"Places Where Words Alone Cannot Take Us": An Interview with Jan Richardson
Jan Richardson's creative work is her ministry: she paints, draws and makes collages, and writes poetry and essays.
A writer since childhood, Richardson discovered her artistic gifts when she began making collages from construction paper during her seminary years at the Candler School of Theology. In recent years, she has focused on painting.
After serving at a United Methodist Church in Orlando, Richardson developed a full-time ministry in the arts. She served as artist-in-residence at a retreat center owned by the Catholic Diocese of Orlando, and for 11 years offered a creative worship service at First United Methodist Church in Winter Park, Florida.
She is the director of the Wellspring Studio, publishing works blending her art and writing, as well as offering her services as a retreat and conference speaker.
Her late husband, the actor and singer-songwriter Garrison Doles, was her partner in ministry, and the pair often collaborated on multimedia projects. Doles died unexpectedly at the beginning of Advent in 2013 after surgery for a brain aneurysm.
The experience of grieving has been part of Richardson's spiritual journey in the past year. Her in-person events have been on hold in the wake of her husband's death, but she is creating new artwork for an online Advent retreat.
"I wanted to be able to offer some images and some words about what it means for us to really enter this season in which, so the story tells us, God comes to us in the dark," Richardson said. "How do we honor our longing for light while also opening ourselves to the God who comes to us in the darkness?"
She spoke to Faith & Leadership about Advent, the creative process and finding God in dark places.
Q: How does art enrich and enhance the contemplative experience of the Advent season?
I'm endlessly intrigued by the stories that we tell in this season and how we inhabit the stories -- the amazing, the remarkable, the astounding stories that Advent and Christmas give to us about the God who comes to us as Word made flesh, about the God who comes to us as light in the darkness.
So I'm really interested in -- intrigued by -- the words that the season gives us, and at the same time also very, very keen to explore how we attend to the images, the imagery, the remarkable imagery that this season gives to us as a place of reflection and contemplation.
Gary and I, in our life and our ministry together, talked a lot about how absolutely crucial it is for us, particularly in the 21st century, to be mindful of how words can only carry us so far in our journey of faith.
It's absolutely crucial for us to enter into those nonverbal ways of exploring and expressing and contemplating and reflecting, and art, in its multitude of forms, gives us such rich, remarkably rich ways to do that -- to enter into those nonverbal places where words alone cannot take us.
As an artist, creating images for Advent and Christmas carries me into the story of the incarnation always in new ways. Of course, I've been through many, many Advent seasons now, and am always amazed by how every time I spiral back around Advent and Christmas again, I find something new in the story.
The "something new" often comes in the process of sitting at my drafting table and waiting for, and wrestling with, and paying attention to, the images that come.
Read more
LITURGICAL SEASONS, ADVENT
"Jan Richardson: Places where words alone cannot take us"
Moving from darkness to light is part of the Advent journey for an artist, writer and minister who uses the arts to encourage contemplation during the season.
Jan Richardson’s creative work is her ministry: she paints, draws and makes collages, and writes poetry and essays.
A writer since childhood, Richardson discovered her artistic gifts when she began making collages from construction paper during her seminary years at the Candler School of Theology. In recent years, she has focused on painting.
After serving at a United Methodist Church in Orlando, Richardson developed a full-time ministry in the arts(link is external). She served as artist-in-residence at a retreat center owned by the Catholic Diocese of Orlando, and for 11 years offered a creative worship service at First United Methodist Church in Winter Park, Florida.
She is the director of the Wellspring Studio, publishing works blending her art and writing, as well as offering her services as a retreat and conference speaker.
Her late husband, the actor and singer-songwriter Garrison Doles(link is external), was her partner in ministry, and the pair often collaborated on multimedia projects. Doles died unexpectedly at the beginning of Advent in 2013 after surgery for a brain aneurysm.
The experience of grieving has been part of Richardson’s spiritual journey in the past year. Her in-person events have been on hold in the wake of her husband’s death, but she is creating new artwork for an online Advent retreat.
“I wanted to be able to offer some images and some words about what it means for us to really enter this season in which, so the story tells us, God comes to us in the dark,” Richardson said. “How do we honor our longing for light while also opening ourselves to the God who comes to us in the darkness?”
She spoke to Faith & Leadership about Advent, the creative process and finding God in dark places. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: How does art enrich and enhance the contemplative experience of the Advent season?
I’m endlessly intrigued by the stories that we tell in this season and how we inhabit the stories -- the amazing, the remarkable, the astounding stories that Advent and Christmas give to us about the God who comes to us as Word made flesh, about the God who comes to us as light in the darkness.
So I’m really interested in -- intrigued by -- the words that the season gives us, and at the same time also very, very keen to explore how we attend to the images, the imagery, the remarkable imagery that this season gives to us as a place of reflection and contemplation.
Gary and I, in our life and our ministry together, talked a lot about how absolutely crucial it is for us, particularly in the 21st century, to be mindful of how words can only carry us so far in our journey of faith.
It’s absolutely crucial for us to enter into those nonverbal ways of exploring and expressing and contemplating and reflecting, and art, in its multitude of forms, gives us such rich, remarkably rich ways to do that -- to enter into those nonverbal places where words alone cannot take us.
As an artist, creating images for Advent and Christmas carries me into the story of the incarnation always in new ways. Of course, I’ve been through many, many Advent seasons now, and am always amazed by how every time I spiral back around Advent and Christmas again, I find something new in the story.
The “something new” often comes in the process of sitting at my drafting table and waiting for, and wrestling with, and paying attention to, the images that come.
Q: Is there a parallel in the kind of patience required in the creation of art and the waiting of Advent?
Yes, definitely. One of the things that I’ve been keen to explore in recent years in Advent is that sometimes when we talk about waiting, we think of it as a passive thing, having to sit idly by while we wait for whatever is going to happen to happen already.
I think part of what God invites us to in Advent is to be mindful that when we are called to times of waiting, God doesn’t mean for us to be passive. I think of Mary so much in the season of waiting, and how her waiting was not an idle time as Christ was growing in her womb.
We’re called to, and invited to, find the spaces of invitation, even in what may, on the surface, look like really slow times. We are called to pay attention. We are called to look beneath the surface. We are called to ask questions about the place we are in, even when it feels like we’re not moving in any direction.
Being an artist, I find, requires a huge amount of patience, and again, it’s not an idle or passive process.
One of the things that frames my Advent season is being willing to wade into the messy, murky, sometimes ugly, painful places -- and I’m talking here both about my art and about my grieving, which are so intertwined -- but to trust that in the waiting there is work to do, and that something will come from it that I can hardly even begin to see or imagine from the place I’m standing.
The wrestling makes me think, and the question makes me think, of Jacob. The story of Jacob was a story that was really core for Gary and for Gary and me. We did a lot of work together around that, individually and together around that story, both in our own work and in some of the retreats and conferences that we led -- in particular, the story of Jacob wrestling with God or the angel or whoever it was that showed up on that dark, dark night.
When Jacob left at the end of the wrestling, he left both with a limp that forever marked him and with a blessing.
I find those things to be very much intertwined, that the limping and the blessing are very much intertwined, and we leave with a new name, some new insight, some new revelation into who we are.
Q: How is your artwork used in your online Advent retreats? What do you get out of it, and what do you hope others get out of it?
During the retreats, people receive an email five times a week that contains a piece of artwork that I have created especially for the retreat. We have a theme for each week of the retreat, and so the daily emails also offer a written reflection that invites us deeper into whatever the theme for the week is.
Gary created some guitar meditations that typically were between 12 and 15 minutes long, that people could use as a way of entering into their time of reflection or in whatever way they chose.
So it is a real intertwining of word and image and song and story for the purpose of inviting people deeper into the season in the way that fits best for them.
One of the things that we so enjoyed about creating this retreat was being very intentional about designing it in a way that fits people’s schedules. I continue to be very mindful about letting folks know this is not one more thing to add to your schedule. This is something that’s designed to slip easily into whatever your rhythm of life is in your Advent days.
