Why does the devil get the art?

For a long time, I’ve had a lot of unanswered questions about art–such as, why is it that Christians, who understand beauty and are intimate with its Source, are typically unable to manufacture it well? Very few Christian artists today are creating work that will stand the test of time.

Americans are a pragmatic people, and as a result we are uncomfortable with the subject of art. When school budgets are tight, we cut music and theater programs long before we touch athletics. We don’t see art as serving a practical purpose, and as a practical people, we don’t really know what to do with it. Believers who are Americans seem even more confused. We tend to think that unless the film or painting or book or song is meeting some express objective such as evangelizing someone, it is a waste of time.

“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”

-Albert Camus

November 7th was Albert Camus’ birthday. Born exactly one hundred years ago in 1913, his philosophies continue to shape our culture. In order to communicate his ideas, Mr. Camus wrote novels that are still read today. “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth,” he explained.

To the believer, beauty–true beauty, that indefinable but universally recognized entity–is the promise of a better reality. As a follower of Christ, I do believe that beauty will stretch out for eternity. Beauty is not a tease, but a promise.

But Mr. Camus felt that beauty was nothing more than a taste of something he could never really consume. Like a shipwrecked man on the sea dying of thirst and surrounded by sparkling, unpalatable saltwater, to him beauty was only cruel.

C.S. Lewis said:

“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 came through 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.”

Albert Camus created enduring art. He was able to communicate his ideas elegantly through the vehicle of fiction, but his philosophy was broken. Christians should be able to create the most beautiful art of all. Yet too often our work is off-putting and heavy-handed.

“A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.” -Francis Schaeffer

Does our art reflect the beauty we know in Christ? Does it generate a longing in people for the place where the truth and beauty came from? I don’t think films that preach sermons, or kitschy pictures of cute cottages with Bible verses slapped on the matting, accomplish this goal. This is lazy art…actually, it is just bad art. We tend to sterilize our art because we wish to avoid mention of sin, or we take the other extreme and make our art a filthy bloodbath in order to prove our grittiness. The Bible is realistic and raw, yet redemptive. It is not gratuitous. It is full of grace.

I do not have the answers, but I think this is something we should be talking about more. Art and beauty matter–they enrich our lives and feed our souls. If everything can be done to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31) we should be individually diligent in praying about how our unique gifts and interests can be used. Americans love Christian athletes because they have a “platform” for their faith. But truly, artists have even more of an opportunity to honor the Lord with their abilities. Filmmakers, painters, singers, writers…we should be thinking about these things, talking about these things, praying about these things, remembering always that it is not about our work itself, but it is about whether or not the truth and beauty we know in Christ is coming through it.

C.S. Lewis, John Milton, and Flannery O’Connor are three examples of writers of faith I admire. Who are some believers in the arts you look up to?

More on Modesty

Some of you may remember my post from March of this year called “Why Christians Should Talk Less About Modesty.” I don’t advertise this blog except to link posts on my Facebook account, but that particular article quickly prompted thousands of views and a lot of feedback, which suggests to me that I am not alone in thinking that this is an important topic. The credit for this article really belongs to my dad because it is the result of a conversation we had. My dad is the first person I am aware of to actually question the common interpretation of I Timothy 2:9-10.

For centuries this verse has been misinterpreted (at least among English speaking believers) and it has led to a lot of highly negative repercussions in the church at large. I don’t know of any other sermons or books on that topic. My dad recently preached a sermon on it and it is the first I know of. He articulates a correct interpretation of the passage much better than I could. I would really encourage you to listen to this sermon. Here is the link to the church’s sermon archive. The message is from August 21, 2013 and is entitled “A Christan Woman’s True Adornment.”

Gratitude is Everything

I’ve been learning something lately:

The only difference between a traffic delay and a chance to pray is gratitude.

The only difference between a disruptive thunderstorm and not needing to wash your truck is gratitude.

