Isaiah 65:2
"All day long I have held out my hands
to an obstinate people,
who walk in ways not good,
pursuing their own imaginations--"
In my younger years I intentionally stayed away from the arts. Apart from practical considerations and a liking for science, I stayed away because I sensed a deep fracture between imagination and spirituality, and I was afraid. Imagination by itself as an abstract concept is morally neutral, but since the time of Eve it has been used to imagine a world without God that could be better than what God has provided. But how can you add to infinity? As SimianD has put it, is there more than God's calling us to do all that we can do in His infinite Spirit?
The arts world at large is given over to creating and interpreting a world without God. My introductory lit module is on modernity, so lectures week by week are about the absence of God and the failure of self-empowerment to create, failure to create a self-identity, failure to commemorate loss--failure, in fact, to be who we imagine ourselves to be. At the same time, we celebrate the agony and ecstasy of an indomitable imagination. This is how G.K Chesterton eloquently phrases the frustration of self-discovery:
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
(G.K Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Romance Of Faith)
Whether it is about rediscovering, uncovering, redefining or deconstructing the past, present, future, duration or eternal moment, the arts reaches out for that word at the tip of the tongue, that glimpse of grey fluff at the corner of the eye (1), that person whose face is an elusive blur. And so, in reaction to Old Religion's attempts to impose a limiting definition that homogenizes humanity, artists, philosophers and scientists have broken out in various directions, striking out on paths of our own making.
To tell the truth, I'd have given up already if I had to find my identity through religion--gone and lived a bohemian lifestyle or something in reaction to all the religious stuff I had to do in the past. Let's face it, the Church can sometimes be as messy as anything out there, so I'm not surprised that many people my age have left it to search for something that fits their imagination, something that might help us recover what we've forgotten, because it looks like the Church is wandering in the private wilderness of its backyard. But we find our identity not through serving, not through being good Christians, but in loving and being loved by Christ. Love--it sounds so soft, but it's deeper than the deepest roots of the mountains that plant their feet into the heart of the earth. It goes beyond the romanticised notions of heroic, noble deaths...many people die nobly and heroically for a good cause, even in this cynical age. I can't get over how Christ would die ignobly for our cause, even when we didn't want or deserve it.
"All day long I have held out my hands
to an obstinate people,
who walk in ways not good,
pursuing their own imaginations--"
In my younger years I intentionally stayed away from the arts. Apart from practical considerations and a liking for science, I stayed away because I sensed a deep fracture between imagination and spirituality, and I was afraid. Imagination by itself as an abstract concept is morally neutral, but since the time of Eve it has been used to imagine a world without God that could be better than what God has provided. But how can you add to infinity? As SimianD has put it, is there more than God's calling us to do all that we can do in His infinite Spirit?
The arts world at large is given over to creating and interpreting a world without God. My introductory lit module is on modernity, so lectures week by week are about the absence of God and the failure of self-empowerment to create, failure to create a self-identity, failure to commemorate loss--failure, in fact, to be who we imagine ourselves to be. At the same time, we celebrate the agony and ecstasy of an indomitable imagination. This is how G.K Chesterton eloquently phrases the frustration of self-discovery:
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
(G.K Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Romance Of Faith)
Whether it is about rediscovering, uncovering, redefining or deconstructing the past, present, future, duration or eternal moment, the arts reaches out for that word at the tip of the tongue, that glimpse of grey fluff at the corner of the eye (1), that person whose face is an elusive blur. And so, in reaction to Old Religion's attempts to impose a limiting definition that homogenizes humanity, artists, philosophers and scientists have broken out in various directions, striking out on paths of our own making.
To tell the truth, I'd have given up already if I had to find my identity through religion--gone and lived a bohemian lifestyle or something in reaction to all the religious stuff I had to do in the past. Let's face it, the Church can sometimes be as messy as anything out there, so I'm not surprised that many people my age have left it to search for something that fits their imagination, something that might help us recover what we've forgotten, because it looks like the Church is wandering in the private wilderness of its backyard. But we find our identity not through serving, not through being good Christians, but in loving and being loved by Christ. Love--it sounds so soft, but it's deeper than the deepest roots of the mountains that plant their feet into the heart of the earth. It goes beyond the romanticised notions of heroic, noble deaths...many people die nobly and heroically for a good cause, even in this cynical age. I can't get over how Christ would die ignobly for our cause, even when we didn't want or deserve it.
We need to reclaim the arts. Not for Christendom, not for the Church or old jingoism like that. Just to use our imaginations to the fullest potential for Christ. Despite all that the academic world tells me about religion limiting the imagination, I still believe that our greatest freedom is in remembering who we are in Christ--a free people no longer thrall to sin. So here I am, fearfully on the brink of the arts world, wondering how to bridge this mental chaos so that spirit and imagination are not sheared in separate directions, wondering how to read and argue through modern and postmodern ideas without losing myself or my faith.
Notes:
1. Imagery taken from Sula by Toni Morrison.
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