Thinking Christianly About Art

(Image from banksy.co.uk)

To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will even begin to compensate for failure in this, and very serious faults will be covered by this, as by charity. -C. S. Lewis

True Christian imaging meets violence head-on, mine and the world's, but also God's... We must learn early to seek God within the wounds that reality inflicts. -Janine Langan

Art and prayer have never been conceived by the Church as enemies, and where the Church has been austere it has only been because she meant to insist on the essential difference between art and entertainment. -Thomas Merton

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. -James 1:17

The tragedy is that so many Christians, in their revulsion at the perverse aspects of [empty postmodern] art, shun all art, even that which may spring from a God-honoring imagination or a Christocentric consciousness. The other "Christian" alternative is a conservatism that responds only to kitsch, a sentimental art of the Hallmark greeting card variety that cheapens true sentiment, turning it into sweetness and light and mere moralistic propaganda - no teeth, no guts, no muscle, no reality. No real Christianity either, if we consider the Creator's work as our powerful, radical model.
But kitsch is easy. It is accessible as a Thomas Kinkade painting, and as stereotypical. It is manipulative and narcotic, and by contrast it makes true art seem difficult or complicated. For true art is not all sweet reasonableness. -Luci Shaw

We know in part. We see through a glass darkly. But it is worth our looking. -Elisabeth Elliot

The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. -C. S. Lewis

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. -Romans 12:2

Prisons, let it be said, have fostered far more art and mystical insight than any Arts Council, Ministry of Culture or other such effort in the way of governmental encouragement. -Malcolm Muggeridge

Art is the signature of man. -G. K. Chesterton

Protestantism - the adroit castrator
Of art; the bitter negation
Of song and dance and the heart’s innocent joy -
You have botched our flesh and left us only the soul’s
Terrible impotence in a warm world. -R. S. Thomas

Big Family Survival - Part 4: Laundry

Yes, the famed Big Family Survival series is back! I have several more posts in the queue, all dealing with the delightful and dramatic mayhem of living in a family large enough to qualify for its own zip code.

Today we're dealing with one of the most mundane chores of modern life: laundry. Everyone needs clothing washed periodically, especially young kids whose primary idea of fun is seeing how much mud and grass they can get onto their clothes in the least amount of time, or older kids whose occupations involve large amounts of dirt, sawdust, cement, and other assorted substances.

The mound of soiled laundry at our house is affectionately referred to as "Mt. Telianappolis," and for good reason. Climbing Mt. Telianappolis is a constant test of stamina and will. Battling valiantly through an avalanche of soiled jeans, dirty jumpers, and smelly socks, the laundry sorter organizes the chaos by color and weight into wicker baskets. That's the hard part.

From there, everyone processes their assigned loads: from the basket to the washer (don't forget to "check the pockets"), from the washer to the dryer (don't forget to "shake the jeans"), from the dryer back to the basket, from the basket to the couch (to be folded), and from the couch to the appropriate bedrooms.

Knowing what is what and whose is whose at our house requires a Ph.d. in laundrology. Reading size tags on jeans, noting miniscule differences in sock design, and developing a detailed knowledge of your siblings' wardrobes are all part of the art. Sometimes certain loads are assigned to certain people because they're the only ones who have memorized the article ownership, and yes, that includes underwear.

This all may sound like a perfectly well-oiled machine, and it usually is. Sometimes, however, the evil laundry monster rears his ugly head, and a pair of shorts or a fleece pullover mysteriously disappears. The process of recovering such an item can take weeks. Sometimes it's buried deep in the bowels of the laundry sorter. Sometimes it winds up in your neighbour's closet or chest-of-drawers. Sometimes it winds up on the pile for Goodwill in the garage (true story!).

My favorite load was always "towels." One, they're nobody's, so you don't have to worry about that. Two, they're nice simple geometric shapes - squares and rectangles - so they're a breeze to fold. (I still can't fold T-shirts "tight" - and "fitted sheets" are an absolute nightmare, even with a partner. And why for heaven's sake do we always have to fold the stupid thing in "thirds"??)

Our laundry system is rather like the Postal Service in that it provides consistent service but very unpredictable results. Depending on when you put your clothes into the central hamper it can take anywhere from several hours to a week or more. The average tends to be about two or three days: if you need it faster you may need to do it yourself.

Because our house is two stories, with the bedrooms upstairs and the laundry facilities downstairs, Dad designed a "laundry chute" that is truly an engineering marvel. Essentially, it's a curved piece of melamine in an upstairs cabinet that directs soiled clothing through a hole in the downstairs ceiling into the laundry cabinet, with a very satisfying whooshing sound. Genius.

