"The Generative Life" with Sara Groves
“The Generative Life” with Sara Groves
Sarah Groves is an extremely gifted singer, songwriter, and recording artist who has been nominated for 7 Dove Awards. Sarah also does important work alongside International Justice Mission, advocating for victims of human trafficking.
Sarah's beautiful voice has this amazing way of speaking to the soul's deepest longings, struggles, and hopes. In my time with her, I talked with Sara about beauty and what it means to search for and understand beauty in the midst of the sometimes very broken human experience.
The Interview
Video produced by: Bret McQuinn at Runs With Scissors
Interview Transcript
Melissa: So I'm sitting with Sarah Groves today and I'm so privileged to be interviewing her for the Mentor Series. Sarah Groves is an extremely gifted singer, songwriter, and recording artist who has been nominated for 7 Dove Awards. Sarah also does some really important work alongside International Justice Mission, advocating for victims of human trafficking. Sarah's beautiful voice has this amazing way of speaking to the soul's deepest longings, struggles, and hopes. She has the ability to speak so authentically to the raw realities of what it means to be human. And yet also has eyes to see God in the midst of the sometimes very broken human experience. And so that's why today I am so very grateful to be talking with Sarah Groves about beauty and what it means to search for and understand beauty in the midst of being human. So, Sarah ...
Sarah: Thank you.
Melissa: ... thank you so much for being here.
Sarah: My pleasure.
Melissa: I’ll just say a couple of things just by way of reminder about the Mentor Series. So part of the mission of Impossible Beauty is to redefine beauty as the life of God at work in us and among us versus some more unhelpful ideas that our culture hands us women and men about beauty. And so in the Mentor Series, I am wanting to uphold women and men who exude internal and eternal beauty, versus how our culture tends to uphold those who are aesthetically perfect.
Sarah: Yes. I love it.
Melissa: Good. Thank you so much.
Sarah: I love your mission.
Melissa: Thank you. I really appreciate it. So if it's okay, I'll just dive right into the questions.
Sarah: Yeah, sounds good.
Melissa: Okay. So the first one is just how do you define beauty?
Sarah: Well, I probably won't add anything new to this conversation because a lot of people for many years have thought about this, given this a great deal of thought. The voices that I'm drawn to are foremost, Makoto Fujimura is an artist/painter who has given so much thought to culture care and to this idea as a maker of what beauty means to us, what its role is in the world. And he often references a lot of thinkers over time, but holds up Dallas Willard's ideas that there is something of goodness and truth in beauty. And so you have goodness, you have truth, you have others that bring in justice as an element of beauty. So outside of just the aesthetic conversation about beauty, there's obviously something much richer to this idea of when we're struck by something. Beauty has I think commonality in that, there's a sense of joy or pleasure. When we encounter it, it can be life changing when we encounter beauty. And I think it's necessary for life.
I actually think it's a part of soul care. And so in spaces and questions and conversations like this, I'm often quoting Makoto Fujimura because he's one of my favorite voices. I've also learned a lot from Charlie Peacock, the music producer in Nashville who started the original Art House. And today we're meeting in my husband and my version of that, Art House North, that we started in 2011 here in Saint Paul. But really it's our attempt to ask this question about beauty and how do we participate in ... Mako says that culture is not a war to be won, but a garden to be cultivated. And there's something about laying hold of the true meaning of beauty that is a part of our efforts here, even at Art House North.
Melissa: So it's almost these like eternal characteristics?
Sara: Yeah. And I think that it's obviously a very subjective conversation. You look at a work of art and is this beautiful or not? You know, it depends. So beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But there's something transformative when we encounter beauty. We need it. It's very necessary. And I think one thing I've taken from Mako's work and writing is that our ... He says every institution has been overrun with utility and pragmatism. And he said maybe primarily the church. This sense that if we have reduced everything that useful equals good. When you think about all the things deemed unuseful, that can't be the point. You know, sort of that level of pragmatism and utility. So you have to me this ... Even if we take it out to this meta level of what God is doing and a narrative where the word redemption, and what God is attempting to do.
