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via SUPERMARKETMONKEY by noreply@blogger.com (urbanmonk) on 8/22/09
I produced these in 2004. I found a stack of them recently in a bottom drawer and I think I am going to pop them into random letter boxes.
At the time, I was part of a "ministry" that was trying to "connect" with people as a matter of supposed "urgency." The title comes from one of the Gospels in which Jesus is reclining at the table of Simon the Pharisee, and the "sinful woman" comes in and starts wiping Jesus feet with her hair and crying.
My idea at the time was that this text from the bible could provide a model for the kind of "space" which I hoped would be possible for this, "connection". At Simon's table, there is intimacy and community, yet there is also judgment and polarization. There is healing. And there is tearing down. There are some very weighty themes unfolding in a very natural, ordinary space.
But what unsettled me ( perhaps at only a subconcious level) was the idea that you can "create" these spaces with some afore decided "intent." Think designing intmacy... oxy moron? Now I think that those kind of user friendly, PC words and phrases like "organic space" and "connecting" used by Christians over the last five or ten years really dont have the ring of depth that the Bible story of Simons Table illuminates. Rather, they appear to mask, or somehow sweeten a subtle agenda of some kind. Which folks can smell a mile away. And in our heart of hearts we know that faux organic things of any kind are an affront to authenticity. They are an affront to the Creator.
Suffice to say, that the ministry of Simons Table never really got off the ground. Im no longer involved in any kind of "ministries." But I am still fiddling around with Zines and silly creative ideas. And these little booklets, which were first intended not for prostletyzation, but for an expression of a vain hope in the kind of space Simons Table illuminated for me, will be popped into random letter boxes. One of them might be yours... but probably not.
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