By Rich DuBose
The primary language of today’s culture is spoken within the context of the arts. Hollywood has mastered the art of story-telling. Every song we hear is essentially a story about some aspect of life. Poetry is filled with messages about life that are sometimes veiled, but nevertheless there!
In order to have a conversation with culture we need to understand and speak the language. What should Jesus’ followers be saying to the world with their art, music, photography and videography?
We can relate to story-telling because we have our own stories. What story-telling techniques are most effective? Most will agree that authenticity and honesty are key to effective communication.
Jesus used story-telling to initiate his mission in the first century. The Gospel accounts feature the stories of Jesus, which have the ability to transform the hearts of those who hear them.
Within the faith context is there a place for art that is non-religious? A painting of a landscape is non-religious, yet it can be highly spiritual. Religious art becomes a problem when the church tries to use it to say things about God that Scripture doesn’t confirm or that suit their bias.
Westboro Baptist church was infamous for their online videos and imagery that unabashedly delineated what they believed "God hated." They used new media and other creative forms of expression to convey their religious belief that God didn’t love the world, at least not everyone, and that he hates sinners, and only certain kinds of sinners can be saved. They carried signs that said, “God Hates Fags.” How tragic! Those who embrace the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) need to counter Westboro’s message of religious hate with God’s promise of love and mercy for all?
In the West we are steeped in what is known as the Protestant Work Ethic. This means America’s religions have been closely associated with taking care of business —which should not be confused with the Lord's business. I'm talking about the marketplace, productivity and the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism. In fact, we are so smitten with productivity and turning a profit that we’ve reduced much of what we do down to two questions.
1) What is it?
2) What is it for?
If we cannot answer these questions with definitive answers, some dismiss us as maybe sincerely, but naive.
Much of what gets created in the world of art falls outside the realm of usefulness. How do you deal with the idea of pouring your life into something that may not be perceived as utilitarian or of monetary value? What value does a beautiful sunset have? What is it for? How can it be exploited?
Visual Media has become the driving force in how we communicate and learn. Smart phones, web technologies, including AI, have taken art out of the realm of objects we can touch and hold (DVDs, CDs, vinyl records, paintings and other works of visual art) and reduced them to pixels and files that are emailed and streamed via the web —a non-tangible realm of ethereal concepts and ideas, which means the internet promotes a surreal ethos that at times seem like non-reality and make-believe.
If everything you have produced is online and suddenly goes away, was it ever real? For example, if you are a digital photographer who puts all your photos on a website gallery that suddenly goes dark, or off-line, you have nothing tangible to show for all the effort you put into creating your art. Your digital camera, which is a physical object, is a transformer of sorts that turns physical realities into pixels, or non tangible data that in turn gets transported to an intangible world of visual apparitions (the internet). All of which begs the question, what is real?
The Anatomy of Beauty
Ray Stevens had a hit song in the 70’s titled, “Everything is Beautiful.” Do you remember it? It started out with a few lines from the children’s song,“ Jesus Love the Little Children.”
The chorus and the first verse go like this:
Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world
Everything is beautiful in its own way
Like a starry summer night
On a snow covered winter's day
And everybody's beautiful in their own way
Under God's heaven
The world's gonna find the way
You can listen to it here: Everything's Beautiful | 50th Anniversary
The dictionary defines beauty as, “the quality or group of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or the mind” (Merriam-Webster). Obviously the definition of beauty will be different for each person. When I typed “beauty” into Google’s search field, I immediately got an AI assisted collection of photos of European looking, white women, like you might see on a fashion magazine cover. This is Google’s and Hollywood’s interpretation of what a beautiful woman looks like, which can end up being harmful because it becomes the filter that many women, and little girls use to view themselves through. If you are not a white, air brushed diva, are you beautiful?
Why do we gravitate toward things and people that we think are beautiful? I think God puts a longing within each of us for beauty.
Years ago I was visiting La Jolla, California (near San Diego) in the late afternoon. And guess where I found a large crowd of people? On the rocks strewn along the ocean’s edge, scores of people were standing and sitting, with their eyes riveted on the setting sun. And most of them were holding cameras. When the sun finally dropped below the horizon and into what appeared to be the Pacific Ocean, everyone started clapping. It was a dramatic moment of communal celebration of nature’s raw beauty.
God is a lover of beauty. Think of all the beautiful things, places and people in the world God has created. He is often referred to as the Master Artist. But keep in mind that we were created in God’s image, which means when he created us he gave us the capacity to not only appreciate beauty, but to create it as well, within the realm of our capacities. God’s creative ability is far superior to ours, but we have the capacity to echo his works with our own expressions that uniquely mimic what he does and continues to do in the world.
Rich DuBose writes from Northern California | Photo by Clem Onojeghuo, with Pexels
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