The Bible references beauty for ashes. That this is sort of God's role in the world is to kind of come bring where there has been by sort of our own attempts at brutally misappropriating making, we end up in these spaces that are just loaded and full of ash. But there is this story all throughout scripture that the role of God is to come kind of bring beauty and bring restoration. Psalm 103 talks about, “who lifts me up out of this pit and crowns my head.” And there's all this language about his lovingness as a father, and the sense that he sees us, that we're not this sort of ... While both these tensions are true, "Man's life is like a flower. We bloom in a field, the wind blows over, its place remembers it not," speaks to our sense of despair and futility and why beauty, why even matter? But “from everlasting to everlasting our maker sees.”
So we're kind of live in these tensions of a constantly of really mass destruction. And then a call and a sense of that generativity is good, is right, is something we should participate in. And so I think that, yeah, it is hard to lay hold of. And I'm sure as you're having these conversations, “what is beauty?” That's a huge question.
I think one story that has just resonated with me through years, now, almost a decade and a half was I was in Charlie Peacock's kitchen at the Art House in Nashville, which he started to just basically have conversations like this.You could go to Nashville and you could learn about how to succeed in business, how to advance your career. But the Art House was where you were going to go to learn about what it meant to be an artist in the world. What is the role of art in the world? How do you push back against this utility and pragmatism that invades every space?
So one thing I remember sitting with Charlie, and he asked me, I was really in despair about a life working with words. I felt like what's the point? And.. you know, already the internet is in full swing and there's words in abundance more than we could ever know what to do with. And here I am trying to put out my ideas. And I told Charlie, I just feel like I might need to change careers and do something more with my hands, more physical.
And he just asked me if I had ever heard of the Cellist of Sarajevo, who during the Bosnian war, he was a cellist in this Sarajevo orchestra. And he went, on purpose, into bombed out areas and often newly bombed out areas where still conflict was happening around, and he played this beautiful Adagio. The music had been found in the wreckage of World War II. It's a beautiful lament. The song just evoked so much emotion. And he played the song in the middle of the bombed out crater. And Charlie said, a lot of people have attributed a hastening of the end of the war to his action because the media was so drawn to this crazy, this act, this protest of beauty out of the middle of absolute ... I mean if you read about the Bosnian war, the level of despair and the depravity at that point. And so this idea that it's easy to kind of stand around the edge of these craters, these bombed out places and we don't have to go far to find bombed out spaces.
But here's a man whose like thinks, “what would I put in that crater, if I could put something in there? I have this cello, I want to put a song in there.” And I think that is the motivating ... really a narrative in that runs through my life, that I want to be as afraid as I am, as despairing as I am myself, I want to be scrambling down in there and thinking, "What would I put here? What generative thing might I say in this moment or place here in this moment?"
And to be found in times of conflict and great moments of rending in history to be found just playing away at every level. In my friendships, and as I'm parenting, my marriage, in the community, what would that look like to be playing that song?
And to me, that's what Jesus models for us. He leaves a perfect place. He enters suffering that's not his own. That story plays through all of our mythology. It plays through every story. Most of the stories we love have that arc of entering into this suffering that's not his own. And then where we want to march, he plays this other song, he plays the Gospel, and it's the most beautiful thing we've ever heard. And it has to do with friendship, and seeing, and beauty.
Melissa: So given that, the next question might be a little tricky.
Sarah: Yeah.
Melissa: So where in the world do you see beauty then?
Sarah: Well, I have had to find those people that are climbing down into that place and doing that. And I found it in the arts, in people like Mako, and others who are just ... Again, if utility and pragmatism have like as he says, infected every institution, and our churches even, are very pragmatic in the sense of like, here's the mission and if what you're doing advances this mission in a very direct way, then we can partner with you in that way. So there's sort of not an ability to hold the artists, the relationship between the church and the artist is strained because there's not really a meeting at the place where questions are held and where that non-prescriptive space is not sort of allowed for long. And only if the arc is kind of short. Like let's get to the point where you figure those things out.
