In my mid-20s, at art school (please don’t hold that against me), one art project I undertook changed my creative and spiritual life. It was the first project where I started to worry less about what people thought about my Christian spirituality and began making clearer and more honest work. I titled it Communion, and here's the gist: I found a quote from the Bible, and then each day, I would take one word from that passage and live inside of it with my body, my mind, my heart, and my spirit. I would set aside several times throughout the day and improvise and record poetry with whoever (or whatever) was around. But really, my plan was to read and respond to each word from the inside out.

Here's the text:

"If I speak in the tongues of men of angels but have not love, I am only an empty gong, a clanging cymbal."

The first day was challenging: IF.

IF is an unstable word. IF is contingent. IF wonders. IF speculates. IF proposes a relationship between what is and what could be. It was destabilizing and a great place to start.

My hope for "Communion" was communion, and I thought I knew what that word meant to me. It had to do with relationships, especially between people. Communion was the root of community. And at that point, my wife and I had been living in Los Angeles for several years and knew how difficult community could be in a town so self-focused and transitory (like us).

I thought that this project was going to deepen my openness towards others. But the first day, as I stepped into the word IF, my certitude, that small voice deep inside me that said, "Yeah, I pretty much know where this is going," began to quiet. And as it did, a sense of confusion came over me. What if I don't know how this is going to end? How will I be able to display what I've done if I don't know what I'm going to do?

I wouldn't call what followed full-out terror, but a sense of threat began to creep up from the center of my being. My first instinct was to control the threat through conceptual organization. Using the categories I had at hand, I would name my experience and then feel more centered and ready to do this. But what if... but what if the categories available to me weren't enough to honor what was happening?

My categories! My precious categories! How would I experience the flow of life if the energy of what I was experiencing wasn't moving through the spaces through which I had so much facility? I felt like I was losing control over my words.

As I stepped into the word and was surrounded by it, I realized I wasn't in control of IF. And as this dawned on me, I became aware of my body with new eyes. I could see the grass, I could hear the planes, I felt the Santa Anna winds as they shook the trees. I wasn't looking at a word; I was living in it as I shared the fragile, potent contingency of IF with the natural world.

Over those 23 days, I was surprised by how few people I interacted with. My experiences of communion wound up being with sounds, sights, and environments. When I connected with people or talked to my friends, for the first time in my life, my faith experience didn't feel like a hidden agenda. It just felt like something I was doing. Something I was in. And what I was in felt bigger and riskier than ever.

The confusion I first felt at the beginning of the project was the beginning of wonder. And the threat that I was trying to control? Not all threats are bad. Some things in me needed to be threatened if I was going to experience communion.