Refractions 26: The Epistle of van Gogh

Walking around the splendidly renovated Morgan Library in Holiday lit New York City, taking in the recent exhibit of van Gogh letters written to his younger contemporary, Emile Bernard, I had an epiphany. First, I was forced to admit the obvious: Vincent wrote and read in multiple languages. The letters were written in French, a foreign language for him. Then, I had to ponder the significance of a 19th Century "uneducated" artist, writing beautiful letters, full of drawings, in a foreign language.

The reputed image of van Gogh as an uneducated vagabond, threatening his society with unbalanced, rash acts of violence, and the real image of Vincent flowing out of these letters seem to conflict. Even knowing that he had series bouts with depression, and suffered from a rare form of schizophrenia, these words attest to his clear, analytical thinking. Troubled? Yes, but illiterate, no. Passionate? Yes, irrational, no. Vincent studied Thomas Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ" in Latin every day and spoke five languages.(1)

And yet Vincent would have been considered only partially educated in his time. To show how much things have changed in only a little over one century, the Dutch Reformed Church rejected Vincent in his request to be ordained as a minister, partly because he was not educated enough.(2) Education standards have eroded to such an extent that we would be astonished by the typical language capacity of 19th century "uneducated" artists.

The recent report on NEA's study on reading in America, "To Read or not to Read," depicts a dramatic erosion of America's reading habits (see http://www.nea.gov/research/Research_Brochures.php). Not only does the report give us hard data on the steep decline of reading at all levels and age groups (except the pre-teen years ... call it the "Harry Potter effect,") but it substantiates an alarming trend of communal disengagement. We are not only reading less, we are reading less well: we are not only reading less well, we are losing our capacity to focus and pay attention to the world around us with empathy. As I thought about this as I perused the exhibit, van Gogh letters began inject in my psyche an antidote to the problems laid out in "To Read or not to Read." Vincent communicated in a foreign tongue with his acute sensitivity, and to impress upon the reader what he felt as sacred. The key word is "communicate," and the report points out the severe consequences if we continue to lose our capacity to communicate. We may, if we go down this road, no longer have the capacity to be moved by van Gogh or any other artist: we would not have the patience and longing in our hearts to do so.

Take, for instance, the link that the study makes between civic engagement and reading: in short, folks who read are far more engaged in civic activities. They make better citizens. They are more likely to volunteer, more likely to go to a sports event, or to go hiking. Imagine that, people who you will find at local bookstores are ones you will see at a baseball field. They might have volunteered in a local charity event or have taken their kids on a hiking trail, or ... to a museum to see Starry Night.


"The data here demonstrate that reading is an irreplaceable activity in developing productive and active adults as well as healthy communities," Dana Gioia, the Chair of NEA writes, "Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading."

What was a shock to us at the National Council, the advisory board of the NEA, was that one of the new findings reports that college students read more coming into college than when they graduate. Every higher education institution should gather their board and consider what this simple data might mean to them. If we are not producing deeply engaged readers, and empowered citizens, then what is the purpose of education?

Businesses spend over 3.1 billion dollars annually retraining their entry workers to read, so they can process information given to them in business manuals. Learning to read translates into an immediate economic advantage, a fact that should make everyone pick up a book.

Vincent would stand out in the work force today for the simple reason that he could speak and write in multiple languages. Would he have been a ph. D candidate in theology if he lived today? Or a social worker? Perhaps he would be working for a major business firm, translating business manuals, working like Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener in some bureaucratic office building Paris, France. Oh no, likely not, you might say, for his impulsive, and destructive behavior would make him unfit; but, I would argue, modern medicine would have given him stability, and these opportunities. The point is, these van Gogh letters should compel us to ask deeper questions about the "progress" of our modern culture and education. They point, along with "To Read or not to Read" report, to a deeper malaise that is more troubling than the bi-polar disorder from which Vincent was suffering.


Some, I am sure, will point out that the mode of communication has shifted from the antiquated print culture to our current internet society; now we have a "visual culture," and are taking in information differently. But taking in mere information does not mean we are deeply engaged with the content. We may be able to scan for multifarious sensory input, and gather unreliable, but perhaps important, bits and pieces in our junkyard of amassed headlines. But the type of mental wrestling that reading a good book brings is irreplaceable. And walking about Morgan Library, I began to unravel a kind of visual code in van Gogh's letters that lead me to consider a deeper connection between reading and the visual arts. I began to speculate that the loss of reading could result in LESS images (at least meaningful, lasting images), and not more.

As I perused the exquisite drawings and letters done in brown ink, a deeper mystery began to unravel. An epistolary "code" opened up in my mind: a type of visual language that connected Vincent's language capacities and imagery. This link between images and words, could have led to Vincent's interests in foreign cultures, especially the Japanese. And I realized further, that all of the above were intricately tied in with his passion for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Vincent's visual language flows out of this cross-cultural curiosity and capacity. He began to draw and paint to communicate to the miners he ministered to in Borinage. He saw drawing as another "language," a visual language that connected heaven and earth. He writes to Bernard, a young artist he desired to mentor, of his intent on creating parables of color and lines. He speaks of his visual strategy to translate what he saw into a symbolic language akin to Japanese paintings and woodcuts. He saw his visual code the same level of synthesis that the pictograms of the Japanese art of the past exhibited. Significantly, he was writing and drawing these letters in reed pens, partly to imitate lines of Japanese woodcut prints.

Vincent adored Japan, considering Japan to be synonymous with paradise. In the fog of psychological confusion he was finding in Arles, he even claimed he was in Japan.(3)

Apparently the Japanese thought of woodblock prints in the 19th century in the same way that we consider yesterday's USA Today newspaper: useful wrapping to protect shipment. They never thought that such prints would end up being revered in museums around the world (a fact that should make us pause - would any newspaper design today be worth keeping?).

Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, and countless artists were influenced by woodblock prints. Vincent lived next to Samuel Bing's gallery in Montmartre, Paris, who exhibited thousands of woodblock prints. Van Gogh owned a few Hiroshige's. Vincent even copied one Japanese print in one of his paintings. He was translating visual reality into a type of calligraphy that created an alternative spiritual language.

The development of this heavenly language reached its culmination in twin paintings, always meant to be shown side by side: one of the Olive Trees, and the more famous Starry Night. (4) The Olive Trees were Vincent's symbol of Gethsemane, and Starry Night his version of the Resurrection. To understand the "codex" of color and forms that van Gogh desired to communicate, we must make an assumption we no longer make in today's cultural milieu.

In order to fully understand van Gogh, we need to assume the gospel of Jesus to be central to our creativity. That is what Vincent assumed. Thomas Kempis, who Vincent arduously studied, stated:

"He who follows Me, walks not in darkness," says the Lord. (John 8:12) By these words of Christ we are advised to imitate His life and habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart. Let our chief effort therefore be to study the life of Jesus Christ. (5)

Christ was the ultimate artist to him. This Renaissance idea of Christ-as-artist echoes throughout the letters at the Morgan Library exhibit. Theologically speaking, not only did Christ represent the Creator, Christ was the incarnate Creator of the universe (Colossians 1). Therefore, we are assuming the centrality of creativity in understanding Christ's centrality in history and culture.


