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Last night it clicked. Sitting in homegroup, discussing something not at all related to my epiphany, I moved a step forward in understanding how art fits into Christianity.

It’s obvious to say, and to say it makes it sound more simple than the nuanced revelation it was, but last night I understood that art is powerful because it reminds us that there is goodness, truth, and real beauty to be obtained. Good art inspires, it moves us to continue on our united journey to put the world back into working order.

As Christians we live with the knowledge that things will never be put back into perfect order while we are alive, that it is a hopeless pursuit to expect perfection here on earth.

Still, we are required to hope in what is to come and to work towards bringing it back, it is our daily task. This is the command of Loving God and Loving our Neighbors that we are so clearly given by Christ.

But the art thing was a big thing I’ve been struggling with. How can we live out the gospel and still have time to pursue things like art? How does art fit in Christianity?

That’s why last night was a big revelation for me. I don’t fully understand it, but here’s some things I’ve gathered so far from this step forward:

• There is still a big place for “dark” art – Flannery O’Connor’s novels and depressing films and such – because they tend to remind us of how broken the world is. In fact, in painting the world honestly, we are often inspired to work more towards the goal, challenged to continue in our efforts. I find that often times I get tired and build this small bubble to live in where I’m convinced the world is doing ok. It’s really not, and good art can remind me of that.
• Artists, in their artistic pursuits, are actually working towards redeeming the world. Just as in the Old Testament rituals and icons were used to signify abstract truths and constantly remind the Jewish people of God’s constant presence in their lives, so art has multiple levels that work to bring us fully alive and remind us how intertwined the spiritual is with the physical.
• There’s some thoughts I’d love to bring out about sentimentality in art, especially art from Christians, but those thoughts aren’t fully formed.

That’s all I’ve got for now. It was a simple revelation, mostly just I finally figured out how the pieces of the puzzle I’ve stared at for years fit together, and now that I seem them together in front of me it seems at once obvious, barely worth mentioning, and somehow revolutionary.

I’d appreciate any thoughts and critiques of these ideas – nothing is permanent in my mind as I pursue Truth.

The wife and I went to see  the Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged in Centennial Park tonight. It was rollicking good fun. I was crying from laughing so hard – pretty much the whole way through.

On our way there, driving down Eastland passing RosePepper and Ugly Mugs we were confronted with this glorious sight, so I had to get out and stand in the road and take a picture!

Sunset

And then after parking, the Parthenon was looking quite glorious so I had to capture that as well, all before the show even began.

The Parthenon at Dusk

Only three actors were involved in the production.

Bradley Brown (As a humble narrator)

Christopher Campbell (As Julius Caesar? It was hard to keep track)

Benjamin Reed (Giving the second most famous speech from Hamlet)

There was a great deal of cross-dressing, editing liberties, misinformation, more editing liberties, some choice dialogue from across the Bard’s plays, and all the comedies condensed into one section because as we all found out, the Tragedies are much more comedic than the comedies.

For the full set of pictures, hop on over to my Flickr, where I uploaded 12 more pictures of the actors performing their wonderful trade.

There are these days that I get euphoria. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like depression – everything in life just combines in the right combinations to push my personality over the top. Rather than being down and lethargic and reclusive – symptoms of depression – I become boisterous, energetic, and super-confident. I feel like I could take over the world, in a benevolent and all-loving sort of way.

Today I’m filled with dreams of being a freelancer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely happy with my job; other potential jobs do not tempt me and you’d be hard pressed to get an actual word of complaint out of me about work. But this isn’t where I’m going to be forever. There is a time and a place for everything. And one day, I’ll get my skillsets in order, I’ll get my online presence in order, and I’ll know that it’s now or never, and I’ll take the leap to start out on my own. And today I’m just thinking about how that’ll be. It’ll be good, I hope.

But I’m also thinking about all the dreams Freya and I share together. Dreams of vacation coming up soon – a weekend hiding out in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains where we’ll spend our time painting and writing and soaking in a hot tub drinking champagne. Dreams of adventure in the near future – our road trip around the US that will be the adventure that makes everyone else jealous (8-10 months going wherever we want, doing whatever we want).

Then there are the dreams of who knows how far off – our dream of starting some sort of commune or collective; a place where artists can come and live for a few months (or longer) as they work on their various projects, a place where we can attempt to put into place the ideas about community that we are continually shaping. We drive past large buildings all the time and discuss its merits for being that place – we’ll find something some day.

Freya has a dream to start a homeless shelter here in Nashville aimed at families and children – the fastest growing aspect of homelessness in America today (see here). She has no clue what it will look like yet, that’s one of the things we want to research on our big road trip. But it’s an admirable dream, and I can’t wait to be there as she finds out how to carry it out.

But then there are the small things, the actual things. There’s the ability to roll down the windows on this majestic day, to sing aloud to a song that actually celebrates the glory of being alive (check it out, it’s on repeat as I type), to see the clouds floating along.

Yeah, it’s euphoria, and it strikes me occasionally and I love it. Today is a good day. Every day is a good day, even if you don’t quite remember it.

I’m rereading Chaim Potok’s excellent novel My Name is Asher Lev right now, and last night I stayed up way too late reading. These two passages really caught my attention and merit putting somewhere that I’ll be able to find again.

