In its recent, albeit furtive, New York appearance, the Russian punk group Pussy Riot noted, among other things, that, in its deepest visions, it does not see itself so much a musical group as a group of artists who endeavor to take the world apart and reassemble and repackage it in new ways.
     Whatever else we may think of the group, and however much we may question their choice of venue (a Russian Orthodox cathedral) for their most public and well-known escapade, we can, in the same way that we have now come to acknowledge how Picasso and his cubism forced the world of art to enlarge its perceptions of what is possible, look at Pussy Riot's vision of art as protest (and vice versa) as a call to look harder at who we are and who we might be.  For many reasons, most of us see the world as a good but often fractured experience, one that we do well to frequently examine and take apart so as to put it back together in a more meaningful way.  As anyone who, like my brother often did in his younger years, has taken apart a piece of machinery just to put it back it together again, knows, the more we pick something apart, the more we can improve on it.
     As Jesus said many centuries ago, we cannot put new wine in an old wineskin, lest that wineskin rip apart.  We can, he added, only put new wine into new wineskins.  Sometimes we can't find something new unless we completely remove or divest ourselves from the old.
     It goes without saying, of course, that we venture into treacherous territory when we dismantle without having an alternative immediately in mind.  Many revolutions have demonstrated this all too well.  Nonetheless, Pussy Riot and all else aside, the point remains:  whether it's a person, idea, or God, we won't see it if we don't look.