why do we face God?

Posted on 19 Dec 2006

To wrestle with lightness and darkness, it is perhaps the highest calling of the artist… to find meaning between places of confusion, or as I like to see it, being a stormchaser: one who willingly faces chaos and brings back words and meaning…

So, using the Mozart vs. Salieri story from the film “Amadeus”, there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between the quality of work from those who intentionally face God and those who do not. If anything, those who face God are at a disadvantage as we believe to have witnessed the truth and when God is the Lord of your life you have access to life’s answers, all nicely packaged and preserved in the King James. Sadly, believers tend to have a knack for better cheese . The answers shouldn’t be boring should they? Perhaps it is the pretense that is boring. Perhaps it is presenting all light that is boring. A certain well-maligned Painter of Lightâ„¢ said he paints as if the Fall never happened. I really don’t understand this. Consequently, he must paint as though Christ wasn’t necessary. Lovely.

So why do we face God?

&this:
should your Attention Deficit Disorder need a moment to meditate, try this Aphex Twin on for size: “Girl/Boy“.


14 Replies to "why do we face God?"

  • cris
    20 Dec 2006 (06:44)
    Reply

    Reminds me of the woman’s question at Kindlings the other week. I forget exactly how she phrased it, but something about how being people of faith should make us better artists but it doesn’t (necessarily). Why do we feel like it should and how? I’ve always taken “he has placed eternity in the hearts of men” to mean that all people share the ability to be co-creators (Lewis’s or Tolkein’s word?). We can be suprised by God anywhere.

    So, I like your question. I’ll be mulling it over because I realize I don’t have an answer or more questions right now that ring very true or deep. They are answers I’ve heard before but not mine.

    I’d rather paint redemption than paradise.

  • Anonymous
    21 Dec 2006 (06:40)
    Reply

    stormchaser, i like this discussion. a thought we haven’t explored yet…

    perhaps it’s the distinction between those who intentionally face God and believe they have witness/access to the Truth and those who intentionally face God and believe they have witness to the Glory of God. one is about self-sufficiency (cloaked in God-centeredness); one is about humility and God-sufficiency.

    perhaps art that pretends to show the Truth feels empty, to some degree, because it feels falsely arrogant. and perhaps there is equally a place for attempts to reveal what we think we know of the Truth as there are attempts to question what we know we don’t know. both, in my mind, are important and inform the other. there is a valid place for Thomas Kinkaide and Top 40 pop. i can appreciate them too, because they are respite from the pain of not knowing how deep and complicated Truth truly is.

    keep ’em coming.

  • LP
    21 Dec 2006 (10:39)
    Reply

    no wonder i can’t stand that guy’s paintings.

    shouldn’t we “paint” as though the fall happened, but there’s beauty anyway? i mean, isn’t that what grace is all about?

    i don’t think beauty is so beautiful with nothing ugly to compare it with…

    so anyway…why do we face God?

    maybe because when we face God we see ourselves for who we really are…not necesarily a good view…

    ahh.. i don’t know. i think the boring is the “everything is cut and dried and nice and neat and kjv”.

    if you’re really facing God, your art shouldn’t suffer, because the real God is…is not a tame lion. is not a boring painting. is not an easy answer that doesn’t really work.
    the real God is absurd and makes sense at the same time, he allows light and darkness at the same time, he loves and he’s just.

    prettymuch, i don’t think i can get my head around it. but do i want to? no…

  • Zadok
    21 Dec 2006 (18:08)
    Reply

    I knew TK would elicit conversation. So…

    Top 40/Kincaid as respite? I must admit that it is a decent argument to be ok with something light–even erring on cheese. He and others are such easy targets. I am so caught up in my elite sensibilities that demonizing crap work becomes a quick way to validate my own “deep and cool” self. I am no Andy Warhol, I am probably more TK than I realize. And yes God allows light and dark, but how does he prefer I handle the dark? Should I take a sojourn to the bottom of a bottle this weekend to get into the darkness, to better know light? be less of a TK and more of a Warhol? Would Mozart have created better music had he accepted Christ and kept away from booze?

  • LP
    22 Dec 2006 (09:59)
    Reply

    i don’t think you need to go anywhere to know the darkness.

  • Anonymous
    22 Dec 2006 (20:54)
    Reply

    Well, artistic expression came from the line of Cain after the fall, so it makes sense that it only really works when it expresses darkeness and sin. Redemption will leave art behind.

  • Anonymous
    22 Dec 2006 (20:57)
    Reply

    Kidding. Ha ha.

    Actually, I haven’t really found an answer to this that satisfies me, either. I do think it has something to do with art being, at it’s best, an honest expression of our hearts and our experience as it is, rather than trying to envision something that isn’t. (There’s a reason people find Dante’s Inferno and Purgatory a lot more interesting than the Paradiso). A lot of the ‘cheesy Christian music’ falls flat for me because it’s trying to instruct, or push us somewhere, rather than resonating with where we are. I do think that hope and God can be expressed well, when it comes from that genuine longing and cry of our hearts, for real (‘Streets Have no Name’ being a good example for me).

