Beauty and Worship: Art for Therapy, part 4

Sarah Lanse charcoal drawing

Paradigm of bringing things from darkness to light

Sarah’s drawing is an image of the contemplative process of illuminated darkness, re written pages, and of excavating roots. All themes that have come up as we have discussed 'The Human Condition' by Thomas Keating

'Gathering' is bringing together the parts missing in darkness. In 'art for play' or 'awe' it is bringing together the materials that are left unnoticed, in 'art for contemplation the truths, the beauty, making connections, and now in art for therapy, it is gathering our lost and forgotten roots, our inner emotional basements, re framing, rewriting them into the rest of who we are so that we are not split and fragmented people. If we perpetuate a false self, a fragmented person, we only add to the fragmentation of or world.

This dis integration can happen easily in otherwise healthy people when exposed to the harsh suffering of the worlds poor wherever in the world. Counselors working with child abuse victims are often required to receive 4 hours a week of counseling do deal with their own secondary trauma caused by listening to the stories of abused children. When working among the poor the stories we are hearing on a regular basis are no less traumatic. The injustices suffered by the children we are serving among will over a short time plunge us into compassion fatigue. No one is immune. In order to survive for the long term one needs to take definitive steps to reflect and process this secondary trauma, that of hearing of the traumas of others.

Self-assessment for compassion fatigue

Answering "yes" or "no" to the following nine statements will help you assess your risk for compassion fatigue:

Personal concerns commonly intrude on my professional role.	Yes	No
My colleagues seem to lack understanding.	Yes	No
I find even small changes enormously draining.	Yes	No
I can't seem to recover quickly after association with trauma.	Yes	No
Association with trauma affects me very deeply.	Yes	No
My patients' stress affects me deeply.	Yes	No
I have lost my sense of hopefulness.	Yes	No
I feel vulnerable all the time.	Yes	No
I feel overwhelmed by unfinished personal business.	Yes	No

Answering "yes" to four or more questions may indicate that you're suffering from compassion

fatigue. [This instrument, developed by the authors, has not been validated, but the results should serve as a quick check of your state of mind.] If you're interested in determining your risk for burnout, try taking the Maslach Burnout Inventory. It may be obtained through the Consulting Psychologists Press at 800-624-1765 or through their Web site at www.cpp-db.com.

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• Much of our coping and integrating of traumatic situations and stories comes from learning to be attentive and attuned to our inner world. It allows us to get to the point where we ask ourselves, ‘how is ‘x’ situation affecting me?

• It is getting this nagging abstract feeling out somehow. Naming the feeling steals its power over us.

• Lung process, heart process, and digestion give us paradigms of gathering in, processing, and letting go/ releasing. We can only process so much at a time. Increased traumatic/ difficult experience necessitates increased time to process, and integrate the experiences into our selves.

Here are some ideas of how Art as therapy can help us move towards habits of processing our experiences in service among the poor.

This is an example of my own sketched memories from an evening on the streets with the boys. This non verbal processing method is direct and immediately externalizes an experience that can eat away at you without you realizing it. Journaling after such street meetings or anything else that is potentially traumatic is an intentional way to precess and externalize the experience of another's suffering. It does not solve the injustice by takes steps towards integrating it into you understanding of God and the world.

still from the movie 'Everything is illuminated'

Holocaust films help reintegrate, finding some meaning in the insanity, and learning to live on with the loss or horror. The image of boxes of the remaining possessions of each victim is a metaphor for our built up unnamed traumas. They have a certain silent power over us if they are unopened and un integrated, and often we are oblivious to them all the way until we burn out and leave our place of service.

Our art teacher at the Valley Center Nina did a project with the boys living on hte streets with collected pieces of wood and interesting branches. The boys spent most of their time cutting cleaning and carving out of the branches they selected from the pile. When they were finished they were asked to give a name to their sculpture. In the process of naming this abstract form many came up with revealing ideas. One sculpture was a cut off small tree with the large roots exposed. It was cleaned and put upside down and gashed were cut about an inch apart up the length of the tree. In the end he named the piece, 'the sad tree'. The tree perfectly mirrored the boys arms which have the gashes form self mutilation. He was able to name the sadness in himself in a non threatening way. Darkness turns to light, unnamed feelings are named and
rendered less powerful.

Often journaling about counseling with kids or about a traumatic story told to us can get us steps closer to understanding how we are being affected.

In comparison to the suffering of the person we care about it is easy to discount this secondary suffering we feel. It is true that we cannot compare the first hand trauma and the second hand trauma, but the affects on our continued functioning are the same over time though less extreme. For this reason we have to be willing to deal with how ministry is affecting us as workers, it is important because our ability to love the least among us depends on it.

Within a few years of coming to Romania a little boy named Mihaita was hit by a car and killed. This painting was part of my own processing the trauma I had of being asked to photograph the funeral proceedings from stat to finish. It was like having my nose pushed into this injustice. The pain I felt seemed so trivial next to the memory of the boys mother screaming. I have not forgotten this boys face but I am no longer debilitated by the unnamed emotional pain. It is re written into my story my history and my faith.

