During my recent trip home to Portland with my son, I found an old collection of Children's Bible Stories. I've had Bible stories a little on the brain as Fyo has received his first Noah's Ark board book, and I've been thinking about how I want Fyo to have the mythology of the stories, but I don't really want him to follow God's Old Testament examples of conflict resolution (smiting, flooding, sending plagues of locusts etc.). So before bed, I read him the stories. In doing so, I remembered how I do actually enjoy the stories as much as I enjoy other myths, legends, and fairy tales. But I was struck - not for the first time - that reading Bible stories never inspire faith in me. Rather, I just marvel at what an amazing literary device the Bible is.
Back home, during Labor Day weekend, my husband and I visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as Monday was free (thanks to Target). Thanks to LACMA's NexGen program (where my infant son has a free museum membership), Fyo and I go fairly often to the museum, but Kent only gets to go when we go for the free Friday night Jazz they have outside. I had yet to see the Contemporary collection or the 12 Korean Artist exhibit.
We walked into the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and first saw Richard Serra's Band (above). The piece is twelve feet high and seventy high. You can walk along it and inside of it. It is mammoth. It is breathtaking. Standing next to it, I felt what I imagined people felt when they first stood next to the Titanic - dwarfed. Not just in size, but in vision and imagination. Then it occurred to me that it is art - and literature too - that inspires my faith, maybe in something divine-ish, but really in humankind - the individual raison d'etre and consequent expression of it. That inspires my faith.