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I really think so. That ‘Wabi’ is just sooo hot right now! But will it replace ‘post-modern’ as the one word to rule them all?
The hottest words on the planet, according to yesterday’s news release by Reuters, are found using word-burst detecting software that tracks blog sites. According to the list of words burning the hottest this morning on the Daypop Top Word Bursts, “Wabi” came in at number 8. The two examples of ‘Wabi’ were from WABI-TV and Blogs4God, a Christian web site that tracks Christian webloggers or “Theoblogians”.
But why Wabi? Why is it so dang hot? And why do journalists and media personnel on the trail of hipness, find themselves eyeball to eyeball with Christians already using this word?
Before I introduce Wabi, I want you to meet its forgotten twin.
‘Sabi’ actually means, among other things, ‘forgotten’. Sabi can be translated as solitude, the imbalance of the new or unfinished, simple and unattached in a spiritual and psychological sense, primitive, lonely, and rusty. ‘Wabi’ refers to the pure in form, the rural, the absence of stuff, the minimal… It is lonely in the material sense.
Wabi and Sabi are quite a pair, and have hung out together for the past 500 years, ever since the concept was introduced to a Japanese culture spoiled by an aesthetics of opulence. Wabi Sabi was a way to bring back the natural, the rural, the barren, the poverty of simplicity, the organic nature of the untamed and unfinished. It was represented by the Tea Ceremony (Wabicha) in a simple hut.
Similar contrasts could be made of the monasticism of St Francis challenging the extravagant Roman Catholic Church, or the minimalist aesthetic of the 1980’s in contrast to the Rococo style of Baroque. Leonard Koren presents Wabi Sabi as an alternative worldview to modernism (pictured below).
Over the centuries, the aesthetic of Wabi Sabi lost prominence. Last year I taught in Japan and was disappointed to find little written evidence of Wabi Sabi. This is probably because it is a difficult concept to articulate and the Japanese are reluctant to reduce such a lofty aesthetic to a few sentences.
But there are plenty of definitions in the western world.
The most common description is taken from the Japanese and used by Leonard Koren:
“[Wabi Sabi] . . is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional...”
“Wabi-Sabi on a trip through western Kansas. Comparatively speaking rural living is Wabi-Sabi. It is dauntless and imperfect to most who inhabit the cityscape.“
Dwain Crispell at Smileyface
“The best explanation of Wabi Sabi as it applies to the design of the Net, is in Ward Cunningham's website at C2.com. This uses Cunningham's WikiWiki software, which allows web visitors to edit the site's text themselves. Unlike the polished prose of most net thinkers, C2 is anonymous, collaborative and often half-finished: the Net in a microcosm and a living depiction of the Wabi sabi philosophy.”
Danny O’Brien, The Sunday Times Culture Magazine, April 9 2000
DafyddRees describes XP [Extreme Programing] as having “the following wabi sabi properties: ‘intuitive worldview, imperfection, one-of-a-kind artefacts, present-oriented, organic.’”
I have used “Wabi Sabi” in previous articles to talk about blogging, house churches and lomography, all of which value the immediate, the unfinished, the process as valuable and not just the finished product.
Quakers seem to like the concept and Richard’s Wabi Sabi World is a good source of Wabi poetry. Many Western artists, poets, gardeners, potters and other creatives have already been exposed to the Wabi Sabi aesthetic.
But the most common usage of the word “WABI SABI” on the internet right now is in regard to an Emergent Conference next month in Austin called “wabiSABI”.
The conference is organised by some twenty-somethings (2 girls and 1 guy) from the Emerging Church Network. They received a BIG TEXAN THUMBS UP from their sponsors, the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the 150 year old Austin First Baptist Church, who are intent on working together with avant-garde artists and young church planters to find a better way to create churches. And it looks like they are getting the even bigger Three-Thumbs-Up from God.
The Wabi Sabi leadership team are also creating the Texas Baptist’s first urban monastery and are finding new ways for pilgrim-missionaries to start businesses around the world. They expect to help 1000 tent making pilgrims to get overseas in the next 5 years.
The discussions and meetings at wabiSABI will take place in a revival tent, a church, and will include a Gospel Brunch in a downtown club. There will be a mix of older and wiser thinkers as well as young artists and new believers. DJ’s, VJ’s (video artists) and young artists from the worship art installation will join the theologians and futurists for a discussion of emerging forms of church. It may sound like a circus of paradoxes but the conference finds energy from diversity and juxtaposition.
How does one describe this confusing mix of concepts and and people under one roof?
Wabi Sabi, of course! Kerry Sutton, one of the organizers, has given an excellent definition of the Wabi Sabi conference.
“ It [wabiSABI] has been called a rustic collaborative with the emphasis on constant movement that is ever changing . . . Both are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, yet are interdependent on one another for progression.”
The conversation about Wabi Sabi comes at a good time. There has been a lot of discussion this month regarding the word “post-modern” and its multitude of misconceptions by Christian authors and speakers. Kevin Miller, of Leadership Journal, recently published an article in which he suggested the word was overused and should be trashed. Emergent’s Chris Seay responded, agreeing that the word “pomo” should go, but the church still has to face the realities of a changed world. Now the search for alternatives has begun. Or perhaps it started a long time ago but now the church is beginning to notice young people on the cutting edge of culture who are not using the word ‘post-modern” to describe what they are doing.
Will Wabi Sabi be the ultimate replacement for ‘post-modern’? I sure hope not. The worldview and zeitgeist of today’s culture is far too complex to sum up with a single word, even a hot word. But if we have to choose an aesthetic that is non-western, responsive to modernity’s excesses, and is noticed by the media AFTER the church is already examining it, then Wabi Sabi may be a good place to start.
Andrew Jones blogs at Tall Skinny Kiwi.
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