Time Continuum

Space-Time Configuration

What does the worker gain from his toil?  I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to the end.  Ecclesiastes 3:9-11

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.  T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Investing time in the studio always yields benefits. The work focuses or branches out into new forms. Pleasurable discoveries shifts the expenditure of our time, expenses, energies as we grasp towards that elusive something. The pursuit is future-oriented, but to obtain it we must be fully vested in the present, all the while sustained by positive past experiences of accumulated processes of art making.  

Yet sometimes the need to create is mere burden. No explanations needed for He has also set eternity in the hearts of men. We experience something good when we make art. And just as our studio practices hones the work, it is a pattern parallel to God’s perfecting of the cosmos through time, space, the particular, through Christ. We cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

What does this mean for artists? First off, eternity is continuous with our present world. Time present and time past are contained in time future. And time future double backs into time present: our time. God is with us through his promised Spirit, the hallmark of a new age. This means we don’t have to get it right the first time. Just as the whole of creation is groaning waiting for God to perfect it, our art is practice. One day the grunts and groans will eventually give way to true worship of the Triune God. Christ has already set the Spirit life in motion--we have the firstfruits of the Spirit awaiting the future redemption of our bodies. He has made everything beautiful in its time.

Secondly, since forever belongs to us, time is not a burden. One of the characteristics of our culture is the weight of time. We never have enough of it so we weary ourselves with too much work, too much play. The more we invent time saving devices to increase leisure, Colin Gunton notes the less capable we are of being able to dwell “in the body and on the good earth.” (Gunton, The One, The Three, And the Many, p.77). In God’s timelessness, he sets patterns of living: birth, death, plant, pick, kill, heal, extirpate, build up. Life does not happen all at once for we are to dwell in each zone discovering its merits and faults.

Isn’t this what we also learn in the studio? Idea, concept, action, introspection, more action, wait for the paint to dry, curse, smile, scrape off the paint, start again with the marks of the old refined by the new. What does the worker gain from his toil? John Dewey remarks how “Every work of art follows the plan of, and pattern of, a complete experience, rendering it more intensely and concentratedly felt.” (Dewey, Art As Experience, p.54) Artists, think of your art making practice as a sensitizing or priming agent for the ultimate experience of eternity.

Let the future break into the present; make art.

--Maria

The Art of Suffering

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T.S. Eliot, Second Quartet, East Coker, III

Suffering loosens the belief we are in control. When all we undertake falls apart and God seems to have gone on vacation, distress discerns an action that can be accomplish; that of waiting. What accompanies an artist’s wait? We create in hope. It is this aspect of art that reflects Christ’s redeeming work in the world allowing us to render every act of creativity as a sign of hope. Art reaches for the eternal despite our society’s refusal of such categories. As Christians we understand this hope as the beauty of redemption through the salvific works of Christ.

Edward Farley in Faith and Beauty maintains beauty is a manifestation of Christ’s redemptive work. Redemption allows us to uphold what is deemed valueless. Here, the darkness becomes light, the cast off is repurposed. Artists have the ability to take what is broken then reconstitute and employ it towards art. For Farley it is this transformative action that constitutes beauty. “Redemption reaches and reshapes into new freedoms all the ways in which the human being is infected by sin” (Faith and Beauty, 93).

John Dillenberger goes further and suggests difficult art needs to exist. He relates how the “literary and the visual are… affirmations in their negations; indeed, they negate in order to affirm” (A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities, 224). Artist make plain what needs to be—what should be, what can be. Ultimately, it is hope that drives the impulse of art making for it seeks to grasp Jesus’ work of redemption and transformation. Whether we are believers or not we all long for renovation. The nature of transformation, therefore, must fall under the Christian artist’s purview. In our own work we accept the waiting and the mysterious chaos of our lives then proceed to shape, arrange, and re-form it. Jeremy Begbie encouragingly reminds us, “In Christ, all that is ugly and subversive in the cosmos has been purified, beautified and fulfilled. Therein lies the promise for the transformation of all things” (Voicing Creation’s Praise, 175).

Redemption does not negate or ignore the ravages of sin but restores all things. Jesus’ transformative power goes further to redirect and transforms our inordinate desires. It is in the waiting where our love, hope, and faith finally reaches out for the Triune God. Barbara Brown Taylor speaks about this in terms of disillusionment. “Disillusionment,” she writes, “is the loss of illusion—about ourselves, about the world, about God—and while it is almost always painful, it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for the truth” (The Preaching Life, 8). It is in darkness we begin to see, feel, know. While waiting for God we offer him the pain, suffering and the waiting, which in turn, makes our work his.

Wait—for the darkness shall be light,

Maria