Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith

by Russ Ramsey

To Jesus, this was ...

“She has done a beautiful thing to me.”

So many things in our world are beautiful but didn’t need to be. God chose to make them that way so he might arrest his people by their senses to awaken us from the slumbering economy of pragmatism. That awakening is a vital function of beauty. This is the gift of beauty from an artist to their community—to awaken

our senses to the world as God made it and to awaken our senses to God himself.

Story is a trojan horse for truth. It can sneak truth past the gates of our defenses and prepare our hearts to hear things we might have resisted if they had come as mere declaration.

In Confessions, Augustine wrote, “I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new! I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself.”

“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

Beauty is a relic of Eden—a remnant of what is good. It comes from a deeper realm. It trickles into our lives as water from a crack in a dam, and what lies on the other side of that dam fills us with

wonder and fear. Glory lies on the other side. And we were made for glory.

The Carrara quarries produce more marble than any other place on earth, and this marble has been incorporated into buildings and monuments all over the world, including the Pantheon in Rome, the Marble Arch in London, the Oslo Opera House in Norway, and the sea of crosses and stars of David at the American cemetery at Normandy.

As with many artists whom history remembers as elite, Michelangelo had little interest in his studies. Mostly he just wanted to create. He copied paintings he saw in churches (which he could reproduce from memory based on only a single viewing) and sought the company of other artists.

We work with what we’re given. None of us build on an untouched foundation. Many people and their many decisions—for better or worse—have played a role in determining where our feet are planted. And the chances are good that we are each shaping some aspect of a foundation on which someone else will one day stand.

Living with limits is one of the ways we enter into beauty we would not have otherwise seen, good work we would not have chosen, and relationships we would not have treasured. For the Christian, accepting our limits is one of the ways we

are shaped to fit together as living stones into the body of Christ. As much as our strengths are a gift to the church, so are our limitations.