The Artist as Theologian

Remember the days when a conversation at Starbuck’s about the deeper matters of life and longing would inevitably end with one party resolutely declaring, “Well, that’s true for you but it’s not true for me”? It seems like only yesterday that relativism reigned as the catch-all response to issues of ultimate concern from philosophy and religion to sociology and even law.

In his recent talk at InterArts Fellowship, Steven Garber sought to orient our community of artists to the times in which we live and encouraged us towards meaningful actions and conversations within our hearts, communities and world. As he does in his book, The Fabric of Faithfulness, Steve reminded us of how the Age of Enlightenment and the rationalism of the modern era have left many in contemporary society with a dulled awareness of human destiny and purpose. Yet, Garber notes, even relativism is coming under strong suspicion amid the devastating scenarios of our war-torn and disaster-prone world, not to mention the accompanying nihilism which offers a bleak and gangly vision of human flourishing.[1] Unfortunately, this dilemma has left many in our society confused, depressed and floundering for a sense of meaningful purpose for their lives. [2]

It seems that in order for the church to navigate this scenario, artists must become engaged in developing our shared understanding of both our times and our God. Cue: the artist as theologian. Clearly, God's world is not black and white. There are grey areas that cannot be packaged or easily reconciled without the use of abstract thinking and imagination.These times may require the presence and participation of artists within the church in order to know God and make him known within a culture that has lost its anchor in rationality and reason yet has grown increasingly suspicious of relativism as an easy fix to the inconsistencies between our knowledge and our experiences. As artists we tend to live in the tension between the what is and the what ought to be as we work. Our gifts and our way of seeing allow us to accept and explore mystery.

What might it look like for your work to become a context in which the mysteries of God are explored and embodied? Have you ever experienced a way of living and working in the arts that integrates and enlivens your engagement with the gospel? Will you as an artist identify with the community and calling of the people of God?

Kenyon

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[1] The Fabric of Faithfulness, Garber. After Virtue, Macintyre. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Bernstein.

[2] Generation Me, Twenge.

The Reality of Abundance

On the table of pine

Stood a tiny Bowl of Blackberries (click to listen)

You poured into it the whitest cream.

In the corner her tail

Wrapped around her tiny body

As herself she did softly clean.

Outside on the lawn

Gently blowing the linen

Almost as if it were a dream.

And in the porcelain sink

My sorrows deep.

Pulled the drain and

I sent them out to sea.

My only wish,

For this.

My only wish,

For more of this

by Jonny Rodgers. See it live at the next InterArts.

Something in Jonny Rodgers depiction of that tiny bowl of blackberries served with cream on a picnic table re-affirms for me a sense of the reality of Abundance. There is a place or person somewhere in the universe that truly fulfills the last aching abyss of the human heart. It is only a sense in my deepest heart of hearts, but could there be some validity to this feeling?

Everything in our culture seems to operate at a deficit, home loans, car loans, student loans, national debt....Yet our individual hopes and desires perhaps are running the highest deficit of all. I look at hundreds of faces each day riding the subways. I look at my own face reflected on my desktop as I write. Contentment seems even more elusive today than the large, dark creature I thought I saw while peering intently into the waters of Loch Ness at age sixteen.

When C.S. Lewis refers to our having desires which cannot be satisfied in this life, he hardly seems to paint a picture of Abundance. He does however conclude that we must, then, be made in fact for another world, suggesting the afterlife which is central to the Christian belief in resurrection. Still, it is difficult in the midst of our longings to find comfort merely in the hope of a life to come. Don’t you agree?

The Police, in their harrowing anthem Spirits in the Material World make a similar observation to Lewis’ but arrive at quite a different conclusion. Where does the answer lie, living from day to day? If it’s something we can’t buy, there must be another way. We are spirits in the material world. The answer for Sting seems to be a realization that life in the body is somehow of less consequence than a disembodied life would be. The song gives me a sense of needing to escape my body, a sentiment which was so heart-wrenchingly expressed by the character Evan in Justin Lerner’s recent New York film premiere, Girlfriend. Actor Evan Sneider delivers a stealth performance as a young man with Down’s syndrome who falls in love with a beautiful and troubled single mother in a rural suburb. For Evan, being in his physical body seemed to keep him from his desire for romantic love. Rocking out at my desk to The Police performing this incredibly virile song leaves me with a feeling that we’d all be better off if we could only escape our bodies and live a purely ephemeral, spiritual life. It’s little wonder that the opening lines to the song decry contemporary efforts to reform society or the human condition. Why engage in politics, religion or even relationships if there's no real hope?Indeed, there must be another way.

