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stunning effect, his faith commitment has been
stunning effect, his faith commitment has been
sometimes dangerous forays into God’s future, and returning to show an often disbelieving world—and, sadly, an often suspicious church—what that future is like. One of the reasons for the suspicion is the mode of that showing. Some parts
sometimes dangerous forays into God’s future, and returning to show an often disbelieving world—and, sadly, an often suspicious church—what that future is like. One of the reasons for the suspicion is the mode of that showing. Some parts
of this book that this particular artist can match the philosophers and theologians stride for stride. “God the Artist communicates to us first,” he insists, “before God the lecturer”—one of many striking aphorisms that glint and glimmer through the multifaceted exposition.
of this book that this particular artist can match the philosophers and theologians stride for stride. “God the Artist communicates to us first,” he insists, “before God the lecturer”—one of many striking aphorisms that glint and glimmer through the multifaceted exposition.
tears and the invitation to the feast of God that we can be partakers of the New Creation.” He therefore has warnings, not only for the undisciplined imagination of a kind of casual “whatever-comes” art or theology, but also for the kinds of Christianity that he refers
tears and the invitation to the feast of God that we can be partakers of the New Creation.” He therefore has warnings, not only for the undisciplined imagination of a kind of casual “whatever-comes” art or theology, but also for the kinds of Christianity that he refers
the age to come we ourselves can be junior “artists,” apprenticed to the One True Artist, God himself. Pragmatism—in the art world, in the wider culture,
the age to come we ourselves can be junior “artists,” apprenticed to the One True Artist, God himself. Pragmatism—in the art world, in the wider culture,
Here Mako draws deeply on various contemporary “makers”: the poets Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot (whose Four Quartets Mako has carried about with him for years, as I have often done myself, and that in his case provided his sustenance during the dark days after 9/11), the artists Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko. (Towering over them, we come to realize, is the music of J. S. Bach.) Here he converges with the poetry of the Irishman Micheal O’Siadhail, whose book The Five Quintets takes Eliot
Here Mako draws deeply on various contemporary “makers”: the poets Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot (whose Four Quartets Mako has carried about with him for years, as I have often done myself, and that in his case provided his sustenance during the dark days after 9/11), the artists Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko. (Towering over them, we come to realize, is the music of J. S. Bach.) Here he converges with the poetry of the Irishman Micheal O’Siadhail, whose book The Five Quintets takes Eliot
I understand now what I did not understand as a child: that every time I created and felt that charge, I was experiencing the Holy Spirit.
I understand now what I did not understand as a child: that every time I created and felt that charge, I was experiencing the Holy Spirit.
Creating art means experiencing the Holy Spirit.
dry. As I wait, I write. Art making, to me, is a discipline of awareness, prayer, and praise. Imagination gives us wings to create, but it is through Christ’s tears and the invitation to the feast of God that we can be partakers of the New Creation.
As I wait, I write. Art making, to me, is a discipline of awareness, prayer, and praise. Imagination gives us wings to create, but it is through Christ’s tears and the invitation to the feast of God that we can be partakers of the New Creation.
Whole quote - art making as prayer
When we make, we invite the abundance of God’s world into the reality of scarcity all about us. What
God's abundance versus our scarcity
All artists, in this sense, operate out of a faith in abundance and the experience of hope, despite the propensity of our egos to twist all that is good and make idols. If what we are created to do actually allows us to fly
Faith of abundance
Technology and social media can be used creatively for life-giving storytelling, but they also can have life-taking results. So the “None” generation does its making through Instagram and iPhone technology; and the power of such a legitimate way of making has not been recognized by the church, other than when it says “let’s ‘use’ these impulses to communicate the gospel and make disciples of these youth.” But
What if the entire Bible is a work of art, rather than the dictates of predetermined “check boxes” for us to get on God’s good side? What if we are to sing back in response to the voice of eternity echoing through our broken lives?
knowledge. All that is to be known about God comes first through God’s desire to be known and revealed. The Word of God, such a revelation, is the central means of tapping into this creativity of God. The Word of God is active, and alive. God the Artist communicates to us first, before God the lecturer.
God the artists speaks to us in a different way and possibly before God the teeacher and lecturer (7).
Bezalel and Oholiab, who are said to have been “filled . . . with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills” (Exodus 35:31). It is the Spirit of God, the God who creates, who fills us in order to create (and as the later passages indicate, with “the ability to teach others” [35:34]). Bezalel and Oholiab are the first examples in the Bible of human beings filled with the Holy Spirit. To God, and to the writers of
Bezalel and Oholiab!