So for me, beauty has ... The title of Dorothy Day's biography written by her granddaughter is Beauty Will Save Us, or Beauty Will Save The World. But again, that's in light of seeing the needy among us. And so there's an element of justice in that. And I definitely have found that in Gary Haugen, the founder of International Justice Mission. When I was looking for God, when I was looking to know where is God when good people suffer, I found the people of God entering dark spaces and playing the cellos all over the world. And so that has been just tremendously hopeful for me. And it was less about this sort of ... that this one type of like what we reduce Gospel to.
Jesus says “the Kingdom of God is near you,” meaning the way of the Maker is near you. It's not at the bottom of the ocean, across the sea where you can't access it. This way of redemptive generative life, where you could look at something and say, "What was meant by ... What was meant here?" Well, surely you weren't meant to be here in this brothel, not going to school.
So how can we participate in that kingdom being near? How can we bring what happens in heaven, how can we bring that here? So everywhere I see people doing that, I find, to me, that's extremely beautiful. And it's often this mix of lament and it's all the things. It's almost always in full boldface truth of the realities that we face as humans.
Melissa: Thank you. Super Helpful.
Sarah: Yeah.
Melissa: And it's inspiring to think about that, for sure.
Sarah: To me, anything that's not discounting both the struggle, you know, I think ... And again, the role of an artist is to hold these tensions, the both/and. You know, “man's life is fleeting, it's like a flower that burns up in a day.” Nothing. You know, “I'm like a worm.” All that language and our maker sees and we've been imbued with infinite value. We're holding all of tensions. Just even the nature of what we claim about it as people of faith, what I claim about Jesus being fully man and fully God. That alone.
So we are holding all these tensions and trying to reflect on them truthfully and the psalmist does it. He walks into the room and he ... In one, Psalm 73, in one stretch says, "The wicked looked pretty happy to me. They succeed all day long. I washed my hands, all I get is a punch in the stomach." You know, I don't get it. And then by the end of that, he's seen something. We don't know what he's seen, but he sees something. And then, "Who have I in heaven, but you, there's nothing I desire more than you." So he's able to hold this sort of lavish praise and recognition at the same time to confess fully, “this feels really bad.”
Melissa: Yeah.
Sarah: You know, this thing is an absolute train wreck. So yeah, so I think I find beauty there, where people are holding those tensions, anytime you eliminate the one part of that side, outside of that, you're not telling the whole truth about it. That frustrates me or that doesn't feel as authentic to what I'm living, what I'm experiencing.
Melissa: Yeah. That's our reality.
Sarah: Yeah.
Melissa: So the next question kind of speaks a bit to that paradox then. Like if you could think of a time or an experience where you experienced brokenness in life and then in the midst of that brokenness, if or where you saw beauty emerging admits that brokenness?
Sarah: Yeah. Well, I'll answer this really personally for me. I've had a few broken spaces, but one maybe seven years ago now, which time flies, but it was in the midst of the deepest depression I've ever experienced. I've had my struggles over the years, but I was really in a place, there was no bootstrapping out of it. And I didn't realize how inundated I was with like a bootstraps theology about my way of approaching it. But the beauty piece, not to get off track of what we're talking about, I had gone, since I moved here to the Twin Cities, really drawn to the floodplain. I've always loved the floodplain. It's just a beautiful non-pragmatic space.
So one day I was standing down in Crosby Farm's area, where I could kind of see the city of Saint Paul up on the bluff. And I thought, "This is the dream of man." You know, it's really cool, first of all, what we're capable of. Look what we've done, all of us working together, we've created this city. But it has an ethos to it, of striving and of doing.
And then I looked and saw the Mississippi river coming alongside the city, and I thought, "This is like the dream of God. This is how God dreams." So this is the dream of man and the dream of God. And this is an invitation to something different, something very beautiful, full of rest of Sabbath, to me, it was like ... And the Mississippi River, who could duplicate it? Who could make that?
So we could strive and strive and strive and never make what he has made all around us. And I see in that, in creation, this invitation to community with Him, community with each other, all kinds of beautiful things in that metaphor of the city and the river.
But at this moment, I'm deeply depressed. I am not dealing with it well, or the way I'm not caring for myself, and the way I'm ... it's coming out sideways in a lot of different areas of my life. And I was going down to the floodplain to just ... this is where I kind of go over to be quiet. And just another word about how beautiful it is, but at this point the, it was late spring. And so you can't stop the green down there. It's just green on the floor as far as the eye can see. Then you have those beautiful Oak groves down there. So they have this ... The black twisting trunks. And then when it leaves the canopy, when the sun shines through, you feel like you're underwater because it's just everything is green and being diffused through this canopy.
And so it's a place of great beauty, but I was really struggling with my own depression, brokenness and my role in it. You know, how I wasn't doing enough to sort of to get myself out of this place. So I happened to be running along the Mississippi River and just in thought and prayer about taking a lot of shame, had a lot of shame about it, a lot of blame, the way I was handling it wasn't good. And I felt this other voice that in this way that happens, it doesn't feel like my own ideas, say “some hearts are built on a floodplain.”
And so I was being given this metaphor for the state of my heart that wasn't all bad, where I had only felt squander, waste, sloth. I'd only had these words to work with. “Not useful, not good, not contributing.”
So here I had this idea now, it's been converted to this abuse place of beauty where some hearts are built in the space that floods, that becomes overwhelming, but is not without its beauty, not without call for ... Maybe the metaphor is not perfect. It's not where I want to stay, but it was a gift to me to see that ... My friend says, "You've been given more, not less." To think about that space when I'm struggling with just the bigness of the way that I'm dealing or engaging with the world, and how to see it as gift instead of… something potentially generating beauty versus just loss and squander.
Melissa: Yeah. So almost like the gifts of, I don't know, sensitivity or what your personality description around that would be, but kind of the gifts within your personality, or I like to call it the shadow side of our strengths or something.
Sarah: Yes.
Melissa: Like how you've been wired. There are huge gifts in the midst of it. It's like God was calling that forth, reminding you of that.
Sarah: Yes. Giving me a beautiful image of ... An image of beauty for something that had been very ashy, and then made me not afraid, and to say, "Okay ... " First of all, it allowed me to call out for boats and realize that I wasn't going to bootstrap my way out of that. I needed to get help. So it gave me permission also to be in the world in a certain way that I needed to get help. And that wasn't a bad thing. We have such like that individualistic thing in our culture instead of again, push back against that and say, "No, I need people. I need help to figure this out."
Melissa: Yes. Well, thank you for sharing that.
Sarah: Yeah.
Melissa: So the next question I have is about lies. Lies about beauty that you've experienced in your life.
Sarah: Obviously, the number one is probably the one you've ... I don't know what responses you're getting, but that would be just the surface of it... But I would want to lean in and unpack even more that we ... Again, to go to the sense of pragmatism. And that if art or if music isn't doing something, that it's not good. And I see God inviting us into these extravagant and wasteful spaces.
Sabbath is a great example, where He ... It just, it doesn't make sense on a productivity level and yet we know our souls need it. So I think a lot of people would maybe not understand the role that beauty plays in their life in soul care. And I don't think people have an understanding that it's not just sort of like good for you on the side.
It's actually a really necessary part of life to seek out beauty, to participate in making things, and participate in thinking about generative living, and what does it mean to be a generative person. And criticism, critique, deconstruction, these things are all really important. But if we don't match those also with putting something in, then ... and that can be simple. I think we have to search for that, what that is for us.
But I think people tend to think of beauty sort of nice. And I would say it isn't just ... So first of all, it's not just surface. I mean we've kind of already said that, but it's actually food. And I think it's really necessary to life and to community, and yeah, it has like more merit and more necessity than we give credence to it.