The Epistle of van Gogh is a visual parable of what Vincent considered to be the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what the Morgan Library exhibit (which runs though January 6, 2008) reveals. The curators note the importance of Letter number eight: what the curator considers central to the exhibit is Vincent's attempt to communicate gospel reality to Bernard. He writes:

You do very well to read the Bible - I start there because I've always refrained from recommending it to you ... Lived as serenely as an artist greater than all artists-disdaining marble and clay and paint-working in LIVING FLESH. I.e.-this extraordinary artist, hardly conceivable with the obtuse instrument of our nervous and stupefied modern brains, made neither statues nor paintings or even books ... he states it loud and clear ... he made ... LIVING men, immortals ... this great artist-Christ-although he disdained writing books on ideas & feelings - was certainly much less disdainful of the spoken word-THE PARABLE above all. (What a sower, what a harvest, what a fig-tree, etc.)


To van Gogh, such a quest for the living parable was no longer possible via the church. Growing up in a family of pastors, and once desiring to become ordained, Vincent's passion for the poor, and his desire to communicate the gospel via paint originated in the church. But while the church, especially the Dutch Reformed church, remained central in his life, he stood outside the tradition, alienated from her in experience and in theology.

Consider the Starry Night, the famed landscape he painted in Arles. Notice that at the very center of the painting is a white Dutch Reformed church, which did not exist in Arles. Vincent imported a church building of his childhood, pasting it into the landscape of Arles because he wanted to create a parable of his own life.


b. Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" without the church building. I used Photoshop to erase the church building. Visually, the painting loses its potency and dynamism.



If you are to take out the church (place a thumb over the church, or see my Photoshop version b) from the painting, the whole painting falls apart visually. It is the only vertical form, aside from the dominant cypress tree on the left, which juts out to break the horizontal planes. The cypress tree and the church are two forms that connect heaven and earth. Without the church, the cypress tree takes over the swirl of movement, and there's no visual center to hold the painting in tension between heaven and earth.

Notice, too, that homes surrounding the church are lit with warm light, but the church is dark. Van Gogh's message: the Spirit has left the church (at least the building), but is alive in Nature. If you follow the visual flow of the painting, your eye will cycle upward, but still anchored by the church building. Our gaze will end up on the right upper hand corner, at the Sun/Moon. Notice it is not just a moon, but a combination of the sun and the moon. Vincent wanted to show that the Spirit of God transcends even Nature herself, that in resurrection, in the New Earth and Heaven, a complete new order will shape things to come.


Vincent wrote to Bernard:

But seeing that nothing opposes it - supposing that there are also lines and forms as well as colors on the other innumerable planets and suns - it would remain praiseworthy of us to maintain a certain serenity with regard to the possibilities of painting under superior and changed conditions of existence, an existence changed by a phenomenon no queerer and no more surprising than the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly, or of the white grub into a cockchafer. (B8, 23 June 1888, Letters 3:496.) (6)



The synthesis of sun/moon represented, for Vincent, this "superior and changed condition of existence," as he developed a visual diction of transformed experience. In other words, he "saw" the transformation before it happened, and by faith painted the world to come.

Again, Vincent was able to "translate" the "Word became Flesh" gospel into visual forms aided enormously by his cross-cultural and multi-lingual training (7). Wrestling with another language, or mastering writing makes one sensitive to the limitation of one's own language, and allows greater empathic capacity to relate to another of a different culture. I began to feel kinship in this experience with Vincent, as I myself wrestled with my bi-cultural upbringing, and with the lack of mastery of either language for a long period of time in my youth. I, too felt this longing for the universal language, and art provided a respite from my frustration in navigating between two cultures.

Vincent's alienation from church and society, his exilic and lonely existence only added to the urge to break through the cultural and linguistic barriers. But especially in his case, Art and language flow out of the same source, and complement each other. To be sure, he experienced the void within, but he also believed that the source of fulfillment was in the Creative God who delighted in his creation.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things ... one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper better and more. That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith. (The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, To Theo, July 1880, Touchstone, pg. 124)

To him, there is a direct relationship between painting and loving God. The exhibit makes it clear, though, that he also loved to write letters, and to communicate the intent of the heart to others. This overwhelming desire to reveal his heart forced a unique synthesis. Every artist, too, wrestles with the limitation of one's existence: and attempts to unite fragmented pieces into something whole, as an offering to the world. Rather than narcissistically dwelling on ego, Vincent wanted to commune, and communicate with humanity.

If the report "To Read or Not to Read" is correct, then engagement with arts and civic activities is intricately tied with reading. But we need more than remedial reading classes to get to the heart of the matter. We need a creative milieu that would involve all of our senses, because deeply engaged reading leads to perceptual awakening, stimulation of the core of the intuitive and experiential . We need to teach that languages of any kind are limited in their ability to reach the true depth of our hearts, for the inherent limitation of a language echoes the divides of cultures. Creativity begins with our dialogue at that point of limitation, at that moment of frustration. We need then to help students to move toward a generative creativity, one that entrusts intuitive and perceptual intelligence to lead the way in creating a world that ought to be. The upcoming International Arts Movement's Gathering "Generative Creativity: Transforming the River of Culture" (you can register now at http://www.iamny.org) will explore that further. What reading and writing can teach us is a deeper empathy that leads us to desire the best for others who are entirely different from us, and to long to communicate with them.

"You never really understand a person, "Atticus Finch tells us in To Kill a Mockingbird (8), "until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Atticus Finch, and later Scout, are both able to rise above their worlds of injustice, and the hatred that surrounds them, because they had cultivated that capacity to leap into "another's skin." To be well read means not just to be able to score high on a reading score, but to develop an attuned empathy that allows us also to "walk around" in another's story. Love requires all of our senses.

Vincent loved and feared his world. Vincent heard in a contorted cypress tree the whispers of the Spirit: Vincent saw in a flight of crows in a Wheatfield a calligraphic trajectory toward his own mortality. And he saw in a family of poor potato farmers a sacred, warm light he never felt at home. His work embodied this kind of empathy, driven by his own limitations and brokenness. He therefore developed an empathetic language of hope, full of prismatic colors, that invites us to hope with him, and long for a renewed world.

This empathic language requires us to use all of our senses, Therefore perceptual education must be tied into our experience of learning at the highest level, one that makes visual education connect with intelligence. It is no surprise that Vincent sought inspiration from Japanese woodblocks. Japanese language fuses the visual ideograms of ancient Chinese with the phonetic lyricism of the Japanese Hiragana alphabet (9). In their art, especially in the Bun-jin ga tradition, merges various forms merge into one art expression, combining visual, poetic and descriptive.


Perception expert Rudolf Arnheim in "Visual Thinking," told us so a long time ago (1969) that such a multi-pronged approach should be the norm of education:

The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought. In fact, educators and administrators cannot justify giving the arts an important position in the curriculum unless they understand that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening the perceptual component without which productive thinking is impossible in any field of endeavor. The neglect of the arts is only the most tangible symptom of the widespread unemployment of the senses in every field of academic study.