From the start, we also offered an online forum using a social platform that enables people to go online whenever they wish and leave comments, respond to other people’s comments, share something that surfaced for them as they have journeyed through the week, something in connection with the theme of the week.
It’s important to say that the online forum piece is always a strictly optional piece. Some people engage in some kind of creative process as they move through the retreats and through the Advent season, and they can share images there.
I don’t pretend to think that what happens online can ever substitute for being in a room, in the same room with people face to face. But it has been really wonderful to discover the kinds of connections and communities that can be created in an online space.
So the online retreats have been a wonderfully rich way of journeying through the season together, moving more deeply into it through images and song and word and music, and for those who choose, also having this community element, the sense that I am not alone in the journey.
Q: How did you discover you were an artist?
It’s been a strange and wondrous kind of journey, because I always, always, always understood myself as a writer, I think from the time I first picked up a pencil in my chubby hand.
I come from a creative family. My mom and brother are talented artists. But I would periodically over the years -- my family kept a stack of that cheap construction paper lying around, the kind that fades in five minutes if you put it in the sun. I would periodically dip into it over the years to do collage, to make cards for people and that kind of thing.
As I kind of went through college, and particularly once I got into seminary, on the rare occasions I would dip into the construction paper, I found that the collages had more and more -- I don’t know, I hesitate to use the word “sophistication” -- but there was more going on there.
I found that something transforming happened for me in the process of cutting and tearing and pasting and piecing together to create something new.
It really has been a practice. I found that as I continued to show up at the drafting table, it was becoming a way of prayer for me, and also an amazing and engaging metaphor for my life.
I was finding that in much the same way that I would sit at the drafting table and cut and tear and paste and piece together, and taking the light and the dark and the rough and the smooth and the pieces that I might prefer and the ones that might otherwise get thrown away and using all of those to create something new, that God was doing much the same work, and continues to do much the same work, in my own life.
I have come to think of God as the consummate recycler, and in God’s economy, nothing is wasted; God has a really stubborn way of using all the pieces of who we are and our experience to create something new. I continue to find and experience it just in my being, in my flesh and bone and soul and heart, the truth of that -- that God is about putting the pieces together.
I am having a particularly awful occasion to experience the truth of that in my own life, and that’s a place where I find resonance and connection between the creative process and my own life.
Artists are people who are called to wait with the pieces, to open our eyes to the pieces, to those places of brokenness and pain. Artists are people who are called to not turn away, to not turn our faces away, but to turn ourselves toward those places of brokenness and pain and to wait with those pieces, and to allow ourselves to begin to imagine, and to allow God to imagine through us, what could these pieces become.
I think that’s the call not just of the artist but of the Christian, of every person of faith. To have faith is to be willing to do the work of waiting and imagining what God through us, how God through us, can put the pieces together in a new and more whole and holy way.
Q: As you look toward this season and also back over the past year, where have you found comfort? Has your art brought you comfort and healing?
I am still figuring that out. Gary died last Dec. 2, the second day of Advent, and so I have been through almost one full Advent since his death, but because his death was so very fresh and I was in those incredibly raw initial stages of grief, I’m curious to see what this Advent is going to be like.
But I’m still carrying that question with me of what will provide comfort, what will provide solace. How do I find my way ahead? How do I listen and discern my way into the life that is waiting for me that is a very different life than I had anticipated having to live right now?
Giving myself into the hospitality and giving myself into the keeping of people who know me well, friends and family, people who know how to welcome me both into their space -- into the space of their home -- and into their life has been a really remarkable gift.
The creative process, both as a writer and as an artist, has been a place both of solace and also of pain. Gary was my partner in ministry, and we did a tremendous amount of collaborating together.
We each had a studio at our home, and we were constantly back and forth and in each other’s studios throughout the course of any given day. I would be in his studio listening to what he was doing. If I was in a stuck place with some writing or some artwork, I would holler down the hallway to him and ask him to take a pass by when he had a chance.
So to be creating without having that, without having him in my space and in my creative process, is something that I’m still navigating. At the same time, the creative process, because he had so inhabited that process with me -- it’s a place where I continue to feel his lasting influence and presence and spirit.
Q: Do you have thoughts for others experiencing loss this season?
One of the first books I wrote was called “Night Visions,” which intertwined artwork with my writing. The subtitle is “Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas.”
I was very aware of those messages that weave through the Advent and Christmas season of it being a happy, merry, joyful time, and very aware that it’s not that way for everybody.
I wanted to be able to offer some images and some words about what it means for us to really enter this season in which, so the story tells us, God comes to us in the dark. How do we honor our longing for light while also opening ourselves to the God who comes to us in the darkness?
I think Advent is a time for really acknowledging that and acknowledging what a staggering amount of mystery we live in. I think it’s so important in the Advent season, as well as in every season, to figure out what’s going to help us abide the mystery, whether it’s the mystery of just simple unknowing that is always attending our lives or the mystery of the darkness that comes in times of pain and grief.
I have found that whatever kind of darkness we are in, God is always very keen to meet us there.
Monday, November 30, 2015
After serving at a United Methodist Church in Orlando, Richardson developed a full-time ministry in the arts(link is external). She served as artist-in-residence at a retreat center owned by the Catholic Diocese of Orlando, and for 11 years offered a creative worship service at First United Methodist Church in Winter Park, Florida.
She is the director of the Wellspring Studio, publishing works blending her art and writing, as well as offering her services as a retreat and conference speaker.
Her late husband, the actor and singer-songwriter Garrison Doles(link is external), was her partner in ministry, and the pair often collaborated on multimedia projects. Doles died unexpectedly at the beginning of Advent in 2013 after surgery for a brain aneurysm.
The experience of grieving has been part of Richardson’s spiritual journey in the past year. Her in-person events have been on hold in the wake of her husband’s death, but she is creating new artwork for an online Advent retreat.
“I wanted to be able to offer some images and some words about what it means for us to really enter this season in which, so the story tells us, God comes to us in the dark,” Richardson said. “How do we honor our longing for light while also opening ourselves to the God who comes to us in the darkness?”
She spoke to Faith & Leadership about Advent, the creative process and finding God in dark places. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: How does art enrich and enhance the contemplative experience of the Advent season?
I’m endlessly intrigued by the stories that we tell in this season and how we inhabit the stories -- the amazing, the remarkable, the astounding stories that Advent and Christmas give to us about the God who comes to us as Word made flesh, about the God who comes to us as light in the darkness.
So I’m really interested in -- intrigued by -- the words that the season gives us, and at the same time also very, very keen to explore how we attend to the images, the imagery, the remarkable imagery that this season gives to us as a place of reflection and contemplation.
Gary and I, in our life and our ministry together, talked a lot about how absolutely crucial it is for us, particularly in the 21st century, to be mindful of how words can only carry us so far in our journey of faith.
It’s absolutely crucial for us to enter into those nonverbal ways of exploring and expressing and contemplating and reflecting, and art, in its multitude of forms, gives us such rich, remarkably rich ways to do that -- to enter into those nonverbal places where words alone cannot take us.
As an artist, creating images for Advent and Christmas carries me into the story of the incarnation always in new ways. Of course, I’ve been through many, many Advent seasons now, and am always amazed by how every time I spiral back around Advent and Christmas again, I find something new in the story.
The “something new” often comes in the process of sitting at my drafting table and waiting for, and wrestling with, and paying attention to, the images that come.
Q: Is there a parallel in the kind of patience required in the creation of art and the waiting of Advent?
Yes, definitely. One of the things that I’ve been keen to explore in recent years in Advent is that sometimes when we talk about waiting, we think of it as a passive thing, having to sit idly by while we wait for whatever is going to happen to happen already.
I think part of what God invites us to in Advent is to be mindful that when we are called to times of waiting, God doesn’t mean for us to be passive. I think of Mary so much in the season of waiting, and how her waiting was not an idle time as Christ was growing in her womb.
We’re called to, and invited to, find the spaces of invitation, even in what may, on the surface, look like really slow times. We are called to pay attention. We are called to look beneath the surface. We are called to ask questions about the place we are in, even when it feels like we’re not moving in any direction.
Being an artist, I find, requires a huge amount of patience, and again, it’s not an idle or passive process.