Melissa: Yes. It's not like a nice extra, it's what we need.
Sarah: It really is I think, yes. Again, Mako, but he writes ... In a blog he wrote about a girl who went to ... She saw a flower, it was in Iraq. In the middle of tensions there and war and in her attempting to retrieve this flower, she lost her life. And the dialogue around this ended up going into a whole thing about like what a waste. You know, what a waste to like ... But something in her resonated with this. “Like I have to ... I see something, I have to preserve this.” Now, obviously she's a child and you can't unpack all the what meaning and what's happening there, but there's something in barren, really hard places.
Even Viktor Frankl, when he writes about Man's Search for Meaning, there is in this giving of self down to the ... In the worst case scenario, there is beauty that's necessary for survival for our very hearts. And the giving of it just because, and the receiving of it just because turns out to be much more part of, I think, of rhythms really necessary to life to take that.
And to me, it comes back to Sabbath and ideas around Sabbath that God does these things because we're kind of following the original creator and that he's trying to ... And Jesus does all these things like this that are ... He meets Martha at Lazarus's tomb and gives her a very pragmatic answer to her question, "Where have you been?" And Mary comes and asks the same thing and he just weeps. He just gives us His tears. He's with us in that way. And so, yeah, I think there's something to the rest in taking in beauty. So that the lie would be that you just don't really need it, that it's superfluous, and I don't think that's the case.
Melissa: Yeah. Thank you. I love that.
Sarah: Yeah.
Melissa: That's so important. Okay. So the last question that I have for you is, have you had any experiences that have transformed your ideas around beauty?
Sarah: Many, many. I think that our ... When Troy and I bought this old church and tried to do this Art House North. This is really just the overflow of our lives, we both have jobs. And then we have this space where we're attempting to have this conversation. And I think the full question or “how do you participate in a generative life that brings about beautiful things?”
I think when I was ... You know, I had a conversion experience when I was like young, when I was four or something, where I invited Jesus into my heart. But there was more of a moment at 13 and at 28. I have these other experiences that add to that. And really at 13 I understand I could be this kind of person in the world or I could be this kind of person in the world, and that there's an invitation to be a generative, a maker, to be ...
We can always choose to be someone who moves through the world in a way that is destructive, we can move through our relationships in a way that is destructive, or we can move through our lives in a way that brings beauty, or at least tries to cultivate that in our lives. And if it's true that culture is not a war to be won, but is a garden to be cultivated, so this is where we've experienced that a lot. Here at Art House, we're attempting to bring that about.
And one way we've attempted to do that is through an artist series called Artists Respond. It began first after Sandy Hook. So after that event, I had a hard time moving on with life. I had a kindergartner that year. Ruby was in kindergarten. I had been doing music in the community next to that community that day.
I was hearing the news come through the radio in the cab. I was riding to the airport and we were hearing reports of this shooting that had taken place not 15 miles from where I had been. So there were things about that event that hit really close to home. When I came home, flew home, I went to pick Ruby up at school. So I'm dealing with all ... and life goes on, And we go, we meet for church, and we either address it or we don't even. And I just felt like there was this incomplete feeling in my heart. And so Troy and I held an event called Artists Respond to Tragedy. And we just invited artists without telling them what, what to do, just respond to this.
We had a poet, and a cello player, a songwriter, a friend of mine in theater who did a piece from I Am Anne Frank, and a dancer. And so the night was just, it was lament, it was a space to grieve. But it was also, we were creating something in our grief, and in the space we were ... we needed to process what had happened. And since then, we've had how many of these? Yesterday, I feel like every day I wake up and there's something, you know, another shooting.
So in these new realities, these destructive spaces, these bombed out craters, I think that these kinds of stories have changed the way I see my attempts anyway, to be beautiful in the world. What it looks like now.