He said to me one day in the second week of July, “Asher Lev, there are two ways of painting the world. In the whole history of art, there are only these two ways. One is the way of Greece and Africa, which sees the world as a geometric design. The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower. Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso paint the world as geometry. Van Gogh, Renoir, Kandinsky, Chagall paint the world as a flower. I am a geometrician. I sculpt cylinders, cubes, triangles, and cones. The world is a structure, and structure to me is geometry. I sculpt geometry. I see the world as hard-edged, filled with lines and angles. And I see it as a wild and raging and hideous, and only occasionally beautiful. The world fills me with disgust more often than it fills me with jooy. Are you listening to me, Asher Lev? The world is a terrible place. I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculpture and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world. You do not understand me yet, Asher Lev. My little Hasid. My sanctifier of the world. My half-naked painter with dangling payos and a paint-smeared skullcap. One day you will understand about the truth of feelings.”

Then, two pages later.

The following week, the third week of July, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We walked through centuries of Byzantine and Western crucifixions. He showed me the development of structure and form and expression, and the handling of pictorial space. I saw crucifixions all the way home and dreamed of crucifixions all through the night.

I told him the next day that I did not think I wanted to see any more crucifixions. He became angry.

“Asher Lev, you want to go off into a corner somewhere and paint little rabbis in long beards? Then go away and do not waste my time. Go paint your little rabbis. No one will pay attention to you. I am not telling you to paint crucifixions. I am telling you that you must understand what a crucifixion is in art if you want to be a great artist. The crucifixion must be available to you as a form. Do you understand? No, I see you do not understand. In any case, we will see more crucifixions and more resurrections and more nativities and more Greek and Roman gods and more scenes of war and love – because that is the world of art, Asher Lev. And we will see more naked women, and you will learn the reason for the differences between the naked women of Titian and those of Rubens. This is the world you want to make sacred. You had better learn it well first before you begin.”

These passages stand alone – but that last sentence was a dagger to my heart. Do I have the strength to learn the world well? Most Christians do not. They do not see the reason to expose themselves to the horror of the world, but in being afraid to do that, they are never able to speak to that world.

I want to avoid that. It sounds like a long long path, but I’ve already taken the first steps…

Marc Webb’s debut film finally made it to Nashville last night, as part of the Nashville Film Festival (which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, very cool). The trailer bills the movie as a story about Boy Meets Girl, but not a love story, and the trailer is accurate, thank goodness. We don’t need another romantic comedy, and this film doesn’t attempt to give us more of what we don’t need.

Instead, the film, in its light-hearted and whimsical style, is concerned with what exactly love is in modern times. Both of the main characters come from homes with divorced parents, but Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) believes in true love and finding “the one” while Summer (Zooey Deschanel) does not believe in any of that stuff. Their story; told in a great non-linear fashion that examines the 500 days that Summer is in Tom’s life, examines whether either of their ideas about love hold up in reality.

Much has been made in early reviews about Webb’s experience with music videos, probably because there is a dance scene and the music is heavily tied to the visuals in the film (look for a great split-screen sequence with Regina Spektor’s song Us), but I think most of those reviewers missed the subtle touch that Webb brought out in the post-film Q&A last night. The narrator that we hear in the trailer is the narrator of the film as well; a deep, soothing voice that sets the tone for a storybook-ish movie. By beginning with the narrator giving us the setup – Girl doesn’t believe in love, boy does believe in love, and boy knows that girl is The One at first meeting – the film gives the viewers the normal cues of a fairy tale story.

But the film isn’t intending to be a fairy tale, nor is it intending to subvert fairy tales by setting your expectations and destroying them. Rather, it is questioning and wrestling with my generation’s takes on love – the fear of labeling relationships, the generation of kids who’ve grown up after divorce, the desire for some concrete idea of love but the complete lack of any model or definition. By using fairy-tale aspects, 500 Days of Summer did well to ask the questions that I’ve heard lots of friends ask (that I myself asked), and while the film didn’t really have any good answers, it wasn’t willing to forsake all hope in the idea of love.

I identified with the movie a great deal because I’ve been in those positions before; finding someone who I thought was the one, being with a different someone who just really really wasn’t the one, and finally finding The One who I’m now happily married to. I still don’t know exactly what love is; but I’m a lot closer and I do know a litany of things that it is definitely not. This movie, rather than being a “happy ending all things tied up neatly but nothing of substance provided” Hollywood film, successfully (to me) asked some questions and wrestled with them in a way fitting its characters and story, then ended on a note of hope. It wasn’t a perfect film, but it was far better than anything that Hollywood normally produces on the subject of love, and I hope it has a great deal of success at the Box Office.

Off Topic:

And I think that somewhere down the line there is a critical essay waiting to happen about how this film identifies another shift in culture; with Summer being representative of this generation’s wrestling with the 70′s generation (which might be defined as Spring – the birth of free love and love as a self-centered, self-seeking concept). If I were to write said essay, I would place the modern generation right at the end of 500 Days of Summer (which I won’t spoil), and explore the themes of the film as suggestions of ways that culture is changing. But that’s just me.