Reenacting Redemption
How do you feel toward making a piece of art? Opening yourself up to creative expression is a vulnerable thing. It may seem like a “less direct” thing to do than to work on your business or – since I’m in the church business – doing church stuff. Making time to sing or draw or whatever creative action that brings you life will probably not make money. Or increase your influence. So why do it?
When I have held art workshops in the past, people have confessed to me things like, “The last time I held a paint brush was 2nd grade!” or “This is so out of my ‘normal’ that I had to try it” or “I am way out of my comfort zone.” Did you like making art as a child? Whenever I offer art to children, regardless of their parents’ profession, they loooooove it. Universally. I bet you can remember something you made that you are (still) extremely proud of. In 4th grade, I made a pencil sketch of my teddy bear, Huggles. It was kind of messy but energetic and filled the whole page. In, “When Did We Stop Being Artists?” Actress Erin Corican blames the “Age of Reason,” age 7, as the artistic killer. She quotes Scholastic.com:
“At about 7, fears are no longer of monsters, but of real people, and most of all of not being liked, being different, and risking loneliness. Pride and shame are real now too. Real, rather than simply imagined achievement, enhances self-esteem….”
At 7ish, we began to be more logical, to want to succeed, and to seek approval from others. We could put words and reason behind the glory story inherent in our human nature, and fostered by our sin. You know, the one where you want to be awesome and have everyone like you? Art doesn’t fit neatly into that story – even for professional artists. What was your “Huggles sketch”? Were your parents proud of it?
In my daughter’s 1st grade class everybody’s favorite teacher was Mrs. Holly, the art teacher. Hands down. She was encouraging. She told each child that he/she was an artist. They believed her. Most of us don’t have a Mrs. Holly. Or she lasts only a year and then another voice replaces her. Just listen to the way we criticize creativity – either our own or someone else’s – and you’ll hear how harsh we are. I love the most recent Mumford and Son’s album, Delta, yet it got scathing reviews from Rolling Stone. Why? The band put a lot of work into it. It’s well made. Answer: we love to tear other people’s art apart. It makes us feel better in our glory story. Perhaps that’s why we are afraid to make our own art?
Art is similar to other disciplines in that artists have their own language—a visual vocabulary . . . If one is to understand the artist’s work, beyond a subconscious response, one must learn the language in its context. Some people may view art and artists as elitist and feel isolated from them. However, not often are other disciplines (science, medicine, finance, politics, etc.) criticized as elitist for similar circumstances.
Gaylen Stewart, “Symbolism,” in Making Art to the Glory of God, 238
More than other disciplines, art is criticized. Did you have someone tell you, “You can’t sing”? or “You can’t draw”? I bet you remember. Our creative side is vulnerable and weak. It is easily shut down. That is on purpose. Our God loves to nurture us in our vulnerable and weak place. “Make a joyful noise,” the Lord invites in Psalm 100. The harsh critic is not him. He loves us in the fleshy, soft underbelly of our soul. It’s no different in the visual arts. Whether you are a vocational artist or recreational one – turn up the volume on the messages you have said to yourself. You will likely find scars. We hate being vulnerable. Yet vulnerability is what love seeks. We need to be known and loved at our weakest.
Art critic, Dan Sidel, says art is a weak and vulnerable thing. Even professional artists who show in Chelsea galleries know this, he says. Art is not an expression of conquering, succeeding, winning but of weakness, passivity, and need.
“Art is about discontinuity and contradiction, which is how grace is experienced in the world: an alien intrusion into a world too used to telling us that we are defined by what we do, not by what we have received (I Corinthians 4:7). And so, we are compelled to prove ourselves, to make something that justifies our existence to God, the world, and ourselves. But art is not just doing and making; it is first receiving and hearing. It is the devotion of one’s life to something so futile, inefficient, and in many ways useless, that it counterintuitively becomes a means of grace, a means of experiencing our humanity and individuality as a gift” (Dan Siedell, Who’s Afraid of Modern Art, p. 61, 62).
