Robert Bettmann – Page 59 – Robert Bettmann

Paul’s Corinthian Letter

peter and paul from the greek orthodox church website As I’ve written about in prior posts, in my forthcoming book I do a wee bit of tracking the history of the relationship to the human body. Of course, one of the highlights is the Christian relationship to the body, and the writings of St. Paul. Here’s a small passage that explains that as founded, Christianity sees sex, and the concerns of the body, as an impediment to holiness. Holiness in human form – Jesus – being the guide for all humans, rejection and denial of the body is inevitable. This has strongly influenced how we today consider our bodies….

Christian writings make a tie to the body as impediment to a higher spiritual calling. The Apostle Pauls famous Corinthian Letter responds to the community in Corinth, which was agitating to create a Utopic society in preparation for the coming of Christ. As Peter Brown establishes in his brilliant text The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, the Corinthians proposed a radical ideal.

[The Corinthians] would undo the elementary building blocks of conventional society. They would renounce marriage. Some would separate from pagan spouses; others would commit themselves to perpetual abstinence from sexual relations. The growing children for whose marriages they were responsible would remain virgins. As consequential as the Essenes, they would also free their slaves. Somewhat like the little groups described by Philo outside Alexandria, men and women together would await the coming of Jesus holy in body and spirit.

At a time when Christianity was just growing, the Corinthians radical notions threatened the inclusion of more mainstream elements, and so Paul wrote to put down this rebellion. That a critical concept within the religious fringe was abstinence is telling. That Paul himself was celibate points directly to early Christianitys troubled relationship to the body. In ministering the Corinthians toward sex, his words expose a very negative conception of the act. In Corinthians 7:36-38 Paul wrote:

If any one thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed [in some versions virgin], if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes; let them marry – it is no sin. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So that he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.

Paul declares that marriage is a negative, undertaken only to ward off the sin of sex before marriage. Second, marriage, and sex, are negatives that are better to be refrained from altogether. Paul states this even more clearly in an earlier passage, Chapter 7 verses 32-34.

I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interest are divided. And the unmarried woman or girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please her husband.

Marriage calls into question the ability to focus on the Lord. Married people lack the quality of what Brown analyzes as “the undivided heart”, and are therefore lesser Christians than those who are married solely to Gd.

[excerpt from Somatic Ecology, copyright R. Bettmann 2009]

The purpose for me in researching this was to document exactly how negative our culture is in relating to the body. That negativity, with ancient roots, has some modern expressions.

Other than that, how did you like the play?

taken from: http://annak.smugmug.com/gallery/5691633_NZqfy#350962380_7LL2b I was talking to my mom today and she said something really funny.

Until very recently my parents had three pets. The cat and the older dog both had to be put down unexpectedly in the last month. Now the young dog has a blood disease, and is going to have to be put down soon. So thats really painful. Losing a pet is one thing. Losing all three, randomly, one at a time, within a short time span, is awful.

Things in my life have been difficult lately, too, though in a very different way. But weve talked about that. You keep going, and you try to enjoy the world.

We chatted about our plans for the next days, etc, and she quipped, “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”, which made me laugh. Sometimes its hard to really enjoy even the nice things in daily life, because of bigger issues.

I googled the phrase to find an image to illustrate, and found that a lot of people like it as a title. The image here is from a series of camping trip pictures with the same title. I’m glad I wasn’t on that trip!

Sometimes daily appreciation for the good – or bad – gets overwhelmed by the context. I think that happens in both personal and professional ways. It’s easy for people who know you a little, interact with you a little, to draw certain conclusions. I know I do that. Sometimes life is just like that… you’re going along with your personal stuff and someone walks up and asks (more or less directly):

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”

‘course the nature of it is that sometimes I do that without knowing I’m doing it. So it goes. In the same google search I found a blog by a very smart government employee. The post on the front of the blog right now is about new media efforts in government:

Changing the paradigm from producing products to producing conversations is never an easy transition…. . Interestingly, many planners forget this step and that, paraphrasing the Cheshire Cat, “if you don’t know where you want to go, you will probably end up someplace else.” But the direction must be light. We work with creative people and we have to let them be creative in their own ways. We must also recognize that MOST of the creativity available to us is outside our own organization.

I’m sure he’s right. But sometimes we explain the world so beautifully that there is no way to develop action off of the inspiration…. Sometimes work and planning get abstracted. I wonder how much all of this new media writing will actually influence things.

Does DC Need Arts Advocacy?

Bill Wilson and Ebby Thacher, founders of AA I am the chair of the DC Advocates for the Arts. I REALLY care about the arts. The studio – the dance studio – is the place I feel most at home in the world. I believe in the arts, because they are my home. But you don’t make much money in the dance studio. You support the dance studio time (mostly) outside of the studio – through grants, commissions, performances, and teaching. That money… it’s hard to get.

I’ve gotten really involved in arts advocacy, in part, because I believe in myself. Advocating for the arts en masse has been a way for me to defend my own choices. But at this point I’m uncertain what I’m fighting for. Funding is the only issue I’ve been able to get people to talk about regarding Arts Advocacy. Not priorities in funding, not efficiency in funding, just funding.

I believe DC does need arts advocacy. But not to advocate for funding. Due in no small part to the granting programs that spend the money, over the last ten years there are a larger number of mid-sized organizations drawing funding with professional development staff, and the stream of small orgs and individual artists stays constant. Nobody talks about patronage, cause it doesn’t serve them to do so, but there is a reason why more money is spent in NW DC, and the reason is the relationships that exist. Not the quality of the artists, or the possibility for arts businesses. Collegial support systems develop between staff, consultants and arts administrators, and no rules exist to manage those relationships toward the public good. Arts businesses are just businesses.

This city has – per capita – a very large arts scene, as appropriate to a locale where a major revenue stream is tourism. But how do we efficiently ensure that every child receives real arts education? How many stable mid/large sized organizations should the city be supporting? How can funding programs really encourage the kind of art that will best serve this city? What categories of art do we need to encourage to best serve this city? How can the arts leverage community development? How can we maximize government investment in the arts for revenue growth?

We cannot expect politicians to actually be experts on everything under the sun. Advocates must inform and educate themselves so that they can contribute to the dialogues, and pressures, which politicians manage on a daily basis. Does dc need arts advocacy? Yes. Because the politically expedient decision and the right decision are sometimes two different things. We might wish that arts business leaders would selflessly contribute to open ongoing intelligent policy discussions, and the needs of the city. But perhaps it’d be better to plan within the reality that exists, and build a broad, participation-driven advocacy organization.