My Jesus-Greg WORLD · The MORE Jesus = More Reality Experiment
An evolving memory palace of ordinary life, sacred imagination, art, and experiment.
I have been thinking about calling this new collection The Church Gallery.
That little change in language helps me see something much larger that may have been developing in My Jesus-Greg WORLD all along.
Perhaps My Jesus-Greg WORLD is, among other things, a gallery of galleries.
Or maybe it is closer to a memory palace—a constructed world made up of places I repeatedly visit, with images, objects, songs, stories, performances, and little movies deliberately positioned there to help shape what I remember and what I see.
The first gallery is becoming obvious.
I go to church every week. I see a chapel, people, pews, sacrament trays, speakers, classrooms, hallways, paintings, parking lots, and a steeple.
But increasingly, that isn't all I see.
Jesus is changing what I see when I go to church.
So I am beginning to make little animated pieces that approximate what I see—or what I am learning to see—with my sacred imagination. I can make the invisible part of my experience somewhat visible. Then I can look at it again.
That last part matters.
I am not merely documenting a worldview after it has changed.
I make the picture. I watch the picture. I remember the picture. I return to the actual place. And now something from the picture accompanies me.
That sounds remarkably like memory-palace technology.
Once I saw The Church Gallery, I realized that I probably don't need to invent most of the other galleries.
My ordinary life has already divided itself into them.
There is The Work Gallery: fences, tools, work gloves, grant writing, handyman jobs, and Heaven Can't Wait.
There is The Bedroom Gallery: waking, sleeping, dreams, the Jesus Pillow, the Open Bible stretch, prayer, Born Again, Womb/Tomb.
There is The Kitchen Gallery: bread, tables, food, hunger, feeding people, the toaster.
There is The Bathroom Gallery: showering, cleansing, cold water, singing, embodiment, humor, mortality, even poop.
There is The Family Gallery and The Friends Gallery.
There is The Music Gallery, where classic rock songs are redeemed and become part of the soundtrack of another world.
There is The Scripture Gallery, where Bible, Book of Mormon, JGV, songs, stories, enactments, and newly written pieces begin interacting with one another.
There is The Dream Gallery.
The Work Gallery. The Body Gallery. The Temple Gallery. The Exodus Gallery. The Zion Gallery. The Outside Gallery. The Jesus TV Gallery. The Jesus Radio Gallery.
And perhaps somewhere in the middle of all of them is The Imagination Gallery—the gallery that helps me notice what the other galleries are doing.
The WORLD Will Grow
My galleries can have architecture, too.
A gallery is not merely a category on a website. It is a place I can enter.
And inside a gallery can be rooms, chambers, exhibits, images, sounds, memories, scenes, and doors leading somewhere else.
So this becomes my Gallery of Galleries—a growing directory of the places inside My Jesus-Greg WORLD.
Some galleries are already populated. Some are only beginning to take shape. Others are empty rooms waiting for life to happen.
My Jesus-Greg WORLD · An expanding memory palace
Chapels, pews, sacrament, paintings, signs, steeples, Jesus TV, sacred imagination, and experiments in seeing MORE Jesus in the places where I worship.
Tools, fences, work gloves, grant writing, handyman jobs, service, and Heaven Can't Wait.
Waking, sleeping, dreams, prayer, the Jesus Pillow, the Open Bible stretch, Born Again, and Womb/Tomb.
Bread, tables, food, hunger, feeding people, meals, family rhythms, and the Jesus toaster.
Showering, cleansing, cold water, singing, embodiment, humor, mortality, and the sacred possibilities of extremely ordinary things.
Redeemed classic rock, songs, soundtrack, performance, memory, and the music of the opera that is my life with MORE Jesus.
Bible, Book of Mormon, JGV, Come Follow Me, selected verses, stories, enactments, and scripture written into lived experience.
Little movies, animated GIFs, signs, magical billboards, film reels, scenes, and approximations of What I See On Jesus TV.
Zion, Babylon, Exodus, experiments, movements, invitations, manifestos, art, and attempts to imagine what inhabiting Zion might look like.
An empty gallery waiting for something from life, Jesus, imagination, experiment, relationship, or discovery to give it a name.
One place can contain another—and any exhibit can become a doorway into somewhere else.
The word gallery also helps me understand the peculiar combination of artist and scientist that I am experimenting with.
An artist makes something so that something inside can become visible outside.
A scientist experiments.
I am doing both.
I can ask:
Then I can make something.
Watch it.
Live with it.
Return to the real setting.
Notice what happens.
Make another version.
In that sense, these galleries aren't merely places where finished art gets displayed. They are laboratories.
Every GIF, photograph, redeemed song, enactment, sign, room, object, and little movie can become another experiment in:
The MORE Jesus = More Reality Experiment.
This also helps me distinguish a gallery from an archive.
An archive stores things.
A gallery asks me to look.
Someone chooses what goes on the wall. Someone decides where it goes. Someone walks through the room, stops, looks again, and perhaps sees something that wasn't visible before.
That is much closer to what I am trying to do.
I am curating my attention.
And because these galleries correspond to places I actually inhabit—church, bedroom, kitchen, workplace, yard, road, temple—the imaginary gallery and physical world can begin overlapping.
I visit The Church Gallery on my computer.
Then I walk into the actual church.
The gallery comes with me.
So perhaps My Jesus-Greg WORLD can increasingly be understood as a giant, evolving memory palace.
Not one I merely walk through in my head.
I can externalize it.
I can build parts of it in HTML. I can hang moving pictures on its walls. I can make songs play in its rooms. I can create signs over its doors. I can photograph its objects. I can enact its scenes in my actual house and yard. I can revisit those representations until they become increasingly available to memory.
And the organizing question running through the entire palace is wonderfully simple:
But soon the galleries will be filled with music, too—the soundtrack to the opera that is my life with MORE Jesus—and eventually, so much more.
Church becomes a gallery.
Work becomes a gallery.
My bedroom becomes a gallery.
The kitchen becomes a gallery.
My body becomes a gallery.
My dreams become a gallery.
Eventually, perhaps, the whole day becomes the gallery.
And that may be one way of describing what My Jesus-Greg WORLD has been trying to become all along:
an inhabitable collection of reminders—constructed by an artist/scientist who is experimenting with MORE Jesus, one ordinary scene at a time.