What if, in response to Lisa’s point, we began to paint (or write songs, plays, and poems) into the darkness with such a light? What if we began to live our lives generatively facing our darkness? What if we all began to trust our intuition in the Holy Spirit’s whispers, remove our masks of self-defense, and create into our true identities hidden in Christ beyond the darkness? What if our lives are artworks re-presented back to the Creator?
The word “dominion” (Hebrew radah) has been misused to mean “practicing domination over” or ravaging creation for industrial purposes. But, as Lisa notes and theologian Ellen Davis affirms, a more accurate understanding of radah is “loving stewardship.” Proper stewardship is based on love of the land and its peoples. Proper stewardship is part of our poetic responsibility to Creation. I connect this Hebrew word radah to the Greek word poietes (maker), as I detail in the following chapters. One aspect of our stewardship is to become poets of Creation, to sing alongside the Creator over
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Radah amd practicing dominion
God may be called not just the first Artist; to me, God is the primal reality of Making, the ultimate “definition” of the Artist. In other words, God is not just the “first order” from which all creativity flows; God is the Maker of all things, preexisting to all forms of knowledge, including the very concept of the “first order.”
God is THE artists and the being from which all creativity comes
God does not need any of our institutions to exist, period; but God’s exuberant love invites us, broken vessels of God’s choosing, to co-create into the New Creation through Jesus.
God does not need our institutions as God runs throughout all of creation.
We see our existence and value only in terms of “fixing the world.” The gospel of a Creator who acts out of love, not necessity, liberates us from this bondage.
The Theology of Making assumes that God created out of abundance and exuberance, and the universe (and we) exist because God loves to create. Some
God loves to create
industrial. The thesis that undergirds the entire culture care project, and the Theology of Making, is an antidote to such utilitarian pragmatism: the essence of humanity under God is not just utility and practical applications; the essence of humanity may be in what we deem to be “use-less” (to use the hyphen in a Dickinsonian way) but essential.5 The deepest realm of knowledge is in Making, and, conversely, Making is the deepest integrated realm of knowing.
Our knowlwdge comea from our creating and our making (19).
The theologian Karl Barth writes of art: Being borne and born by pain is particularly the lot of art because this is by nature an expression, a special action which introduces special works, an action whose alien character as play cannot be concealed or diminished in the midst of the seriousness of the present. The artist’s work is homeless in the deepest sense even though it is also real work alongside scholarship and church and state. Art does not come within the sphere of our work as creatures or our work as sinners saved by grace. As pure play it relates to redemption. Hence it is at root
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Karl Barth on art
By “co-creating into the future of God,” I do not mean that somehow we have the equal weight of power or knowledge to co-create with God. God is the greatest, and perhaps the only, power there is, so what does it mean to co-create? It means to be invited to a dance, invited by God’s grace to be on the stage, to step into a journey of New Creation that we do not yet fully understand. Co-creating is accepting the Creator’s invitation to a feast and supping on what is provided abundantly to us. For mysterious reasons, God chooses to depend on fallen creatures to steward God’s gifts, as poignantly
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Co-creating with God
world. The path of creativity gives wings. The essential question is not whether we are religious, but whether we are making something. When we stop making, we become enslaved to market culture as mere consumers. But in order to understand the path toward Making into
Not are we religious but are we making and creating?
All art, music, and poetry, by intention or not, invokes the New. Even a non-Christian creating must have some sense of hope or it will not be possible to create into a future audience that will have a future encounter with that work of art. These three aspects of New Creation are simultaneously working together to empower, to restore, and to create into the New. What if we began to create, and live, into the New Creation to come?
THE WINE OF THE NEW CREATION Through the pipes flows the wine of New Creation to invite us into the feast of the New. But the wine of the feast will flow backwards from New Creation to our reality. As Christians, we can begin to sup on the feast to come, even though our vision of it is limited on this side of eternity. The arts—even as done by nonbelievers—celebrate this feast to come.5 Examples such as Isak Dinesen’s story “Babette’s Feast,” Ernest
The inherent danger in focusing on our making is that we may make more of our making than what God intends—that we may create idols of our art, or of our “making” abilities. God invites us to co-create, but that does not mean that we are the ones to create the New Creation; only God can do that work. Here, then, is a central parable for our Making journey:
We are not creating the new creation - we must remain humble in our creating.
