I was thirty-six years old the first time I visited an art museum. The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. To be brutally honest, I thought art was stupid. It was the kind of thing people did if they couldn’t hit a curveball. You’ll have to forgive me if I had a grudge against art, it almost kept me from graduating high school. Just before the Christmas break of my Senior year, my guidance counselor sat me down and explained to me that I was lacking a half credit in art that was required to graduate. The reason I was lacking this credit was because during my freshman year I was thrown out of art class on the first day for making a sarcastic and disrespectful comment about art. Nearly four years later it came back to bite me.
I wasn’t taught to hate art, it was just kind of a byproduct of the environment I grew up in. No one that I was around on a regular basis though much of art. It was the kind of thing that hippies, druggies and weirdos cared about. You know, people who didn’t do important things, real work. That all changed for me when I stood in front of the painting “Crucifixion: Corpus Hypercubus.” Something about this painting capture my attention. I never understood the purpose of those benches I often saw in movies set in an art gallery, but now I did. Standing in front of this painting, I felt compelled to sit down and just stare, to look closely and examine deeply. I really can’t explain it to you, but that day, in that moment, for the first time, I “got it.” The rest of the day was a dream as I tried to soak up nearly four decades of neglect in one afternoon.
I’m not expert on art and I’m certainly not an artist myself, but in the twelve years since that day, I have come to love, appreciate and value art in all its forms, and it comes in many forms. I’ve witnessed the creation of art in kitchens and concert halls as often as on canvases. I’ve seen it in the cultivation of a garden and the construction of a sacred space. If you are one who is tempted to think of art as a wast of time and resources, I want you to think about this. Imagine a world without movies, tv, games, fashion, novels, music, photography, beautiful cars. If you are interested in any of those things, you should realize they are all the product of an artist.
Art is about expression, about things that can’t necessarily be spoken, but can be felt, often universally. God Himself is an artist, as anyone who has ever watched the sun rise or set knows. One of the most historically renowned artists, Michelangelo, said, “The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.” Art is our feeble and frail attempt to be like God, to create something from nothing more than our imagination or perspective.
Our world needs art now as much as it ever has. Art is not a luxury, it is a necessity. Think about the last time you witnessed something beautiful that stopped you in your tracks. Remember how it made you feel, how it was transcendent and powerful, something you felt deep inside of you. If you can return to that moment, you can understand why Fyodor Dostoyevsky had his protagonist, Prince Lev Nikolyaevich Myshkin in the novel The Idiot, declare, “I believe the world will be saved by beauty.”
To borrow from Brian Zahnd, who wrote a book titled “Beauty Will Save the World”, “Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ. We do this best, not by protest or political action, but by enacting a beautiful presence within the world. The Western church has had four centuries of viewing salvation in a mechanistic manner, presenting it as a plan, system or formula. It would be much better if we would return to viewing salvation as a song we sing. The book of Revelation (from which George Frideric Handel found the lyrics for his Hallelujah chorus) doesn’t have any plans or formulas, but it has lots of songs. The task of the church is to creatively and faithfully sing the songs of the Lamb in the midst of a world founded upon the beastly principles of greed, decadence, and violence. What is needed is not an ugly protest, but a beautiful song; not a pragmatic system, but a transcendent symphony. Why? Because God is more like a musician than a manager, more like an composer than a clerk keeping ledgers.”
The opening section of the Sermon on the Mount is a sort of preamble to the kingdom of God. One we call the “Beatitudes.” The word is a sort of contraction of the words beautiful and attitudes, the beautiful attitudes that describe the beauty of a world where people are humble, meek, merciful, pure hearted, and peacemakers. True, there is so much ugly in the world, but there is also beauty, and where beauty is lacking, you can create beauty with nothing more than an attitude or action benevolently directed toward your neighbor. When you see beauty you see God and when you create beauty you are like your Father in Heaven.
