Kelli Sallman Writing & Editing

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Why Art?

In my faith tradition, I often find myself giving an apologetic for how we ignore art at our peril, why instead we must invest in art, teach the vocabulary of art, celebrate art. In my children’s school district, the leadership recently considered ways to continue elevating STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) over everything else and incorporate electives for law, medicine, and other professional fields into the curriculum, even at the middle school level. Since the school-day length stays the same, these additions required a subtraction: the arts and the full-time positions of the artists who taught these courses. Thankfully, a parental outcry countered the intended loss.

We often treat the arts, at best, as an expendable luxury; at worst, a corrupting distraction. Art careers are often considered “flighty choices,” “undependable,” “childishly irresponsible,” “economically dumb.” I’ll give you that last one. Art careers may be economically dumb in our current value system. So is going into the pastorate or serving as a missionary. Yet all are spiritually smart for those called to such fields to serve and equip the body of Christ.

Faith communities understand the value of pastors and missionaries. In many traditions, we even outsize the role of pastor and missionary and diminish the rest of the faith community’s pursuit of human flourishing. But many churchgoers still ask, “Why art?”—excusing the music minister, of course, and maybe the worship-screen graphic designer. Why prioritize an, illusive, elite, expendable, expensive—go ahead, put your favorite descriptor on it—endeavor to create what seems ambiguous content?

 

Art Moves Us

Recently I have again picked up my poetry pen. In many ways I feel I have come full circle back home to a warm fire and cozy slippers. Poetry is where I started as a child and has always been the driving force of how I write. Poetry is more than the words on a page. Literary writing, narrative writing, poetic writing—all these art forms multiply the root words at their base by the power of sensory experience, shared memory, and emotion. Art creates an exponential equation for either the well-being or detriment of those it touches.

It moves us beyond rational expression. Verbal and nonverbal forms use sensory experience to prick the emotions. Done well, they pierce the soul, they give us a glimpse of beauty, they express a greater truth than we can reach by reason alone. You cannot articulate the fullness of art through logical discourse. Rational thought is merely a subset of wisdom, not its clone.

This glimpse of beauty, this fuller truth—these effects serve well enough as answer to “Why art?” But good art does more than increase understanding. Art helps us to listen. Art helps us to move.

Think. Which moves you more and causes you to respond with your feet and heart? A study stating that the underprivileged suffer? An imperative to serve the poor? (Maybe the feet but not the heart.) Or images and minor-key music showing poverty’s suffering, poetry linking the daily experience of the impoverished to your worst painful moments, story giving you insight into the humanness of one poor individual who breathes and bleeds just like you?

Advertisers and movie makers know the answer to this question. They exploit it. The church, sadly, often does not. Information is important. Moral imperatives are important. But if we want to reach into the center of heart change, if we want dead people to wake up and start living and loving, we have to press beneath data and “shoulds” to our emotional and experiential core.

 

Art Makes Us Remember Our Humanity

The ancients understood this connection between art and action. They ordered their spaces and time around rituals and artifacts that pictured their beliefs. They painted and carved and chiseled and tiled stories of divine favor, victory in war, and pursuits of immortality. They embedded history and the ordering of the universe into memory through story. They worshiped with sensory input: incense, burnt offerings, feasting, light and dark, song and rhythm, the seasons, and the weight of water, blood, and breath.

In Scripture, God often takes a familiar culture liturgy and reorders its pattern[1] to reflect the beauty of who he really is. Do the ancients of Sumer and Akkad create temple and garden space so that their deity can take up residence and have the people meet his needs? Then the God of the Bible will tell his story with a similar temple and garden space—a space in the cosmos that reflects order and sacred rest—so he can take up residence there and meet the people’s needs.[2]

Do first-century religious Jews restrict women from the holy places and withhold from them the rituals, spiritual education, and honor, in part because of the impurity of their monthly flow? Then Jesus will be pleased to draw attention to the touch of a woman beset with constant hemorrhaging and his delight that she drew near to him for healing (Mk 5:25–34). And God will cause Mark to draw that story within the midst of the tale of Jairus’s daughter (5:21–24, 35–43). We often think the frame narrative is about the faith of Jairus. But what if the whole is really about God treasuring his daughters and wanting to gather them near and give them life? We know Jesus could have healed the girl from a distance. And he could have healed the woman in secret. What exponential message does he send through his touch to these ritually unclean “dead” females? The quotient of these healings is more than the words “Little girl, I say to you arise” plus “Daughter, your faith has made you well” (41, 34). It is action times posture times character times setting times dialogue times God equals justice.

Have women gained value in our culture? If they have, it is because we first experienced that beauty here, in artful story glimpsing the divine.

 James K. A. Smith, author of the Cultural Liturgies series that includes Desiring the Kingdom, spoke at Dallas Theological Seminary during their Arts Week in early November 2018. He discussed the “aesthetics of our assimilation” and “cultural capitulation”—that we are “blindly unaware of cultural forces that influence our imagination and disrupt a people.” In our daily habits, we are “scripted into stories,” with all their metaphorical power, and those narratives “seep into our bones in such a way that they come to really dominate what philosophers call the background of our perception, a background horizon…that shapes the very way we perceive the world”: The consumerism of the shopping mall. The quiet-space interruption of the smart phone. The homogenous gathering of God’s people in our various churches. In participating in these rituals, “we absorb rival gospels as an unconscious vision of a way of life, and then we act toward them. We are pulled toward a different vision of the good life that rivals the vision of the kingdom of God.”

