Sermons

Art for the Soul

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  September 28, 2003                                            Psalm 150

One of the gems of this past season was a book by Paul Elie called The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Elegantly, compellingly, Elie interweaves the biographies of four twentieth-century Americans – Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton – who all happened to be Roman Catholic and who all happened to be writers. It is a book-group-worthy book, to be sure; if any of you ever works through it, let me know and we could have our own little discussion.

Elie could have, I suppose, told the tale of any four writers. But rather he chose to tell this tale, with these writers, and by so doing makes a point beyond the particularities of the story. “The story of their lives,” he writes, “is also its meaning and implication for ours. They saw religious experience out before them. They read their way toward it. They believed it. They lived it. They made it their own. With us in mind, they put it in writing.” (page 472)

In the broadest sense, that is what this conversation is about – putting it in writing. Or putting it into painting. Or dancing. Or acting. Or singing. It is a conversation about faith and arts, and the way each plays into the other’s agenda. Faith and arts.

The precipitating event for this particular conversation is this very weekend at Third Presbyterian Church, what we are calling ArtReach 2003, a kind of fine arts festival for our own benefit and the benefit of the broader community. It began with a debut concert by a group called Neos on Friday. It continued with a wonderful play reading, Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, last evening. It will continue following worship with a presentation by our friend Anthony Bannon of George Eastman House. It will conclude this evening with a film viewing and discussion – cello and dance all gathered into a wonderful film. It’s been a rather breathtaking weekend, not simply for the pace of events, but even more so for what they have suggested.

Why do we do all this? Somehow, at the deepest levels of human existence, there lies a theological question. Somehow, at the deepest level of human creativity, there lies the theological enterprise. Somehow, whether the activity is “secular” or more consciously aware of its religious dimension, there lies a theological quest. Somehow, faith and art, faith and the arts, the processes and products of the artist’s endeavor and our quest for purpose and meaning, somehow in the midst of all that there lies theology itself.

We know that intuitively, I believe. But I would venture that there is something to be gained by exploring those intuitions just a bit, as long as that doesn’t mitigate against the artistic process, or the theological one.

It happens to us all the time, does it not, aware and unaware. We hear a song. We see a picture. We watch a movie. And something, big or little, grabs us, and for a moment we hold on to that transcendent moment, or rather it holds on to us. And we who gather in the name of a sovereign God whom we believe has a hand in everything, we somehow sense that the transcendent moment is more than a human contrivance.

Robert Wuthnow writes that “the role of music and art in devotional life is… shaped by the persuasive conviction that it is possible to somehow feel the presence of God…bringing one’s feelings and even one’s body into a state that seems more in tune with the divine.” (Christian Century, May 3, 2003, page 29) More “in tune’ with the divine.

So that is one of the central affirmations to make this morning, that art, somehow, draws us into deeper community with God. Art in all its myriad forms. Arts connects us to God, with God, teaches us something of who God is. Art worships God, we might even say, not that art is always devotional, but that art reflects something of the human condition back to its creator, perhaps even when we consider some work of art to be profane.

This has not always been an easy conversation for us Protestants. As we reminded ourselves recently, we have reveled in such theological doctrines as “total human depravity.” We have, in our tradition, little problem with embracing the doctrine of original sin. We believe that we experience it all around us, 24/7.

And so at the point of protest, in the sixteenth century, we applied those doctrines to the world of art. We removed statues from sanctuaries. We destroyed stained glass. We determined that anything that would even whisper the possibility of drawing attention away from God and to ourselves was sinful. Idolatry, we called it.

Of course, we threw out a whole lot of appropriately faithful expression with the theological bathwater. For several centuries, we sang only psalm texts in worship. Hymns with human-composed words were anathema. We sang with no instrumentation, lest our worship be thought of somehow as our own achievement.

There is great irony in this, of course, not to mention more than a little residual anti-Catholicism. While we couldn’t write hymn texts, we created some of the most beautiful hymn tunes ever. And while the New England meeting house is known for its plainness and simplicity, a direct outgrowth of Protestant austerity, there have been seasons of my own spiritual journey, and perhaps yours, when I wouldn’t have traded five minutes in a plain, elegantly simple New England sanctuary for any European cathedral you could name.

Fortunately, bit by bit, we came to our senses. People like Bach and Mozart helped us, as did generations of painters and playwrights, even into this most recent century. Who could imagine NOT gathering in a room like this, with wood and stone and glass, and not be touched by something greater than self?

Part of our coming back to our senses, of course, had us listening to our own teaching about the role of the Bible in our life, the centrality of the word. How can one not read these words and be touched by their beauty, as well as their practical application. The ancient Israelites were a word-loving, dancing, playing, artistic people. Their extraordinary understanding that God could be praised in all of creation, not exclusively and not entirely, leads to every kind of wonderful affirmation. But it’s more than that. How can one not read these words and sense something deep. “Praise God with trumpet sound. Praise God with lute and harp. Praise God with tambourine and dance. Praise God with strings, with cymbals. Let everything that breathes praise the Lord.” Everything.

If everything that breathes praises the Lord, some even by the very activity of breathing, then we are called to understand worship as more than the formal gathering in a place like this. We have said time after time from this context that all we do is worship, our work and play, our living and our dying. That means we are called to embrace the artist’s vocation as a proper and even profound way of worship, of leading us into worship.

And it’s why we must also consider each of us, in our own way to be sure, as artists, as children of God given some creative gift to use for the common good, for worship and service. This is art conceived in an entirely different manner than simply thinking about being able to carry a tune or to draw a convincing picture of a horse, an endeavor I gave up in about the fourth grade. No, we are artists, all of us, because we are called to use our gifts to create beauty in the world, to worship God and to bring the world ever closer into community with God and God’s people.

We believe that God the great gift-giver inspires certain artists in unique ways, the novelist, the composer, the ballerina, the photographer. And the fruit of that gift-giving inspires us all, touches us all. But we believe as well that God the great gift-giver calls us all into artistic expression. It was not merely the trained musicians that sang God’s praises in ancient Israel. It was the whole people of God. And it is not simply the activities of what we sometimes call the fine arts. It is about more than taste, about more than what we like, or appreciate.

Theologian John De Gruchy has devoted a career to thinking about the interaction between faith and South African apartheid. De Gruchy connects apartheid with injustice, and connects injustice with “ugliness.” He reminds us that the great South African novelist Nadine Gordimer once said that “art is at the heart of liberation,” and so it is. (See John De Gruchy, “Holy Beauty: A Reformed Perspective on Aesthetics in a World of Ugly Injustice” in Reformed Theology for the Third Christian Millennium, edited by B.A. Gerrish)

Art, because it seeks the truth, is concerned with justice, beauty in the face of ugliness, the ugliness of oppression and injustice transformed by imagination and creativity. That is to say that we are to be inspired by natural beauty all around: the leaf turning from green to fiery red, the droplets of water crystallizing into snow, the rose petal evolving slowly on the stem. These inspire us.

Or the note following note to form a chord. Or the light refracting through glass as red and blue coming together to make a holy purple. Or word following word, then paragraph following paragraph, a novel that literally changes our lives. These inspire us.

But these do as well, acts of beauty, an aesthetic of integrity and justice. An act of kindness. A generous gesture. A meal served. A heart opened. It is never the act for its own sake. It is never art for art’s sake. It is never theology for theology’s sake, for that matter. It is, rather, any moment, any incident, any product that serves our chief end, which is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. Any activity that by its very beauty proclaims the goodness of God, through whose creativity and imagination we are transformed.