Was reading this week from one of my favorites I go back to from time to time and thought I'd post this excerpt. The book is "Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art" by Madeline L'Engle, and the excerpt is regarding the artist, chaos, and redemption. It made me think of all the many conversations I've had the past few years with so many different people about pain and struggle (chaos), so many different stories of suffering - whether told or untold, and the longing you can hear in each voice that their suffering would be truly seen by those who walk with them and then redeemed by their Maker. One of the things I read from her here is that artists, maybe more than anyone else, are willing to recognize both chaos and redemption in the Gospel (and artistic) process and that they are constantly striving to "see," or overturn, the hidden chaos in life for the sake of exposing it to redemption. So I guess this post goes out to all those in this life, artists or no, who are willing to admit to the chaos both in their own lives and around them, those who know that church is not a clean and pretty place for clean and pretty people, those for whom growing up and family were not places of safety or haven but mazes of confusion or abuse. It is brave to be willing to see and name. Depravity must be named before redemption can occur.
I was outraged a number of years ago to read a book by an eminent Freudian analyst whose theory was that all artists are neurotic, psychotic, sado/masocists, Pepping Toms; that not one is normal.
At this moment I do not know why it bothered me so. He means one thing by his labels; I would call it something quite different; but there is no denying that the artist is someone who is full of questions, who cries them out in great angst, who discovers rainbow answers in the darkness, and then rushes to canvas or paper. An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in this world. Along with Plato's divine madness there is also divine discontent, a longing to find the melody in the discords of chaos, the rhyme in the cacophany, the surprised smile in time or stress or strain.
It is not that what is is not enough, for it is; it is that what is had been disarranged, and is crying out to be put in place. Perhaps the artist longs to sleep well every night, to eat anything without indigestion; to feel no moral qualms; to turn off the television news and make a bologna sandwich after seeing the devastation and death caused by famine and drought and earthquake and flood. But the artist cannot manage this normalcy. Vision keeps breaking through, and must find means of expression. (p. 143)
For those who "cannot rest" until all things are set right and for whom "vision keeps breaking through." One day Redemption will win out in fullness, but for now, we continue to ask the questions.
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