Friday, June 02, 2006

Walking On Water

I just finished a great book. It's called Walking on Water and it's by Madeline L'Engle. It's her writing about art and the christian artist. Very inspiring. Here are a few quotes from it:


The artist, if he is not to forget how to listen, must retain the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns, and all the lovely creatures which our world would put in a box marked Children Only.

As quoting George MacDonald: "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his."

As quoting Cardinal Suhard: "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist."

We human beings far too often tend to codify God, to feel that we know where he is and where he is not, and this arrogance leads to such things as the Spanish Inquistion, the Salem witch burnings, and has the result of further fragmenting an already broken Christendom. We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds.

Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been still-born.

How many of us really want life, life more abundant, life which does not promise any fringe benefits or early retirement plans? Life which does not promise the absence of pain, or love which is not vulnerable and open to hurt?

But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential.

We write, we make music, we draw pictures, because we are listening to meaning, feeling for healing. And during the writing of the story, or the painting, or the composing or singing or playing, we are returned to that open creativity which was ours when we were children. We cannot be mature artists if we have lost the ability to believe which we had as children. An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith.

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham to living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to recieve and give love.

In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self control which he normally clings to, and is open to riding the wind. Something almost always happens to startle us during the act of creating, but not unless we let go our adult intellectual control and become as open as little children. This does not mean to set aside or discard the intellect, but to understand that it is not to become a dictator, for when it does we are closed off from revelation.

The artist must be open to the wider truths, the shadow side, the strange worlds beyond time................We are not taught much about the wilder aspects of Christianity......God is constantly creating, in us, through us, with us, and to co-create with God is our human calling. It is the calling for all of us, his creatures, but it is perhaps more conscious with the artist - or should I say the Christian artist?...for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his mighty actions comprehensible to our finite minds. It is not that the power to understand is not available to us; it is; he has promised it. But it is a power far greater than the power stations for our greatest cities, and we find it easier not to get too close to it, because we know that this power can kill as well as illuminate.

But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive...Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living...Our freedom to be creators is far less limited than some people would think.

There is much that we cannot understand, but our lack of comprehension neither negates nor eliminates it.

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