Peteskibreen's Blog

A.L.S.O.

SPIRITUALITY

In owning my abandonment of the evangelicalism’s enclave – “convertive piety*” – I also own the long road to the opening of that gate onto a new path. And at that gate are the voices of my present and past mentors, friends and critics. Some are not even interested I suppose and others know their own adjustments to constructs in the second half of their lives. Some feel the need to preach louder. At a recent funeral where an old friend was remembered it featured his sermon to be read for his children in true hard core fundamentalist evangelical style. “If only you believed I will see you in heaven” was the clear uncomfortable and forgettable message. He would be at the gate. Some who are not with me on the path, some who I would suggest are classic fundamentalist evangelicals are not enemies but remain kind and generous when we meet. In these days I do wonder at how we will all be as the power of the holding of constucts without escape hatches grows so oppressively. It seems a dullness, deafness and blindness has millions at the edge of despair without awareness.

Untitled drawing – Journal entry, 2019 [ Peter Breen]

One of the primary means I continue to use through the gate on the new winding foggy path is silence, while as Beckett says in the above quote – we who rush in slippers to silence need to consider the kind of silence we are keeping. We cannot be silent on Palestine, domestic violence, climate change. My primary silence practices that hold the smaller disciplines of meditation, mindfulness and gratitude are walking, mark making and over the past 14 years, a curated installation, “White Silence.” Some books generate a silence in a dive into imagined worlds – lately it has been British Mythologist Dr Martin Shaw’s books and the online print copies of Emergence Magazine. Foundational reading favourite on this unfolding path is the late Anglican Bishop Bruce Wilson’s 1998 “Reasons of the Heart.” Epiphany is what it means to be human, he posits.

Performance piece: Jugglers Art Space, Fortitude Valley, 2017. “Drawn to Silence: Against the flow of my constructred self.”

Performance piece: Jugglers Art Space, 2014. “White Silence” The Shed, Hamilton Northshore, Brisbane.

*”Convertive piety” is the term used in Stanley Grenz’s 2000 book [ Baker Academic] Renewing the Centre – Evangelical Theology in a post theological era to describe or sumarise the essence of evangelical theology.