Like cultural influence, not all art moves us in a good direction toward the kingdom. Art is a tool wielded by the artist to move humanity toward a destination influenced by the artist’s spiritual core. Like preachers, neither art nor artists are perfect. But what the artist can do for us, especially in our modern age, is help us slow down and notice, help us see the patterns and metaphors we have unconsciously accepted as the good life, help us create new rituals to notice and produce beauty.

And in an era and place that has moved far toward comfort and virtual reality and away from nature, art connects us to our universe. Art reminds us of the beauty of the lily, the texture of sackcloth and ashes, the shape of the wind that is both breath and spirit. Art connects the metaphysical with the physical, delusion with truth, and the human with other humans. Art reminds of our humanity, with all its facets, in a created world.

 

Art Reveals the “Mysterious Equations of Love”

A few nights ago, the television ritual captured me once again. I had just spoken of a movie with a colleague days before, and there it was among the multi-channel lineup, available for consumption: Akiva Goldsman and Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind. I succumbed.

[Spoiler alert]

The movie tells the story, with some poetic license, of real-life mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., whose unorthodox thinking gives him success and creativity in mathematical theory. As an arrogant asocial, better with numbers than people, Nash lives on the margins of the social graces. But he manages to capture the affection of grad student Alicia, who readjusts her “girlish ideas of romance” and accepts his proposal. Before long, however, an explosion of schizophrenic paranoid delusions that have become his background horizon derails his family and brilliant academic career.

Insulin and shock therapy and antipsychotic medication reduce Nash to a shell without joy or intellectual capacity. Together, John and Alicia devise an experiment for how he might function without the debilitating drugs: he will manage the delusions by filtering everything he thinks he sees and hears through a logic grid, and when he fails to know reality from delusion in his head, he will know what’s real, because of her, in his heart.

 A lifetime later, Nash has been allowed back on Princeton Campus. He has regained the ability to study and teach math. Unexpectedly, he learns he will receive the Nobel Prize in Economics for his early work on game theory. At his acceptance speech—a complete fabrication by the filmmakers for the sake of art—Nash says a few powerful words:

 “What truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has taken me to the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional, and back. I have made the most important discovery of my career—the most important discovery of my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found. I am only here tonight because of you [motioning to his wife with the handkerchief he keeps in the pocket over his heart]. You are the only reason I am. You are all [acknowledging the whole audience] my reasons. Thank you.”

I cried for an hour. I knew it was coming, I knew it was fiction, I’ve seen it before, and yet the moment moved me to tears. Why? Because in an earlier scene, John’s wife is a shell-shocked survivor of John’s devastating schizophrenia diagnosis. He is unable to work, unable to provide, unable to connect emotionally, unable to have sexual desire for his wife, unable to be the brilliant creative mathematician he is. Not only his trajectory but hers changed overnight. Her husband disappears and yet remains.

She responds to a question about her well-being from one of John’s friends with an admission that a large part of her wants to leave John and this illness she didn’t know she was marrying. But instead she looks at her emotionally dead husband—a financial, physical, and psychological drain—and chooses to love and see the man she knows he could be but may never be again.

And that moment, really, is the best answer to why art?

Because as someone with a physical chronic illness that my husband didn’t know he was marrying and as someone who walks through the clutches of depression from time to time and cares for others who suffer mental health ailments, I connected.

Because true love itself isn’t an emotion; it’s a selfless choice followed by sacrificial action that hopefully someday produces the best kind of emotion not in me but in someone else: the joy of being known and loved.

Because love in a naturalistic world makes no rational sense, yet we crave to be loved like that, to feel love like that.

Because love like that makes no sense unless you’ve touched the divine. Unless you’ve known beauty. Unless you’ve felt art.


[1] In making my point here, I’m passing over a more complicated discussion of first cause, whether ancient Near Eastern worship took this form due to generational memory of the historical garden (as I believe) or whether Scripture restates historical beginnings, however they happened, in temple and garden imagery merely to provide a rhetorical polemic to contemporaries at the time of the writing.

[2] See Genesis 1–2 and Revelation 21–22. See also John Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), especially p. 49. “In the ancient world, the temple was the command center of the cosmos—it was the control room from where the god maintained order, made decrees and exercised sovereignty. Temple-building accounts often accompanied cosmologies because after the god had established order (the focus of cosmologies in the ancient world), he took control of that ordered system. This is the element that we are sadly missing when we read the Genesis account. God has ordered the cosmos with the purpose of taking up his residence in it and ruling over it. … In the ancient world, a god’s place in his temple is established so that people can relate to him by meeting his needs (ritually). That is not the case in Israel, where God has no needs. He wants to relate to his people in an entirely different way.”

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