The only difference between an interruption and an opportunity is gratitude.

The only difference between a joyous life and a dour one is gratitude.

Because at the end of the day, everyone’s got problems. I’ve got problems, you’ve got problems, we’ve all got problems. Gratitude doesn’t deny their presence, it just denies them power and precedence.

I mean really, it’s all about perspective.

What I want to say is that no stage of life is going to be “perfect” in the way you’ve envisioned it. There is always something just ahead that keeps us from appreciating what we have, if we let it.

This may depress you, but it should inspire you, because it frees you up to enjoy what you have without worrying so much about making it perfect. It ain’t gonna be.

The Preacher said, “For everything there is a season.” If you spend springtime wishing it would be summer and then in the summer you whine about the heat and then in the fall you mope when it rains, you’ll always be unhappy. But if you enjoy the flowers in May and the sun in August and the pungent smell of wet earth in November, and if you can learn to splash in the puddles and make iced tea when the temperature is over 100, then you will enjoy every season, and you will know the secret victory of gratitude.

So whether you’re in high school yearning for the big world or in college yearning to never read a book again or single and wishing you weren’t or dating and annoyed he hasn’t asked or married and wanting babies or a parent and dying for those babies to be grown…just slow it down.

Be thankful for Saturday mornings with your mom and dad because being a kid is a precious thing. Be thankful for the four years when your job is to go to school and be incurably curious and learn everything you can. Be thankful for the times with your friends because people who tell you that they will never change are wrong. Be thankful for little ones in your life. Be thankful for the first things, and the changes, and the awkwardness of a young romance and the way holding hands is thrilling because soon it won’t be anymore. Then, cherish the deeper connection when you’ve got past the butterflies and you have a best friend. Every step of the way, thank God. Savor it all. Drink it up.

And when life is hectic and crazy and imperfect and your finances are tight and your pants are tight and your schedule is tight…congratulations, you are a human being. Life isn’t an uninterrupted plan, life is a long serious of interruptions. You either embrace them, or you don’t.

So then the goal isn’t to win but to see why you’re already winning, and the happy people aren’t the ones who have the life they love but who love the life they have, and life is more like surfing than bullfighting after all.

Boats, Wind, and the Light on the Shore :: Solomon and Jay Gatsby

Somehow, I got to my senior year of college without ever reading The Great Gatsby.

So, last Christmas, I picked it up. I soon found myself in an obsessive F. Scott Fitzgerald kick in which I read everything of his that I could get my hands on. He’s brilliant.

Sunday night I saw the Baz Luhrmann film. I had low expectations going in, but I enjoyed the spectacle and the costumes and especially the soundtrack. My main problem with it was that it sidestepped the point of the book.

“You can’t repeat the past,” Nick (Tobey MacGuire) says.

“Of course you can,” insists Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby. “Of course you can.”

Luhrmann’s film goes on to insist that no, you can’t. But the above exchange–although lifted from the novel–does not capture F. Scott’s main point.

The tragedy of Gatsby’s obsessive longing for Daisy Buchanan is not so much about the hopelessness of rekindling a past happiness. The Great Gatsby is tragic because it is about a man trying to capture an ideal that was never there, and that he can never find.

The Preacher & the Man from West Egg

In the trenches of World War I, Jay Gatsby built a world around his girl. She became his everything. When he came back from the war and learned that she had married someone else, he needed to believe that she never loved her husband at all. He needed to believe that he could win her back and make all his dreams come true. He fashioned a life around her empty space. He earned a huge fortune and had everything a man could ever hope for in this life: friends, popularity, wealth, women, alcohol, notoriety, success. He was the Ultimate Man—he was Solomon. But it was all nothing—all he wanted was a woman.