Being a song-writer and a follower of Christ I am trying to understand the tension between recognizing the brokenness in my own heart and life, and allowing that brokenness to take over my view of myself and the world. If it weren’t for my pain, I wouldn’t have much to share with others. On the other hand, I also have this notion in my gut, having met the resurrected shepherd, that even the darkest night will one day be a distant memory in the face of such beauty as He possesses and which He will one day restore to all things. Living in this hope means loving Abundance: loving the world while regarding only one thing as most precious. That thing is a person, whose mystery is enough to tickle the laughing/crying soft flesh of our longing. Yet, He is master enough to restore all things. The reality of Abundance stares us back in the face through the eyes of this mysterious and masterful person. In holding him dear, all things become dearer to me.

Kenyon

The Deep Places: Accessibility and Responsibility

ac-cess /'ak,ses/ , n. a means of approach or entering a place.

ac-ces'si-ble, adj. easy to reach or influence.

As artists we have access to a key environment in the structure of a human being. Nigel Goodwin calls it "your belly". Martha Graham calls it "your center". Aretha Franklin calls it "my soul" and King David called it "my innermost being". This deep place exists between dreaming and waking where we are most ourselves, in which no pretense could ever possibly materialize, where the passions and fears that drive our lives are cultivated. But we would be kidding ourselves to think that artists have some kind of original authority or credential at the gateway to the deep places of the human heart. No, it is only in collaborating with the most mysterious Artist of all that we ever even come close to accessing the deepest realms of human longing. It is in this place, the deep place, that we need God to meet us most of all.

So, much of our work as artists is a kind of active or skilled waiting, as we delve into this mysterious place where the Holy Spirit is quite impressively on the move like a merchant sailing a trade route in hostile waters. Much of our work, indeed, is looking, listening and waiting to respond or simply be awed by what the Holy Spirit is doing in us, through us and around us. Unlike us, He is not limited by time, place or resources. He has infinite power to access the deep places in every human heart.

Might we consider that the spiritual responsibility of the artist could be a matter of stewarding the access we’ve been granted to this most potent environment? How are we doing as artists with stewarding the access we have to human hearts? How are we doing as a community of artists within churches...within families...within society? As individuals? Have we learned the discipline of listening, looking and waiting? Are we aware of how He might be moving in our own deep places? Understanding accessibility and responsibility might help us discover an important aspect of our spiritual calling as artists, particularly within the church. But certainly, the first environment we must explore is our own.

Have you been met in the deep places by the Spirit of the living God? Certainly we are being met by many other presences, personas and influences in the deep realms of our hearts from which our longings stir us to daily actions and ways of being; or to use James K. Smith's helpful description, our cultural liturgies. Has the risen Christ stepped into your "inner most being" lately and impacted your "center"? Would you notice if He did? Does He sometimes seem to take flesh in your dreams, or perhaps he's used the melody of a song or a childhood memory to take apart your facade until you crumble at His feet? Has He undone you with His skillful, compassionate artistry? Has he melted your heart with warm fear and penetrating hope?

If artists do not learn to articulate and understand the nature of the spirit’s work through the various mediums of the arts then we may ourselves begin to conceive of a lesser value for the power and access we’ve been given by the grace of God. In this world, we need merciful merchants on the waters of that deep river. Artists do not control the heart, but we can know Him who is the Desire of nations.

It is because of Grace that artist’s can operate in the deep places. Grace was bought with a price. Let us give the Lamb of God the reward of His sufferings. What He seems to desperately want in all of this is to create hearts that are awed by Him and Him alone. As He says, to remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Isn't it ironic that all of the other things that move us deeply and control our lives only make us harder, colder, less alive, less human? But He works with all the maniacal devotion of a research scientist who's discovered a cure, using his own body and blood as the test subject.

Let's look and listen and wait for the Holy Spirit to invade the deep places of our hearts; and as He gives us grace to move others, let's move them to awe at the One who paid such a price to have full access to our hearts.

