The Christian Imagination

W. David Taylor is writing a series of posts on Marks of a Believer Artist, and starts with Humility: “If you could only work on one virtue your whole life, I would highly recommend humility.” I’ve read the post a few times, and it’s still sinking in. It just seems, so, well, counter-cultural.

Madeleine L’Engle had lots of great insight into what it means to be an artist and a Christian, including humility:

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist…. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens. But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work. Getting out of the way and listening is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer.

I want to be open to revelation, to new life, to new birth, to new light. Revelation. Listening. Humility. Remember—the root word of humble and human is the same: humas: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves. But we were made to be co-creators with our maker. (L’Engle, 134)

L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking on Water. New York: North Point Press. 1995.

For many artists, art is more than something they do, it is who they are, and it is a vocation they take seriously. And while everyone is creative in some way, it does take time and effort to develop artistic talent, and anyone who excels in their craft is to be commended. There are many who view art as something done by a special class of people, artists, and many artists who view themselves that way. That leaves art as something disconnected from normal life, which is unfortunate.

G.K. Chesterton had some harsh words about elitism in art:

They have goaded and jaded their artistic feelings too much to enjoy anything simply beautiful. They are aesthetes; and the definition of an aesthete is a man who is experienced enough to admire a good picture, but not inexperienced enough to see it. (Chesterton, 92)

Any man with a vital knowledge of the human psychology ought to have the most profound suspician of anybody who claims to be an artist, and talks a great deal about art. Art is a right and human thing, like walking or saying once’s prayers; but the moment it begins to be talked about very solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing is come into a congestion. (Chesterton, 171)

Chesterton insisted that real artists are ordinary people who do art; they are not finely tuned instruments hovering on the brink of psychological catastrophe. Nor do artists need to live in trendy places, to possess certain eccentric furnishings, to wear a certain arty kind of clothing, or to eat at certain notorious cafes. Aesthetes, however, must be careful about such matters. (Peters, 65)

The issue here is the heart of the artist. It’s one thing be artsy, another to do it for the sake of status, and yet another when one gets caught up in their own pride. Of course, this isn’t limited to artists. Pride affects us all.

Chesterton, G.K. Lunacy and Letters. New York: Sheed and Ward. 1958.
Chesterton, G.K. Heretics, in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 1. San Francsco: Ignatius Press. 1986.
Peters, Thomas C. The Christian Imagination. San Francsco: Ignatius Press. 2000.

This week, we discussed a speech I heard back at Jubilee ‘99 in Pittsburgh given by David Bestwick-Satterlee titled, “A Dangerous Faith.” It was a really good discussion. I’ll include some quotes from that speech below:

If we don’t look to God for our identity, we will instead look to something else in the creation and we will worship it. If we turn from God, we will turn to something else because we have to. We need a god in our lives. And if we don’t choose to worship the true God, we will worship a false god instead. Our fundamental religious nature will never let us do otherwise. And these false gods that we worship, these gods that we look to for our identity, are what the Bible calls “idols.”

As we look to God for our identity, we are shaped by God and we become, in every way, the people that God intended. Likewise, when we look to an idol for answers of identity, we are shaped by that idol. And soon, that idol begins to create an entire framework of understanding that begins to answer our questions about every area of our lives. We call this system of answers an “ideology,” which comes from the word “idol.” These ideologies begin to shape every bit of who we are.

The reality is that, for the vast majority of work going on in America, the one true God has little voice among the many gods battling for your allegiance. And it is not just the gods of work that threaten us. It is the gods that we bow to personally. The gods of popularity, comfort, self-fulfillment. These gods are already hard at work trying to persuade you to bow to them.

Idols are insidious. They entice us by promising something that they can’t deliver and then, instead of serving us, they begin to demand service from us. Pretty soon, you can’t even remember how you got swallowed up. And by then you have a mortgage and a mound of debt and a vision of who you are that demands all of who you are. And at work, you have trouble seeing God as relevant at all. All you can do is keep plodding ahead, serving your false god and holding on to a promise that we begin to believe will never come and so we give up on believing in promises at all. Pretty soon, we don’t even look human anymore. We look like consumers.

Here’s the thing—and here is why the stories of Israel are so important to us. Do you think the people who burned their kids in the hands of those idols didn’t believe in Yahweh anymore? They probably still believed at one level or another. They probably still went to the temple to make their sacrifices. They still went to church. But they had so bought the idols in the world around them, they had so accommodated to them, that they couldn’t even see the inconsistencies anymore.

You see, there is a hard truth here and if there is one thing I want you to take away, it would be this. The life that the world is promising you, that life you have always been told you deserve? That life is a lie.

Imagine if we drew a line around the walls of this room, just a simple pencil line, and that line represented the history of the world… Wherever we are in that history, at best your life is a tiny dot. What is your life worth? What is this pursuit of your comfort and the pursuit of things worth? Is it worth wasting your life? Is it worth having your life mean nothing in the bigger picture that God has always intended for you? All that will be remembered of you will be those pieces of your life done in service to God. What would you like to leave on that line?

We, as Christians, so often feel the need to have the right answers, to make the right decisions, to do the right things, and to be strong in our faith. We take the culture’s view of what it means to be strong and make it even worse by adding religion to it. It is then, refreshing to read this post from Matt Kleberg where he says:

Last summer a certain friend of mine weighed heavy on my heart. I made a point to pray for him and love him whenever and however I could. That same friend later shared with someone else that he simply could not relate to me. In his eyes, I had put on a glossy façade, feigning invincibility and faultlessness. I never revealed my weakness and humanness and thus was not a real person. He saw me as a fake, like a mannequin in Christianity’s window display. My friend’s assessment was right on- my pride and fear kept me from really loving him at all.

I internalize and cover up my sin and weakness because I fear that any failure on my part implies a failure of Christianity. I must be perfect; otherwise Christianity is just a big flop, exposed as an elaborate hoax. The pressure is on and I must perform so that Christianity looks like a good buy.

I so relate to that, on both sides, for I have put on the strong Christian front, and I have tried to relate to people who had no faults and all the right answers. It’s all the more disturbing when I have considered myself a fairly vulnerable person, and yet have still tried to be perfect, and sometimes put up a facade to appear strong. Yet, it’s all a lie. It’s another way that God’s kingdom is not of this world.

When I think of the Christian leaders I’ve known, the ones who are humble and unperfect are the ones I’ve respected the most. I can also think of a lot of Christian leaders who feign invincibility and faultlessness, and that saddens me.