This may be close to what the New Creation will be like. God desires in God’s heart to be with the child as the child plays on this side of eternity. God chooses, out of God’s gratuitous heart, to co-create into the New World.
Co-create = play!
This act of compassion became the basis of Kintsugi, which added gold in the Urushi filled cracks, creating a work of beauty through brokenness.
Kintsugi
This New Newness breaks into our lives through Christ. Christ’s death on the cross is a new beginning; Christ’s resurrection is a new beginning. Pentecost is a new beginning; the Ascension is a new beginning. It is more than transformation: it is really metamorphoo, or transfiguration. The Bible is all about these “new, new beginnings”; the Bible is about us being transfigured by Christ.
hands that had nurtured and used the bowl every day. A visceral communication spanning thousands of years went though me like I was now holding hands with the maker of this pot. Nakamura-san quipped, “I wish children could go to the Raku Museum and touch the bowls; that’s the only way to appreciate them.”8 I nodded,
Holding hands with the creator
creativity that is birthed out of a need to fix a real thing that is broken. Plumbing is to be valued, and a good plumber can fix our pipes—but a great one can take it to the level of artistry and even hospitality. I can imagine there may be a Kintsugi plumber in the
Artistry and hospitality
who have lost loved ones from both sides. She recently texted me this statement about “common ground” that builds peace: “Common ground is not simply middle ground—not simply waiting to be found, but waiting to be created. Artists create this new ground for culture and society. And teach others how to create, through their creation. As you know :)”
of the New World to come; we are to “build for the Kingdom.” Building for the Kingdom is the act of the ultimate Kintsugi master, Jesus; and it is through his wounds that the New Creation begins.
“Fixing” is part of stewardship of the soil, and we can apply this directly to our lives and our cultures.
His painting Starry Night could simply be the most effective vista, or even evangelism, of the Good News of the New (kainos) reality breaking into our darkened churches (like the one at the heart of the painting) that anyone ever could have offered.13 Perhaps
points. Poets and artists are heralds of the New. Embedded, incarnated artworks that are authentic to the “fuller picture” journey into the sacred Kintsugi works of God can help us to understand the conditions of the soil or modern culture, and thereby help us to communicate, and commune, into deeper cultural means for the advancement of the gospel.
Artists ans the new - the best instigators of it
If “to love will be to know,” then our knowledge of God depends upon the act of making. To build on Meek’s statement, to make (in loving attention) will be to know. Of course, that making is effective only if we create into what is good, true, and beautiful—what God initiated in Genesis 1. Pépin can make what I cannot. By that definition he “knows” how to make an omelette, and I do not. That simply means that I have not loved deeply enough.
Not loved deeply enough? Does that mean that anyone who does something only in a mediocre way accorsing to norms that they do not love as deeply? That does not seem right.
going to show her. “Oh, the unicorn tapestries, of course.” Apparently, my son was listening to me when I took him there as a boy, though at the time he seemed to want to throw a baseball rather than listen to my lectures on the significance of the unicorn tapestries. Now he is married to that young girl, and they have two children. I am grateful for the unicorn tapestries. Love demands creativity; love draws out our call to make. Love is the language of the Holy Spirit; and through love, the Spirit guides us.
Love demands creativity
creative. When I speak to teenagers (especially at boys’ schools), I tell them that they need to know art history, music theory, and cinema studies just to be better at dating! (I get their attention right away when I share this.) The beauty of art, music, dance, and theater (let alone architecture, poetry, stories, and gardening) invokes the God of Creation, the Spirit of mediation into the heart of love. This is the work of Making.
Art = love!
What’s wrong is that churches are not investing enough time and effort in thinking about the context of communication, and they are not empowering makers. We often seek out experienced business minds to lead our church financial drives, but churches rarely seek out artists who exemplify “the gift economy” to help lead in creating the context for their communication. And if we do not consider the context, the context will define our message as much as our preaching and singing do. The Theology of Making encourages churches to prioritize the gift economy, to restore our message as a powerful
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Churches need to value communication and making more.
The Eucharist relies on us to be culture makers.14 Bread and wine are both realities that would not exist on their own, but earthly materials must be cultivated by human beings and require much time to create. In other words, just by wheat or grapes growing naturally, neither of these elements for the Eucharist will be created. Human beings, through their toil, and over a period of time experimenting to perfect the craft, have made bread and wine.
Mmm but isn’t it also from God? Bread and juice ultimately come from creation and we are given the ability to create.
