Yesterday we meditated with Jennifer Hereth and her excellent, enabling and ennobling work of art as healing. Her deck of cards called The Teenage Archetype Card Deck: 88 Cards for Therapists and Teachers has inspired people in Russia, Ukraine, Sri Lanka, refugee camps, New Zealand, China and many places in between.
When Jennifer lectured on the book in Xian University in China, the response of students was to make up Rap songs based on the archetypes from the Deck.
She confesses to how her projects “expressed my faith that art and politics are good bedfellows.” Her intention is to inspire her students and others “to keep paying attention when it is so easy to be politically overwhelmed and numbed.”
The card deck was inspired by a 19 year old boy who entered a mall in Nebraska and murdered seven people and himself. His good-bye letter offered this mantra, “I’m a loser, I’m a burden, and now I’m famous.”
She tells us, “I was left stunned, realizing maybe this was the extent of this young man’s vocabulary for expressing profound angst. And this call for help did not move anyone.” She wondered what she could do since she was only one person and not a therapist.
But his message haunted me until I came up with an idea. I gathered my wonderful community of students, and together we produced a tool to help broaden the vocabulary of teens. We would use archetypal language to hep teenagers realize that others had gone through what they are going through and triumphed and succeeded in life.* Thus, the card deck.
*Jennifer Hereth, An Artist Responds to Political Injustice (Charleston SC: Palmetto Publishing, 2020), pp. 3, 93.
See Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet.
Banner Image: “Cages” – Jennifer Hereth’s art students’ dramatic performance art installation on the children detained in cages at the U.S. Southwestern border. Photo from Jennifer Hereth’s collection, used with permission.
For a transcript of today’s video teaching, click HERE.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you also recognize that young peoples’ vocabulary for expressed profound angst and other feelings is often very limited? But that art is a powerful way to share our deepest feelings and experiences and truths?
Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet
Because creativity is the key to both our genius and beauty as a species but also to our capacity for evil, we need to teach creativity and to teach ways of steering this God-like power in directions that promote love of life (biophilia) and not love of death (necrophilia). Pushing well beyond the bounds of conventional Christian doctrine, Fox’s focus on creativity attempts nothing less than to shape a new ethic.
“Matt Fox is a pilgrim who seeks a path into the church of tomorrow. Countless numbers will be happy to follow his lead.” –Bishop John Shelby Spong, author, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin
Upcoming Events
“Wisdom, Grace, Love” – a 3-part online lecture series by Caroline Myss, Andrew Harvey, and Matthew Fox, September 8, 15, and 22, 3:00-4:30 pm Pacific (GMT/UTC-7). Learn more HERE.
6 thoughts on “Creativity, Nobility, Healing with Jennifer Hereth, continued”
Dearest Matthew, thank you for your tireless effort to teach us. My eyes a d heart are opening daily. May I always remain faithful like you. Blessings and much love to and your staff.patricia Ferrari.
Thank you sooo much Patricia, for your kind words of support!
Finding our purpose in life and blessing others as we live into it. It may be far more simple than we can imagine? }:- a.m.
Patrick, I think you’re on to something! Don’t make life harder than it is. Let it flow in a simple way…
I see a large majority of our youth expressing their angst and other feelings through graffiti, tattoos and body piercings, as well as the things you mentioned such as rap music and other forms of art. In these images I see a lot of pain, suffering, anger, darkness and dare I say death. I am not opposed to these forms of self expression, but rather I am compassionately concerned for the state and condition of our youths well being, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Art can and does create a forum for their voices to be heard, regarding all the things concerning them and all the things that are deeply effecting them… that are in need of being acknowledged and responded to.
Society, not listening, not acknowledging, and not responding to our youths forms of self-expression and all that this is giving voice to, has resulted in the drug crisis, which our youth has turned to, to self medicate themselves from all of the pain, angst, and anger, as well as body cutting, and other acts of violence, self-directed and outwardly directed… among many other things… which are actually forms of some of our youth expressing all that is overwhelming them internally.
However, as you have communicated in these daily meditations, art itself can be used as an effective theraputic and healing tool, as well as an educational method, teaching them how to process and deal with everything that they are experiencing and encountering both internally and externally. Like Jennifer Hereth, we as a society need to get creative in the ways we can reach out to our youth, whom are so in need of this kind of mentoring.
It’s not easy… I know from personal experience, as I once worked in a youth center within my community… in which I did introduce expressive arts therapy into programs being offered. One of the things I learnt through this engagement was that you have to be a really strong, compassionate container, that can hold a sacred space for all that the youth need to pour out of themselves, with total acceptance and empathic understanding, and that’s just one of the many challenges of learning to become and be a really good mentor.
Jeanette, you seem worried about the art of many youth as “expressing their angst and other feelings through graffiti, tattoos and body piercings” then you say, “In these images I see a lot of pain, suffering, anger, darkness and dare I say death.” But then you say, “However… art itself can be used as an effective therapeutic and healing tool, as well as an educational method, teaching them how to process and deal with everything that they are experiencing and encountering both internally and externally.” Your second comment here makes you seem more hopeful, and I know you know it because you conclude your comments by saying, “I know from personal experience, as I once worked in a youth center within my community… in which I did introduce expressive arts therapy into programs being offered. One of the things I learnt through this engagement was that you have to be a really strong, compassionate container, that can hold a sacred space for all that the youth need to pour out of themselves, with total acceptance and empathic understanding…” Thank you for your comment and invitation for reflection.