Visual Thinking, Rudolf Arnheim, University of California Press, 1969, pg. 3

Arnheim points out that there is an "unwholesome split" between reason and visual thinking today. The post-Enlightenment split between reason and intuition, or emotion, casts a shadow into our assumptions today. Theologically speaking, it is precisely this split that caused the gospel to be communicated as information only, a check list of do's and don'ts, and not as a cohesive life force full of mysteries and multi-sensory stories. Vincent brings them together. The Gospel as preached by St. Francis, would have meant full engagement of the senses, too. The Word becoming Flesh would not make sense otherwise.


If Vincent had not been such a deeply attuned and dedicated communicator, and a student of foreign languages and cultures, such power of synthesis would have been highly unlikely. He had, to borrow from Howard Gardner, "multiple intelligences." In his case, visual language developed because of his language interests, and not in lieu of reading and writing. He was painting not because he could not write: he painted these indelible images as part of the total communiqué package. He learned these mark making skills by studying pictograms, and was attuned to "walk around in another's skin," in all that he did.

If we desire to love the world, and communicate that love, we must use all of our senses, and our "multiple intelligences" to present the best case possible. Communicating in this visual age will require us to read more, and more deeply, than ever before. If Vincent serves us as a test case, his visual language developed as his curious mind and letters began to explore more depth and sophistication. Development of a visual language requires more than learning to depict what we see. We must thirst for deeper knowledge and probe the layers of mystery beneath what we see. Thus, education of any kind, whether theological or secular, must begin from the acknowledgement of deep connectedness between writing, reading and other forms of the arts. "To Read or not to Read," raises serious issues for education and reading: but after spending time with Vincent, I began to think that the report points to a demise of visual imagery as well, if we do not chart a new course of education.



My guess is that visual images pre-existed in Vincent's mind, a kind of supra-reality that his writings alluded to, but could not well explain. The potency of such a Reality resonates in all of this images and writings, to the extent that we must begin to admit a deeper connection and relevance, even if we do not believe in that world ourselves. In Vincent's letters we find a transfixed imagination, a window to see beyond the minds eye into the soul.


The art of the Creative or Aesthetic Age (10) must be able to provide similar window. Sciences, arts, philosophy and theology (and even business) must find a common tongue, a reconciled whole. At the same time, such a common tongue must honor and recognize the distinctive limitations of each language and each sphere. We need to see through the window of own brokenness to gaze into a salvific reality that graces our souls. In other words, we need to come up with a "third" language of synthesis that values the whole of humanity, both past and future, both in body and spirit. Just as the Spirit spoke via distinctive languages to bring reconciliation of nations at the Pentecost, Spirit continues to speak today, and is powerfully alive in the language of the arts. Vincent leads the way into this path of discovery. If not for this intervention of the Spirit, language of any kind, including the visual language, will continue to break up into debased fragments, unable to communicate the deepest conditions of our humanity.

Refracting in the beautiful halls of the renovated Morgan, are the letters and coded strokes of Vincent offering a profound mystery that probes the depth of our twenty first century condition. We need Vincent's beautiful, and sometimes awkward, meditations today because our current state of culture will not even come close to the level of articulation he mastered, even as alienated as he was from the church and society. In order to break the van Gogh code, we must first recognize that art and languages are intimately tied together in a Divine formula. The intuitive epiphany is at the core base of both, lighting the path of our creative journey. If we do not have a nation full of engaged readers and imaginators, we will also lack the creative mind that can mediate communication, or create new languages. We may have all the technology to communicate but have nothing to say to each other. More significantly, we will not feel for each other if we do not cultivate the inner lives of contemplation that reading and engagement with art brings. This exhibit highlights an artist writing and drawing to simply communicate with another artist of his time. And what he wrote tapped into a world that ought to be; a world where barriers of linguistic limitation are removed. Only painting full-time for three years, Vincent offered with such brevity and beauty meditations of such weighty substance. Would we, in a few decades, have the capacity to appreciate such offerings? And will we be able to create, above the clamor of fragmented splintered voices of the art/media world, and continue to trust that light can be resplendent with life, even in the gnarled twist of branches, like in van Gogh's olive trees?


Makoto Fujimura




(1)IAM lecture on van Gogh by Dr. James Romaine, November, 2007, Space 38|39, NYC
(2) See Kathleen Powers Erickson's At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh, Eerdmans
(3)http://www.artelino.com/articles/van_gogh_japonisme.asp
(4) IAM lecture on van Gogh by Dr. James Romaine, October, 2007
(5) The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis, Pg. 3, Hendrickson Christian Classics
(6)Vincent van Gogh, Painted with Words, p. 190-192
(7) I realize that many theologians would disagree, at least in principle, with the idea that the gospel truth can be communicated via visual languages. What I am suggesting here depends on the assumption of what that language is, and ultimately what we consider to the truth communicated. I am not making an argument here that words are unnecessary to communicate the gospel, or any truth claims: I am suggesting the opposite, that Vincent's linguistic capacity allowed him a rare synthesis, and that words are central to his visual symbolism.
(8)Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Warner Books, Pg. 30
(9)One of two Japanese phonetically based alphabets
(10) I want to thank my son, Ty, for suggesting this term

Refractions 25: Traveling in China with Father Dowling

Traveling in China with Father Dowling


The road back from Xian airport felt dusty to my skin, even riding inside a comfortable bus for the US delegation. The pale sky seemed weighed down, thick with coal fumes from the nearby factories. Bicycles crisscrossed the road, even on the highways, farmers and workers somehow managing to swerve in and out, and from what we could see from the inside of the cool, air conditioned bus, their breathing seemed labored and resigned to the heat. We were on our way to Beijing, after an exhilarating day in Xian, visiting the terra-cotta warriors from the Qin Dynasty (211-206 B.C.).

Refreshing also were the conversations that I had on the bus, with fellow delegates from the President’s Committee on the Humanities and Arts (PCHA). I was there to represent the National Council, with Eileen Mason, the deputy director of the National Endowment for the Arts; Marc Pachter, the head of the Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian (expect our conversation will be a future Refractions piece); Irene Love, a world renowned archeologist; Henry Moran, the director of the PCHA; and Adair Margo, the head of the delegation and her husband Don. Bruce Cole, the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, with his wife Doreen, James Billington, from the Library of Congress, and his wife Marjorie accompanied us. And then there was Ralph.

Ralph McInerny has taught for over forty years at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the director of the Jacques Maritain Center. You might know his name, or know of his fictional character, as he has authored twenty-six Father Dowling mystery novels. I found out that Ralph even came to read and sign books at the local Mysterious Book Shop right near my loft in Tribeca. A Thomas Aquinas scholar, I began to grill him with questions after finding out about his connection with Jaques Maritain; and to my delight, he was also a scholar of Dante (see my “Water Flames” exhibit, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, www.saratecchia.com.)

Maritain’s “Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry,” one of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, given in 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, has been a seminal work for my journey of creativity and faith. I have carried it around with me since college, and this French philosopher/theologian has sown seeds of faith and an integrated view of art and theology into my life and my work. It is not surprising that the Maritain center at Notre Dame chose someone like Ralph who is equally versed in Aquinas and Dante, as well as the genre of mystery novels. Maritain’s theology recovers art and poetry from being a specialized category exiled from the intellect, into an indispensable, central catalyst of the mind. Maritain, in doing so, to the chagrin of many academics then and now, validates “the Virtue of Art.”

