• I will not read this book because it might shake my belief in the answers I am so comfortable with.
Zeal for thine house hath eaten me up.
But Bertrand Russell says, “Zeal is a bad mark for a cause. Nobody has any zeal about arithmetic. It is not the vaccinationists but the antivaccinationists who generate zeal. People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.”
It is hard for us to believe now that there were antivaccinationists, when vaccinations have succeeded in wiping smallpox from the planet. It is hard for us to believe that Dr. Semmelweis was almost torn to pieces when he suggested that physicians should wash their hands before delivering babies in order to help prevent the septicemia or puerperal fever which killed so many women after childbirth. It is hard for us to believe that Bach was considered heretical when he put the thumb under instead of over the fingers on the keyboard. It is hard for us to believe that Shakespeare was considered a trivial playwright because he was too popular. But great negative zeal was expended in all of these cases.
We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our ears and eyes open to that which may expand or even change that which we so zealously think we know.
My non-Christian friends and acquaintances are zealous in what they “know” about Christianity, which bears little or no relationship to anything I believe.
A friend of mine, Betty Beckwith, in her book, If I Had the Wings of the Morning, writes about taking her brain-damaged child to a Jewish doctor. He said, “You people think of us as the people who killed your Christ.” Spontaneously she replied, “Oh, no. We think of you as the people who gave him to us.”
—
In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.
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? The number of people who attempt to withdraw from life through the abuse of alcohol, tranquilizers, barbiturates is statistically shocking.
How many of us dare to open ourselves to that truth which would make us free? Free to talk to Roman Catholics or charismatics or Jews, as Jesus was free to talk to tax collectors or publicans or Samaritans. Free to feast at the Lord’s table with those whose understanding of the Body and Blood may be a little different from ours. Free to listen to angels. Free to run across the lake when we are called.
What is a true icon of God to one person may be blasphemy to another. And it is not possible for us flawed human beings to make absolute zealous judgments as to what is and what is not religious art. I know what is religious art for me. You know what is religious art for you. And they are not necessarily the same. Not everybody feels pulled up to heavenly heights in listening to the pellucid, mathematically precise structure of a Bach fugue. The smarmy picture of Jesus which I find nauseating may be for someone else a true icon.
—
Another problem about identifying what is and what is not religious art is that religious art transcends its culture and reflects the eternal, and while we are alive we are caught within our culture. All artists reflect the time in which they live, but whether or not their work also has that universality which lives in any generation or culture is nothing we can know for many years. Also, art which is truly iconographic for one period may have little to say to another. My parents, who were in their thirties at the time of the First World War, loved Romantic music, Chopin, Wagner—how they loved Wagner! But Wagner has little to say to me. The reasonable, peaceful world in which my parents grew up, the world which was far too civilized for war, was broken forever by the horror of World War I. My father went to fight in the war to end war, and for the rest of his life he had to live with the knowledge that not only had his war not ended war, it was the beginning of a century of near-total war.
My generation, and my children’s, living in this embattled and insane period, finds more nourishment in the structure of Bach and Mozart than in the lush romanticism of Wagner. Wagner is fine if the world around one is stable. But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential.
Usually, after the death of a well-known artist, there comes a period of eclipse of his work. If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive. It’s difficult to believe that for several centuries after Shakespeare’s death he was virtually unknown. William Green, his contemporary, was considered a better playwright than the too-popular Will, who pandered to public taste. But was it pandering? Art should communicate with as many people as possible, not just with a group of the esoteric elite. And who remembers Green today?
Bach, too, was eclipsed and remembered as a good church organist rather than a composer, and for a long time that putting of the thumb under the fingers was held against him; no wonder the thumb had been very little used in keyboard music until Bach came along with this “radical” departure from custom.
Bach might have been forgotten forever had not Mendelssohn discovered some monks wrapping parcels in music manuscript—and given the St. Matthew Passion back to the world.
The St. Matthew Passion is an icon of the highest quality for me, an open door into the realm of the numinous. Bach, of course, was a man of deep and profound religious faith, a faith which shines through his most secular music. As a matter of fact, the melody of his moving chorale “O sacred head now wounded” was the melody of a popular street song of the day, but Bach’s religious genius was so great that it is now recognized as one of the most superb pieces of religious music ever written.
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older. But they start off without self-consciousness as they paint their purple flowers, their anatomically impossible people, their thunderous, sulphurous skies. They don’t worry that they may not be as good as Di Chirico or Bracque; they know intuitively that it is folly to make comparisons, and they go ahead and say what they want to say. What looks like a hat to a grownup may, to the child artist, be an elephant inside a boa constrictor.