The only drawback to the laundry chute is that it occasionally gets "clogged." Depending on the severity of the "clog," you can generally ram the clothes through with your foot. Other times you have to get down on your hands and knees and fish everything out piece by piece in order to clear the blockage, which is quite exasperating, but you always feel very noble and heroic afterwards, so it's worth it.

(Common-sense etiquette requires that you ensure your clothing sails completely through the chute without getting jammed. If you clog it, you clear it - just like a toilet. However, not everyone abides by the code and it's not always easy to enforce.)

In a big family, you can make scandals and celebrations out of almost anything - even dirty clothes.

Image courtesy of campus-cleaners.com

The Reflected Face Of Evil

Note: this post is a rewrite of a speech I gave this week for the young men's group I'm a part of. The slideshow below is the powerpoint I prepared for the presentation.

At the heart of the world there lies a profound conflict, normally referred to as the conflict between good and evil. This is accurate and suitable enough for most purposes, but I believe there is a deeper and more fundamental way of thinking about the problem. Instead of good vs. evil, we should understand this conflict as love vs. self.

How it Begins: The Fall

To understand the destructive nature of self, we have first to understand The Fall. And to understand The Fall, we have to understand Satan's original rebellion that resulted in his exile from heaven and his subsequent deception of man. This rebellion is described in dramatic detail by Isaiah:

"How you are fallen from heaven,
O Day Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart,
'I will ascend to heaven;
above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far reaches of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.'"¹

What little word do you notice recurring repeatedly in that quote? The tiny and terrible pronoun I. Satan's downfall was not a delight in evil - it was his desire to exalt himself. After he was cast out of heaven and began his program of sabotage, he appealed to the same desire within man.

The Creation

God created Adam and Eve free and fulfilled. He made them autonomous beings and placed within them the desire for relationship with Himself. The self was created by God and for God, and as such it is good, as long as it is properly related to God.

(As a point of semantics, I should make it clear that I do not believe the self to be inherently bad; it is self-will and self-interest are the problem. In this article I am using the term "self" in reference to these destructive qualities.)

The Temptation

The temptation of the Fall, specifically, was to "be like God." As we saw in Isaiah's description of Satan's fall, the root of sin is a desire to exalt the self - not a delight in evil as such. The Serpent took Adam and Eve's innocent, God-given desire to know God, and perverted it into a desire to be God - effectively substituting self for love.

The Devastation

The self, morally corrupted and removed from fellowship with God, becomes enslaved in sin. It doesn't take long for the rebellious desire for exaltation, knowledge, and power to deteriorate into boldfaced wickedness. The self continues to demand more and more, the conscience is dulled, and the noose of sin begins to tighten.

How it Happens: The Slavery of Self

J. R. R. Tolkien offers us some profound commentary on the destructive nature of self in the Silmarillion, describing the spider Ungoliant:

She had disowned her Master, desiring to be mistress of her own lust, taking all things to herself to feed her emptiness; and she fled to the south, escaping the assaults of the Valar and the hunters of Oromë, for their vigilance had ever been to the north, and the south was long unheeded. Thence she had crept towards the light of the Blessed Realm; for she hungered for light and hated it... In a ravine she lived, and took shape as a spider of monstrous form, weaving her black webs in a cleft in the mountains. There she sucked up all light that she could find, and spun it forth again in dark nets of strangling gloom, until no light more could come to her abode; and she was famished.²

The self is like a black hole: it violently turns everything - including itself - into nothingness.

Self is selfishness, Love is otherness. Self cannot love because it cannot ascribe priority to someone else. Love, on the other hand, is so abandoned that it is not even self-conscious. We love most and best when we're thinking about the object of our love, not the love itself.

Self is what we hold and cling to, Love is what we give and release. "I remember what Susan Said / How love is found in the things we've given up / More than in the things that we've kept..." (Rich Mullins)

Self implodes our natures, Love expands them. This is why C. S. Lewis (in Letters to Malcolm) suggests that Heaven will display much more variety than Hell. Heaven is full of people whose natures have been expanded and developed into the fullness God intended for them, while Hell is full of people who have chosen themselves over and over again, until their once-beautiful nature collapses in upon itself in a cloud of dust.

Self is a mirror, Love is a window. The self is "the reflected face of evil," drawing us ever inward until there's nowhere else to go. Love is outward, drawing us ever "further up and further in," as impossible vistas open up on every side and we are quite literally beside ourselves with wonder and delight.