One of the things that frames my Advent season is being willing to wade into the messy, murky, sometimes ugly, painful places -- and I’m talking here both about my art and about my grieving, which are so intertwined -- but to trust that in the waiting there is work to do, and that something will come from it that I can hardly even begin to see or imagine from the place I’m standing.
The wrestling makes me think, and the question makes me think, of Jacob. The story of Jacob was a story that was really core for Gary and for Gary and me. We did a lot of work together around that, individually and together around that story, both in our own work and in some of the retreats and conferences that we led -- in particular, the story of Jacob wrestling with God or the angel or whoever it was that showed up on that dark, dark night.
When Jacob left at the end of the wrestling, he left both with a limp that forever marked him and with a blessing.
I find those things to be very much intertwined, that the limping and the blessing are very much intertwined, and we leave with a new name, some new insight, some new revelation into who we are.
Q: How is your artwork used in your online Advent retreats? What do you get out of it, and what do you hope others get out of it?
During the retreats, people receive an email five times a week that contains a piece of artwork that I have created especially for the retreat. We have a theme for each week of the retreat, and so the daily emails also offer a written reflection that invites us deeper into whatever the theme for the week is.
Gary created some guitar meditations that typically were between 12 and 15 minutes long, that people could use as a way of entering into their time of reflection or in whatever way they chose.
So it is a real intertwining of word and image and song and story for the purpose of inviting people deeper into the season in the way that fits best for them.
One of the things that we so enjoyed about creating this retreat was being very intentional about designing it in a way that fits people’s schedules. I continue to be very mindful about letting folks know this is not one more thing to add to your schedule. This is something that’s designed to slip easily into whatever your rhythm of life is in your Advent days.
From the start, we also offered an online forum using a social platform that enables people to go online whenever they wish and leave comments, respond to other people’s comments, share something that surfaced for them as they have journeyed through the week, something in connection with the theme of the week.
It’s important to say that the online forum piece is always a strictly optional piece. Some people engage in some kind of creative process as they move through the retreats and through the Advent season, and they can share images there.
I don’t pretend to think that what happens online can ever substitute for being in a room, in the same room with people face to face. But it has been really wonderful to discover the kinds of connections and communities that can be created in an online space.
So the online retreats have been a wonderfully rich way of journeying through the season together, moving more deeply into it through images and song and word and music, and for those who choose, also having this community element, the sense that I am not alone in the journey.
Q: How did you discover you were an artist?
It’s been a strange and wondrous kind of journey, because I always, always, always understood myself as a writer, I think from the time I first picked up a pencil in my chubby hand.
I come from a creative family. My mom and brother are talented artists. But I would periodically over the years -- my family kept a stack of that cheap construction paper lying around, the kind that fades in five minutes if you put it in the sun. I would periodically dip into it over the years to do collage, to make cards for people and that kind of thing.
As I kind of went through college, and particularly once I got into seminary, on the rare occasions I would dip into the construction paper, I found that the collages had more and more -- I don’t know, I hesitate to use the word “sophistication” -- but there was more going on there.
I found that something transforming happened for me in the process of cutting and tearing and pasting and piecing together to create something new.
It really has been a practice. I found that as I continued to show up at the drafting table, it was becoming a way of prayer for me, and also an amazing and engaging metaphor for my life.
I was finding that in much the same way that I would sit at the drafting table and cut and tear and paste and piece together, and taking the light and the dark and the rough and the smooth and the pieces that I might prefer and the ones that might otherwise get thrown away and using all of those to create something new, that God was doing much the same work, and continues to do much the same work, in my own life.
I have come to think of God as the consummate recycler, and in God’s economy, nothing is wasted; God has a really stubborn way of using all the pieces of who we are and our experience to create something new. I continue to find and experience it just in my being, in my flesh and bone and soul and heart, the truth of that -- that God is about putting the pieces together.
I am having a particularly awful occasion to experience the truth of that in my own life, and that’s a place where I find resonance and connection between the creative process and my own life.
Artists are people who are called to wait with the pieces, to open our eyes to the pieces, to those places of brokenness and pain. Artists are people who are called to not turn away, to not turn our faces away, but to turn ourselves toward those places of brokenness and pain and to wait with those pieces, and to allow ourselves to begin to imagine, and to allow God to imagine through us, what could these pieces become.
I think that’s the call not just of the artist but of the Christian, of every person of faith. To have faith is to be willing to do the work of waiting and imagining what God through us, how God through us, can put the pieces together in a new and more whole and holy way.
Q: As you look toward this season and also back over the past year, where have you found comfort? Has your art brought you comfort and healing?
I am still figuring that out. Gary died last Dec. 2, the second day of Advent, and so I have been through almost one full Advent since his death, but because his death was so very fresh and I was in those incredibly raw initial stages of grief, I’m curious to see what this Advent is going to be like.
But I’m still carrying that question with me of what will provide comfort, what will provide solace. How do I find my way ahead? How do I listen and discern my way into the life that is waiting for me that is a very different life than I had anticipated having to live right now?
Giving myself into the hospitality and giving myself into the keeping of people who know me well, friends and family, people who know how to welcome me both into their space -- into the space of their home -- and into their life has been a really remarkable gift.
The creative process, both as a writer and as an artist, has been a place both of solace and also of pain. Gary was my partner in ministry, and we did a tremendous amount of collaborating together.
We each had a studio at our home, and we were constantly back and forth and in each other’s studios throughout the course of any given day. I would be in his studio listening to what he was doing. If I was in a stuck place with some writing or some artwork, I would holler down the hallway to him and ask him to take a pass by when he had a chance.
So to be creating without having that, without having him in my space and in my creative process, is something that I’m still navigating. At the same time, the creative process, because he had so inhabited that process with me -- it’s a place where I continue to feel his lasting influence and presence and spirit.
Q: Do you have thoughts for others experiencing loss this season?
One of the first books I wrote was called “Night Visions,” which intertwined artwork with my writing. The subtitle is “Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas.”
I was very aware of those messages that weave through the Advent and Christmas season of it being a happy, merry, joyful time, and very aware that it’s not that way for everybody.
I wanted to be able to offer some images and some words about what it means for us to really enter this season in which, so the story tells us, God comes to us in the dark. How do we honor our longing for light while also opening ourselves to the God who comes to us in the darkness?
I think Advent is a time for really acknowledging that and acknowledging what a staggering amount of mystery we live in. I think it’s so important in the Advent season, as well as in every season, to figure out what’s going to help us abide the mystery, whether it’s the mystery of just simple unknowing that is always attending our lives or the mystery of the darkness that comes in times of pain and grief.
I have found that whatever kind of darkness we are in, God is always very keen to meet us there.
Monday, November 30, 2015
Emotional Intelligence is widely studied in the business world to help improve leader effectiveness. The Emotional Intelligence of Jesus introduces readers to the ways emotional intelligence can enhance their work in faith settings. Authors Roy M. Oswald and Arland Jacobson highlight the emotional intelligence of Jesus, illuminating the remarkable ways he related to a diverse array of people, then show how these lessons can enrich the ministry of faith leaders today. The book walks readers through five key principles of emotional intelligence -- self-awareness, empathy, assertiveness, optimism, and stress management -- illustrating these principles in the life of Jesus and offering practical applications for leaders today.
Buy the book »
Continue Your Learning with The Church Network
Webinar: Tax and Legal Update -- Contributions
featuring Frank Summerville
December 10 at 2:30 p.m. EST
As hearts and minds turn to holiday parties, church leaders' thoughts will turn to year-end giving. Understanding the laws and reporting requirements for contributions are a critical task of church finance.
Learn about a new proposed regulation (REG-138344-13) regarding a new voluntary IRS form that churches may file to confirm contributions.
Verify your compliance with reporting requirements and appropriate timing.
Give the proper response to those postdated checks.
Learn how online giving is affected by timing.
Review non-cash contribution reporting.
Hear the latest on year-end stock and IRA gifts.
Consider whether BITCOIN might be in your contribution future.
Ask your specific questions about all things contributions.
Uncertainty about reporting requirements is enough to spoil a good punch bowl of eggnog... but clear understanding can bring added holiday joy.