God has given us the gift of art that is “futile and useless.” What a wonderful wrench in our glory story! And yet for those who know the Gift-Giver art can be communion and worship.
made with artists from the South Side Senior Center who were so proud of their collaborative painting!
Art is a gift from God - whether you know Jesus or not. The journey it takes you on will lead you through all sorts of terrain until it has run its course and the piece is done. Flannery O’Connor describes this journey: ““I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” You discover bits of yourself as you make a thing. You encounter generous space—creative space to express your deepest hurts or greatest joys or the gray middle stuff of life. You wrestle with your medium. The end is more than the beginning was. You want to share it. That is what my art professor said was the “heroine of art making.” The weak and vulnerable world of art making reflects grace. We don’t ascend into heave to save ourselves (or others) – God in Jesus descends to us (Romans 10: 5-9). Whether you know it or not, making art reflects God’s grace to us. Now you know.
In his book, Grace and Necessity, former Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams says art is a form of “creative excess” in the world. It is not shelter, food, clothing, or safety. Art is a gift whereby we enjoy the extra grace of beauty, expression, and self-exploration that is also granted in this life. Art is a wrinkle in a purely scientific, random-collision-of-atoms view of creation. We make things yet those things won’t make the species survive. They will make it happier, more fulfilled, more robust. Art infuses us with extra life. It’s a gift. Given. By a Creator who gives good gifts.
Now back to the weak and vulnerable work of art. Art, you might say, reflects God’s left-handed power. Robert Farrar Capon writes of God’s left-handed and right-handed power in Parables of Kingdom, Grace and Judgement.
“It is precisely the right hemisphere that governs the left hand – and it is by the paradoxical, indirect power of God’s left hand that he saves the world in the death and resurrection of Jesus” (Capon, 228).
Capon exposits Luke 11 whereby Jesus performs an exorcism and then has to defend himself against religious people who say he too is possessed. Capon writes, “’The world,’ [Jesus] says in effect (Luke 11:21f), ‘is full of strong-arm, right-handed types; but when the stronger, left-handed arm comes, it takes away all the armor in which the world trusted and divides the spoils of its plausible efforts’” (Capon, 228).
God’s right-hand delivered the Jewish slaves from their Egyptian masters. We love the right hand. Conquer. Rule. Judge. Win. Super Bowl. Gold medal. One million followers on Instagram. On the other hand, the left-handed power is how God rescues sinners (from his right hand of justice). God is known through his left-handed power, through his Son on the cross dying for us. God’s glory story is not ours; his glory is our cross story. God’s Son shed his heavenly glory and was born in a feeding trough only to grow up and give his life to save ours on the cross: “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). He is like no earthly king ever. He doesn’t seek glory. He gives it away. Jesus “who, though he was in the form of God… made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him” (Philippians 2:8, 9). The Almighty Creator God communes with you in your weak and vulnerable place. God unites us with Jesus at the cross. Not in our straight “A’s.” Not in our big house and fancy car. He meets us in our insecurities. He meets us in the thing we are trying to hide. That’s where we need the cross, that’s where we need his love more than ever. “For I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. For the life I live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). That’s where God’s left hand lifts the broken.
So back to that childhood artist within you. In our creative endeavors as a child, we became afraid of rejection, of criticism. We were frustrated in our attempts at glory so we shut down our creative sides. We craved acceptance, praise, affirmation. We didn’t get enough. We never will from other broken people…but there is a source of unending, steadfast love. There is a scar that heals all of ours. It’s from our God who emptied himself to take on all our harshest critics and all the idols we made of them at the cross. We reenact our redemption through the weak and vulnerable process of making. Every time we sew, sing, soap-make, still-life paint, or something else, our soft underbelly is exposed to the Lord who loves us so. Jesus redeems art-making into a time of affirmation and worship, regardless of the skill, even – especially - when it fails. By his wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:5).
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