Conversation pieces

“Not that you’re asking,” says Steve Scott, digressing from a discussion of his new album, Cross My Heat (Harding Street Assembly Lab), “but if someone was to ask me, ‘What is the best book about Christian art?’ I would say, ‘Start with the Gospel of John.’”

Scott knows whereof he speaks. A Christian since the late 1960s and a poet, essayist, lecturer, visual artist, and singer-songwriter to boot, he has long been fascinated by the intersections of art, faith, and culture, intersections that have in turn informed his work. Cross My Heat, his fourth spoken-word-atop-looped-sounds album and 10th altogether, is no exception.

Its nine tracks draw on sources as diverse as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Roger Grainger’s book Watching for Wings: Theology and Mental Illness in a Pastoral Setting, and the toys and storybooks in a child’s bedroom.

What unifies the selections is their sharing in what Scott has called the “humanizing and socializing function” of all serious art—namely, the requirement that anyone intent on appreciating it must “slow down.”

It would be difficult for anyone in a hurry to extract meaning from Scott’s meditative recitations of his poems, their digitally doctored backing tracks, or the levels on which the two reinforce each other on Cross My Heat. “Art that asks you to slow down,” says Scott, “and to think about what you’re listening to or looking at is an important way of opening up a conversation.”

Conversations are one reason that Scott considers the Fourth Gospel relevant to Christian art. “There are,” he says, “several instances that call for a slower, more in-depth reading,” instances such as Jesus’ conversations with the woman at the well, with the lame pessimist at the Bethesda pool, and with the man born blind “that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” These conversations play no direct role in Cross My Heat, but something of their spirit—of their willingness to engage honest truth seekers—permeates the album.

There is one direct reference to an instance from John’s Gospel. It occurs in “The Altar at Isenheim,” a track that at 11½ minutes requires more slowing down than any other Cross My Heat cut.

In it, Scott assumes the voice of a 16th-century monk at the Isenheim Monastery of St. Anthony, guiding sufferers from the disease commonly referred to as St. Anthony’s fire in an examination of the Matthias Grünewald masterpiece commonly referred to as the Isenheim Altarpiece. The central panel depicts John comforting Jesus’ mother at the foot of the cross.

John’s Gospel also plays an indirect role in “Lilias,” Scott’s tribute to the painter Lilias Trotter, who in 1888 at the age of 34 left her native England to begin 40 years of missionary work among Algeria’s Sufi Muslims.

“She ended up writing a book, The Way of the Sevenfold Secret, on Jesus’ ‘I am’ sayings in the Gospel of John that was very much nuanced towards the Sufi inquirer,” says Scott. “So in the first half of the poem I imbed some images and metaphors of Sufi Muslim poets, notably Rumi and Hafez. And in the second half, I draw more upon the things that Lilias herself put in her prayer letters and her books on the spiritual life.”

Things, of course, best appreciated slowly.

“When I was in the Unterlinden Museum with the Isenheim Altarpiece, I spent hours each day in front of individual panels,” says Scott.

“But I still feel as if I’ve barely scratched the surface of that tremendous piece of work.”