Learn more and register »
Ideas that Impact: The Church and the Arts
"Restoring our Contemplative Gaze: Congregational Transformation through the Arts" by Linda Privitera
An artist, consultant, teacher, and priest-without-walls tells how she and her congregation were transformed when they used the arts to explore their deepest feelings and attitudes, their differences and their faith.Read more »
"Restoring Our Contemplative Gaze: Congregational Transformation through the Arts"
Buy the book »
Continue Your Learning with The Church Network
Webinar: Tax and Legal Update -- Contributions
featuring Frank Summerville
December 10 at 2:30 p.m. EST
As hearts and minds turn to holiday parties, church leaders' thoughts will turn to year-end giving. Understanding the laws and reporting requirements for contributions are a critical task of church finance.
Learn about a new proposed regulation (REG-138344-13) regarding a new voluntary IRS form that churches may file to confirm contributions.
Verify your compliance with reporting requirements and appropriate timing.
Give the proper response to those postdated checks.
Learn how online giving is affected by timing.
Review non-cash contribution reporting.
Hear the latest on year-end stock and IRA gifts.
Consider whether BITCOIN might be in your contribution future.
Ask your specific questions about all things contributions.
Uncertainty about reporting requirements is enough to spoil a good punch bowl of eggnog... but clear understanding can bring added holiday joy.
Learn more and register »
Ideas that Impact: The Church and the Arts
"Restoring our Contemplative Gaze: Congregational Transformation through the Arts" by Linda Privitera
An artist, consultant, teacher, and priest-without-walls tells how she and her congregation were transformed when they used the arts to explore their deepest feelings and attitudes, their differences and their faith.Read more »
"Restoring Our Contemplative Gaze: Congregational Transformation through the Arts"
“When it comes to spiritual experience, words are often woefully inadequate. For that matter, neither do images or any of the arts fully convey the Great Mystery. Even so, there are some practices that improve our chances. When we open ourselves to the intrinsic value of art—its vast array of styles and techniques—we open ourselves to being met by the Holy One who speaks in unexpected ways.” —Lois Huey-Heck and Jim Kalnin, The Spirituality of Art1
According to Robert Wuthnow and others who study the life of congregations, parishes that are vibrant and growing are making use of the arts in many forms to revitalize and strengthen their faith communities.2 The hope of this article is that churches might be willing to risk new practices, to continue to expand the ways in which people can appropriate the symbols and practices of worship, and to provide additional ways through which members can share their faith. The arts invite response, reflection, and attentiveness. Creativity and imagination affect church systems, including our worship.
Not so long ago, a parish I served in a community near Boston was transformed, and so was I, when we chose to embrace a model of what C. Kirk Hadaway calls “transformational community,” a faith system that is open-ended, permission giving, nurturing and growing, and one that embodies its purpose, transforming its people.3 This model moves people into new ways of seeing themselves, each other, and God. Undergirding the transformative work we undertook based on this model were several beliefs that form the basis for my consulting work and ministry: I believe in the priesthood of all believers, in a shared power through our baptisms. I believe that we are called to offer the gifts we bring in a spiritual democracy marked by radical welcome and open hospitality. I believe that the liturgy is the work of the people of God and that the whole space is a container for the sacred. And I believe the arts offer us a way to make a spacious container for difference.
Creativity demands, or perhaps implies, an attitude of openness to discovering new things, experimentation, imagining new possibilities, and taking risks. The opposite pattern can maintain tradition, safety, and conservative patterns. A creative approach allows conflict as a healthy part of congregational life when it exposes difference; the other works to avoid it. As a small Episcopal parish, we wanted to embrace mission and a future, not maintenance and a holding onto just our past. We imagined what God might be yearning to call forth in our midst. We had grown and our growth included many of the rich and complex demographics of a Boston suburb; we wanted to find ways to deepen our level of community within the richness of our diversity.
We chose art as a means for our transformation, discovering that creativity and imagination, the gifts of the people of God, impacted our systems—our ways of doing the business of the church. The new projects we undertook changed our understandings of racism and multiculturalism, moved us toward new vehicles for healing, developed deep community, and helped us reshape our liturgies.
“I believe that creativity includes the art of life itself. It is about the way we live and work, what we risk and why,” writes Ted Loder in his book The Haunt of Grace: Responses to the Mystery of God’s Presence.4 I agree with this statement and I believe in the power of this artful way of life to move me. I was amazed, however, at the changes this work brought forth in us as individuals and as a congregation.
These changes did not happen overnight, of course. We began slowly, learning to do mosaic depictions of church symbols as our first project. Our leader for these workshops provided the patterns and we chose the symbols that were meaningful to us, such as the boat on the sea of Galilee or the dove representing the Holy Spirit. One woman designed her own symbol, a combination of symbols representing her Buddhist and Christian household. People were delighted with the projects and expressed their individuality in terms of color and balance. We hung their mosaics in the worship space for a season and were pleased to hear the comments: “You made those? When is there another workshop? They add some brightness to the space.”
Next we transferred the mosaic style to the Easter side of a large five- by eight-foot cross on which we had placed an icon for Good Friday. Those who worked on the icon portion were only five in number, but the Easter mosaic involved the whole parish on Sunday mornings; even the youngest child could add some tiles. Comments from participants included thoughts of being more a part of the Holy Week events. “I thought of my own life as I added those pieces of tile, what was it about me and Easter in this place.” The children in particular could hardly wait for the turning of the cross from the Good Friday to the Easter side at the Easter Vigil.
The Good Friday/Easter cross became an important part of our worship after September 11th and at funerals too. What began as a simple task to replace a short cross that was too small for our space and our proclamations became resymbolized for us; we had a hand in this work as God also has a hand in our lives. Those who laid the cross on their shoulders for the Good Friday liturgy were joined to it in an embodied way. Those who helped me turn the cross on Holy Saturday remembered times when their lives had turned around as well.
Next we began a series of art credo projects—projects reflecting the artists’ beliefs—in which parishioners were invited to depict their faith through a variety of artistic mediums. For the majority of the credo projects, I supplied the 18-inch-square wood panels on which members of the congregation created their works of art. Once the subject for reflection was decided upon and announced, everyone in the parish was invited and encouraged to sign up for one of the boards. We had placed some nails in the walls on the sides and at the back of the church, which gave us a reasonable number of places to hang the work.
Our first project involved depicting the traditional stations of the cross. I wanted to extend the Holy Week experiences into the worship space, into the nave. The large cross we had made the previous year was situated near the altar. In placing these stations close to the congregation, on the walls near the pews in which the congregation sat, I hoped that the experience of the events of that week would come closer to my people. I wanted to know how they made connections in their own lives, placing their own stories next to the stories of the text. I was in awe of what came forth. And, I think, so were the artists as they reflected on what was going on within themselves, in their faith worlds, in each other, and in the world beyond the doors of the church. The variety of expression, both individually and in common faith, was an important part of this transformative process for those who made, received, and reflected upon the art. We gained insights into each others’ lives that we would not have gained without the visual forms.
For example, the mother of an adolescent placed the cry of the forsaken one (Jesus) in a graffiti city street with the words, “Why have you forsaken me?” (see image below). In the reflection time when the artists gathered, she spoke about why she had chosen this station and what it meant in her own life. She said that as she walked to work through the city’s streets she noticed and was affected by street youth and the graffiti on buildings, which, she said, invited notice and response. Some, in response to her work, suggested that we neglect our youth.
Another artist, an adolescent young woman, pondered the fashion industry and its pattern of masking and unmasking our bodies in the station she chose, Jesus being stripped of his garments. He
r work was a combination of images drawn from fashion magazines aimed at young women (see image, page 31).
A lawyer, reflecting on the then-current debate in the state legislature about the death penalty, drew a courthouse and created a collage of newspaper headlines about the debate for his station, Jesus being condemned to death (see image, page 32).
As we took these images in, we began to look at what others thought and prayed about, and these images began to accompany us in worship. They reshaped our prayers, inviting the congregation to think more deeply about the concerns that are living in others. And, since the images remained in our space for a time, the concerns remained as opportunities for reflection and action.