"The activity of the practical intellect divides into human actions to be done…and the works to be made; in other words, it divides into moral activity and artistic activity…Art is a virtue – not a moral virtue…Art is a virtue in the larger and more philosophical sense the ancients gave to this word; a habitus or 'state of possession,' an inner strength developed in man…Art is a virtue of the practical intellect." (Jacues Maritain, Creative Intuition)

The "habitus" of an Aquinas scholar could include mystery novels, or to consider all creative activities to be a significant intellectual work. Whether art and poetry, a Sunday afternoon baseball game or gourmet cooking, we do not need to segregate art and creativity into a corner, an exiled “extra” of our lives.

Ralph confided to me, though, that he really began to write mystery novels as a side business; to put his kids through school. I told him that my wife is a mystery novel fanatic, and knew of his books. I, on the other hand, first “met” Father Dowling as Tom Bosley, in a TV mystery show in the Eighties. “They loosely based it on my novels,” he said in his jovial voice, “but paid me well.” Having a son at NYU, I nodded, knowing that a financial opportunity a purist may resist, a parent grabs onto for dear life. I began to even ponder what kind of a mystery novel I would write…"Murder at NYU" (a parent gets mysteriously murdered on his way to paying his son’s tuition)?


* * *

When we arrived in Beijing, it was Saturday. Ralph had asked one of our interpreters if there was a Catholic church nearby the hotel. They rushed about to find one, and they did, and found that they had a mass on Saturday evening. “If we rush, we can still make it.” Off they went, out of the VIP lounge at the airport, where we waited for our bags. He took one of our interpreters with him.

Later, I asked the interpreter, Jesse (a name given to her by her college English instructor), of her experience going to church with Ralph. She told me that she had a friend who got married there, so she recognized the place. She asked Ralph, though, what the difference between a Church and a Temple was. Not having gone outside of China, she really did not know the difference, she said.

How do you explain to a well educated Chinese, the difference between a church and a temple? Ralph told me that he began to explain, but the conversation soon turned to how she suddenly became a widow recently, losing her husband in a car accident. She had since become a Buddhist: “ I before believed in utopia, now I follow in Buddah’s ways to find peace.”

Father Dowling, Ralph’s fictional character, would have found himself drawn to this conversation. Instead of asking probing questions about someone’s present, though, he would have found something in common with someone’s past first, especially in someone’s loss and anguish.

As an “archdiocesan marriage tribunal, specializing in the misery of others,” Father Dowling spent much of his early career counseling broken marriages. But then he found himself carrying their anguish in his heart, silently. “He began to drink…A final binge, a cure, and then, as though into exile, he had been sent to St. Hilary’s in Fox River, a city west of Chicago. Fifty years of age, a failure in the eyes of many of his friends, he had come to see this parish as the sweetest consolation. God is merciful.”


Reading Ralph’s books now, (purchased at the Mysterious Bookshop with my wife’s help) I realize his books read as an interior journey of faith and brokenness—to capture the real mystery hidden within the very heart of a human being.

As we traveled about China, I began to see China as a mystery, a beautiful mystery.

Here’s a country that would spend a third of their GNP on preserving Xian and the thousands of terra-cotta warriors buried beneath the tomb mount, but at the same time creating a dam to wash away an ancient village. China is a country that would re-build the main road in Beijing to Beverly Hills glamour, providing thousands of workers with jobs, but would force people into retirement at 55, to make room for younger workers, and then displace these younger workers in order to make room for the tourists as the Olympics open. Their parks were filled with the over-55 group of ex-workers, kicking around a feathered version of a hackey sack, playing and singing all day to pass the time. Here’s a country that is investing toward a huge cultural infrastructure, supporting their own artists both at home and abroad, but at the same time carefully censoring the internet, the news and the media. A country that would print Bibles domestically (not many Americans know that for many years they printed their own Bibles for Catholic Churches, but forbade the foreigners to carry them in to China), and yet persecute and arrest Christian leaders in rural areas. They also highly value harmony between people and nature, and yet have one of the worst pollution problems in the world. We asked one of the officials, while riding through the glitzy Beijing streets full of smog, if a marathon can take place in the polluted air: “oh, they will shut the factories for two months before the Olympics.” No other country can be so confidently matter of fact about moving 500,000 workers out of the region to make room for tourists. Today’s China can afford to do so, and has the governmental control to carry that out.

We toured the “Egg,” the brand new Performance Center in Beijing, and one of the delegates who has been involved in building arts centers like this in the US commented to me: “There’s no way we could do this…we don’t have access to enough concrete!” Touring the center, which seemed overly extravagant, even at the half finished state, we were told that the center will be done this fall… which prompted another comment: “There’s no way our unions would allow us to build so fast!”

Each day, The China Daily was delivered to our hotel rooms. We noticed that there were front-page articles about the places we were to visit, often on a specific issue we were to discuss that day. At the end of our tour, when we saw the “Egg” was the subject of a top article with headliner indicating that the construction was on schedule, we realized we were in a bit of a Truman Show. The Chinese could re-create a city in several years, build the largest performance center in the world in a short time, and control everything about how it is reported to impress a small foreign delegation. Shaking our heads, we all had to admit, however, that we were still quite impressed.

From their perspective, to be fair, the US, too, must be a mystery. We speak of freedom of speech as our highest humanitarian virtue, and our internet pages are filled with pornography and other explicit forms of dehumanization. We are a nation swimming with individual wealth, and yet have no national insurance and a high percentage of homelessness. We are an advanced nation of educational opportunity, and yet have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the industrialized world. We are a country of innovation, in technology and the arts, and yet the first time we broadcasted the Superbowl live to China, Janet Jackson’s famed “malfunctioning bra” incident represented us instead. We bicker about the cultural budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, when the budget remains tiny compared to other nations, and a mere half of a baseball player’s (Alex Rodriguez, New York Yankees) salary.

And if you were to read China as a mystery novel, the opening chapter would be on the Cultural Revolution, exiling thousands of families into forced encampment. The trauma left deep wounds that still exist in the lives of people in China. The Cultural Revolution was their Ground Zero.

The vacuum that this Ground Zero has left in their culture, is now being filled by their fantastic drive to bring the world to the Olympics (’08) and then to the Expo (’10). The museums and arts districts are getting support and infrastructure, making even New York artists envious of China’s bourgeoning arts scene. On the way to Beijing, David Fraher of Arts Midwest, passed out a magazine article called “China’s New Creative Class,” highlighting “the next cultural revolution” from China’s creatives like Ou Ning (curator, designer), Lin Jing (furniture and ceramics maker) or Ji Ji (graphic designer). Apparently, the race is on for the creative domain as well, to see which culture can take the lead.

When we met and spent time with their Minister of Culture, Sun Jiazheng, we realized why they were making such a headway into a cultural development.