• In 'Art for Therapy' we are talking about gathering the boxes of our dark closets, ‘basements’, ‘excavating roots’, ‘allowing old pages to be re-written’ so we can be fully present as a whole integrated persons.

See more examples of 'Art for Therapy'

Here is an article written about the exhibit putting cameras in the hand of some of the kids Word Made Flesh is working with in Sierra Leonne...

Beauty and brokenness

A photo exhibit shows the way young people in Seal Beach and Sierra Leone view their worlds.

By SCOTT MARTINDALE

The Orange County Register

For the 12 teenagers in war-ravaged Sierra Leone who were asked to capture their daily lives with a disposable camera, the exercise was about finding beauty in their broken, hurting world.

read the rest of the article and see more photos...

article on Broken and Beautiful Photo Exhibit

Homeless


"This is a collaborative project with a class of underprivileged teen aged girls. We developed the story and animation together around an eaten apple and the seeds that remained.

In the story the apple is eaten, the two seeds run from the scene and one cries about loosing its home while the other is comforting. They are thrown in the trash where they find a new home, a rotten apple. Then they feel an earthquake and are tossed through the air onto the soil."

By the end of our months in a row of Tuesday classes spent on the parts of the animation the girls finally said, 'enough let's finish it already!'

art for therapy

We had a psychotherapist sharing with the community this week. In part he dealt with clinical attachment styles. One of which is Anxious Ambivalent Attachment. This is the case when the child distances herself as a way of coping with the insecurity of the environment. The mother may well be loving and well intentioned but just isn't able to or doesn't know how to give the child a base of love and consistency. Often there is an alcoholic in the mix creating instability. It reminded me of this strange painting I did a while ago and gave as collateral to the local gallery for showing in their space. At the time it reminded me of Dostoevsky's salad bowl mix of persons disorders working off each other. Now I just think it rings true to the deprivation many of us live in and live as if there were no other reality.

art for therapy

The Deposition

“The police are giving us an apartment!" Are you coming or not?" Each of us hop into the police van and see the grinning cops joking with us. They usually swear at us and look at us like we are rats, but never are they happy to see us.

The city spins outside the van a few times and we pull up. "5th floor", we traipse up the stairs one after another. 'Who can bust in the door?" We all jump up and start pounding in the door. There are no sounds inside, just echoes of beating on the door. John falls in on his side on top of the mangled door and there she is.

In the kitchen lies an old woman. She must have been dead for a while now. The kitchen is moldy and smells like the bottom of a garbage can. The woman’s face is an old spotted bleached house shirt.

“The granddaughter was sent to the orphanage there is no one left to carry her out boys', Here is a bag, lets get her down to the van, we'll talk about the apartment later.

It is one of those houses, where there are no corners, only worn edges and solidified gum in every corner filling in until the home rounds till it looks like the underground tunnels we sleep in for now.

Dark, damp collections of clothes, shag strip on the bathroom floor, split toilet seat, scraps of wood, broken furniture, hear the echoes in the walls, neighbors gargling through the bathroom wall.

We all find places around the body and carry her over the broken door spiraling down together like the 'Lord’s Cow' bug with each of us as a leg.

We carry the black bag down the five flights of stairs and each of us knows what to do with death. Laugh in its face. (Except when we carried Mike out of the sewer last year after he got beat up and drank himself till he choked on his own vomit in the sewer, nobody looked at anybody, we all hated him anyway and you don’t want him haunting you just because you laughed). So we tell jokes the whole time, we joke that the body would ride nicely on the top of the van and we could aim and drop it down quite easily. The police are quiet for once, those two hate us and love us at the same time. We all know it.

We scuffle out the back of the van stopped at the morgue entrance at the back of the hospital. Placing her body on the hospital stretcher for a minute I remember my grandmother. Her smell, the way she always touched my ear and couldn't get me to eat enough. The way her bare feet looked in those jelly slippers in the summer. Blackened toe nails, And I thought of my mother, and hell, the last time I saw my dad, my brother fishing, and my mother. I feel that nameless black blob coming up my chest and say, 'so do we get to use the apartment or not?'

“We'll see what the mayors office works out and we'll let you know. I am not sure it will do any good, you'll still be back at the corner smearing your dirty rags on car windows pestering good people for change”

(a short story based an experience of the kids we meet with regularly on the streets)

art for therapy

sketch of a woman begging

(often those begging hold an icon of the Theotokos or Christ)

The other night I took Simeon to meet some of the guys in the street. As we got off the Tram across from Mc Donalds I noticed a guy without legs on the ground behind his wheel chair counting his income for the day, and a couple guys around him helping out. He seemed a little agitated when I heard him say, "am fost sârman dejeaba astazi", which means something like, "I was a poor begger all for nothing today". God have mercy on us.

Beggars Society Cross

collaborative community piece

baggers society at Word Made Flesh in Omaha

may 2006

This cross was made one evening with a group meeting to talk about faith, social justice, and our responses. The little crosses were made on scraps of paper brought by the participants and came to represent areas of poverty we were commited to confront, rather than just fix, ignore, or forget. Audio from the evening is at http://www.wordmadeflesh.com/learn/sermons/2006_05%20Beggars%20Society_JKlepac_Joy_in_Suffering.mp3