A good idea starts with a seed, but because of our lack of vision to see a hardy tree come from such a tiny seed, the seed falls on rocky ground. That is, until such a time as the spirit blows and carries the seed in its right season to its fertile soil.

Four guys, with Taylor University, the art basement, and all-night painting routines in common hear four different calls to four ends of the earth. Throughout the final year at college one of them, daniel, has been trying to convince the other three to move with him after graduation to New York and set up an idealistic artists’ commune. But, mortarboards in hand, they scoff, shake the mid-West from their boots, and climb aboard their 747s. All three end up in Africa doing idealistic development and linguistic sorts of things, and it is here that the wind starts to pick up.

Jason, who’s doing linguistics in Togo gets invited by a colleague to a gathering of Belgian artists who meet annually for a week of art and community in a Brussels chalet. Word of this gets around and the idea of an ‘occasional artists community’ begins to capture the imagination. When Stefan, who by now has moved to India, plans a visit to the US, the pieces start to click into place and daniel floats the idea of the first ‘Gathering.’ Derek is friends with the owner of a reclusive lake-side house with attached barn deep in the Hoosier National Forest, and the owner, a renaissance celt, sees the connection between faith, art, friendship and a motley bunch of cash-strapped Taylor grads. The venue is sealed, and the first ‘Gathering’ takes place. Somewhere along the line someone has both the idea and the gall to toss the outcome of our week into an exhibition in an Indianapolis gallery. A week after the Gathering we thus hang the work, throw the switches and, over cheese, wine, and the din of a surprisingly large crowd, recoup our costs in a silent auction.

Emboldened by this unexpected success plus the sheer enjoyment of the Gathering we realize we should be doing this more often, and plans are made for a second Gathering the next year. At this point Melinda makes her entry. Mel, who has been faithfully working the books at Taylor and Boston University while the other guys gallivant in Africa, had not been unbusy. With the founding of Taylor’s first student arts community, ‘The Guild,’ to her credit, she hears about the Gathering, and the Gatherees hear about her. When it comes to the second Gathering there is a unanimous agreement to invite Mel as the next Limner.

With the success of the second Gathering, the five of us realize that something has been born. The seed of an idea has not only taken root, but sprouted leaves, and these, although curiously shaped, have a strange draw on our hearts and minds. What we recognize is something that answers a deep desire within us as artists for meaningful community, and for the opportunity to take time out of our busy lives to express creativity and faith and have that expression shared with the society around us. We thus decide to give ourselves a name and climb up into the tree, as unlikely as it first looked, to enjoy the fruit and see where its growth takes us.

Curious Bystander: “But pray tell me, who, what and why is a Limner?”

We take Webster off the shelf and, a good lungful later, we read the following through a cloud of dust: limner \Lim"ner\ (l[i^]m"n[~e]r), n. A painter; an artist; esp.: (a) One who paints portraits. (b) One who illuminates books [Archaic]. Next the mind conjures slightly out-of-focus images of balding monks bent over medieval tomes, painstakingly transcribing sacred texts onto crisp parchment. The brothers, although not of freshest cassock, devotedly scratch their ink-dipped quills as a beam of sunlight angles down from some window high above, splashing their work with a pleasant golden hue and bringing into sharp silhouette a long-lost tradition.

To illuminate is to allow light to fall upon, to pass through, to reveal, to quicken, to imbue with sacred meaning, to reveal the ephemeral in the mundane. It was this sacred task that the original limners—the monks transcribing the scriptures—believed they were achieving by putting down sacred words onto plain parchment in a seamless weave of faith and artistry. Often with embellishments and artistic flourishes, these pages themselves became works of beauty, the aesthetic transcending the ascetic, as seen in the Irish Book of Kells. History has chronicled the role that the Irish illumination of the scriptures played in countering the barbarian waves that swept Northern Europe during the dark ages. Monasteries and their missionary monks started libraries and schools, which became islands of light against the spreading darkness of the barbarian invasion that threatened European civilization (cf. ‘How the Irish saved Civilization’).

Gutenberg eventually put the original limners out of work, but the act of illumination took on a wider meaning as the church developed a tradition of bringing the stories and characters of the scriptures to life for an illiterate public by means of stained-glass windows, murals, altar masterpieces and bas-relief sculpture. It can be said that the church thus became the source of a profound flowering of art, creating the foundation for modern Western art.

It is this rich tradition that we as Limners, also not of freshest cassock and some of us baldish, try to tap into as we seek to first illuminate our lives, then our art and finally our world with the light found along the Way. As seeing through a glass darkly, we hold to the conviction that our actions can change history and that we can have an impact both in encouraging the church to reengage the arts as well as to see our art bring an illumination into society and a revealing of reality in all its pain and beauty.

Curious Bystander: “Hmmm…Anything else?”

Among other things two ideas capture our imagination. The man who would be king, the lover of our souls, on taking his temporary leave, left his disciples with a task: to turn around and make disciples of nations. We see the role of the artist as playing a key albeit unlikely role in all of this. Somehow it is the balladeer, the artist, the poet, the song-writer, the filmmaker who ends up wrestling with life’s conundrums, capturing or being captured by an idea and then packaging, presenting and unwittingly popularizing that idea across whole strata of societies. Unlike the preacher, professor, scientist and car-mechanic, the artist seems to have a sacred responsibility to come at truth from an oblique angle, through story and shades of light, to cause whole nations to reconsider, take a second look, think again or just receive.

The second idea is that creativity is a spiritual discipline to be cultivated. If we are consistent with the idea that the originator of life is a Creator, then creativity and the aesthetic must have its rightful place in our value system. And in our busy lives it requires the disciplines to create space for the things we value but which the urgent push aside. Much like a religious order takes a set of vows, such as Mother Theresa’s Sisters of Charity and their vows of poverty with the resulting work of compassion, or the Jesuits and their resulting educational enterprise, we too want to take a vow of creativity and truly find the fulfillment of a calling to art through a spiritual discipline of creativity woven into the hubris of our daily lives.

Curious Bystander: “Thus…The Gathering?”

One of the outcomes of making art a spiritual discipline in the midst of busy lives is the annual Gathering, an opportunity for us to set aside a block of time for creativity. As an ‘occasional artist community’ committed to helping the church reengage the arts, we ourselves seek to be a microcosm of the church as we meet for a week in a barn and exercise that creativity in deep communion. Starting the week with a foot-washing ceremony, we commit ourselves to serving each other. Having picked a theme for the week, we build in each day a time for reflection both on the scriptures as well as through general discussion and group critique. Time to relax and simply enjoy one another's company over bread and ale is also critical to being Church. Our individual work thus flows out of these times of corporate reflection, discussion, community, and enjoyment. Although we aim to create enough work to have a gallery show the week following the Gathering, to us the process of the Gathering is just as important as the art end-product.