Minister Sun charmed us, a Renaissance man, who freely quotes philosophers and poets, and humanized every meeting by taking off his tie and his jacket, shaking every delegate’s hand personally. But it was his own poetry, shared at the banquet on the last day of our visit inside the Forbidden City, Jin an Fu Palace, that truly moved me. Our delegation head, Adair Margo, insisted that he share a poem he quoted at the table. He seemed reluctant, saying “such a sad poem should not be part of a grand celebration between two nations.” He explained that the poem was written after his friend, a Japanese author/composer and president of the Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchange Association, Ikuma Dan, suddenly passed away during his visit to China. He brought the poem to Sakuma’s gravesite in Japan, to read at the site.

April comes to Tokyo
The cherries should be at the height of their bloom
I’ve come to see the flowers
But spring came early and they faded too soon

April comes to Tokyo
This should be a glad reunion
Friends from afar once more together
Instead we stand bereft by your grave

Oh, honored colleague!
The blossoms have fallen, but spring still comes in all its splendor
You left with no warning; with whom can we share
The fathomless depths of our loss?

Graveside Reflections, April 2002, from "Dream and Pursuit" by Sun Jinzheng

It would have been a courageous enough act to reveal such a personal journey in public. But his offering was even more daring to me because of the current tense relationship between China and Japan. Even a few days before, the Japanese papers were full of questions regarding Prime Minister Abe’s response to Yasukuni Shrine, a Japanese holy site where many war criminals are buried and honored, including those invading China. Further, the Chinese have demanded an inquiry into the forced prostitution of Chinese women by the Japanese military in the 19th Century.

In that setting, Minister Sun’s poem was not just a balm to soothe such historical wounds, but a principled reconciling act based on common humanity, casting light into the divide.

Art moves into the chasms of past injuries, inspecting and noting each detail of a heart’s wounds. At the same time, Art and Poetry can feed us the manna of hope to malnourished, distrusting souls due to abuses of the past. In the age of terrorism and fear, that is why we need poets and artists. Artists have the potential of creating in love, providing an imaginative vision for their culture, a holistic language to deal with a fragmented, oppressed past. The result should be an even deeper longing.

Thus, Jaques Maritain wrote: “Poetry is spiritual nourishment. But it does not satiate, it only makes man more hungry, and that is its grandeur." That hunger cannot be filled by even the greatest of banquets in a Forbidden City. In Minister Sun’s poem for the Japanese composer, I felt a certain longing. There’s a mystery there, not a mystery of “who-done-it,” but a longing for a true Jin an Fu (a Place of Eternal Happiness), to finally resolve the irreconcilable brokenness within our hearts for eternity.

Mystery novels seek an answer for every wrongful death. But, really, every death demands an answer whether by murder or by accident. Jesse, our interpreter who met sorrow and death in her young marriage, began to search for peace in the midst of her tears. Father Dowling would always offer clues to such a journey, to re-discover the path home, not just to solve the crime, but for a spiritual home. For often, even in a mystery novel, the accidental turn of events can overwhelm the logic of the analysis of evidence. The Spirit of God, the true detective of our souls, searches via our creativity, a journeyer’s void within.

When Minister Sun read the lamentation poem, Jesse had to translate the poem impromptu. One of the assistants, rushed on stage with Minister Sun’s book in which the poem was translated to help Jesse. Jesse closed the book, gave it back politely to the assistant, and proceeded to begin to translate the poem with her eyes closed. Refracting in each word, carefully and tenderly given to us, both Ralph and I felt the weight of life and death. Father Dowling would have noticed that moment, too, as he, too, would peer deeply into the pain and sorrows of a poet grieving for a friend, and an interpreter grieving for a husband. That, more than even the splendid banquet, would reveal the mystery of our being, being transcribed and etched in our hearts, one word at a time.


Makoto Fujimura

Being a Child of the Creative Age

Being a Child of the Creative Age
Makoto Fujimura, International Arts Movement's Redemptive Culture Conference, 2007, at TriBeCa Performance Center, Ground Zero.




Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.

Songs of Innocence, The Lamb, William Blake


Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame they fearful symmetry?

Songs of Experience, The Tyger, William Blake



1. Inviting Monsters into our Hearts

A child uses all of her senses to discover the world. She picks up and finds fascination with a dandelion, feels the bumpy bark of a tree, tastes the baseball, smells the fallen leaf.

If you asked a room full of kindergarteners “Raise your hand if you are an artist!” Almost every child would raise his hand. But if you ask a room full of adults, almost every adult would not. (At a conference full of artists like this, you might say we are not just a gathering of artists, but a gathering of children!)

And if you are an artist, you know you are seen as out of the main stream, as avant -garde, but you also have been treated like a misfit or patronized like a child. You struggle to find meaning and significance in that gap between the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. “Grow up and do something useful for society!” The world seems to place in opposition pitting the Innocence against the reality of the Experience. We are caught between being able to have that curiosity, inquisitiveness and emboldened sense of discovery of a child and the reality of the “adult world”, a reality that forces us to realize that we all indeed live in fear, in a ground zero of some kind or another. In our conversation to create a world that ought to be, we must start at that zero point of devastation.

In a recent Fresh Air broadcast of Guillermo Del Toro, Terry Gross interviews the writer/director of Pan’s Labythinth (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7000935). A remarkable film. Not what you would call a family film, but as a kind of Narnia for adults, it delves deeply into the mystery of redemption within the cruel setting of the Spanish civil war. Terry Gross interviewed Del Toro about his upbringing, in which his strict Catholic grandmother tried to exorcize him twice because he was drawing monsters. He was forbidden to imagine a fantasy world. That was his “ground zero.” So he grew up having to bifurcate his moral sense of duty to his family, and his growing imagination. He was lead to believe that he could not have both imagination and religion, that the two worlds could not be reconciled: so he chose to journey on the path of imagination, leaving religion behind him.

Some of us identify with Del Toro, thoroughly. We feel that the church has tried to “exorcise” us of our imagination. Del Toro states “I invited Jesus into my heart as a young child…but then I invited monsters into my heart.”

International Arts Movement exists for this type of wrestling of faith, culture and humanity. It starts with the admission that living and creating in ground zero means you live with both Jesus and monsters.

Wrestling in this way, we give ourselves permission to ask deeper questions. What if the monsters do take over? That would be a concern of parents in this room for their children. That may be our current cultural condition of fear. But, in reality, I think the situation is reversed: monsters have already taken over in reality, and the only hope we have is to imaginatively work backwards. We are to take charge of the situation, and we mediate both the sinister and the good. Just like in Pan’s Labyrinth, we need to know we have a greater inheritance waiting for us.

Some have called the 21st Century the “Creative Age.” Phil Hanes, philanthropist and arts advocate, at a recent National Council on the Arts meeting, began a discussion on how we need to prepare ourselves as a nation to address this shift. Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pink and others have noted similar shifts in culture: The Information Age is behind us, and yet we, in America, are educating our children to thrive in that past. The skills and knowledge for Information Age are now outsourced, but we are ill equipped to lead in the age of imagination, the age of synthesis. While a hard term to define, The Creative Age will certainly mean one thing: we would have to reconcile living with both Jesus and monsters in our imaginative territories. We have to reconsider the artists’ role in society, in our education of our children: and we need to redefine how we see ourselves, all of us, as creative human beings who need art in our lives so that we can preserve a child’s innocence in the midst of horror and unspeakable evil, and help them to prosper and thrive in the creative age.

