The arts and the sacraments of community.

June 5, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

One of my other hats in the community is as an organizer of new ventures in spirituality and the arts. This being Hollywood, involvement in the arts is almost required. Every week I meet more people involved in film, music, theatre, design and visual arts.

Deacon Roberta Morris came to me more than a year ago and proposed that we launch a new organization for spirituality and the arts. It is still in formation now and will incorporate shortly as a non-profit. But in the meantime, we launched the Los Feliz Art Walk, one of a growing number of grassroots neighborhood arts enterprises to allow emerging artists to exhibit their work, and some of the surrounding galleries, studios and public art spaces to reach new audiences.

Tonight was our monthly First Friday Art Walk. The informal center of the cluster of galleries and stores is our church’s work in progress—Courtyard Studio & Arts— which is being created out of junk classroom space and a back playground now filled with grass and a bubbling fountain. It is amazing what space, light and water can bring together. Since last September, we’ve had the Courtyard open for art exhibits, and the number of talented but unknown neighborhood artists who want to exhibit keeps growing. Three artists brought their work for tonight’s exhibit, two accomplished plein air painters and a sculptor.

Our hope is to eventually capture some modest grant money to pursue spirituality and the arts in many forms, including performance, film, music and other media. You can see some of our proposals as www.LosFelizArtWalk.org.

In these ten months, the most gratifying part of the Art Walks has been conversations with people who admit they are not religious but are trying to express or find (or both) their native spirituality in a way which is graciously received by others.

Without the formal structures of religion, spirituality is comfortable with all the arts, probably because it is not concerned to present, impose or enforce specific content or message. The arts speak with their own voice. So far that has included decorative work, crafts, sculptural nudes, both art and documentary photography, documentary film and spontaneous unscheduled music. For World AIDS Day , in conjunction with Hollywood Remembers, we also exhibited huge panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the largest work of folk art in the world.

So far I have not drawn people directly into the church but I’ve had many conversations with total strangers who enjoyed our wine and cheese receptions, who were much more open to talking about faith, love, hopefulness in an age of cynicism, the spiritual search, and the spiritual lessons of life experiences with an openly religious parish priest. Most of these people were churched people at one time, but no longer. Some were wounded. Most became bored. Many were shown the door, made to be unwelcome at some point in their lives, yet felt happy to be able to be honest about their wounds, their boredom or their distance with a “man of the cloth.”

Of course, both because of people Roberta and I know, and because this is Hollywood after all, many of the artists and the public who come to see their work, are gay or lesbian or transgender. For them, being this near to a church can have an element of surprise or uncertainty. I try to put them at ease, both with my art and my faith and life experience.

To me, these chance encounters with lapsed Christians, non-practicing Jews and others, have almost been sacramental. The arts are sacraments, in one sense. Conversations can be confession and absolution. Simply for me to be present to unchurched people and to speak easily and openly about my own faith and life—including creativity, spontaneity, and hopefulness—is a genuine proclamation of the word. When I read Acts of the Apostles and some of Paul’s writings I realize that for every formal sermon he may have delivered to a gathered audience, he probably had a hundred informal one-to-one conversations first.

Maybe the biggest reason that the church as a whole fails so much to engage its culture and its neighborhood is that typically its doors are open only for the religion business, rather than for art, spirituality, community service and simple conversation. While we are growing only modestly, I have every confidence our trend will continue because of our creative ventures and our straightforward openness to people we don’t know. We will all learn from one another, and I suspect the Holy Spirit of God will find ways to be heard in those settings.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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