So what happens? Why do we lose our wonderful, rackety creativity? What corrupts us?
Corrupt: another unpopular word; another important one. Its importance first struck me when I was reading Thomas Traherne, one of my favourite seventeenth-century poets and mystics. “Certainly Adam and Eve in Paradise had not more sweete and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I was a child,” he wrote. Everything was new and delightful for him. The rosy glow of sunrise had in it the flaming glory of creation. The stars at night were a living, heavenly dance. He listened to the grass growing, smelled the west wind, tasted the rain, touched the grains of sand on the shore. All his senses, his mind, his heart, were alive and in touch with being. “So that,” Traherne adds sadly, “without much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world, which now I unlearn, and become as it were a little child again, that I may enter into the kingdom of God.”
A lot of my adult life has been spent in trying to overcome this corruption, in unlearning the dirty devices of this world, which would dull our imaginations, cut away our creativity. So it is only with the conscious-unself-consciousness of a child that I can think about theories of aesthetics, of art, particularly as these touch upon my questions about life and love and God.
—
I was still at the age of unself-conscious spontaneity whe
n I started to write. At the age of five I wrote a story, which my mother saved for a long time, about a little “grul,” my five-year-old spelling for girl.
I wrote stories because I was a solitary, only child in New York City, with no easily available library where I could get books. So when I had read all the stories in my bookcase, the only way for me to get more stories to read was to write them.
And I knew, as a child, that it was through story that I was able to make some small sense of the confusions and complications of life. The sound of coughing from my father’s gas-burned lungs was a constant reminder of war and its terror. At school I read a book about the Belgian babies impaled on bayonets like small, slaughtered animals. I saw pictures of villages ravaged by the Bôches. The thought that there could ever be another war was a source of deep fear. I would implore my parents, “There won’t be another war, will there?” My parents never lied to me. They tried to prepare me for this century of war, not to frighten me.
But I was frightened, and I tried to heal my fear with stories, stories which gave me courage, stories which affirmed that ultimately love is stronger than hate. If love is stronger than hate, then war is not all there is. I wrote, and I illustrated my stories. At bedtime my mother told me more stories. And so story helped me to learn to live. Story was in no way an evasion of life, but a way of living life creatively instead of fearfully.
It was a shock when one day in school one of the teachers accused me of “telling a story.” She was not complimenting me on my fertile imagination. She was making the deadly accusation that I was telling a lie.
If I learned anything from that teacher, it was that lie and story are incompatible. If it holds no truth, then it cannot truly be story. And so I knew that it was in story that I found flashes of that truth which makes us free.
—
And yet we are still being taught that fairy tales and myths are to be discarded as soon as we are old enough to understand “reality.” I received a disturbed and angry letter from a young mother who told me that a friend of hers, with young children, gave them only instructive books; she wasn’t going to allow their minds to be polluted with fairy tales. They were going to be taught the “real” world.
This attitude is a victory for the powers of this world. A friend of mine, a fine storyteller, remarked to me, “Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.”
Yes. God who told stories.
St. Matthew says, “And he spake many things unto them in parables…and without a parable spake he not unto them.”
When the powers of this world denigrate and deny the value of story, life loses much of its meaning; and for many people in the world today, life has lost its meaning, one reason why every other hospital bed is for someone with a mental, not a physical, illness.
Clyde Kilby writes, “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything….It is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.”
The well-intentioned mothers who don’t want their children polluted by fairy tales would not only deny them their childhood, with its high creativity, but they would have them conform to the secular world, with its dirty devices. The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs but in truth.
When I was a child, reading Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, reading about Joseph and his coat of many colours and his infuriating bragging about his dreams, reading The Selfish Giant and The Book of Jonah, these diverse stories spoke to me in the same language, and I knew intuitively that they belonged to the same world. For the world of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, is the world of story, story which may be able to speak to us as a Word of God.
The artist who is a Christian, like any other Christian, is required to be in this world, but not of it. We are to be in this world as healers, as listeners, and as servants.
In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.
We write, we make music, we draw pictures, because we are listening for 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.