As a communal social act, the liturgy must be in touch with both the lives of its individuals and with the wider sorrows and joys of the world. The mediator of these worlds is often the priest, but artists can stand in the liminal place as interpreters too. If we welcome artists and encourage those who can offer their own creativity, if the use of imagination is freely encouraged, our parishes may experience liberation, releasing the yearning and longing for a new humanity and even a new way of being a community of faith.
Perhaps if we can acknowledge that we have made words a central beauty in our prayer books and that rationalism and the dissection model of coming to the texts is our norm, then we will be able to admit that we have lost the contemplative gaze, the mystery of God that comes through images and through each one of us, that is expansive and a wonder. Through sharing the work of our hands in a new way, we deepened our community. This was a new form or recovery of the offertory action, a handing over of ourselves in the midst of the gathered faithful.
Our present worship service patterns do not include much time for reflection. At my church we would acknowledge that our Eucharistic worship moves us steadily toward communal action and we have little opportunity for changing the scripts or the forms. In this parish, we initially impacted our gazing, our noticing, as we began to move the signals for the liturgical seasons toward the community, over their heads or on the wall, not just in new colors for vestments or altar. By inviting parishioners to create art for each of the liturgical seasons, the work of the community became the signal for each rotation. Hundreds of peace cranes were suspended overhead when Pentecost inside met war in the world, and a tree branch invited us to think about the tree of life. Placed near our baptismal font, it reminded us of the roots and branches of the community of faith. One year I handed the Advent gospels to a creative couple. “I need for you to find a way to embody these texts for us each week,” I told them. “Can you give me some figures? A man and a woman?” Advent one had the figures they created, life-sized and made of flexible aluminum tubing, at the entrance of the church, one with a candle in hand and the other pointing toward the altar. Week two had them seated in the pews with their hands over their ears as John the Baptist shouted to the brood of vipers. Week three found them suspended overhead from the beams, the scrolls of the prophets hanging from their arms. “Go tell John what you see—the blind receive their sight, the lame leap for joy… .” Week four found them approaching the altar, and on Christmas Eve they had an infant in their arms and all had stars as halos. Initially the figures were greeted with surprise and some confusion; as they were present each week they became more a part of us. This movement of the figures in the space encouraged people to get their heads out of the books and to look around and see what they might have been missing. One of the biblical texts for the season said, “Keep watch.” In using the Advent figures, we made room for another new expression of the gospel texts.
A letter from one visitor made this evidently clear. “As a recent visitor to the Church of Our Saviour, I’ve had what I would consider one of the most uplifting liturgical experiences I have had in quite some time,” she wrote. “It is the very first time I have been in a church where I noticed all of the art is ‘homemade’ and not produced by a religious products company… . First, they are the living signs of the community, life manifested by the Word. Your stations, as well as other artwork, spoke volumes to me about the kind of community the Church of Our Saviour is, a community filled with joy and care and a commitment to another’s well being. You truly see yourselves as gifts to one another. Second, they are objects made by your loving, human hands and the presence of the Holy Spirit… . As a visitor I have been transformed by them as well… . Lastly, I found them to be signs of your call to a shared journey of faith. And I am grateful to have been in their midst, to have been witness to your call.”
“When I came through the door and saw all the art, I knew that something was happening here, that this parish was alive,” another visitor commented. I was stunned to realize that so many of my people had lots to say and not much opportunity in community worship to say it. So the credo projects continued. We learned from the “stations of vocation” about each other’s satisfactions and struggles at work. We commissioned a set of multicultural banners to reflect the increasing diversity in our congregation and in the connections with others in our neighborhood and in the world. Our nearest elementary school had over 30 languages spoken in the homes of its families and we, too, had more to represent than a white Jesus with white children in a pastoral scene complete with sheep. Initially, our parish had no imagery of welcome in the multicultural neighborhood. Twelve watercolor-on-silk angel banners of various ethnicities helped us reflect on infrequent depictions of the location of the Holy (see image, page 28).
After the completion of each project, I gathered the artists together in a small group where they could share their stories of faith, why they chose the particular images and sentiments, and how doing the art was a prayerful act for them. I found these reflections to be so helpful that I began sharing them in the parish newsletter, at sermon time, and in notebooks accompanying the seasonal art offerings.
The images and mutual reflections also helped me as priest and preacher to attend to the concerns of my parish through my sermons. I opened up the sermon time for comments and questions from the congregation, and sometimes I incorporated the art in my preaching, having been inspired by it. All of us were affected by these offerings.
Clergy play a primary role in encouraging the arts in church settlings, especially in visual forms. Our forms may vary, but we are continually invited to go deeper, explore more, connect with something and someone different than ourselves, and risk transformation. Through our art we made room for difference, for faith to be met in a variety of color, shape, and form. We made an expansive container for our worship.
_______________
1. Lois Huey-Heck and Jim Kalnin, The Spirituality of Art (Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada: Northstone Publishing, 2006).
2. Robert Wuthnow, All in Sync: How Music and Art are Revitalizing American Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
3. C. Kirk Hadaway, Behold I Do a New Thing: Transforming Communities of Faith (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2001).
4. Ted Loder, The Haunt of Grace: Responses to the Mystery of God’s Presence (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2002).
[The Rev. Linda Fisher Privitera is the former rector of the Church of Our Saviour in Arlington, Massachusetts, where the spiritual practices in visual theology described in this article are still ongoing.]
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"Makoto Fujimura: The Function of Art An Interview with Faith & Leadership"
The church needs the arts, not so there will be opportunities for more artists in churches, but for the sake of the gospel, says the artist and founder of the International Arts Movement.
Read more »
THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION, ARTS & CULTURE, VISUAL ARTS
"Makoto Fujimura: The function of art"
The church needs the arts, not so there will be opportunities for more artists in churches, but for the sake of the gospel, says the artist and founder of the International Arts Movement.
Chances are if you’ve heard others use the expression “It’s like watching paint dry,” you’ve assumed they meant that something was boring.
But that’s not the case for Makoto Fujimura, an artist and the founder of the International Arts Movement (IAM)(link is external), a nonprofit that encourages artists to wrestle with questions of art, faith and humanity through workshops, lectures and performances.
He finds watching paint dry fascinating -- so much so that he has even videotaped it. “There’s something about it that is very generative for me, that makes me come alive,” said Fujimura, who moved from Japan to the United States when he was 13 and was drawn to visual communication as he learned English.
He paints using the traditional Japanese technique Nihonga, and his paintings have been exhibited at galleries around the world, from the Dillon Gallery in New York to the Contemporary Museum of Tokyo. His latest work is “The Four Holy Gospels,” an illuminated manuscript of the Gospels published by Crossway in January to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.
Fujimura became a Christian while completing a master of fine arts degree at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and was named World magazine’s “Daniel of the Year” in 2005. A former elder at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and a founding elder at The Village Church, he is the author of a memoir, “River Grace,” and a collection of essays, “Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art and Culture.”
Fujimura spoke with Faith & Leadership about the function of art, the International Arts Movement, and the “Four Holy Gospels” project. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What did you take away from illuminating the four Gospels?
It was a life-transformative experience. I was working on this for a year and a half and dedicated to this task mostly. Each day I would read a segment of the Gospels that I was working on and meditate on it. My creative process was aligned with the text.
It exposed so many things. It was a deep and abiding sense of how sinful I am, and at the same time, I was seeing visions of God. I would dream about images, and I couldn’t even translate that into concrete forms. It was like I had some map that was given to me, but I couldn’t read it. It was as if I was walking into a foreign country with a foreign language.
So I had to take baby steps and trust that each step is going somewhere and that I would be able to tap into a visual language that I had never thought about before but that I had been cultivating. I had to trust that using everything that I had known in all my training and in all my work would capture and give honor to the biblical text. It was amazing, amazing.
Q: And now it’s over?
The funny thing is, I don’t think it’s over. I think there’s a lot that I learned. Certainly my art will change after this, and I’m already thinking about doing the Psalms. And I would love in my lifetime to try to be able to do all the chapters [of the Bible], but I don’t know if I can. At least I would like to do Isaiah, Jeremiah and Revelation.