Satan is Self, God is Love. The devil prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking prey to devour, the very incarnation of death. God offers himself as a sacrifice, for the express purpose of creating a way for us to share in his death-defying, self-transcending life.

How it Ends: Hell

Hell is the inevitable destination of unchecked self-dom. Sheldon Vanauken, in his book A Severe Mercy, says "We saw self as the ultimate danger to love, which it is; we didn’t see it as the ultimate evil of hell, which it also is."³ Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, makes a similar point with this chilling statement: "I ask myself: 'What is hell?' And I answer thus: 'The suffering of being no longer able to love.'"⁴

C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain provides what is quite possibly the clearest explanation of how this tragic end is reached:

They wanted, as we say, to 'call their souls their own.' But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, 'This is our business, not yours.' But there is no such corner... The damned are, in a sense, successful, rebels to the end; [..] the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man 'wishes' to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.⁵

God does not coerce or compel his creatures, and so when man insists on having his corner, God allows him it. The doors of hell are locked from the inside.

Love: The Redemption of the Self

Living in a fallen world, we are all subject to the slavery of self. We have nothing left to do but cry out in desperation with the Philippian jailer: "What must we do to be saved?" How do we get out? What can we do to escape this self-destructive force that has shackled the world?

We find the answer in the first and greatest commandment.

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”⁶

Love God with everything you are, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is the only way to overcome the destructive nature of the self. Still, in and of ourselves we are powerless to do this, like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. This realization should lead us to the Cross.

We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.⁷

We love because he first loved us - that's the why and the how. It is only in accepting God's love that we are enabled to love our brother, and it is only in loving our brother that we truly love God - it cannot be abstracted.

Our one need is to simply be people who are loved for free, who are filled with love for free, and who therefore love all other people for free.⁸

When we lay down our lives and love others, the process of self-destruction is arrested and reversed. "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

Love is the redemption of the self. The Cross, the greatest symbol of love ever, is a crossed-out I.

(1) Isaiah 14:12-14, ESV
(2) J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, (Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 73
(3) Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, (Harper & Row, 1977), 37
(4) Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 322
(5) C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 75, 130
(6) Luke 10:25-28, ESV
(7) 1 John 4:19-20, ESV
(8) Greg Boyd, Repenting of Religion, (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 105

For Meditation

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling.

Selah

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
The nations rage, the kingdoms totter:
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

Selah

Come, behold the works of the Lord,
how he has brought desolations on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.
"Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!"
The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

Selah

-Psalm 46, ESV

Strategic Stewardship

The Christian is constitutionally sensitive to the vast needs of the world - both spiritual and practical. This awareness is good. If it isn't a problem we can solve, at least it's a burden we can carry and care about. I think it's only damaging when it turns into a sort of depression - or, alternately, a sort of frenzy - and prevents us from enjoying what God has given us to enjoy.

The encouragement of Ecclesiastes is to accept and enjoy the fruits of your labor as a gift from God. For me to not enjoy what I have does nothing for my neighbor who has less. The world needs more enjoyment, more celebration of what is good.

With that in mind, 2 Corinthians 9 is very clear about giving willingly and joyfully, and I wholeheartedly believe in that. I think Christians ought to take the pain of the world very seriously. Consider these lines from Derek Webb's song This Too Shall Be Made Right:

"I don't know the suffering of people outside my front door / And I join the oppressors of those I choose to ignore / I'm trading comfort for human life / And that's not just murder, it's suicide / And this too shall be made right..."

At the same time, "taking the pain of the world seriously" does not always mean simply throwing money at it. We can give and invest ourselves in many other ways, some of them much deeper than direct financial aid.

In Dissident Discipleship, David Augsburger makes a distinction between "simple" service and "strategic" service. They're both good and legitimate ways to serve, they're just different.

• Simple service is frontal, direct, raw: children in Haiti need food - let's send money to this organization that is trying to feed them. Strategic service is more thoughtful and takes in the big picture.
• Simple service asks: are we contributing all we have? Strategic service asks: how do we contribute what we have and invest ourselves into the world in ways that will have lasting and far-reaching effects?
• Simple service offers the five loaves and two fish. Strategic service invests the five talents to earn five more.

This is not to exalt pragmatism, but rather to suggest some thought and deliberation before we rush headlong and burn ourselves out. We have only one life to live, and we want it to count. There's some wisdom to be learned from the man who says "Give me six hours to cut down a tree, and I'll spend the first four sharpening my axe."