And then he gets her back. Nick helps. It’s all so nice. And we allow ourselves to root for him, even though Daisy is married. We want him to be happy, and after all, her husband Tom is an adulterous brute. When he breaks his mistress’ nose in the film, it is a faraway, slow motion shot—hardly noticed. When I read that scene, I remember it disturbed me so much I had to put the book down. Tom is easy to hate, Gatsby is easy to sympathize with, and we want Daisy to be our pretty, charming heroine. But it all goes sour in that hot Plaza room, and the disastrous drive back to East Egg. The tragedy of Gatsby unfolds, and the book closes with the famous line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The book of Ecclesiastes was written by a man who had everything. He was a genius, a sage, a ruler, a woman’s man, a man’s man, a soldier, a tycoon, a king. He was the Gatsby of his day, only not of New York City, but of the whole world. He wrote Ecclesiastes as a record of his attempts to be happy. He was full of ideas. Maybe money would do it. Or work. Or women. He writes about each new experiment, and how each fell flat. “All is vanity–chasing after wind.”

Fire, Freshness, and the New Jazz Age

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to men and women in a decadent era. The 1920’s were marked by the overwhelming success of the American Dream–a time when everyone had money, and the vapidity of the upper-class strata led to an entire generation dancing on the brink of dissolution. Himself part and parcel of the alcoholic revelry of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald also became–somehow–its prophetic voice.

His day is reminiscent of our own. We, too, are a rich and decadent culture. For example, despite Presidential scandals and epic unrest in North Korea and the Middle East, one of today’s top news stories on the top news website in our nation concerns a new tourist attraction outside Atlantic City: a $35 million, 40,000-square-foot complex named “Margaritaville” after the 3-cord, 208-word Jimmy Buffet drinking song–which, by the way, is the most lucrative in music history (“I blew out my flip-flop, Stepped on a pop-top, Cut my heel had to cruise on back home, But there’s booze in the blender, And soon it will render, That frozen concoction that helps me hang on”). It is all quite reminiscent of the frivolous America of 1925. Our culture, too, is drowning in vapidity. If Fitzgerald had been born in 1984 instead of 1896, he could still have written a Gatsby set in 2013 New York.

Even in the midst of this decadence and the loss of spirituality and meaning, Fitzgerald reminded his readers that God was still watching–symbolized by the great blue eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg on the billboard presiding over the valley of ashes.

Still today, as in every day, men and women seek significance and peace. Solomon wanted it, Jay Gatsby wanted it, we want it.

Hope

Gatsby put all his hopes on a woman. Far from being noble, it was a selfish act. No human being–not even Daisy Buchanan–could bear the burden of his eternal happiness. And Gatsby himself realized it, the very afternoon of his anticipated reunion:

As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

Our local drive-in — best place to watch a summer movie!

Even the world admits, to varying degrees, that money can’t buy happiness, that parties and high living will leave us empty, that alcohol is a treacherous friend. The one fairy tale we allow ourselves to believe is that true love can make us happy. The right woman, the right man, will answer all our self-doubts and give us purpose. We hold this hope close to our hearts both inside and outside the church. Yet even this hope turned sour for Gatsby. Even this hope betrayed him.

Perhaps Baz Luhrmann did not want to look to closely at this. He preferred the cautionary “you can’t repeat the past” moral of the story to the truly bleak outlook of F. Scott, which pointed to a future equally blighted and hopeless. Jay Gatsby may represent hope in director Luhrmann’s world, but a closer look reveals that his is a deluded hope. In the end of the film he is happy, yes, because he thinks his love his calling him, he thinks that all his dreams are coming true. But instead he takes a bullet for a crime that was hers, and the voice on the other end of the line was not even Daisy’s. He died without knowing this, and we are glad that he dies happy. But the fact is, he dies deluded.

Light

“‘We know not what we shall be;’ but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper.

If they vanish in the risen life, they will only vanish as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.”