These are just the thoughts and dreams, but it pushed me toward a path that -- well, I guess it would be a lie to say I wasn’t expecting it, because I knew this would be an extraordinary experience, but I feel like I’ve just begun. I don’t know where it leads, but I feel like I have just begun to understand the map, and I’m eager to get to the next level.
Q: What do you hope other people will get out of “The Four Holy Gospels”?
I want to communicate tears of Christ and what that means today, as the semper Creator, the God who is always creating. There’s something about the nature of tears and the drying of them. “Jesus wept” -- that to me is so critical for understanding the gospel, and I see that as a critical path toward knowing what the arts are for and what they’re not for.
Q: What are the arts for, especially in terms of their role in the church?
The arts provide a comprehensive picture of both humanity and God. What I mean by this is, it’s not a theological statement. I’m not saying that the arts replace the divine word of God or the expression of the church.
But what I am saying is that the arts are fundamentally connected with the realities that God has created in the universe, as well as in communities of his people. Look at everything from the Genesis account of Adam being asked to name the animals to passages in Revelation that are full of images -- and maybe, in some ways, only artists can understand that. All those things are the language of the arts.
It’s more than arts being used. I think in some ways you can’t use the arts any more than you can use a human being. So we want to have a language that fully celebrates both the artist and the gospel. And in my mind, they are two intertwined realities. The reason that we need the arts is not so we can have more artists in the church, but for the sake of the gospel.
The arts are a cup that will carry the water of life to the thirsty. It’s not the water itself; it’s the vessel. What we are doing in the church today is we are just picking up water with our bare hands and trying to carry it to the thirsty. We can still do it, but the effect is minimized by not fully utilizing what God has given us.
We have to do what we can to carry the full cup, rather than be satisfied with waters that slip through our fingers.
Q: How do you carry the full cup?
We need to regain our practices of discipline. St. Benedict said “To work is to pray,” and Sister Wendy said “To see is to pray.” And I think, in some ways, when the artists come into the picture of that process for the church of proclaiming the gospel and living out the gospel, they give us the language, the colors, the passion and the tastes. Those things are cultivated in your lifetime and maybe even generationally. Bach did not become Bach overnight; there was a generational sacrifice that was made for music and for faith that allowed him to become Bach.
We need to look at the long term and say, “Yes, we as a church have to uphold these principles so our children will be able to go much further than where we can in culture.” That cultivation -- the practice, the discipline -- all these things will be required.
Q: What role does creativity play in this?
When you empower a child to write or to paint or to sing -- something that will awaken the senses to take in both the challenges and the darkness of our days, but also the hopes and dreams -- you’re causing a ripple effect in that child’s life and for generations to come.
And that’s why the arts in some ways are fundamental to even scientific research and mathematics. We talk about needing math and science education all the time, but we don’t realize that they start with an intuitive process. Mathematics is not just this mechanism that you teach, but true math is this creative process of re-examining these abstract concepts and not making things up. They are grounded in reality, but they have these margins that you question deeply, even the assumptions that these abstractions are really giving you. And so at the core level, all the disciplines need to have a grasp on the intuitive side of our experiential side.
That allows us, I think, to go deeply into each of the disciplines and connect them at the same time.
Q: In 1990 you founded the International Arts Movement, and you have said that its goal is to re-humanize the world. What have you learned about how to do that?
You first identify what’s dehumanizing. We do that by understanding the arts and the fundamental beliefs that we have about the arts. You cannot “commoditize” art and make it sustainable. It’s OK to be part of a market system; it’s just that you have to guard the very heart of expression that cannot be commoditized.
It is a gift, and we want to honor that gift. You have certain ideals, and you’re often co-opted by and hijacked by these ideological realities and dehumanized mechanisms. So you identify those dehumanizing things first, and then you re-humanize by working at it and being faithful in the place you’re called to be, by not giving in to these dehumanized realities. At the same time, you’re willing to engage with it somehow, being part of it but not being of it.
And then you begin this generative conversation. You reverse this somewhat excessive narcissistic interest by intentionally being generous, a radical transgressive act. And you become, hopefully, part of the microcosm shalom that is able to be a catalyst for the whole and will generate like yeast. There is something very generative about it, and then you move on and create more microcosms.
Q: What role does tradition play in the generative process? Is there a place for both tradition and innovation?
That’s a critical bridge that 20th-century modernists tried to shut out of the process, yet they were unable to. T.S. Eliot talks about it in “Tradition and the Individual Talent(link is external).” We have to have a paradigm in which we can make alive these traditions and create something new from them. And ultimately, I think that’s what’s going to be enduring.
If you cut yourself off from the past, you may think you’re doing something new, but in reality, you’re not. However tentatively, it’s connected to the past. That will remain as we look at these works now, so it’s critical to have tradition and innovation connected.
I’m actually in the process of creating a small institute to think about that, because I’m not quite sure how it plays out in reality. I know how it works in my work, and it’s instinctive. It has to do with Japanese traditions and my connectedness to them, and then what I want to do in the creation of new paintings, and so forth.
At the same time, it’s so intuitive. It’s like, I don’t know how I paint; I just know I do it. But after a while when I’m doing exhibits, I have to stand back and talk about it, and that’s a different process and mechanism. I have to get input from other people to really have this conversation be useful for the next generation. I’m in the process of doing that.
Q: You’re known for painting in a traditional Japanese style. In what other ways does being a Japanese-American, as well as a Christian, influence your work?
I’m such an amalgam, I don’t even think about it. In a sense, I love what it is that makes Japanese culture unique and American culture unique.
I think a wonderful advantage that I have is being able to both critique and honor what is good in both sides. And so I don’t consider myself a Japanese-American artist, but I know I am.
I don’t consider myself a Christian artist either. I’m an artist who follows Christ, yes, and I don’t mind people saying that, but it’s an adjective. It’s a category. Really, to me, the most important part may be the part that is exiled from these things, because I realize that’s where God dwells.
Maybe that’s a Kierkegaard influence, but there’s something about the in-betweens and either-or that allows me to prophetically speak into both. That’s what I like to do.
---------------------
"Makoto Fujimura: The Function of Art An Interview with Faith & Leadership"
The church needs the arts, not so there will be opportunities for more artists in churches, but for the sake of the gospel, says the artist and founder of the International Arts Movement.
Read more »
THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION, ARTS & CULTURE, VISUAL ARTS
"Makoto Fujimura: The function of art"
The church needs the arts, not so there will be opportunities for more artists in churches, but for the sake of the gospel, says the artist and founder of the International Arts Movement.
Chances are if you’ve heard others use the expression “It’s like watching paint dry,” you’ve assumed they meant that something was boring.
But that’s not the case for Makoto Fujimura, an artist and the founder of the International Arts Movement (IAM)(link is external), a nonprofit that encourages artists to wrestle with questions of art, faith and humanity through workshops, lectures and performances.
He finds watching paint dry fascinating -- so much so that he has even videotaped it. “There’s something about it that is very generative for me, that makes me come alive,” said Fujimura, who moved from Japan to the United States when he was 13 and was drawn to visual communication as he learned English.
He paints using the traditional Japanese technique Nihonga, and his paintings have been exhibited at galleries around the world, from the Dillon Gallery in New York to the Contemporary Museum of Tokyo. His latest work is “The Four Holy Gospels,” an illuminated manuscript of the Gospels published by Crossway in January to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.
Fujimura became a Christian while completing a master of fine arts degree at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and was named World magazine’s “Daniel of the Year” in 2005. A former elder at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and a founding elder at The Village Church, he is the author of a memoir, “River Grace,” and a collection of essays, “Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art and Culture.”
Fujimura spoke with Faith & Leadership about the function of art, the International Arts Movement, and the “Four Holy Gospels” project. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What did you take away from illuminating the four Gospels?
It was a life-transformative experience. I was working on this for a year and a half and dedicated to this task mostly. Each day I would read a segment of the Gospels that I was working on and meditate on it. My creative process was aligned with the text.