In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he exhorts us:


“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”



Thus, if the whole creation longs for the revealing of God’s children, we see that creativity, too, longs for some reality. Creativity longs for our “fittingness” in God’s plan of redemption. But this “frustration” causes setbacks, and birth pangs.

In Eden, Adam the poet names animals, and then discovers his need for Eve. Before the Fall, Adam’s creativity revealed his inner lack. After the Fall, then, the whole creation longs for a redeemed humanity to appear, not to return us to the Edenic state, but to move us into a better longing, for the New Creation. Our longing is not just to be restored to the fullness of our being, our longing is for the glorious freedom of the children of God and for liberation of our creativity and Creation. Our longing is for nothing less than a coronation/wedding celebration. The glorious freedom is in anticipating what that day will reveal in us and in our creativity.



2. From Being an Orphan to a Bride:



In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte’s Gothic tale, I see a (romantic) parable for us for the Creative Age. Now, I have known about Jane Eyre for a long time now, as this book had a transformative effect on Judy, my wife, when she encountered it at the age of 13. I heard from her how God filled her heart via the voice of Helen, a little girl (probably about 13) who befriends Jane in the school for orphans. Helen sows seeds of belief into then very bitter Jane. Jane had a right to be bitter, rejected by her cruel aunt who adopted her, and bullied by the new siblings; she was not only cast as an orphan, and falsely accused in the process, and some often used Biblical reasons for doing so. But Helen spoke of forgiveness and her confidence in God, even though she was treated just as unfairly, and even as she lay dying of typhoid fever, caused by less than adequate facilities at the school.



Recently, I watched with my wife the Masterpiece Theatre production of Jane Eyre, which, by the way, sadly, but typically, took out Helen’s exhortation to Jane (although I did like the casting of Ruth Wilson as Jane, and Toby Stephens as Mr. Rochester). I realized, though, how this powerful story, written before the Enlightenment schism, anticipates the modern dilemma and opens new vistas. Jane Eyre is a story of an orphan who finds herself becoming a bride of inheritance, even a double inheritance. She perseveres betrayal, neglect, and abuse and breaks through class barriers. It is a parable of liberation of humanity from “our bondage to decay” to that “glorious freedom.” She is also an artist, learning to draw at the school where she was exiled as an orphan. Written in first person narrative, the depiction of her world is done via a first-rate artist’s eye. In short, if you have not read Jane Eyre, take my advice: “Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay.” Actually, I am quoting Charlotte Bronte here, speaking well of her Yorkshire native William Wilberforce.

“Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay;” she wrote, “and read the Memoir of Wilberforce,--that short record of a brief uneventful life; I shall never forget it; it is beautiful, not on account of the language in which it is written, not on account of the incidents it details, but because of the simple narrative it gives of a young talented sincere Christian."
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/egaskell/bl-egaskell-cbronte-8.htm



Charlotte Bronte, consciously or unconsciously, fuses this Wilberforcian idealism into her creativity. In her novel, she makes art with the belief of liberation for all people. This is precisely why we need to be speaking about her at this conference. She incarnates our common call to “create the world that ought to be,” and speaks through Jane Eyre’s voice.


It humbles me to think that I have been married to Judy for over 20 years now, and have never read the most influential book in her life. When I told her this, she, with her typical gentleness, countered by saying “That’s why it’s so worthwhile to stay together. It may take 20 years to start to read each other’s books…we’re just getting to the good part!”

Jane Eyre is equally as patient, a plain governess who determines her path of forgiveness, choosing to love her enigmatic, brooding employer Mr. Rochester, despite his inevitable downfall. There’s quite a drama in this rich landowner conspiring to hide his past, and the disastrous path that he paves for himself. But somehow, throughout, he acknowledges Jane, an orphaned woman without glamour, a woman of intellectual and creative thirst, as his equal.

But because of Rochester’s failures, she is exiled and again abandoned, to be one without family or friends. If you know the story, she then gains the favor of a missionary suitor, St. John Rivers, who takes her in when she is at his door, in near starvation. He then discovers her to be a determined force. St. John Rivers wants to marry her to take her to India, to be a missionary although neither loves the other. Jane would tell Rochester later, her true love, trying to allay his jealousy: “He (Rivers) is good and great…but as cold as iceberg.”

I find it curious that Charlotte Bronte sensed in the early 19th century that just like St. John Rivers, the church will manifest the effects of the enlightenment: theology veering towards depicting the gospel intellectually and only as a set of facts or information, but not communicate with the heart. The church is “good and great… but as cold as iceberg.” Bronte, throughout the novel, ties in Jane’s spiritual state with her creative, artistic state. Jane is an artist, cast away by society and circumstances from her true love. And the missionary can only present a sound, rational argument why she should join him, and this without love.

This disconnect is, also exemplified in works of van Gogh, where the church is still present in the Starry Night, holding the image together visually. But the Spirit has left the church, swirling into Nature. Her lover Rochester is the emblem of that Nature, swirling in her mind as her salvation. But Rochester, once a wanton world traveler, now is haunted by dark secrets. Though initially, Nature taps into her hunger, Nature herself fails ultimately, as Rochester fails her. But even in a severe, literal hunger that Jane experiences, Bronte also paints a landscape of hope.


I was recently going through the Biblical book of Joel, which I find to be a stark reminder of the catastrophes all around us, and those to come. I had put a post-it note on Joel 2 that I had forgotten about. I wrote: “The world is 90% catastrophe, but 100% grace (not 10%). “

Theologically, the whole world, after our expulsion from Eden, is ground zero. But art can refill the world with the aroma of grace.



There’s grace at work deeply imbedded in the novel, Jane ultimately using words reminiscent of Helen to cry out to God in her wilderness. She is exiled from both the world and her lover. Meanwhile, Mr. Rochester has literally been blinded from tragic consequences, though he finally begins to “see” his real wretched state. Jane would chose to return to him. “It is time some one undertook to re-humanize you,” and she begins to comb his tangled hair.

Re-humanize: what a wonderful word. Rochester needs to be re-humanized. Jane needs to inhabit that enigmatic, but now repentant heart. Just like Mr. Rochester, we need to be re-humanized. This culture needs to be re-humanized. Culture has been a tangled “shaggy black mane” like Rochester’s, that Jane has to comb out, blind to it’s own misery. Modernism has resulted in a tangled mess, or perhaps a neatly categorized supermarket of ideas, as in this photo (http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2001/07/22/28891.html) re-presented in Andreas Gursky’s “99 Cent”.

As a result of the enlightenment’s tendency to seek specialization, and minute categorization, “ it knows more about the little things and less about the big things. It knows more about every thing and less about Everything.” (Peter Kreeft, pg 108, Seel). Without the macro perspective, the grand narrative, our tangles get smaller and tighter, and as a result our creative expression has had to focus on the details, like here in Yayoi Kusama’s painting (http://www.exporevue.com/magazine/fr/kusama.html).


