Refiner’s Fire: Beyond the Divorce of Faith and Art

Two books that challenge the Christian reluctance to create.

“What has Zion (religious life) to do with Bohemia (artistic life)? My answer is everything!” says John H. Westerhoff, professor of religion and education at Duke University Divinity School (Religious Journal, Jan.–Feb. 1981). “Religion is better sung than recited, better danced than believed, better painted than talked about.”

Both celebration and challenge for the reunion of art and Christianity are primary in new books by D. Bruce Lockerbie and Madeleine L’Engle. Lockerbie’s The Timeless Moment (Cornerstone, 1980) contains the challenge to merge creativity and the Christian faith; L’Engle’s Walking on Water (Harold Shaw, 1980) celebrates the journey of the Christian artist, the living sign that “human beings are more than they are.” If L’Engle and Lockerbie are heard, the kingdom population could explode in glorious worship to God through color and shape and notes and words and movement. Our non-Christian friends might pause for an introduction to reality.

Lockerbie says, “Each of us is called by God to the vocation of artist, since being made in the image of God entitles each human being to image forth the Creator.”

I first became excited about the difference common creativity—that spark we all have—can make when I taught seventh- and eighth-grade children of missionaries. They knew biblical facts to excellence. But they were bored; the rainbow and song were missing. The Christian life cannot be celebrated with lists of facts and predictable offerings.

In those years of teaching, I tried to push assignments beyond mere facts. Often all those young people needed was the idea that God was not dull. They sang their own songs, made home movies, played with cartoon paraphrasing, wrote parables, dramatized. They were discovering what areas they might develop as creators offering back their works to the Creator.

An eighth grader struggling to own her faith wrote;

I am the grass in the field, Lord,

And you are the great, blue sky.

Wind tries to blow me down.

Rain hits me hard.

But I am trying to grow higher, higher

Into the blue heaven, Lord.

“We are God’s poems,” Lockerbie says, “written in the same meter and rhythm, the same form and shape, as the Incarnate Word himself. In the orders of Creation, as poems we are to beget poems; as creatures of his handiwork, we are to be fruitful and multiply, imitating our Divine Original.”

Our school systems train people to multiply, build, drive, repair, repeat. Why should not they and we give at least as much attention to developing the arts and gifts of creativity? Many of us are still childishly skilled in areas in which, with practice, we could have excelled. If my student had written her prayer-poem as an adult, it would lack the myth and magic mature poetry must have. But she was in the process of becoming; she was exercising for future excellence.

For years we have been told that Christians must push toward creative excellence. Sixteen years ago Frank E. Gaebelein wrote, “It is because of who and what God is, it is because of the beauty and truth manifest in his Son, it is because of the perfection of his redeeming work, that evangelicals can never be content with the mediocre in aesthetics” (CT, Feb. 26, 1965).

Today, Lockerbie says, “Easy-does-it-not! Like life itself, there can be no true art that is not born in pain and labor.”

L’Engle agrees. “The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birth-giver.”

We’ve had no lack of challenge and rationale for creativity. We need to act, supporting gifted people and growing in personal areas that will allow us to offer our lesser talents. Each of us should be involved in both processes. L’Engle points out that we often forget that God has a special gift for each of us, because “we tend to weigh and measure such gifts with the coin of the world’s market place.”

I like the story Elizabeth O’Connor tells about Michelangelo pushing a large rock down the street. An observer questioned his effort. Why labor so hard over a piece of stone? “Because there is an angel in that rock that wants to come out,” was Michelangelo’s answer.

Lockerbie’s and L’Engle’s books challenge us to chisel out our own angels and to support those whose carvings are superior to ours. “God the Creator calls each of us, his creatures, to share in his inimitable and absolute powers of creativity by allowing us to give form and shape to those ideals by which we live,” says Lockerbie.

In the past 20 years, 1,500 doctoral theses and over 200 books have been written about creativity. We now have hints of what happens in our brains when a “Eureka! I’ve-got-it!” experience occurs. Silvano Arieti adds significantly to our technical understanding in Creativity: The Magic Synthesis. Yet, there is still mystery. “Creativity, a prerogative of man, can be seen as the humble human counterpart of God’s creation. Whereas theologians and religious people in general believe that God’s creation comes ex nihilo, from spatial and temporal nothingness, human creativity uses what is already existing and available and changes it in unpredictable ways.… The creative process brings about a desirable enlargement of human experience.”

I loaned my copy of Timeless Moment to a friend because it is the best book I’ve read on creativity and the Christian faith. When she returned it, she apologized. “I kept it so long because it demands to be read slowly,” she said. “I feel I should be memorizing everything he says.”

Walking on Water is also in that worthremembering category. With L’Engle, I feel like a welcomed intruder, reading in her journal pieces of her life and her understanding of faith and art. The hardcover book may have been quickly written, but the pieces that made up her original “book” were done neither hastily nor easily. I suspect they span the miles of her life, paragraph by paragraph. Though the stringing of those paragraphs seems a bit forced, the beauty of words and depth of concepts is not lost.

“My feelings about art and my feelings about the Creator of the Universe are inseparable,” L’Engle writes. “To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing.” And, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

L’Engle stretched my thinking. For example, while I smile at what God is doing in many Christians, I can often see him more perfectly reflected in the work of others who don’t know him. Lockerbie quotes L’Engle: “We can’t tell God where he can or can’t be seen.” She quotes Canon A. M. Allchin of Canterbury Cathedral, England: “Provided he is an artist of integrity, he is a genuine servant of the glory which he does not recognize, and unknown to himself there is ‘something divine’ about his work.”

“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred,” she says, “and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”

“Science is only one of the methods of studying the world around us,” says Russian scientist Leonid Ponomarev in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards (J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1979). “Another—complementary—method is realized in art.… We cannot assess the degree of damage we undergo from a onesided perception of life.”

Researchers are encouraging curriculum developers to structure materials that encourage students to use both sides of their brains. Now we concentrate on the left. We analyze, abstract, count, verbalize. We process information in a linear, rational, and logical fashion. For educators, and for Christians, these functions are “safe” (though to ignore them would be dangerous).

The functions of the right sides of our brains may not be safe in that sense. With the right we perceive images holistically, think abstractly, develop imaginatively. We should be making conscious efforts in our Sunday schools, our Bible classes, our worship planning committees, to develop and use the products of the right. I like to think of myself as a product of the right side of God’s brain, and my goal should be to give him back a bit of his own.

Created—the first active verb in most versions of the Bible. Creativity—we each have a smaller or larger potential. It dare not be an inactive concept among God’s people. What are we willing to venture to prove L’Engle right when she says, “Unless we are creators, we are not fully alive”?

MARLENE LEFEVERMrs. LeFever is administrative youth and teacher growth editor for David C. Cook Publishing Company in Elgin, Illinois, and the author of several books.

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