Walking Through Water: Reflection on Art and Faith

It has often struck me with awe that some of the most religious people I have known have been, on the surface, atheists. Atheism is a peculiar state of mind; I quite personally feel you cannot deny the existence of something that does not exist. I don't believe I can say, "That chair is not there," if there is no chair to say it about. Many atheists deny God because they do in fact care so passionately about a caring and personal God and the world around them is inconsistent with the God of love, they feel, and so they say, "There is no God." But even when one denies God, to create music, art, or words is a religious activity. To serve any discipline of art, no matter what it be, is to affirm meaning, despite all the ambiguity and terror and confusion surrounding us. Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous. We will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. We need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that G-d is most present. How badly do we need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly? I suggest we are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly. I know my grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what. We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men. Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God Himself."

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes. C.S. Lewis pens this more beautifully than ever I could in The Weight of Glory:

"In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only camethrough them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the Kingdom, to make us, a people who are status viatorus aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward Home.

Aeschylus (Greek playwright, 525-456 BC) writes, "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." We see wisdom and that awful grace in the silence of the Pietà; in Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems; in Poulenc's organ concerto; but we do not find it in many places where we would naturally expect to find it. This confusion comes about, I think, because much so-called religious art is in fact bad art, and therefore bad religion. Those angels rendered by grown-ups who obviously didn't believe in angels and which confused the delegates at Ayia Napa are one example. Some of these soppy pictures of Jesus, looking like a tubercular, fair-haired, blue-eyed goy, are far more secular than Picasso's Mother and Child. The Lord Y'shua who rules my life is not a sentimental, self-pitying weakling. He was a Jew, a carpenter, and strong—tough as a root and probably (at least outwardly) about as appealling—the uncontainable Logos made flesh. He took into His own heart, for our sakes, that pain which brings "wisdom through the awful grace of God."

I recognize that it is impossible for an artist to attempt a graphic reproduction of Jesus in any way that is meant to be literal. I sympathise with the Hassidic teaching that it is wrong to try in any way to make pictures of the Most High or His prophets. The Moslems have this philosophy too, hence the intricate, nonrepresental designs on the mosques. However, I think in a way they both miss the point which the Eastern Orthodox artists are taught when they study the painting of icons. The figure on the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, nor what the Theotokos (Mother of God) looked like, nor the Child, Jesus.

But the Orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the Man Jesus 2,000 years ago, but it contains some quality of Jesus, His Mother, or saints, and so the icon becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God. Indeed, there is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.

That Holy Fool, St. Francis of Assisi, says that "In pictures of God and the blessed Virgin painted on wood, God and the blessed Virgin are held in mind, yet the wood and the painting ascribe nothing to themselves, because they are just wood and paint; so the servant of God is a kind of painting, that is, a creature of God in which God is honoured for the sake of His benefits. But he ought to ascribe nothing to himself, just like the wood or the painting, but should render honour and glory to God alone." An icon is a symbol, rather than a sign. A sign may point the way to something, such as: "Athens—10 kilometers." But this sign is not Athens, even when we reach the city limits and read "Athens." A symbol, however, unlike a sign, contains within it some quality of what it represents. An icon of the Annunciation, for instance, does more than point to the angel and the girl; it contains, for us, some of the Blessed Virgin's acceptance and obedience and so affects our own ability to accept, to obey.

Icons are painted with firm discipline, much prayer, and anonymity. In this way the iconographer is enabled to get out of the way to listen, to serve, and to work. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like the Theotokos who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command. I sincerely believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

As for the Theotokos, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss. When I was a child, I used to think that when I was grown-up I would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable. Beloved reader, you and I, we have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are. The God of compassion understands that part of us which is more than what we think we are.