Pilgrimage
I sit amongst a group of Spanish pilgrims tending their blisters and sore muscles. Over the top of my laptop I see a dirt road winding through several stone barns and homes. Cows lounge, cats nap, and flies — oh so many flies! — buzz about. I try hard not to be intimidated when neighbors walk by with a foot-long machete in hand. Maria passes with a weighty bale of hay on her back, her beaming smile undiminished by her seventy-three years. This is Ligonde. During the month of July my digital lifestyle finds itself squarely stuck in the roundabout days of rural life. I am working at 4800bps on a radio modem from the Fuente del Peregrino (Fount of the Pilgrim), a refuge for pilgrims traveling the Camino de Santiago. Last night the house showed the Jesus Film, served dinner to twenty pilgrims, and with the talent on hand, performed an impromptu concert of opera, praise, and a ditty or two. It is a wonderful place and my mission is to capture its ambience and good feeling on the web. This will prove to be very difficult short of new technology with olfactory abilities. One must smell Ligonde to know Ligonde.I arrived in Ligonde having just finished my own pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, walking seven days alongside my brother Jonathan, my cousin Kim, and her brand new fiancé Abe, among many others. At every turn on the Camino, an indispensable, yellow-painted arrow directs pilgrims on their way to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. But in life we are blessed with many an arrowless crossroad. God does not lead us by the hand in such cases. Instead He allows us to feel the full weight and privilege of our decisions. God has been very good in recent years to clarify what I believe is His calling on my life: to make sense of Christian faith for myself as a postmodern and to communicate what I find through the artistic media of our time (especially film and the web). And yet, the details of just how to pursue something so obnoxiously vague have hardly been obvious.
A few months ago I decided to put doctoral plans on hold indefinitely in favor of pursuing several long-overdue projects. The remaining question was where to do so. Far beyond my initial plans, John O’Neal and I have been discussing the possibility of my starting an artist’s studio in Barcelona. In addition to pursuing my own writing projects, I would create a studio affiliated with the ministry here in Spain where Christian artists could use their skills and passion to the end of serving God. Currently there is no special avenue within Campus Crusade for Christ for Christian photographers, painters, writers, filmmakers, and poets to use their skills. When I recently began mentioning the idea to friends and a number of students, their response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. For some time I have felt that while the Christian community is well-supplied with critics, it is sorely lacking in creators. As a philosopher, I do not minimize the importance of critical thinking and analysis for the Church. But we are sorely in need of those who will paint a picture of true love, write a poem of empathy for the suffering, and make a film that captures our need for a savior. Several difficult issues in particular beckon the postmodern apologist and artist: to come to grips with the Church’s unexceptional and occasionally egregious past and present; to show by example and by art that human flourishing is found by living as Christ did; and to rediscover in what sense it is good news that there is ONE way, ONE truth, and ONE life. I desire a life of creating and making and I believe this is just such an opportunity. I will keep you informed.
In the meantime, we have finally begun our filmmaking in earnest. Several weeks ago I jumped on the night train to Malaga. My assignment was to film in five days the lives and stories of four Spaniards in two cities. I didn’t know any of them and wondered if my Spanish would hold up, if I’d have enough time, if I’d hook the mics up right, if I’d be able to do justice to what God has done in their lives… Mari Carmen, Inma, Jose, and Sharon are each new Christians who have come to Christ through the ministry of Ágape. We wanted to capture the newness and energy of their stories on film as a way of piquing the interest of other wary Spaniards. For each of these new Christians the story was the same in this respect, each was drawn to Christ at first by the distinct kind of love that they saw amongst the Christians they knew. I’m now putting the final touches on their video, “Tres Amigos”. (See grublet.com/spain/hr)
The weekend before that I was in Bilbao to visit with Antonio Soto, an artist I had met in Barcelona. Once the industrial Detroit of Spain, Bilbao has rebuilt and refurnished itself as a stunning cultural center nestled in the verdant, rolling hills of Pais Vasco (Basque Country). You may recall that Pais Vasco is the perpetual thorn in Spain’s side whose disgruntled minority agitates for independence by offing one or two national leaders per week. In Bilbao, the Spanish National Bank is splattered in red graffiti, cars with a Madrid license plate are keyed, and being from the South of Spain, Antonio never feels entirely safe. But, they’re famous for their fish.
Antonio, unassuming family man that he is, hardly conjures expectations of a great artist. All the same, he paints bold, abstract, somewhat Picassoesque, human forms that are in love, enraged, exhausted, humiliated, humbled. One of his series is an ode to married love and childbirth without a taint of sentimentalism. In another, he illustrates a poem on judgment day in which all those who have suffered in this life sentence God to live a life of suffering before realizing that He has done so already, in Jesus. (At grublet.com/spain, click on “Picasso and Me”) One day at the office, on a whim I decided to turn these paintings into a short film. I added music, voiceover, and spliced the images together with a few special affects. Now Antonio’s work can be used in an entirely new medium. This week I commissioned a talented amateur photographer volunteering at the Fuente del Peregrino to do a series of photos for the new web page. She was thrilled. In part, it is this chance to commission and enable collaboration between artists looking for an outlet for their work that is so exciting about the studio.
I return to Colorado September 1st. Between now and then I will be finishing our short film, “The Gospel without Words”, redoing the Fuente del Peregrino web page, and exploring possibilities for a studio in Barcelona. Please pray that I will somehow be able to pull all the thousands of images in the Gospel without Words into a sensible whole and that my time in Barcelona would be very telling.Thank you all for your support, and if you’ve read this far, for your interest,Nathan JacobsonPS. There is a new photo essay on And