Technological advancements, certainly, lead to better living conditions and longer lives, and we should be thankful for that. But it also means the expansion of not just supermarkets, but of ground zeros. We find ourselves there alienated and smaller and smaller, and our injuries greater still. Just like Rochester’s limb, at the end of Jane Eyre, culture has been disfigured by the horrid fires of Hiroshima, and the poisons of the Holocaust, the twin emblems of the 20th century. These ghosts still haunt our post-modern, and now post-human realities (here captured as Willem de Kooning’s “Woman I” http://www.moma.org/ecards/write_ecard.php?object_id=79810).



Artists, the “the canary of the cultural mine” (Marshall McLuhan), know and sense this reality of being disfigured and cut off, orphaned by society. They feel that beauty, and pleasure, are both tainted and cannot be trusted. They embrace everything “anti” but rarely have much to say about what they are actually for. I was recently at the Veritas Forum at Columbia University where I was asked to debate feminist/activist artist Coco Fusco. At the end of the night, I felt very saddened by the fact that our dialogue seemed to be stuck on the NEA related culture wars of 15 years past. But the church, seen as the main source of cultural hegemony and oppression, has not provided her an alternative vision. The church has not romanced artists. As a result, the artists are left alone to defend themselves in culture, and do not have many Helens to speak God’s hope into their hearts.

Like Jane Eyre, we are to face a ruined heart and a ruined condition, our ground zeros. Mr. Rochester is disfigured, in misery. Astonishingly though, she tells Mr. Rochester as she combs his hair: “You are no ruin, sir – no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous.” She, by saying this, forgives. She not only gives a nod to Eden here, but foreshadows the New Creation to come. She is able to do this because, somehow, she keeps her innocence and purity intact, while recognizing fully the fallen reality. It was indeed during the deceptiveness of her lover that caused the actual lightning to strike on the tree she refers to. It was God’s judgment. She sees now with a refined purity of having gone through the fire of betrayal, and having come through without dross. She stands faithful.


In his book, “Breaking Ground,” Daniel Libeskind, the architect chosen for Ground Zero master design, also stood in the pit of Ground Zero, and facing, and laying his hand on the slurry wall, and heard an Augustinian echo, “Take it and read it…take it and read it.” “Take it and read” the slurry wall of your ground zero. “Take it and read” the faces of those who lost their lives there. He called his Berlin office and told his staff to scrap everything they had done up to that point: “The slurry wall is an engineering marvel, a metaphoric and literal stay against chaos and destruction. In refusing to fall, it seemed to attest, perhaps as eloquently as the Constitution, to the unshakable foundations of democracy and the value of human life and liberty.” (pg. 43, Breaking Ground)

Artists, we are called to create in our ground zeroes, too. We need to be a voice of faith there. Yes, we have been alienated and orphaned. It is time to regard the age at hand, and take individual steps to move beyond the post-modern fog into the Creative Age. It is not time to remain bitter, but it is time to bring the words of Helen into our bitter culture. Helen embraced, even in her illness, the deeper voice of her God for her friend, Jane Eyre. You, along with other entrepreneurs of the age, are asked to hold your gaze true to your original call. Though the conditions are bleak, it is still our call to listen to the voices speaking through our slurry walls, our limitations and our boundaries. The Creative Age exists because of the opportunity presented by the crisis of our age. We face a precipice of despair and fear, a culture at a loss to offer what it means to be a human being. This culture herself is orphaned, and cannot see beyond her misery. We at IAM can see our “slurry wall” in front of us, a wall that somehow withstood the onslaught of ideological attacks that claim bondage to our souls. Within, there are millions of faces, victims of dehumanization, the holocaust, and the fragmentation of our time. It is time to read those faces, and build on faith. There’s no other choice; To love is to remain human. We need to romance the culture in this present crisis. Woo her to love, and not fear. To do that is to be a true artist of the Creative Age.


Artists have the empathetic capacity to embrace humanity even in the most destitute of times. But to do so, we have to see, like Jane, in a disfigured man a “green and vigorous” reality. She did not create reality, but she saw the greater reality. It is imagination guided by faith that taps into the New Earth and New Heaven. We need to note that she saw her own heart as disfigured, too, and she had to go through the fire of sanctification herself to know and recognize another cry, the cry of Mr. Rochester, out of that fire. Charlotte Bronte created a parable that echoes Romans 8. “Our sufferings are not worth the future glory…” We are destitute and orphaned, yet Christ sees a royal wedding and a coronation to come.



Artists need to remember that the reality of faith unlocks creative vision. Christ has been disfigured and orphaned for us. The great Artist, the Author of Life, who the prophet Isaiah speaks of as “crushed for our inequities” (Isaiah 53:5), released our souls from our own “bondage to decay.” The Spirit gives birth to creativity. God’s love flows into our hearts, via our creativity, to the world. In Christ you are part of the ekklessia, the new kind of community, that Jesus died for. You are not only invited to a wedding; You are the bride of Christ. Even if your stand alone, in you ground zero, you can stand like Jane Eyre, with a wedding dress.




3. The Bible begins with Creation, and ends in a wedding.



What does a wedding require for a Bride? We are to anticipate that day with all of our resources. We are always thinking of the Bridegroom. A wedding has all the genres of the arts represented; Dance, spoken words, art, culinary expertise, fashion and music. Children of the Creative Age are really wedding planners. We are to present the best, to spend the rest of our time preparing for that reality. This anticipation will usher a new age, and a new purpose. But it will cost, and it will require sacrifice. Do not listen to anyone who tickles you with a notion that we are a generation of Indigo children, and evolving into a new, and higher consciousness. No, instead, we are the children of God in a disfigured age. Our call is to love in that condition. Our call is to see through the disfigurement and tragedy.

Mr. Rochester cannot fully comprehend how Jane would be as “happy as I can be on earth,” to be with him. “Because you delight in sacrifice?” he asks.

“Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value – to press my lips to what I love – to repose on what I trust; is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.” She, apparently, loves him more despite his infirmities.

This is the heart of the New Creation. This parable gives us artists a new paradigm to consider. How do we love a disfigured world? How do we give sacrifice, without being conscious of it?

This sacrifice, that is no sacrifice to Jane, is precisely what we need now for true, lasting beauty, to re-humanize. Beauty is not cosmetic. Botox will not result in happiness. Jane Eyre is telling us we need to love even more our wrinkled faces. It is through this path that we will see creativity that not only restores but also redeems. We need, as the children of the Creative Age, not only to create in love, but to create what love means in this culture. By doing so our art will begin to re-humanize the world.

4. Enchantment of Jesus

So how do you indeed live with monsters and Jesus in your heart at the same time? How do we remain innocent and pure in the age of wickedness? We must live with groaning and expectation of Romans 8 at the same time. After all, our world is broken but also enchanted, in the sense of the medieval word for gospel – “Good Spell.” We have been cast a good spell by the words and breath of Jesus. The arts need to cast good spells into the world that is dying and cynical. Do not “throw out the baby with the bath water”: Jesus, the babe, is the source of life and art that no religious water can tarnish. So it is no surprise that all the tales of old that we were enchanted by as children, like Beauty and the Beast, seem to fit into our journeys. It is no surprise at all, that as we venture forward, we seem to give a backward glance, as in to this marvelous image of coronation by Fra Angelico (http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/Gowing/Fra-Angelico.jpg).

In a world that ought to be, we will have monsters dancing in our cosmic wedding. Our Experience, even our greatest of fears, will be rewoven into the texture of God’s design for the Innocent. You are not an orphan, but a prince and a princess of God. We are to receive more than a double inheritance. We need to begin to live like a bride expecting a great, cosmic wedding. We need to begin to act like Jane Eyre, the first child of the Creative Age.

---------------

This keynote was delivered at a recent International Arts Movement conference. Other keynotes by Daniel Libeskind, Jeremy Begbie and others will be made available soon at www.iamny.org

*Image above: Still taken from Distintegration Loop by William Basinski (www.mmlxii.com/)

Here's a wonderful image from a sketchbook of John Hendrix (www.johnhendrix.com). He sketched this image as I spoke.

A.R.T. Introduction

Image by Pamela Moore, "128 Cooper B"


Dear Refraction Readers:

For the upcoming International Arts Conference’s 15th year anniversary conference, “Artist as Reconcilers,” I am preparing the following series of essays about art called “A.R.T.: Awareness, Reconciliation and Transformation”. Here is my introduction section. The whole content of “A.R.T.” will be initially be available to IAM members only, so if you are interested please join IAM membership ($40 annual) via www.iamny.org (go to the conference section).

I will continue with my Refraction essays, free for all, again in March.

Makoto Fujimura


What is A.R.T.?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Little Gidding, The Four Quartets

About A.R.T. (Awareness, Reconciliation and Transformation)

Introduction:

I write this in order to encourage artists and to help facilitators of the arts understand their role in cultural stewardship. While About A.R.T. is an effort to broadly describe what Art is, it is not by any means a complete definition. I am drawing upon my own experience as an artist and what I find myself teaching to others. I do believe that these principles are helpful to understand the role of creativity in our lives, and to contextualize our creative activities in society. I am ultimately interested in a dialogue that move toward a stewardship of creative gifts, and how we may as a society see artistic roles, and creativity in general.

I also write here to begin a dialogue among church leaders and Christians who desire to understand the arts. While this dialogue is not directed only to a Christian audience, I do speak and write as one, with all of the worldview assumptions attached to that pre-supposition. I make this premise because in all of the recent effort to define the importance of the arts, and critique of art and arts education, I have noticed writers such as John Carey (“What Good Are the Arts?") and James Elkins (“A Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art”) specifically describing their worldview as strictly secular. I find their discussions helpful, although I find that presupposition often breaks down in their own turfs as their ideas evolve, and they may not be as consistent in their worldviews as I am trying to be for mine. Nevertheless, I do think it is important to start out with a premise. I am not a secularist, so I have certain presuppositions that frame my discussions. I do believe that creativity is a gift of the Creator. And because of my theological framework, I believe that such a view of the arts will produce more diversity, more content and more color to all of the arts, Christian or not. We are created to be creative: and we have stewardship responsibilities that come with that gift. The more we find fittingness in the God given responsibility, the more freedom we will find in our expression.

It has been noted that we have entered the Creative Age. The Information Age, for us Americans and other non third-world countries, is over. India and China, and other countries have taken over the role of dispersing technology and executing productions: the only resource that we have that cannot be outsourced is our creativity. Thus, we are at a crucial moment in history in which we are witnessing a paradigm shift in culture, a shift that may be as significant as Gutenburg’s invention of printing. Just as the invention of prints caused many shifts in cultural values, the Creative Age, with her accompanying technologies, will usher in principles that formerly were considered unimportant for the everyday needs of the society. Some have called this time “post-Human” as our boundaries of creativity begins to have serious ethical and moral boundaries. Before Modernism, artists depicted flowers as flowers, asking “How do you depict a flower?” Modernism asked “What is a flower?” and Post Modernism followed with “Is there a flower at all?” And in post-Human time we ask, “Can humans combine their DNA with a flower?” In other words, we are at a point in which what we create and what we imagine will not merely be virtual, but are actualized into reality, and quite possibly, into our DNA.

If Gutenburg brought books to us, this age brings CG technology, virtual realities, and DNA manipulation. So do we study the sciences to find answers and guide our path? The sciences cannot reach into the supernatural, nor into the mysteries of our realities, because they are bound by natural, measurable data. Art on the other hand should and can reach into the very heart of existential mysteries sciences cannot tackle. But we need to have a clear understanding of how art functions, in order to begin to understand this role. Art of the past, it seems to me, is a great place to calibrate our place in history, and press our existential marker into the shifting tide of culture.

Some have moved away from the study of the classical and traditional in favor of erasing boundaries of the past. But we have found ourselves anchorless, without any agreed upon boundaries at all, ever so fearful of the future as a result. I believe that what we can learn from Rembrandts and Shakespeares of the world is even more significant today because they give us hope in turmoil, and therefore give us a picture of mediation to this age, in the power of technology today. The sciences and technology need this trans-historical dialogue on the arts, because arts determine our cultural values, and determine what the culture sees as beautiful and true.

Recently I spent some time visiting friends who work as insiders in Hollywood. There is a significant effort, I found, among the industry experts to create a more principled way to develop creative content, movies and the new media. After the success of Lord of the Rings, and now Narnia, we desire for more Lewises and Tolkiens to come out. These creative resources are not birthed out of a vacuum, but over generations of commitment to nurture and value creativity. The church has been mostly reluctant to take the lead in cultural production, fearful that those who enter Babylon will come out tainted by her, unable to speak for her values. And since there is still a vacuum in culture that the church abdicated to general culture, even if we desire more Tolkiens and Lewis, the church, in her present status, will be the first to reject them as misfits.

In order to have meaningful dialogue in this condition, we Christians must reevaluate our definition of creativity and art. On one hand, Biblical literalists and separatists (such as the “Left Behind” authors) may insist on that all of what is discussed in art must be literal interpretation of Christian stories, an approach which forbids certain art to exist at all. On the other we have secular purists who desire art to be left alone to the “good” desires of our hearts, self reliant and (in most cases) necessarily alienated from society. My approach in A.R.T. is neither of these routes. In order to lead, and teach our children to lead, Twenty First Century with creativity, we must speak in to our culture to value art and steward her with proper boundaries, and lead with a sense of responsibility. At the same time, we must realize that art is neither a mere tool to be used for ours or other ideologies. A.R.T. must ask deeper questions: what I have began to call “a five hundred year questions.” What we create matters: all art products cast their vision of what the artist consciously or unconsciously desire for the world to become. We are, and will become, what we imagine: and if we do not understand both the power and the danger of our imaginative powers, we will not begin to birth meaningful, and hopeful works of inspiration.

Makoto Fujimura

Next chapter, “Awareness,” will be released after the conference for members only.

Image: Pamela Moore, "128 Cooper B", mixed media on paper, 30x36 inches Please go to www.fujimuracontemporary.com for more information on this painting