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

by Russ Ramsey

The pursuit of goodness, the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of beauty are, in fact, foundational to the health of any community.

“To name a thing is to acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else that has a name; to confer upon it the dignity of autonomy while at the same time affirming its belonging with the rest of the namable world; to transform its strangeness into familiarity, which is the root of empathy.”13 Creativity is a path to beauty. The creative work of naming is the work of ascribing dignity and speaking truth.

The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth [beauty]; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism” [goodness and truth]. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.17

We can establish certain codes to live by and focus our minds and interests on more cerebral matters, and in that way occupy ourselves with goodness we have reduced to conduct and truth we have relegated to the possession of knowledge. Of course, we have to become legalists in the process and minimize goodness and truth quite a bit to pull this off, but we can pursue some semblance of them both in isolation. People do this all the time.

The more we engage with beauty, the more we train our hearts to anticipate finding beauty, until eventually, everywhere we go, we’re looking for it.

Scarry wrote, “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.”28 Songwriters do not go home defeated when they see Paul Simon in concert; they go home hungry to write songs.

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.

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.

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.

Until then, we save our vacation days, plan our itineraries, and make our way across oceans, over mountains, through cities, and down the long stretches of highway that span the countryside to take our place in line to catch a glimpse of the deeper glory we know we were made for.

one could paint a horse with fine detail and precise proportion and show the viewer a realistic representation of the animal. Or he could paint with fluid, dynamic, unrestrained brushstrokes and give the viewer the impression of a horse in the wild, coiled in fear. The impression of the horse seemed more alive—a truer horse than the realistic portrait.

Sometimes this is the artist’s work—to stand and knock on the door of glory and, whenever possible, siphon little wisps of smoke from those places where we catch a glimpse of the light so that others might see and believe. What can we show each other of glory anyway except light in shadow? What glory can anyone see in any of us except for wisps of smoke, traces of the

There’s a certain loneliness in Hopper’s work, but it’s a complicated loneliness. It isn’t that his characters are outcasts, destitute and unable to find community. Rather, when we see them, they are often turned inward as the world around them moves about, turned in on itself too. James Peacock said, “In Hopper’s works, even a buzzing city doesn’t remedy isolation, but heightens it.”16