The Thursday Review: Musing Art and Faith

First Posted, April 24, 2009

The other day I was driving along, half-listening to the radio when this girl with a fragile voice started singing a melancholy tune about her confusing love affair with some guy named Art. And I thought: "Sweet melody, but the girl-chases-boy thing's been done before."

But by the time the second chorus came around, I was listening a bit closer, and it slowly dawned on me: She's not singing to Art-short-for-Arthur; she's singing to art itself. This is music for the muse:

Art, O Art I want you
Art, you make it pretty hard not to
And my heart is trying hard here to follow you
But I can't always tell if I ought to

And as I listened, the words fell around me like familiar rain. I'd sung this song before. Not the tune, of course, or even the lyrics, but the question. I want to do art, but I how can I tell if I ought to? This is a question my heart used to sing a lot.

For me, the uncertainty came from some vague notion I picked in the ditches of my faith-journey, that you couldn't be a Christian and an artist; it was an either-or. Somehow, growing up evangelical left me with the pretty strong impression that art was only acceptable in the church if it asked you blandly to ask Jesus into your heart when it was through with you. No ambiguous questions about ugliness or beauty, please, just solve the problem with a simple sinner's prayer. (Franky Schaeffer refers colorfully to this kind of evangelical "art" as "theological sloganeering".) In one of my more maudlin moments some ten years ago, I put it like this in an old journal: "Because something (God did you put it there? Is it sin to listen?) inside me sings of the beauty and truth of creation, and because something even deeper longs to capture, reflect and join the beauty and truth of creation, I am a poet .... I stare at the word on the page, and am flooded with questions impossible to answer: can I be a poet & serve God?"

By God's grace I happened to read a number of books that helped me answer that question with an honest and hopeful "yes." Among these were Madeline L'Engle's (insightful) Walking on Water, which suggests that all true art is Christian art, since Jesus himself is "the Truth"; and Franky Schaeffer's (sometimes bitter) Addicted to Mediocrity, which calls evangelicals to rediscover the church's rich tradition of art-making.

By God's further grace, I also meet a wise mentor who encouraged me to see my artistic passions as a calling and gift from God. He helped me believe that there really was an important role for the artist in the Christian community. He also allowed me do art in a way that served the Christian community (like the artwork I designed for the chapel space pictured above).

But I'm convinced there are other men and women besides me asking the same confusing question that the girl on the radio was singing to her lover Art: is there any place anywhere for this artistic passion of mine? And as she sang that afternoon, I started to imagine all over again: what would it be like if the community of Jesus' people sought out these wondering artists to tell them, "That place is here among us." What would it be like if Jesus' people embraced the artists in their midst without asking them merely to do some theological sloganeering for them?

What would it be like if Christians affirmed the truest work of the artists among them with the heart of Jesus, who affirms all things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable?