Fermata 24 Jun 2022: Your vocation can help others rest
Creative Community Care Virtual Residency
Fermata is the weekly newsletter describing some of the past week’s highlights from Notes of Rest, my contemplative-musical retreat that interweaves text, music, and questions for the sake of cultivating stillness, introspection, and creativity in communities so that all may rest. I'd love to host a Notes of Rest for your church, seminary, or affinity group. Feel free to reply to this email to start the conversation! (I also sometimes include updates about The JuJu Exchange, my jazz-electronic fusion band.)
Upcoming appearances:
June 26, 11a eastern, Notes of Rest at Calvary Baptist Church, Haverhill, MA
July 1-2, 8p-midnight central, Jazz Show at the Green Mill with Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few
July 10, 10a central, Notes of Rest at The Practice Church, South Barrington, IL
Hi everyone,
Last week I held a unique kind of Notes of Rest retreat for the artist residency of which I am a member, Creative Community Care Virtual Residency. This residency has been convened by City Seminary of New York as part of their Ministry in the City Hub, a multi-year project about church ministry in American cities. The artist residency has enabled my 7 colleagues and me to explore how we as visual, literary, and performing artists have provided care for our cities during the pandemic.
When this Lily Endowment-funded program started in February 2021, Notes of Rest hadn’t even come into view! But Notes of Rest launched in part because of the residency’s call to interrogate how I care for my communities. I created Notes of Rest because I care for physical and virtual communities by offering space to rest through contemplation and music. Thank you, City Seminary, for helping me see what God was bringing forth in my life!
Last week, I paired up with fellow artist-theologian Olga Lah to do a collaborative workshop on art and rest for our fellow residents (based on the Notes of Rest model). Olga is a dope visual artist who creates large-scale installations in physical spaces. Her work centers on themes of transcendence, perception, and phenomenological experience. Because both of our projects in this residency are about contemplation and stillness, we were a likely pairing for this workshop about our Residency projects.
Olga and me meeting for the first time in-person in LA during a trip for my band The JuJu Exchange. I love how the worlds intersect!
For my segment, we sat with 1 Samuel 16:23, in which David as a boy was brought into King Saul’s court to soothe him with music. In antiquity, just as today, music was widely regarded as having spiritual healing capabilities. But in this story, I inferred that not only was the king helped, but by virtue of Saul’s office, so too was all of Israel. For a troubled leader can’t rule peaceably. On this view, David’s artistic practice helped his nation rest because its leader rested. My resultant question to my fellow residents was this: how have your artistic practices helped your cities rest?
I’m interested in the political impact of any vocation. As an artist, I know my work can rouse the citizenry and it can provide a healing balm for a distressed populace. But even for people whose professions lie beyond the arts, we can choose to show up in ways that bring rest for others or in ways that perpetuate the restlessness of this world. For good and for bad, all of us affect the emotional and psychic state of others. Given all of the tumult our nation is experiencing today surrounding Roe v. Wade and gun safety, this is therefore an important question for us all to ask of ourselves about our vocations, no matter the field: How does your professional vocation help your family, your neighborhood, your corporation, your city, your nation, rest?
Thanks for reading.
abundantly,
Julian
P.S. Here’s an opinion piece from Sojourners in which some of my thinking around politics and rest was referenced. By the way, the author, Josiah Daniels, held an interview with me this week and that will be published on Sojourners in the near future! I’ll be sure to post here once it does.
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash