Art as Relational

God desires for us to know him. So, when the Word became flesh, the Triune God actively established himself in our world through a relationship. Even now when we read the four apostles' distinctive gospel accounts of their time with Jesus our emotions are drawn upon because of specificity of time, place, people, and things—their experience and our experience become essential. The artistic value of the narrative is its ability to feed the imagination by employing what is familiar: emotion, experience, the things we bump against day in and day out. Unlike the scientific that views things as object, Jesus, Incarnate, make all things subjects. In the same way, art employs things—ideas, emotions, people, and places--and begs for the participant to “see” them. At a recent lecture the sculptor Anish Kapoor reminded the audience that “art is good at saying ‘come here and take a look at me.’” * Art, therefore, can assist in detecting Jesus, who John relates “was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.”

Roberto Goizueta also reminds us how the aesthetic “allows us to live life itself as an end in itself rather than as some-thing to be understood.” Goizueta observes when we treat subject like object--analyzing emotions and things as information, we continually set apart the emotional and spiritual dimension of our humanity (Goizueta, Caminemos Con Jesus, p.94). Likewise, John Dewey notes how in our society "prestige" goes to those who use their minds “without participation of the body.” Dewey continues that a further mind-body separation occurs when we depend and take control of the “bodies and labors of others” to accomplish our ideas and wants (Dewey, Art as Experience, p.21). As artists we frequently experience this disconnect when we are asked to create something overnight with no consideration for creativity's lengthy and costly process. The prophet Isaiah laments how we are people who hear, but never understand; we see, but never perceive. It takes relationship between the heart, mind, and body to hear with our ears, and understand with our hearts, in order to be healed.

Art allows both emotion and experience to formulate connections and weave patterns until the next experience causes us to establish anew our way of seeing, feeling, knowing. Art enables our transformation, the taking in of the new. And, indeed, it became the gospel writers’ mission to explore the new world Christ initiated. Furthermore, according to theater director Peter Sellars, our experience with art “holds us together.” * The sharing of art deepens our relationships with one another and with the art itself. Think of how much more we understand a work of art through the action of describing it to another. Art enlarges us. We, reciprocally add to its profundity. Through Christ, we no longer look at the world as object, to be owned, exploited, ignored. The king, who calls us his subjects, asks us to be in relationship with the world. Art is one way of embodying this commitment.

--Maria

* Quotes from Anish Kapoor and Peter Sellars are from the New York Public Library Lecture Series event of November 13th. Their conversation also included Brian Eno.

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