Remembering Walter Wink

Over at my creativity blog, I've written a tribute to the theologian Walter Wink, who died May 10.  It might have been more appropriate for this blog, but sometimes, the blogs cross-pollinate each other.

Perhaps I should have written more about Donna Summer, but I don't really have much to say.  On our way home from Church Council, my spouse and I were trying to remember her songs.  My spouse kept bringing up other disco songs:  "We Are Family," "I Will Survive" . . . frightening that I could name each artist.  My brain is a font of only occasionally useful information.

No, it was the news of Wink's death that made me feel weepy at work. He had ideas that took my breath away. He wrote books that I underlined copiously. He made me want to work for social justice, and he convinced me that social justice was possible. He will be missed, but happily, he lived a long life, and left behind a body of work for us to continue to cherish.


This week-end, I plan to get started on Pentecost plans.  I'll take photos and post some updates.  There will be sticks with streamers and impressionistic flames that will hang from lights.  Maybe even some kind of altarscape.  Stay tuned!

That kind of work doesn't feel as important to me as the work of Walter Wink, but it's good to remind myself that it's important in a different way.  Art can lead us to God in a way that academic words and deep studies can't.

I'd like to strive, in everything that I do, to keep an eye to what's important now, what will be important in 10 years, what I hope people will still see as important work that I did, even after I've died.  I'd like to stop stressing so much over the stuff that's not important, that's already passing away.

I'd like my art to point us to the important, the essential.  Well, actually, I'd like every part of my life to do that.