Jon Guerra

BEAUTY AS WELL AS BREAD | 9.2.25
Night 1/9
Grace Chapel,
Only 10 tickets left. Link in profile.

Over the next year I will be hosting a series of 9 nights at St. Mark’s Church in Austin called “Beauty As Well As Bread.” They will feature varieties of combination of song, poetry, stillness, reflection, lecture, and visual art, with featured guests ranging from scholars, painters, poets, priests, and fellow songwriters.

These nights are not concerts so much as experiments in cultivating resonance — resonance with the deeper layers of the world. Beauty puts us in touch with invisible things. Deep beckons to deep.

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread.” - John Muir, The Yosemite.

Muir understood how maintaining wild places in nature is essential for the flourishing of the human spirit; I want to maintain similar spaces for the arts for the same reason. Beauty stuns us, consoles us, stretches us, and rewrites us. I want discover again that beauty is not a luxury for the artsy, but necessary nourishment for all.
FALL SAVE THE DATES:
OCT 14 feat.
NOV 18 feat. Dr. Judith Wolfe
DEC 2 feat. John Cobb
*Made possible by + + yours truly

“Jesus” album is out today. All the songs are in conversation with the words of Christ. A couple of years ago I felt I needed to be reacquainted with Jesus. And so I began cyclically reading through the Gospels, in different translations. The repetition became prayerful and then generative: little song fragments started coming. I was trying to really hear the words, to feel the stories again and so I’d write little tunes around certain phrases —  “do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth” “if anyone would come after me” “give to everyone who asks of you” “take this cup from me” “Lord, the one you love is sick” etc. I didn’t record any demos or begin recording until most of the album was done. The tunes lived in my head a while before I heard myself singing them back on a recording. The songs are a portrait, and I can’t help but feel like I left important things out. But like John says, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”

In museums there are little written blurbs on placards placed next to paintings. They tell the title of the painting, describe the artist, maybe the context in which the painting was created. For this album, the Gospels were the placard and the songs are the painting. My hope for you is that the songs would feel like an encounter with Christ, and that the feeling would be confirmed inwardly with who you’ve known him to be.

Speaking of paintings, the album artwork is by the amazing .domig . I hope his incredibly brilliant work aids in your reflection!