Mirror

Infrequently and unexpectedly, art can surprise us. It can feel a bit like catching a glimpse of oneself and one’s surroundings in a mirror you didn’t realize was there. Recently, I had this experience while watching Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. The succinct title reflects the film’s unmerciful directness. Separated into six episodes and almost exclusively featuring two lead characters, Johan and Marianne, the film surveys a marriage by making us privy to the critical turning points in the narrative arc.

Scenes from a Marriage offers at least two insights. The first is specific to the subject matter of the film (marriage) and the second is a broader point about the way Christians encounter art.

Let’s start with marriage. When the film begins, Johan and Marianne are presented as a picturesque married couple and the envy of their friends. This presentation appears to reflect what both characters believe about themselves--their circumstances are ideal: they are an upper-middle class couple, youthful, attractive, interesting and successful. This seeming perfection sets the stage for the central conflict.

As Johan and Marianne discuss their relationship throughout the film, Johan believes their marriage is possible because they possess the ideal circumstances. Marianne believes they share the same “language” and that this shared language enables their marriage. These beliefs become irrelevant when Johan begins an affair with another woman.

What interests me most about the narrative to this point is that most marriages are sustained and many fail out of these beliefs. Nearly as soon as Johan and Marianne articulate their assumptions things fall apart.

Love is conspicuously absent. Most of us believe in the power of love which is a kind of emotional-romantic attraction to or infatuation with the other. It’s exciting, but less exciting is the kind of love that actually holds marriages together. The latter love involves things like self-sacrifice and compassion. Many people get married out of the former rather than the latter, their partner posses an attractive inventory of circumstances and goods. Or like Marianne, they believe they share something special and exclusive with their partner. Each assumption is based on a sort of idealism, material in the former case and romantic in the latter. This film offers a rebuke to anyone who believes that their material comfort or romantic idealism will serve as the lasting foundation of marriage.

What makes this film instructive for Christians (and for all, really) is that Bergman offers an unmediated view of the couple’s split and each individual’s search for self-fulfillment. Johan and Marianne turn out to be ugly people with a huge predilection for selfishness, adultery and violence. It would be easy to judge them if you thought you were a much better person. Bergman offers no judgment. He simply shows us how rotten human beings can be to one another, especially when real motivations revolve around their self-procured and perceived happiness.

This illumination opens to a larger point I would like to make, not about Christians and marriage, but about Christians and the arts. One of the ways Christians can engage the arts is by taking the time to seriously consider work that may or may not be complementary to their faith. In doing so we may find there are works like Bergman’s that remind us of our own insufficiencies and false gods. Regardless of the intent of the author, and Bergman would certainly have disagreed with the conclusions I drew, we might find that modern art is very much aware of our contemporary spiritual poverty and personal insecurity.

This is why contemporary art has something to tell us about ourselves. It is the art of the society and culture in which we live. Both are contexts to which we are often more beholden than we would like admit and we ignore this at our own peril. In this regard, the force of the Christian narrative in our lives is largely a counter cultural one. Sometimes contemporary art with all its capacity for dissonance and the grotesque is the smelling salt we need to bring us to our senses. Bergman’s film is not a Christian one in terms of the answers it offers but I think we can consider it so in terms of the unflinching look it offers of something we call sin. When we are honest with ourselves, this unflinching look isn't simply an interesting story told by a gifted film director. It is our mirror image we come to confess each Sunday.

--Daniel

Daniel Clemens is a painter and writer participating in our seven-week study, In The Living Room

Strange Fruit

One of the artists in our community at Redeemer, a classical actress, recently encouraged me to think more about the idea of God’s sanctifying work in our life v/s our own ideas of success: His fruit v/s our fruit. In the process, I’m attempting to draw a tangible connection between our lives in the city, and the purposes of God to reconcile ourselves individually, even artistically, to Himself. How can we see a connection between our personal sanctification and the Grand Work of Renewal that God is bringing about in the world, of which our own salvation, sanctification (and potentially our creative expression) are an evidence?

Perhaps married life is a good starting place. When I got married I had some good intentions, like wanting to love and serve my beautiful-sweet Emily, and see her reach her potential in Christ. But also, in my own sinful condition, I married her to make myself happy forever and found new hope in this “perfectly wonderful person” whose love could make my life, somehow, more pleasing to God. On the surface, those don’t seem like bad things, but they aren’t exactly what God had in mind. He does intend to make me happy forever and He knows that union with Himself is the only hope of that. But happiness is not the point of marriage, though it is a pleasant bi-product. Rather, in laying down my life for my wife each day, as Christ did for me, my heart is transformed to be like His heart, bringing me into fellowship with God who is the source of all true Joy and the only reward worth longing for. It wasn’t even a bad thing that I wanted a perfect person to justify me and make me right with God. That person just isn’t my wife. It’s Jesus. So, those two, seemingly small, distinctions become major shifts in my reality and lived experience.

Just as my marriage is not about making me happy, I had to realize that my being in New York may not be for the reasons that I initially had in mind. But that doesn’t mean that the Sovereign God of my life and this world doesn’t have a reason for me being in NYC. In fact, I can take a pretty good guess that it has a lot to do with the life of Christ being formed in me (which involves a very unpopular word beginning with an “s”), and the hope that I, yes even I, can join Him in His work of renewing all things, through creative endeavors which flow from a heart and life which are being renewed through suffering (I waited until the end to drop the “s-bomb”). And He is so lovingly faithful in bringing about this end, that He will allow many trials and Graces to come until Christ is fully formed in me. “Christ in me, the Hope of Glory”!

I can’t help but think of Paul, the apostle, chained to the wall of a prison cell, probably unable to write on his own after being cruelly beaten, but joyously testifying in a letter to the church in Philippi. He writes in Philippians 1:29,

“...for it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake…and, “do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit…”.

Perhaps the most exultant part of his letter to the Philippians is in chapter 3 when he says,

“( vv. 7-11) Whatever gain I had, I count as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as [dung] in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him…that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

God bless you as you seek His purposes for your life and creative work in the city. Grace is at work here, in us and around us. Thank God for that Reality check.

Kenyon

The Greatest Commandment

Some time ago, in conversation with a friend, she claimed that in order to have the capacity to love others well one must know one’s self. I argued the opposite. One couldn’t possibly love the self fully without knowing others. Knowing the other makes clear the boundaries that exist, which force us to identify what we are not, thereby imparting what makes us tick. My intent here is not to prove my friend wrong: while our emphases are considerably different we both understand knowing and loving happen in relationships. In Mark 12:30 Jesus summed up God’s commandments as such. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” And “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Loving self, loving neighbor, comes by way of loving God. The ten commandments are therefore gracious. They seemingly restrict our being by setting boundaries, but these boundaries help us to know what we are (or what we are not) while simultaneously giving us insight into loving and knowing God, self, and others. The law does not rob us of particularity, it protects and honors what makes us particular and offers us a way to care for others.

Jonathan Magonet in A Rabbi Reads the Bible understands God’s commandments in terms of relationships. In Hebrew to have “no other gods before me” uses language similar to an intimate marriage contract. (p. 201) Magonet points out the biblical and Rabbinic terminology for the commandments is the Ten Words. Instead of a list of prohibitions it carries a more relational sense—“you could not possibly wish to do any of these things” because personal relationship promotes “internal, volunteering policing.” (p. 194) When do we break one of the ten commandments? When we are not in true community. We fall into sin when knowledge of God and others becomes an extension of ourselves.

I’ll be married 25 years this April. The roughest points in our marriage have been when my husband becomes an extension of my own desires, fears, and insecurities. Sometimes I can’t hear, believe, or accept his love for me. I also won’t ask him for help (after all I created him in my image therefore he already knows what needs to be done). I take away his personhood by not honoring the choice he made to enter a contract that entailed loving and caring for me. I violate the community of our marriage when I don’t allow myself to depend on or grow through him.

In the same way many artists understand their work as extensions of themselves. Christian artists forget they have entered into a relational contract with God. God in turn set us in community. Our work does not necessarily comes from us or belong to us—they are not solely extensions of who we are but also of the relationships and communities we come from. In his article, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot goes so far as to state that poetry “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” For Elliot the artist forgoes individuality, “surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.”

Our work grows out of community. Not only does the community feed and strengthen our creative disciplines, but ultimately our work is a gift stemming from our relationship with God. Through God’s own being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we are given the ability to live and create in community. Our work is to be a regenerative force that continually bears fruit, not just in us, but also in those around us. This is why when I visit a friend’s studio I am eager to get back home and paint. My friend’s work becomes the best critique of my own, forcing me in new directions or helping incarnate my thoughts and ideas in a fuller sense.

While it is true that God and his commandments help “determine the stability of society,” (Magonet, p. 196) they point to something beyond the ethical. Within the commandments there is disclosure not only of God and his desires but also of clues towards humanity’s wholeness. Our God is a relational God and has made us to be relational beings. Like any creative endeavor relationship building is difficult. We must continually die to self for God to reinforce our particularity—our truer sense of being and our place in community. When we create we must remember how valuable our endeavors are, for they come through, in, and for community. Let us then love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Amen.
-Maria