I found this whole chapter by the pastor, Tim Keller, from "It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God" (a book written by various artists) very encouraging. As I cannot post it all, I tried to get some quotes that would get the main points across. I would highly recommend the book to you all. It's rare to find a book that makes me feel like I'm actually being fed intellectually and spiritually. This is definitely one of those books.
"C. S. Lewis said that reason is the organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning. When people talk about the difference between human beings and animals, they often conclude that one of the greatest distinctions is that animals do not do art. Why don't they? It appears to me that humans have art because they understand, perhaps at an intuitive level, that there is meaning in what we do. Our lives are filled with meaning that is greater than a simple factual evaluation of actions and consequences. We show that we recognize this when events touch our emotions and affect our behavior...." Pg 79
"What does 'meaning' mean? How do we define 'meaning?' Significance is really a synonym but it does not capture all that is contained in the word 'meaning.' Can we define 'meaning?' I believe we can. While it appears to some to be almost impossible to define, yet it is clearly something we know exists and understand at some level. Even people who insist that nothing has any meaning show that they don't believe their own words when they don't live as people who have no meaning. Many people do not know what it is that gives meaning to life but they know intuitively that life is meaningful. What I have found is that the meaning of life is the glory of God. If there is no God then nothing can have ultimate significance. The word glory means weight, it means significance--it basically means 'meaning.'
For those who want to deny life any meaning, the folly of their view is exposed by Christian artists who express the meaning, the glory of God, in a way that Christian non-artists cannot. C. S. Lewis in the Weight of Glory says,
'In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the unconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism or Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter...The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not them, it only came through them, and what came through them was a longing...For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.'
Lewis is suggesting that every artist recognizes the secret desire for the other country, whether he calls it by one of those names Lewis mentioned or not. A person who is not a Christian doesn't really know what to call the other country. It can be terrifying for one who is not a Christian to even begin to try to identify the other world. But whether he gives it a name or not, he senses that this greater reality exists and gives everything meaning. So Lewis is right when he says, 'It is only through imagination that we really sense something has meaning.'" Pgs 81-82
"Thinking specifically of Christians for the time being, why does the Church and why does Christianity need artists? While we have artists because they have the ability to see the greater reality, we need artists because, if Lewis is right, we can't understand truth without art. You see, reason tells me about the truth, but I really cannot grasp what it means; I can't understand it without art. Jonathan Edwards, the third president of Princeton University, probably the most important American theologian and one of the most prominent preachers in the First Great Awakening makes this point as well. Edwards said that unless you use imagination, unless you take a truth and you image it -- which of course is art -- you don't know what it means. If you cannot visualize it, you don't have a sense of it on your heart. We see this in one of Edwards' sermons called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. It is unfortunate that this sermon is one of the only sermons by Jonathan Edwards that people ever read. He has so many others that are quite excellent. Edwards, at one point in the sermon, looks at the congregation and says, 'Your righteousness cannot keep you out of hell.' That is a truth. You may not believe it, but there is the principle. While that is the content of what he is saying, he says it in a way that better makes the point. He says,
'Your wickedness makes you, as it were, heavy as lead, and to tend backwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock.'
Now as soon as he said that, what has he done? He has used imagination, moving from truth into the area of visualization. As a result you have a clearer sense of what he means. Even if you don't agree with the concept, you begin to recognize what is going on. You may not have understood what he meant until he crossed over into another mode -- until he put it in the form of a sense experienced and showed you what it looked and felt like. This sensual expression of the truth allows you to hear the truth, to see the truth, to taste it, touch it and smell it. The more various forms in which truth is described, the more we understand and can then communicate truth. We can't understand truth without art. In fact, a preacher can't really express the truth he knows without at least couching it in some artistic form.
It takes the imagination to sense something has meaning because we cannot cognitively grasp the glory of God. The glory of God is beyond our ability to understand or describe. The imagination goes beyond what we can think of and rises to lofty heights where it contemplates the glory of God. It is those elevated thoughts that help us know that everything has meaning. We have artists to stimulate that imagination and to show us that things have meaning. Artists have a special capacity to recognize the 'other country' and communicate with the rest of us regarding greater reality. A good artist will reveal something about the greater reality in an indefinable but inescapable way." Pgs 83-84
"Having explained why we have artists and why we need artists, we now need to explore how to be an artist, if you are a Christian. If you are wondering why I keep quoting C. S. Lewis, it is because almost everything I know about Christianity and the arts comes from him. When Lewis' best friend Charles Williams died, he thought that his other best friend J. R. R. Tolkien would fill the gap. Lewis felt that since the three friends were all together and shared so much with each other, the change once Williams was dead would result in his getting more of Tolkien. But he found to his shock that when Williams died he had less of Tolkien. Why? Because, he observed, 'I'll never get out of [Tolkien] the particular kind of laugh that only a Charles joke could get.' Lewis began to realize that no one human being could call the entire person into action. What happened when Williams died was that Lewis got less of Tolkien because he lost the part of Tolkien that only Charles Williams could bring out. This clarifies how much we need each other. The Christian artist needs to interact in community because of what he will bring out in others and what they will bring out in him.
If artists pick up some aspect of meaning and if all meaning is some aspect of the glory of God, things mean something only because they have something to do with the glory of God. This is true whether we are Christians or not. One artist can express only one little ray of God's glory. We all need one another because we cannot possibly see the whole thing. We need one another because only together do we get some idea of the multifaceted array of God's glory. It is incredibly frustrating to only see one part of the glory and to never quite get it out. We need one another to help us express our part of the meaning.
This can be seen from an example in the life of Tolkien. Once, when Tolkien had a terrible case of writer's block, he sat down and wrote a short story. It broke through his writer's block, and he went back and wrote The Lord of the Rings very quickly after that. If you want to read this short story, it is called Leaf by Niggle. Go into any bookstore and find a Tolkien reader; it is in there. The story is very short. It is about a poor artist, a man named Niggle, who spent all of his life trying to paint a huge mural of a tree on the side of the post office in his hometown. Niggle had a vision but he was never able to get it out. Ultimately, all he ever did was draw one little leaf down in one little corner. Of course everyone in town asked, 'Why did we commission you? We paid you all this money and what is going on?' Not long after, Niggle dies and suddenly finds himself on a train going to heaven. As he is looking at the landscape from the train he suddenly sees something off to the right and he tells the train to stop. When the train stops, Niggle runs over and at the very top of the hill is his tree. He looks up and realizes that this is the tree he had in his mind all of his life. He had been trying to draw it the entire time he worked on the mural and all he had ever gotten out was one leaf. For some reason, when Tolkien realized that the single leaf was all he ever would get out, he was able to go back to work. He realized that he would never produce the whole tree, the whole glory of God.
We get a leaf. But only together as artists are we going to see the whole incredible tree. We all have to 'do our own leaf.' Every one of us has something to contribute." Pgs 86-87
- Tim Keller
http://sermons2.redeemer.com/
From: http://www.amazon.com/It-Was-Good-Making-Glory/dp/0978509714/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342504694&sr=8-1&keywords=it+was+good
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