The Artists Among Us—What Are They For?
Consider the words of a young, aspiring evangelist of the 19th century. After preaching his first sermon, with exuberant joy he wrote to a family member:
When I was standing in the pulpit, I felt like somebody who, emerging from a dark cave underground, comes back to the friendly daylight. It is a delightful thought that in the future, wherever I go, I shall preach the Gospel.
The 19th century was an era of great preachers. Who might have written such buoyant words? Dwight L. Moody? Charles Spurgeon? Alexander Campbell? The answer may surprise. It was Vincent Van Gogh, the great Dutch Impressionist. The artist boldly declared his “innate love for the church and everything connected with it.” He wrote to his brother Theo, “We are strangers on the earth, but … we are not alone for our Father is with us. We are pilgrims, our life is a long walk or journey from earth to Heaven.” But things changed. Soon the rigid prejudices of the church’s leaders (including Vincent’s own harsh father) alienated the young man and drove him out of full-time ministry. (For this story see Cliff Edwards’s book, The Shoes of Van Gogh.)
Van Gogh’s tortured sojourn in an asylum, depression, and self-mutilation are legendary. His paintings are among the best known in the world. Yet few people today know about the artist’s passionate longing to serve God, nor do they know how the church wounded and neglected this great artist.
It would be a pleasant fiction to suppose that Van Gogh’s alienation from the church was exceptional, but it is not. Too many gifted souls have felt estranged from their communities of faith. Consider how many creative people grew up in believing homes but who abandoned their faith along the way—Frederick Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Ingmar Bergman, and even The Beatles come to mind. The list is long. Each case is different, but the recurring pattern is inescapable. Minimally it ought to provoke reflection among church leaders and ministers. What happens to a church that exiles its best and brightest creative types?
Fortunately, there are happy exceptions to this sad narrative. Christian Wiman, one of America’s finest poets, will be speaking June 4, 2015, at the Christian Scholars Conference at Abilene Christian University. Wyman illustrates a hopeful outcome. As a youth Wiman experienced the depressing effect of being taught a gnostic suspicion of nature and beauty: “I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God,” he wrote in Ambition and Survival. The poet came to see things differently in his later years when he faced a life-threatening illness. Through the crisis of pain he experienced “a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it.”
Churches face extraordinary challenges today. This month the Pew Research Center reports the continuing decline of U.S. church membership and the remarkable increase in the religiously unaffiliated (a category larger than the memberships of either mainline Protestant churches or the Catholic Church, according to Pew). In such a time as this, don’t we need all the creative gifts that God bestows on his people? Shouldn’t we be looking out for the next Vincent, or C. S. Lewis, or Christian Wiman, who may be wavering in our church doorways, if they haven’t already exited?
Given the way people—especially youth—are moved and even transformed by the arts, could it be that aspiring painters, musicians, novelists, screenwriters, and cinematographers are our future evangelists in the making? Might they help heal the fissure between body and soul that the Incarnation not only makes possible, but necessary?
Novelist Jacques Maritain describes the artist as “an associate of God in the making of beautiful works; by developing the powers placed in him by the Creator—for ‘every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of lights’—and by making use of created matter, he creates, so to speak, at second remove.” It just seems to me that our churches would be more welcoming places to unchurched folks today if we fully partnered with these “associates of God” to dramatize the gospel story, employing the full array of resources at the artists’ disposal. May the day come when the artists among us will say, paraphrasing Van Gogh: “It is a delightful thought that, throughout our lives, wherever we practiced our craft we also preached the Gospel.”
Note: In my next post I will consider the story of another highly creative type—John Muir, one of the grand figures of the early Stone-Campbell movement who still has something to teach us about faith.
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Header image: Vincent Van Gogh. Starry Night. 1889. Graphic retrieved from Wikipedia and cropped for use on this blog.
Portrait image: Vincent Van Gogh. Self-Portrait. September 1889. Graphic retrieved from Wikipedia and cropped for use on this blog.