It exposed so many things. It was a deep and abiding sense of how sinful I am, and at the same time, I was seeing visions of God. I would dream about images, and I couldn’t even translate that into concrete forms. It was like I had some map that was given to me, but I couldn’t read it. It was as if I was walking into a foreign country with a foreign language.
So I had to take baby steps and trust that each step is going somewhere and that I would be able to tap into a visual language that I had never thought about before but that I had been cultivating. I had to trust that using everything that I had known in all my training and in all my work would capture and give honor to the biblical text. It was amazing, amazing.
Q: And now it’s over?
The funny thing is, I don’t think it’s over. I think there’s a lot that I learned. Certainly my art will change after this, and I’m already thinking about doing the Psalms. And I would love in my lifetime to try to be able to do all the chapters [of the Bible], but I don’t know if I can. At least I would like to do Isaiah, Jeremiah and Revelation.
These are just the thoughts and dreams, but it pushed me toward a path that -- well, I guess it would be a lie to say I wasn’t expecting it, because I knew this would be an extraordinary experience, but I feel like I’ve just begun. I don’t know where it leads, but I feel like I have just begun to understand the map, and I’m eager to get to the next level.
Q: What do you hope other people will get out of “The Four Holy Gospels”?
I want to communicate tears of Christ and what that means today, as the semper Creator, the God who is always creating. There’s something about the nature of tears and the drying of them. “Jesus wept” -- that to me is so critical for understanding the gospel, and I see that as a critical path toward knowing what the arts are for and what they’re not for.
Q: What are the arts for, especially in terms of their role in the church?
The arts provide a comprehensive picture of both humanity and God. What I mean by this is, it’s not a theological statement. I’m not saying that the arts replace the divine word of God or the expression of the church.
But what I am saying is that the arts are fundamentally connected with the realities that God has created in the universe, as well as in communities of his people. Look at everything from the Genesis account of Adam being asked to name the animals to passages in Revelation that are full of images -- and maybe, in some ways, only artists can understand that. All those things are the language of the arts.
It’s more than arts being used. I think in some ways you can’t use the arts any more than you can use a human being. So we want to have a language that fully celebrates both the artist and the gospel. And in my mind, they are two intertwined realities. The reason that we need the arts is not so we can have more artists in the church, but for the sake of the gospel.
The arts are a cup that will carry the water of life to the thirsty. It’s not the water itself; it’s the vessel. What we are doing in the church today is we are just picking up water with our bare hands and trying to carry it to the thirsty. We can still do it, but the effect is minimized by not fully utilizing what God has given us.
We have to do what we can to carry the full cup, rather than be satisfied with waters that slip through our fingers.
Q: How do you carry the full cup?
We need to regain our practices of discipline. St. Benedict said “To work is to pray,” and Sister Wendy said “To see is to pray.” And I think, in some ways, when the artists come into the picture of that process for the church of proclaiming the gospel and living out the gospel, they give us the language, the colors, the passion and the tastes. Those things are cultivated in your lifetime and maybe even generationally. Bach did not become Bach overnight; there was a generational sacrifice that was made for music and for faith that allowed him to become Bach.
We need to look at the long term and say, “Yes, we as a church have to uphold these principles so our children will be able to go much further than where we can in culture.” That cultivation -- the practice, the discipline -- all these things will be required.
Q: What role does creativity play in this?
When you empower a child to write or to paint or to sing -- something that will awaken the senses to take in both the challenges and the darkness of our days, but also the hopes and dreams -- you’re causing a ripple effect in that child’s life and for generations to come.
And that’s why the arts in some ways are fundamental to even scientific research and mathematics. We talk about needing math and science education all the time, but we don’t realize that they start with an intuitive process. Mathematics is not just this mechanism that you teach, but true math is this creative process of re-examining these abstract concepts and not making things up. They are grounded in reality, but they have these margins that you question deeply, even the assumptions that these abstractions are really giving you. And so at the core level, all the disciplines need to have a grasp on the intuitive side of our experiential side.
That allows us, I think, to go deeply into each of the disciplines and connect them at the same time.
Q: In 1990 you founded the International Arts Movement, and you have said that its goal is to re-humanize the world. What have you learned about how to do that?
You first identify what’s dehumanizing. We do that by understanding the arts and the fundamental beliefs that we have about the arts. You cannot “commoditize” art and make it sustainable. It’s OK to be part of a market system; it’s just that you have to guard the very heart of expression that cannot be commoditized.
It is a gift, and we want to honor that gift. You have certain ideals, and you’re often co-opted by and hijacked by these ideological realities and dehumanized mechanisms. So you identify those dehumanizing things first, and then you re-humanize by working at it and being faithful in the place you’re called to be, by not giving in to these dehumanized realities. At the same time, you’re willing to engage with it somehow, being part of it but not being of it.
And then you begin this generative conversation. You reverse this somewhat excessive narcissistic interest by intentionally being generous, a radical transgressive act. And you become, hopefully, part of the microcosm shalom that is able to be a catalyst for the whole and will generate like yeast. There is something very generative about it, and then you move on and create more microcosms.
Q: What role does tradition play in the generative process? Is there a place for both tradition and innovation?
That’s a critical bridge that 20th-century modernists tried to shut out of the process, yet they were unable to. T.S. Eliot talks about it in “Tradition and the Individual Talent(link is external).” We have to have a paradigm in which we can make alive these traditions and create something new from them. And ultimately, I think that’s what’s going to be enduring.
If you cut yourself off from the past, you may think you’re doing something new, but in reality, you’re not. However tentatively, it’s connected to the past. That will remain as we look at these works now, so it’s critical to have tradition and innovation connected.
I’m actually in the process of creating a small institute to think about that, because I’m not quite sure how it plays out in reality. I know how it works in my work, and it’s instinctive. It has to do with Japanese traditions and my connectedness to them, and then what I want to do in the creation of new paintings, and so forth.
At the same time, it’s so intuitive. It’s like, I don’t know how I paint; I just know I do it. But after a while when I’m doing exhibits, I have to stand back and talk about it, and that’s a different process and mechanism. I have to get input from other people to really have this conversation be useful for the next generation. I’m in the process of doing that.
Q: You’re known for painting in a traditional Japanese style. In what other ways does being a Japanese-American, as well as a Christian, influence your work?
I’m such an amalgam, I don’t even think about it. In a sense, I love what it is that makes Japanese culture unique and American culture unique.
I think a wonderful advantage that I have is being able to both critique and honor what is good in both sides. And so I don’t consider myself a Japanese-American artist, but I know I am.
I don’t consider myself a Christian artist either. I’m an artist who follows Christ, yes, and I don’t mind people saying that, but it’s an adjective. It’s a category. Really, to me, the most important part may be the part that is exiled from these things, because I realize that’s where God dwells.
Maybe that’s a Kierkegaard influence, but there’s something about the in-betweens and either-or that allows me to prophetically speak into both. That’s what I like to do.
---------------------
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Sacred Wood. 1921.
"Tradition and the Individual Talent"
I
IN English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archæological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archæology.1
Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.2
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.3
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.4
In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.5
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.6
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.7
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.8
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.9
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.10
II
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. In the last article I tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.11
The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.12
The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which “came,” which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet’s mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.13
If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For it is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmution of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.14
The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.15
I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:
And now me thinks I could e’en chide myself
For doating on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge’s lips,
To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her?…
In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.16
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.17
III
This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
---------------------
"Why Should We Care About the Arts?" by Richard B. Hays
Christians should be attentive to the ways in which the character of our community is shaped by the imaginative spaces we inhabit, says the former dean of Duke Divinity School.
Read more »
THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION, ARTS & CULTURE
"Richard B. Hays: Why should we care about the arts?"
Christians should be attentive to the ways in which the character of our community is shaped by the imaginative spaces we inhabit, says the dean of Duke Divinity School.
Why should theology care about the arts? Or, to put the question in a more pointedly practical way, why should those who are engaged in the church’s ministry care about the arts?
We live in a culture that tends to focus narrowly on pragmatic concerns and to regard the arts as peripheral. Faced with budgetary constraints, our public schools have massively cut funding for classes in visual art, music and theater; financial resources are focused instead on preparing students to pass standardized tests. It is not hard to see that such educational policy impoverishes the imagination of students and deprives them of the collaborative joy that comes from working together to produce a play or perform a concert.
