Christian Art

About a year ago my family read a graphic novel version of A Wrinkle in Time. Somehow this book had escaped all of my high school reading lists (or perhaps I had skipped it in favor of Tom Jones?), so I have not read the original. All the themes and plots as expressed in Madeleine L'Engle's classic book were new discoveries to me.

In addition to my failure to read L'Engle's classic work, I had failed to take notice that Madeleine L'Engle was a confessing and practicing Christian. A book by L'Engle, passed along to me by a friend, entitled Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art (1980) piqued my interest as I pulled it out of the box. What faith was this that I had never heard attributed to this world-famous author?

Walking on Water comprises a collection of mini-essays delivered as talks at an international conference on the topic of faith and art. Through the book I found L'Engle describing her own mature, orthodox faith and a thoughtful, piercing critique of how the Christian faith has neglected the proper place of art--or the proper function of art--in the life of the Church and the believer. As a Christian artist myself (you'll have to read the book to get L'Engle's helpful definition of "Christian art") I found her experience and theology of Christian art deeply inspiring and refreshing.

True to the calling of an artist following Jesus, L'Engle does much of her teaching in discrete stories. So a small sample of those moments is in order when I felt compelled to dog-ear the pages:

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She cites the story of a village full of clocks but with no horologist (the former one had died). When a renowned clockmaker and repairer later visits the village, he declares he can fix the clocks that--though inaccurate--have been kept wound. The ones left unwound are forever lost.

"So we must daily keep things wound: that is, we must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain. We may not always be able to make our 'clock' run correctly, but at least we must keep it wound, so that it will not forget." (p96)

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"I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my Christianity, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awed faith." (106)

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Upon encountering rigid and sealed theology next to open and wondering science: "I had yet to learn the faithfulness of doubt. This is often assumed by the judgmental to be faithlessness, but it is not; it is a prerequisite for a living faith." (118)

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"So a children's book must be, first and foremost, a good book, a book with a young protagonist with whom the reader can identify, and a book which says yes to life. Granted, a number of young adult books have been published with a negative view of life, just as with anti-heroes. Again, from all I hear from librarians and teachers, they may be read once, but they are not returned to." (121)

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Wisdom perhaps for all Christians as well as the practicing artists: "If my stories are incomprehensible to Jews or Muslims or Taoists, then I have failed as a Christian writer. We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it." (p122)

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"So I start the Ballad of Barbara Allen. I have sung only a couple of verses when Charlotte says, her voice quavering slightly, 'Gran, you know that's a bad one.' 

'What, Charlotte?' 

'You know that's a bad one.' 

Both Barbara Allen and her young man are dead and buried at the end of the ballad; I ask, 'Why, Charlotte? Because it's sad?' 

'No! because she doesn't love anybody.' 

Charlotte knows what it is all about. The refusal to love is the only unbearable thing."

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Quoting the words of Hawaiian Christian Alice Kaholusuna: "Before the missionaries came, my people used to [pray at the temple] and afterward would again sit a long time outside, this time to 'breathe life' into their prayers. The Christians, when they came, just got up, uttered a few sentences, said Amen, and were done. For that reason my people called them haoles, 'without breath,' or those who failed to breathe life into their prayers."

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I am especially struck by one thread that runs through L'Engle's mini-essays, mini-memoirs: how Christians are co-storytellers with God. I have always been troubled by the thoughtless repetition of "Word of God" to refer to scripture, especially since the equivalent given by scripture itself for "Word of God" is Jesus Christ. Book = person, person = book, living being = fixed cipher, text = life are troublesome equivalencies for me.

So I have tried in teaching my own children to impress on them that the bible is God's story, and it is Jesus' story, and it is the story of the people of God, and it is our story. I think that to simplify--or mask the complexity of--the nature of the scriptures as story is to take the breath out of them. I think I understand the impulse to make the 66 canonical books into a Third Law, but I am also keenly aware of the chasm between Law and Person that Saul met on the Damascus Road (Acts 9).

L'Engle, in Walking on Water (a work that she herself was hesitant to undertake, as she reflects in the book), brilliantly traces the sinews of the divine story and leads the reader to appreciate its power. One will emerge from L'Engle's work with a greater appreciation for God's story, a greater confidence that our stories are important to that divine story, and a greater determination to tell stories that will help unfold the tesseract of God's love in the world.

~ emrys