It's counter-intuitive, but investing ourselves in the people around us, even if their needs aren't as dramatic as those of children in Africa, may often be more consistent with our calling as disciples in the Kingdom. Deepening our understanding of the world and developing our communication to the world ought to be high priorities also, especially for those of us who have inherited a love of language and letters. This allows us to engage the world with truth and meaning, which, alongside the simple love of a cup of cold water, changes lives and redeems human resources for the service of Christ.

These are some of the reasons I am unapologetically building a library and seeking to learn all I can about the world and how to develop my voice within it. The books and music that I buy - and the backpacks and hiking boots too - are means of exploring and understanding the world, so I can then write, speak, sing, and give with greater knowledge, greater appreciation, and greater relevance.

"And the pain of the world is a burden / And it's my cross to bear / And I stumble under all the weight / And I know you're Simon standing there..."

-Caedmon's Call, Long Line Of Leavers, "Love Alone"

Image courtesy of fotosearch.com

Long Straight Road

I want to walk down this long straight road in front of me
I want to see the glad sun shining on your face
I want to feel the gentle rain that makes the grass grow green
Like a righteous man who's still in need of grace

Image courtesy of flickr.com

The Beauty of the Specific

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity
In the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour¹

Timeless writing - that is, writing that transcends the daily news and has lasting meaning - is a wonderful thing. Sadly, however, I often fall prey to the illusion that the more generalised and detached from real life my writing is, the more timeless it will be. This is wrong. Somewhat paradoxically, writing is only truly timeless when it is time-full; anchored in a real place, located in real sequence, and packed with rich draughts of distilled and fermented experience.

Great authors like G. K. Chesterton or C. S. Lewis understood this well. They knew that the worst way to write timelessly was to deliberately set out to do so, and as such they did not hesitate in the least to use real people, real dialogue, and plenty of proper nouns and culture-specific terms in their writing. They understood that all of us write in space and time, and that the crowning literary achievement is not to divorce your surroundings but rather to celebrate them and make them come alive.

Very few of us can write inventively, out of thin air. The ideas in this post, though brewing inside me for some time, have been brought to life and shaped by very concrete things that I've been doing recently, such as talking with Jessica, reading a book called The Christian Imagination (excellent), and so on. Most writing, then, far from being creation from nothing, is simply a compilation - an organization of varied and loosely linked experiences into a coherent whole.

I think the reason some of us are reticent about allowing our everyday experiences to inform and enliven our writing is that we are embarrased about our lives - we think our own experiences too crude or commonplace. Lacking a voice of our own, we pursue some abstracted poetic or scholarly identity, trying to make things "interesting." When we do this, we've completely missed the point. Noticing, probing, and sharing life as honestly and deeply as we possibly can is at the very heart of literary craftsmanship, and to do that we have to start with ourselves and our own experience.

We are here to witness and abet creation. To notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.²

"To witness and abet creation" means developing an eye for detail, for small things. The work of the writer is one of magnification; putting life under the microscope of appreciation, reflection, and imagination; being a scientist of the specific. Thus, the writer is deeply interested in facts, in particulars, in things as they are. And further, it is his intent to appreciate and comtemplate them in all of their self-existent splendor, not merely as a metaphor or a vehicle to some higher end.

The strangeness of things, which is the light in all poetry, and indeed in all art, is really connected with their otherness; or what is called their objectivity. What is subjective must be stale; it is exactly what is objective that is in this imaginative manner strange. In this the great contemplative is the complete contrary to that false contemplative, the mystic who looks only into his own soul, the selfish artist who shrinks from the world and lives only in his own mind... All the romance and glamour [of real things], so to speak, lies in the fact that they are real things; things not to be found by staring inwards at the mind. The flower is a vision because it is not only a vision. Or, if you will, it is a vision because it is not a dream. This is for the poet the strangeness of stones and trees and solid things; they are strange because they are solid.³

It has been observed that people are only interested in art because they are interested in the world, and when art ceases to be about the world, they lose interest. This unnatural division is a distinct danger for Christians, who are predisposed towards abstracting things in the name of spirituality. As Chesterton warns, "The main outline of the Christianity that has come down to us should be supernatural but not antinatural; and should never be darkened with a false spirituality to the oblivion of the Creator and the Christ who was made Man."⁴

All around us there is beauty in the specific: startling, tangible, and profoundly real. Rich Mullins sang "There's so much beauty around us for just two eyes to see / but everywhere I go, I'm looking..."

Let's live and write with open eyes.

(1) William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
(2) Annie Dillard, as quoted in Leland Ryken, Ed., The Christian Imagination, (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook Press, 2002), 90
(3) G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, (Doubleday, 1956), 153
(4) Ibid, 161

Image courtesy of photobucket.com