The Protestant churches have sometimes been guilty of a similar shortsightedness. We gather to meet in bare, functional spaces and focus on wordy, ungraceful, discursive sermons. We care about the doctrinal content of our beliefs and about the good works we seek to organize in our congregations. But we may be insufficiently attentive to the ways in which the character of our community is shaped by the imaginative spaces we inhabit.
In fact, there are at least four very simple reasons we should care about the arts in the church.
First, there is no escaping the arts. They create the imaginative symbolic world in which we live and move; we are constantly surrounded by images, music and stories. And so if we seek to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5), we need to reflect critically and faithfully on the artistic media that profoundly shape the consciousness of our culture.
How does the architecture of the buildings in which we live and work shape us? How do iTunes and Netflix tell us stories about who we are and what we should desire? How does the diction of advertising stunt our capacity to speak kindly and truthfully to one another? If theological education focuses only on ideas and fails to reflect on their artistic milieu, we will be quite literally tone-deaf or insensible to major elements of human experience, and we will fail to perceive ways in which the gospel may challenge and transform us.
Second, all elements of corporate worship organize words and actions in some sort of artistic form. So really, the only question is whether they will do so well or badly. Will our hymns and proclamations be beautiful, incisive and provocative? Or will they be trite, sentimental and plodding? Will they beckon hearers to explore “the beauty of the infinite,” to use David Bentley Hart’s phrase, or will they recycle turgid clichés?
Sociologist Mark Chaves (who holds a joint appointment at Duke Divinity School) has pointed out that congregations are one of the most important venues in which Americans experience art or participate in its production. He reports, for example, that more than 60 percent of American adults hear live music in a worship service in any given year, compared with 39 percent who hear live pop music; 17 percent, live classical music; 12 percent, live jazz; and 5 percent, live opera.
If the church is one of the primary places where the arts are actually practiced, we ought to evaluate our worship in a way analogous to Thomas Merton’s probing question about the state of literary art in the church: “We who say we love God: why are we not as anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God? If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all. In any case it is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly, when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well.”
Third, participation in artistic performance can teach us crucial skills for the life of obedient discipleship. Consider, for example, the skills of listening, self-restraint and cooperation fostered by participation in a choir -- disciplines that not only benefit the common good but also make us more wise and peaceful people.
Similarly, it is often through the arts that we most deeply internalize the truths of our faith. I would venture a guess that far more Christians imbibe theology through singing the Psalms or the hymns of Charles Wesley than through reading Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth.
Finally, because we are made in the image of God the creator, we are destined to be creators of images and stories. It’s in our flesh and bones. God is the great artist who conceived and constructed the intricate cosmos, the sculptor who shaped the human form out of the mud of the earth. God is the poet who imagined Israel’s improbable epic drama -- election, fall into slavery, exodus and return to the land of promise -- and then inspired psalmists and prophets to sing the story, and to re-imagine it for later generations living new chapters in the drama of exile and return.
If we are made in the image of such an inventive God, it follows as day the night that we too will be makers of shapes, symbols, songs and stories. As bearers of the image, we can do no other. Art bubbles up out of the center of our being. The more fully we acknowledge God’s creative power, the more freely we will celebrate the creative expression, the poiēsis, through which we respond to God’s grace.
For all these reasons, we should be concerned about theology in and through the arts. God has spoken creation into being, and God has breathed life into us. Therefore, when we sing with the psalmist, “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord” (Psalm 150:6), we are declaring that all creation breathes with the life of the logos. And so, through our arts, we are rendering back to God the only fitting response: creative praise.
---------------------
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"Why Should We Care About the Arts?" by Richard B. Hays
Christians should be attentive to the ways in which the character of our community is shaped by the imaginative spaces we inhabit, says the former dean of Duke Divinity School.
Read more »
THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION, ARTS & CULTURE
"Richard B. Hays: Why should we care about the arts?"
Christians should be attentive to the ways in which the character of our community is shaped by the imaginative spaces we inhabit, says the dean of Duke Divinity School.
Why should theology care about the arts? Or, to put the question in a more pointedly practical way, why should those who are engaged in the church’s ministry care about the arts?
We live in a culture that tends to focus narrowly on pragmatic concerns and to regard the arts as peripheral. Faced with budgetary constraints, our public schools have massively cut funding for classes in visual art, music and theater; financial resources are focused instead on preparing students to pass standardized tests. It is not hard to see that such educational policy impoverishes the imagination of students and deprives them of the collaborative joy that comes from working together to produce a play or perform a concert.
The Protestant churches have sometimes been guilty of a similar shortsightedness. We gather to meet in bare, functional spaces and focus on wordy, ungraceful, discursive sermons. We care about the doctrinal content of our beliefs and about the good works we seek to organize in our congregations. But we may be insufficiently attentive to the ways in which the character of our community is shaped by the imaginative spaces we inhabit.
In fact, there are at least four very simple reasons we should care about the arts in the church.
First, there is no escaping the arts. They create the imaginative symbolic world in which we live and move; we are constantly surrounded by images, music and stories. And so if we seek to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5), we need to reflect critically and faithfully on the artistic media that profoundly shape the consciousness of our culture.
How does the architecture of the buildings in which we live and work shape us? How do iTunes and Netflix tell us stories about who we are and what we should desire? How does the diction of advertising stunt our capacity to speak kindly and truthfully to one another? If theological education focuses only on ideas and fails to reflect on their artistic milieu, we will be quite literally tone-deaf or insensible to major elements of human experience, and we will fail to perceive ways in which the gospel may challenge and transform us.
Second, all elements of corporate worship organize words and actions in some sort of artistic form. So really, the only question is whether they will do so well or badly. Will our hymns and proclamations be beautiful, incisive and provocative? Or will they be trite, sentimental and plodding? Will they beckon hearers to explore “the beauty of the infinite,” to use David Bentley Hart’s phrase, or will they recycle turgid clichés?
Sociologist Mark Chaves (who holds a joint appointment at Duke Divinity School) has pointed out that congregations are one of the most important venues in which Americans experience art or participate in its production. He reports, for example, that more than 60 percent of American adults hear live music in a worship service in any given year, compared with 39 percent who hear live pop music; 17 percent, live classical music; 12 percent, live jazz; and 5 percent, live opera.
If the church is one of the primary places where the arts are actually practiced, we ought to evaluate our worship in a way analogous to Thomas Merton’s probing question about the state of literary art in the church: “We who say we love God: why are we not as anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God? If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all. In any case it is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly, when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well.”
Third, participation in artistic performance can teach us crucial skills for the life of obedient discipleship. Consider, for example, the skills of listening, self-restraint and cooperation fostered by participation in a choir -- disciplines that not only benefit the common good but also make us more wise and peaceful people.
Similarly, it is often through the arts that we most deeply internalize the truths of our faith. I would venture a guess that far more Christians imbibe theology through singing the Psalms or the hymns of Charles Wesley than through reading Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth.
Finally, because we are made in the image of God the creator, we are destined to be creators of images and stories. It’s in our flesh and bones. God is the great artist who conceived and constructed the intricate cosmos, the sculptor who shaped the human form out of the mud of the earth. God is the poet who imagined Israel’s improbable epic drama -- election, fall into slavery, exodus and return to the land of promise -- and then inspired psalmists and prophets to sing the story, and to re-imagine it for later generations living new chapters in the drama of exile and return.
If we are made in the image of such an inventive God, it follows as day the night that we too will be makers of shapes, symbols, songs and stories. As bearers of the image, we can do no other. Art bubbles up out of the center of our being. The more fully we acknowledge God’s creative power, the more freely we will celebrate the creative expression, the poiēsis, through which we respond to God’s grace.
For all these reasons, we should be concerned about theology in and through the arts. God has spoken creation into being, and God has breathed life into us. Therefore, when we sing with the psalmist, “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord” (Psalm 150:6), we are declaring that all creation breathes with the life of the logos. And so, through our arts, we are rendering back to God the only fitting response: creative praise.
---------------------
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STAY CONNECTED
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