-C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

There is a hope: a great hope that sustains the soul, a hope that redeems the past, that promises a future, a hope with its eyes wide open. This hope is found in Christ, who conquered the grave, who saved Solomon, who receives the Gatsbys and Daisys and Nicks and Toms and Myrtles of this world to Himself. For all of us are wandering sheep, looking for a way to get by without our shepherd, and all of us are–in our various and sundry and infinitely creative ways–building dream palaces and swallowing the pills of our own lies, chasing after winds, crashed over and over again against the shores of the world. Delusion is utterly necessary for the man or woman without Christ. He cannot live in the real world. He cannot survive it.

Christ is reality. He is the hope that does not disappoint. He is the light that shines across the shore and grows only brighter and more brilliant with time.

You Won’t Change the World.

At first blush, it was not the thing to say.

Our classroom was just eight blocks north of the United States Capitol building and it was buzzing with the ambition and energy of 40+ over-achieving college students. We came from Christian universities around the nation. We wore blazers, pearls, suits, ties. We were belonged to a generation defined for its longing to pursue social justice and change the world, and we had had flown to the most important city in the United States of America set on doing just that. We had good grades, good resumes, good prospects. We were ambitious and too young to know our own limitations. We were a Christian mobilizer’s dream.

And yet the speaker promised us on that sticky August morning in Washington, D.C. that we would all fail.

“You will not change the world,” he announced, deflating everybody. “You are not the savior this city has been waiting for.”

“The Messiah has already come. And you are not Him.”

Some might call this an impolitic strategy–surely not the thing to tell such hopeful young evangelicals.

But this is one of the best things anyone told me during my semester as a Capitol Hill intern.

I went to D.C. because I wanted to change the world. I wanted to help fix the broken system, hold lawmakers accountable, and stand up for the innocent and voiceless. I thought going to D.C. would help further this goal.

This speech changed how I approached my work. If anything, my semester on the Hill made me more excited to serve God in whatever capacity I can. But in D.C. He changed my perspective.

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. 

I Timothy 2:1-6

Ours is a generation marked by activism. But as believers, we must remember that the world is not going to change–it is already destined for judgment.

But human hearts can change.

Rather than trying to “change the world,” we must point people to the only One who can effect true change.

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Philippians 3:20

God does use individuals to bring His grace to a sinful world. William Wilberforce was a strong believer who served in the British Parliament and almost singlehandedly led the movement to end slavery. Many believers are called to serve in politics or journalism or diplomacy, and God can use this work mightily. We should never place a “calling to ministry” above a calling to the workforce. The Lord has a different purpose for each of us.

But for those of us who do believe we are called to the public sphere, we must always keep in mind that this world is ultimately not our home. We cannot rest our hope here–we will always be disappointed. We fight for the things of God and the defense of the weak, but always remember that what truly matters is the gospel, the individual heart-transformations of redeemed men and women. That is change that is eternal, lasting, important.

When you think you have to change the world, you might overlook the reporter or staffer at the desk next to you. But seeing life through the lens of the gospel brings the perspective that the individual matters. I Corinthians 13, the famous love chapter, says that the most gifted person, without love, is worthless. Love is desiring the good of others, and the greatest good is salvation. True love demands that we share true hope, which is only found in the message of the cross.

Christ is the only Savior of the world. None of us can replace Him or add to His work: we can only point to Him. This is incredibly encouraging to me, because while in D.C. I realized how much is broken in our world. There is so much that needs change. Knowing that God is sovereign and that the world’s Messiah has already come gives me peace. I can fight to effect positive reformation and yet know that the weight of changing this fallen world is not on my shoulders. I can fight for the rights of the oppressed, and I can point the individual men and women I encounter to the great Hope found in Jesus Christ. This gives me strength.

Our professors urged us to be a faithful presence in our internships. This is how I tried to approach my semester. I encourage you to be faithful where you are today, whether that is at home with your family, in a classroom, at work, or on Capitol Hill. Work hard and then rest in the knowledge that the results–and the glory–belong to Him.

Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. 

Philippians 2:14-16