I spend time trying to be beautiful like anyone, but I want to be pursuing also this generative life that leaves something when I come across these craters. And like I said, you don't have to go far. You're finding them. You'll find them. And that's the thing, there's work enough to do for all of us, right? And that we all are coming across bombed out spaces, and places, and people's, and friends' lives, and our communities. And so we all get to participate like this or have an invitation to participate like this.
So since then, we've had several Artists Responds, Artist Respond: Creation Care. But again, always coming from the spot, the place of an artist who is reflecting genuinely on the topic, less talking ahead and less sort of analysis, but more from this place of beauty. Hopefully, in a place of where that moment that when ash does become something beautiful.
Not silver lining either or just not positive thinking because positive thinking is not the gospel that saves me. It's actually really sewn into the lament and deep in it that I find that beauty. And so yeah, so those experiences have really transformed what I would describe as beautiful and where I've seen and encountered the things that have altered me and the way I think about the world.
Melissa: If there was one thing that you wish you could tell people about beauty or one thing that you wish people knew about beauty, what would it be?
Sarah: Well, I think about think about my daughter a lot when you asked that question or all these questions because she will be, and my sons, honestly, we're all up against it. There is a writer, Albert Borgmann, who writes about focal practice and how technology takes away ... So if washing the dishes is a focal practice then the dishwasher, it helped us in that way, but it took away the focal practice. So he's talking about the need for us to engage with focal practice even though we don't have to, even though technology might make this part of our life easier, but he says there's a threshold of effort to every focal practice. So you have to put on your coat and go for a walk, or you have to pick up a book and read. Everything about technology, not to make technology the enemy because it's not, there's a lot of beautiful things that have come about because of technology, but focal practice.
So I think when I'm talking to my kids, there is always going to be the shimmery, you know, the thing that is immediate gratification that we would call that's about beauty or that people strive for that is on the surface of things. And I always am trying, attempting to draw my kids' eyes and especially Ruby, her eyes, I'll say, I'm going to always keep in front of you the Ruby that I see, the Ruby that I catch glimpses of, that you are the becoming Ruby. And I'm always going to keep that in front of you because that's the Ruby of substance.
And again, not to bang the same drum, but to me, that happens when she leans into the generative life, when she ask that question about “I have two ways of being in the world, one that is destructive, and one that is giving life, and how can I be that beautiful? How can I contribute to that kind of beauty that isn't surface, isn't utility, pragmatic, is tapping into those deeper Sabbath spaces in her life?” And yeah. Does that make sense?
Melissa: That makes a lot of sense, yes. Thank you.
Sarah: When you end a season with your kids ... Right now, my son's getting ready to go to college. It's a lot like closing up a packing box and you wonder, “What did I put in that box? Did I put the right things in there?” And I think about my daughter and my kids, my boys, and I think if I were to impart one thing to them ... I think intrinsically we kind of know it. We know when we've seen something generative, but I think ... I pray for them. A similar moment as to the moment that I had. It doesn't have to happen just like it did for me, but that they would have that very clear understanding that there is a way of being in the world, that you can be this kind of person or this kind of person. And I think that moment, to me, that is conversion.
That's the moment where you say, "I'd like to sign up for the generative life, the redemptive process, the process that that brings beauty for ashes."
And to realize that that's not just something that God does, but that we are participating in as Imago Dei, made in His image, we are also participating in that as we move through our world. There's a lot more here and now than we realize.
And so I think that if my kids could apprehend that idea that ... Because we're all chasing it. I chase it, I want to, on the surface, look good. But I also want them to catch hold of that vision of “I'm going to be this kind of person in the world and I want to live the generative life and have ... To simplify it, left things better than I found them ultimately.” That would be the greatest gift, if my kids really internalize that, it would be a wonderful thing.
Melissa: Wow! Thank you. Yes. That's wonderful.
Sarah: Thank you.
Melissa: So again, we're here at Art House North with Sarah Groves, and we're doing this for the Mentor Series at impossible-beauty.com, so thanks so much for joining us today.
Photo credit: Rebecca Wynia
To learn more about Sara Groves click here.
For more on Art House North click here.
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