—
Bach is, for me, the Christian artist par excellence, and if I ask myself why, I think it has something to do with his sense of newness. I’ve been working on his C Minor Toccata and Fugue since college, and I find something new in it every day. And perhaps this is because God was new for Bach every day, was never taken for granted. Too often we do take God for granted. I’m accustomed to being a Christian. I was born of Christian parents who were born of Christian parents who were…
That’s all right when one is a child, that comfortable familiarity with being Christian, because to the child, as to Thomas Traherne when he was small, everything is wonderful and new, even familiarity. The edge has not been taken off the glory of God’s creation. But later on there comes a time when this very familiarity can become one of those corrupting devices. We learn this early, in our attachment to certain bedtime routines of bath and story and prayer and teddy bear and glass of water and good-night kiss—and the routine must never be varied because this is security in what the child learns early is an insecure world.
This past winter, while our three grandchildren were with us because their parents were in the Holy Land, I knew the joy again of a bedtime routine with a two-and-a-half-year-old. Edward and I sang “Molly Malone” and “Speed Bonny Boat” at the piano. Then came bath and bed and more songs, and finally the great moment of the bedtime routine came when he looked at his great-grandmother’s charm bracelet, and particularly a small, silver wicker basket, which we opened with extreme care, for within it was the baby Moses. The basket was the basket of bulrushes in which Moses’ mother put him in the river, that he might be found by Pharaoh’s daughter. Edward would hold this tiny metal baby, less than a centimeter long, and look at it wonderingly, and every night he would say, “He will grow up to be a great prince.”
The child himself will know when it is time to let this safe routine go, when holding the soft corner of the favourite blanket is no longer needed for sleep, when the most dearly loved stuffed animal can stay in the toy chest. It is a mistake for the parent to try too abruptly to break the pattern. Most children will let it go when the right time comes. But there are other and less creative familiarities which remain with us and dull our perceptions. When we lose waking up in the morning as though each day was going to be full of adventure, joys, and dangers, and wake up instead to the alarm clock (as most of us must, and how lovely those rare nights when we look at the clock and don’t have to set the alarm) and the daily grind, and mutter about TGIF, we lose the newborn quality of belief which is so lovely in the child. It may be less lovely in the artist; it can occasionally be infuriating; but without it there is no impulse to rush to the canvas to set down that extraordinary smile, to catch the melody in the intricacies of a fugue, to reach out to life and then see Hamlet pull back, and wonder why.
—
Along with reawakening the sense of newness, Bach’s music points me to wholeness, a wholeness of body, mind, and spirit, which we seldom glimpse, but which we are intended to know. It is no coincidence that the root word of whole, health, heal, holy, is hale (as in hale and hearty). If we are healed, we become whole; we are hale and hearty; we are holy.
The marvellous thing is that this holiness is nothing we can earn. We don’t become holy by acquiring merit badges and Brownie points. It h
as nothing to do with virtue or job descriptions or morality. It is nothing we can do in this do-it-yourself world. It is gift, sheer gift, waiting there to be recognized and received. We do not have to be qualified to be holy. We do not have to be qualified to be whole, or healed.
The fact that I am not qualified was rammed into me early, and though this hurt, it was salutary. As a small child I was lonely not only because I was an only child in a big city but also because I was slightly lame, extremely introverted, and anything but popular at school. There was no question in my mind that I was anything but whole, that I did not measure up to the standards of my peers or teachers. And so, intuitively, I turned to writing as a way of groping towards wholeness. I wrote vast quantities of short stories and poetry; I painted and played the piano. I lived far too much in an interior world, but I did learn that I didn’t have to be qualified according to the world’s standards in order to write my stories. It was far more likely my total lack of qualifications that turned me to story to search for meaning and truth, to ask those eternal questions: Why? What is it all about? Does my life have any meaning? Does anybody care?
To try to find the answers to these questions, I not only wrote but also read omnivorously, anything I could get my hands on—fairy tales, the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, the story of Tobias and the angel, Gideon and the angel. Very early in my life the Bible taught me to care about angels. I also read about dreams in the Bible, and so I took dreams seriously. I read and reread and reread Emily of New Moon, by L. M. Montgomery, author of the more famous stories about Anne of Green Gables. I liked the Anne stories, but especially I loved Emily, because she, too, wanted to be a writer, a real writer; she, too, walked to the beat of a different drummer; she had a touch of second sight, that gift which allows us to peek for a moment at the world beyond ordinary space and time.
My lonely solitude kept me far more in touch with this world of the imagination than I would have been had I been off with the other children playing hopscotch or skipping rope. It was this world which gave me assurance of meaning and reality despite the daily world in which I was a misfit, and in which I knew many fears as I overheard my parents talking about the nations once again lining up for war.
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art Page 5