Beauty Placed

01/03/2012

“It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level.”

On Beauty and Being Just, pg. 81
Elaine Scarry

Beauty as Profession

01/01/2012

“Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky … question all these realities. All respond: “See, we are beautiful.” Their beauty is a profession. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One who is not subject to change?

The Explanation, then, of the goodness of creation is the goodness of God. It puts an end to all controversies concerning the origin of the world…The heretics mention, for example, fire, cold, wild beasts and things like that, without considering how wonderful such things are in themselves and in their proper place, and how beautifully they fit into the total pattern of the universe, making their particular contributions to the commonwealth of cosmic beauty.”

St. Augustine
The City of God 11.22

Echo of Eden

12/25/2011

“Our work in any field of the arts will be imitative. We will be thinking God’s thoughts after Him—painting with His colors; speaking with His gift of language; exploring and expressing His sounds and harmonies; working with His creation in all its glory, diversity, and in-built inventiveness. In addition, we will find ourselves longing to make known the beauty of life as it once was in Paradise, the tragedy of its present marring, and the hope of our final redemption. All great art will contain this element of being an echo of Eden: Eden in its original glory, Eden that is lost to us, and Eden restored.”

Christianity and the Arts
Covenant Theological Seminary
Page 7

Glory Oozes

12/21/2011

In the works of His hands God is revealing His glory and grandeur. Sometimes it surprises us, flaming out for an instant only to recede again into what we normally regard as the commonplace. At other times it seems to ooze around us, gathering strength and power, rich and fragrant, filling the place we occupy with an unmistakable sense of the divine presence. So powerful, so undeniable can be the sense of God’s self-disclosure that it is remarkable that most people seem to take so little notice of these evidences of divine glory and grandeur. Occupied with the affairs of this world, they trudge through their daily routines of trade and toil, unmindful of the glory shimmering and beckoning around them. They take the creation for granted, or even abuse it. Having shod their feet with the comforts of material existence, they surfeit themselves with an abundance of things, preferring these for their own sake alone, rather than for any firsthand experience of God revealing Himself in what He has made.

T.M. Moore
Consider the Lilies, pg. 8

God’s Grandeur

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down thing;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

A Gift, Not a Commodity

12/03/2011

Jesus is telling us that these things we use and take for granted, like the arts, can have a central place in our conversation about the eternal. Because they are ephemeral and spindly, they ignite. Because they are throwaways, they serve a greater purpose. Precisely because the arts are useless, peripheral, and ephemeral, they are significant, essential, and permanent for God’s Kingdom. The arts are a gift, not a commodity. To the extent that we commoditize art and value art as the price dictates, to that extent we will devalue ourselves. To the extent that the arts are devalued in the church, to that extent we will dehumanize and devalue the gospel. We will end up “selling” the gospel as cheap, utilitarian merchandise, filling our mall-like churches with trinkets only worthy of 15 seconds of fame and attention.

Makoto Fujimura, Consider the Lillies, The Ooze

Of Clodhoppers and Humans

10/25/2011

I, Doctor Martin Luther, wish all lovers of the unshackled art of music, grace and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ! I truly desire that all Christians would love and regard as worthy the lovely gift of music, which is a precious, worthy, and costly treasure given to mankind by God… A person who gives this some thought and yet does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.

Martin Luther

Context for a Song

08/22/2011

…with songs of ours, I realize that with the good ones, it’s like when you hear about an actor who has created an entire backstory that informs the little snippet in the movie that you actually see. I feel like our good songs are like that. That I have this immediate sense of the entire world that that song comes out of, like there’s an unspoken novel back behind the song.

Gillian Welch

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/08/gillian-welch-and-dave-rawlings.html

Art vs. Utilitarianism

08/19/2011

“When we consider the most precious memories we have in life, we often find that such moments are hard to categorize. The memories of a conversation you had with a loved one, or a special experience that you cherish are often accompanied by the memories of touch, smell, images and sounds. Well, all of these elements (touch, smell, images and sounds) are abstract elements to that precious experience. What we have done in our contemporary culture is to reduce experiences into a commodity or rational explanation. When we do that, art must become explainable so that we can “sell” it to others, or “explain” it to others propositionally. This type of pragmatism not only kills the arts, but also de-humanizes us. Such utilitarianism dilutes the gospel into something that we can “purchase” by our good deeds, and something that we can “understand” by simply taking in a set of information, or by following a set of principles.”

Makoto Fujimura

The Aroma of the New

06/06/2011

“The World that Ought to be is that which is already imbedded in our senses. God’s hand touches us, even through the cold earth of death and despair, even though we are being washed away in the sea of Liquid Modernity. The Gospel is an aroma, the roma of the New. And the aroma will reach us, even in the darkest despair.”

Makoto Fujimura
The Aroma of the New
2011

 

Devaluing Creation

“Repeatedly in the history of the Church, Christians have been tempted to devalue the richness of creation and therefore to devalue also the arts, as if it would be somehow more “spiritual” to live a life devoid of beauty, of good things, of music, of literature, of painting, of color, etc. It is as if bare simplicity, barrenness, and even ugliness were somehow considered to be more pleasing to God. Behind this idea is the conviction that it is only what is “spiritual” that matters, and that the physical, therefore, is only of secondary value at best. In this view, the arts are thought of as an optional, rather extravagant, and unnecessary extra in life. But this belief is nonsense, and is, according to Paul, a heresy of the most serious kind, for in the end it is a denial of the goodness of creation.”

Jerram Barrs
Christianity and the Arts
Covenant Theological Seminary
2006