Kenyon

Art Illuminates: A Lenten Reflection for the Artist

PROLOGUE

We must never imagine that art is wholly subject to the fallen mind. On the contrary, the fallen mind must be lifted up in taking in the art. Art can offer us a taste of the kingdom come and illumine our hearts and minds in view of the renewing work of Christ.

ACT I

Because of the gospel, the artist can delve into the deepest grime of fallen man’s mire to illuminate God’s hidden glory through the power of expressive mastery. This assumption of imminent glory is predicated by the incarnation: that God has visited man in His mire. The reality of this truth has radically changed the material world in which the artist seeks to work. Therefore an artist who works in view of this reality may enter into a particular context with hope to see Christ’s own hand at work. In this way, Christ is the master of all who aspire to create.

ACT II

Yet, if Christ is master of the artist, then artists must also receive His most striking and paradoxical distinction, that of the servant-king. For Christ did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage, but made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant. Therefore, as we are encouraged by our own God-likeness, being made in the image of God and possessing His power to create, we also identify with Christ as the humble servant of all. In laying down His life, Christ demonstrated the sublimity of His own expressive mastery. In the gospel, divine love is the central subject of God’s masterwork. Creation becomes the object of His love and Christ’s life, death and resurrection are the potent vignettes of this hyper-radical performance-art piece of cosmic proportions which will culminate, of course, in the glorious return of the servant-king. Behold, I am making all things new!

ACT III

Art that is created in view of the gospel is sacramental. It invites the divine presence. It seeks to transcend and yet be embodied in the physical. This transcendent embodiment is rooted in the Christian hope, the redemption of our bodies. If our bodies are to be redeemed, then we also have hope that life in the body may also be redeemed. Therefore, the sacramental element of art—transcendent embodiment—extends even to the material elements of one’s trade and the disciplines of mastery. Light, color, sound, stone, skin, bone, breath, pen, paper, laptop…all are included in the sublimity of this hope of redemption. Most joyously, we realize that the artist herself, through the hope of the gospel, is swept up into this work of Renewal. The performance which is now in previews is awaiting the opening night. In the gospel, the artist becomes broken bread and poured out wine through the wringing and emptying of her own soul, releasing the storehouses of hidden glory. For is not God at work in our hearts to restore us?

EPILOGUE

It is not merely in the letters on the page, the mixing of the paint, the pointing of the foot, the distinction of the brand, the delivery of the lines or the structure of the story, but the artist himself in body, mind and soul set apart for this breaking and pouring out in sacramental service. To what end? So that no stone shall be left unturned in declaring and realizing the Renewal of All Things through Christ!

Kenyon

Embodied Soul Work

Through Christ, love took form as a body. Jesus, the ultimate love offering, is the foundation for a theology of embodiment. How does this theology relate to artists? Since we will soon relaunch a dance industry vocation group let’s refer to a dancer’s work. Hours of discipline result in wounds and pains to the body; artistic activity can be physically challenging. Yet through the bleeding and bruising we are able to witness the wonder and awe of patterned movement and physical elegance. Beth Felker Jones speaking of Christ, but a fitting remark for a dancer, proclaims, “If we want to know the shape of a holy life, we look at the wounded body.” (Mark of His Wounds, p.111)

Stanley Hauerwas commenting on the disciplined life of the artist writes, “Artists, who must learn to submit to the medium in which they work, demonstrate the kind of training necessary for any of us to see the world rightly.” (Hauerwas, “Fully Human; Art And The Religious Sense.” Image Number 60 (2009): 103) But the regiment of an artist is not just an analogy or a paradigm for the well-ordered life of a Christian, it is reflective of true Christian embodiment. Just as the ascetic directs the body to God, the dancer can likewise make room in the body for God to nourish self and others. What makes anyone want to exert such effort? Love—therefore, Jones is correct, “Love must have a body.” (Mark of His Wounds, p.108)

A theology of embodiment is crucial for our technical age, with our rational ethos. The Church needs dancers, painters, and actors to teach us how to inhabit our bodies. Christians are called to be present in space and know how to move in space with real presence in order for love to take shape physically. Let us, then, offer up to God our bodies and our bodies of work and begin to praise him. Let’s dance.

--Maria