are thrown into life,
and nobody is perfect,
nobody has it all figured out.

You find the exception, you let me know –
I’d like to meet them.
I’ve never found one.

But this is what is great about us –
we can glimpse possibility –
but we live in actuality.
To make that leap takes creativity –
imagination, willingness to risk.
And we keep trying –
most of the beauty and courage and love in the world
is the consequence of people striving
and reaching for their best self,
for the person and the life that they believe they are called to be,
called by the spirit or by God or by the impulse of life itself.

It is my hope and my prayer that,
therefore, we will be generous with each other,
and ourselves.
Nobody is perfect.
It is enough to send a gentle note –
we need not send Chicken McNuggets in the mail.
It is best if we can laugh at ourselves.
It is best if we can forgive and begin again.
It is best if we can remember that so much depends on taste,
and not everyone’s is the same,
that we all have our own creative spirit, our own muses and styles,
and that the most beautiful world,
the most just world,
is the world where everyone is able to be who they are,
to be and express their own beautiful heart.

I hope and I pray, on this day and every day,
that we, and others, will have the courage and the wisdom
to make wise editorial choices.
I hope that we will remove barriers and see possibility,
be lured by it,
become more open and wonder-struck,
be filled with the hope of the imaginable.

I hope and I pray that we will be our real outrageous beautiful self,
that we will live out loud,
honest, true, spirit-filled, noticeable,
that we will take risks for the sake of authenticity
and our true vision of the beautiful,
even if others just can’t see it,
even if it isn’t profitable or safe.
I hope and pray that we will know how to say,
and have the courage to say,
this is who I am,
this is what I care about,
this is how I define myself,
and I’m open to influence,
I’m open to inspiration,
but this is what I value.

If the clouds and the sun are playing hide and seek,
and they ask you,
why aren’t you playing with us,
what will you answer?

If someone says,
what are you for?
what will you say?

What is the world?

You’ve got to make your own answer,
but I think, at least, it is a work of art,
a beauty and a wonder, and so are you.
So let your light shine,
be hopeful and truthful and yourself,
and let’s sing together.