  • Anonymous
    24 Dec 2006 (03:23)
    Reply

    i agree with lp. there is no need to seek out darkness or light; both are impossible to miss with open eyes. and what would be the point? to contrive the sources of our inspiration? this too would be falsely arrogant. “art is either plagiarism or revolution.” – Paul Gauguin

    merry christmas!

  • LME
    24 Dec 2006 (19:58)
    Reply

    It is both the darkness and the light that reminds us that we are not alone…
    It is both the darkness and light that creates the tension in a life that we must straddle.
    Can we not moan and work to recover hope at the same time in music? Why do they have to be seperated.
    I want a music/”worship” experiance to help the seeds of hope that are inside of me to grow…b/c they are trampled daily by the feet of the world and covered by the dirt of despair. Life creates the darkness, i want to uncover the hope. I want music to tend to the seeds of hope within people that are buried…and i believe that the “darkness” and the “light” need to be married in music in order to enable us to more greatly brave the tension of this life.
    i want to feel the same hope i can feel sitting with a cancer patient, whose body is ridden with cancer- yet still lives…their hope is unexplanable/ un-understandable as they sit in the “darkness” of their circumstance. That is both “darkness” and “light”. hmmmm…. i have needed both in life to even know the beauty of the light… i am glad to see light in art, and certainly glad for the relationship to the art that speaks to despair/darkness etc…

  • The Chiz
    29 Dec 2006 (07:37)
    Reply

    I just had a great discussion about this with my dad the other day over a little Sufjan in the car… My feeling is this- the “cheese” as we are calling it seems to result from an assertion or ownership of the truth, rather than an honest exploration of where the truth leaves us. I guess I have to explain context- My dad and I were listening to Sufjan’s Illinois album; right around Casimir Pulaski Day, my dad says, “this song is one of the most earnest and honest songs I can remember hearing in a long time. If I think about it too long, it makes me tear up.” The song recounts a young boy (Sufjan?) who’s young love of a girl is complicated by cancer and finally death; even after praying and yearning, “nothing ever happens” and the young girl passes away, leaving the boy with a gigantic question mark, a huge “WTF?!?!” I agreed with my dad, making he connection that Sufjan didn’t give us an answer or a cleverly phrased bit of fundamentalist jargon- he gives us a real-life slice of what it means to be a person of faith and not understand why the “miracle-makin’ power” didn’t swoop down and cure the cancer. I mean, that’s what I wanted to happen. But it didn’t. And yet, my faith was somehow bolstered more because I recognized this situation as something very near to the human condition and not some made-up fantasy world where sin doesn’t exist or is easily dispensed with or forgotten about sans the bloody sacrifice of Christ. I think we straddle darkness and light all the time, and I think that good artists do this regardless of where their faith, or lack of, may be. They are responding to what they see rather than pushing their creation as a means to getting a point across. That, if I remember some of my art history, would look a lot like some of the communist propaganda art which tried to insinuate an ideal and a form that was not real and never would be real.

  • Zadok
    29 Dec 2006 (17:52)
    Reply

    Your comments, lovelies, are full of brilliance. It is a true blessing to wonder such issues with all of you and, in some ways, find some understanding on this issue. We could probably wrestle with this one till Kingdom come. So we don’t have to really try hard to see the dark, if anything we have been trained to look away from it. To be honest and to create involves opening the eyes a bit wider and wondering. And to do so minus as much pretense as one can muster. I bet I’m working at around 95% pretense, 5% guts. I think I like that, guts. Sufjan has the guts to say: “nothing ever happens”? I’m off to straddle light and dark now.

  • nicole
    29 Dec 2006 (21:11)
    Reply

    Wow, this is really meaty. I like the idea of searching for meaning between places of confusion. I’m not sure I understand the reasoning behind wonder being used as the nature of finding good ways of explaining ambivalence, and empathy as further obscuring it. Perhaps this can spark lively debate and conjecture at a later time.

    I do like the metaphor of Amadeus and Salieri as the difference between the artistic renderings of thise who face God and those who do not. But, in this instance, which is the one who has seen God? The one who is constantly tormented and unhappy, working so hard to achieve the perfect artistic expression, or the one who rests in His abilities, lives and breathes his gift, and enjoys it as lavishly as he enjoys his life?

    On some level, I crave the notion that to face God in our Art; to live in the beauty of the gift of artistic expression that we’ve been given means to revel in it, and enjoy with abandon.

  • nicole
    29 Dec 2006 (21:20)
    Reply

    …because I still have far too little abandon…

  • Jeremy
    21 Jan 2007 (01:23)
    Reply

    haha!
    Hey guys, (and Zdk) you guys rock!- it’s good to see your posts ;)

    these things are something I’ve been thinking about lately…

    … in what way does the doctrine of “original sin” (or the the possibility of that not being the case)
    play into this?

    …what if the world is actually as bright as the Kingdom of God?
    What if our pre-concieved notions of what is “truth”… prevent us from seeing the truth… that has always been … in front of us?

    …what is it my my world-view that is
    “not quite”?

    …of course not the answer is not to self-flagellate for not seeing perfection (for that would assume the first world view)

    …but gently prompt us to wonder…
    what may be… “more quite” ;)

    Love,
    Jeremy


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