Walking on Water (3 page)

Obedience
is an unpopular word nowadays, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it be a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.” And the artist either says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.

As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.

God, through the angel Gabriel, called on Mary to do what, in the world's eyes, is impossible, and instead of saying, “I can't,” she replied immediately. “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

God is always calling on us to do the impossible. It helps me to remember that anything Jesus did during his life here on earth is something we should be able to do, too.

When spring-fed Dog Pond warms up enough for swimming, which usually isn't until June, I often go there in the late afternoon. Sometimes I will sit on a sun-warmed rock to dry, and think of Peter walking across the water to meet Jesus. As long as he didn't remember that we human beings have forgotten how to walk on water, he was able to do it.

If Jesus of Nazareth was God become truly man for us, as I believe he was, then we should be able to walk on water, to heal the sick, even to accept the Father's answer to our prayers when it is not the answer that we hope for, when it is
no.
Jesus begged in anguish that he be spared the bitter cup and then humbly added, “but not as I will, Father; as you will.”

In art, either as creators or as participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure, we who are children of God by adoption and grace.

In one of his dialogues, Plato talks of all learning as remembering. The chief job of the teacher is to help us to remember all that we have forgotten. This fits in well with Jung's concept of racial memory, his belief that when we are enabled to dip into the intuitive, subconscious self, we remember more than we know. One of the great sorrows which came to human beings when Adam and Eve left the Garden was the loss of memory, memory of all that God's children are meant to be.

Perhaps one day I will remember how to walk across Dog Pond.

At Ayia Napa I talked about the artist as birth-giver, as one still able to see angels, and after the lecture there was considerable buzzing among some of these young Christian delegates. “Does she really think she can see angels?” “What's all this about angels?”

It turned out that their idea of angels came from illustrations in children's books,
Christian
children's books, rather than from reading about them in the Bible. It is impossible to read the Bible regularly and carefully and not pay attention to angels. It is probably because we lose our ability to see angels as we grow up that the grown-up artist's depiction of angels is so unbelievable.

Recently I received a letter from a perspicacious eleven-year-old: “As I read the descriptions of the cherubim, Progo, in
A Wind in the Door,
it seems to me that you are describing him like the cherubim in the Bible. Did you do this on purpose?”

Yes, of course.

Cherubim, seraphim, all the angelic host as they are described in Scripture, have a wild and radiant power that often takes us by surprise. They are not always gentle. They bar the entrance to Eden so that we may never return home. They send plagues upon the Egyptians. They are messengers of God. They are winds. They are flames of fire. They are young men dressed in white.

Three of them come to Abraham to be his guests. One wrestles all night long with Jacob. They minister to Jesus after the temptations in the wilderness. They are God come to tell us something, and in the Old Testament it is obvious that God's people understand that angels are voices and appearances of the Master of the Universe himself. To be visited by an angel is to be visited by God. To be touched by an angel is to be touched by God, and it is a terrifying experience. When the angel smote him on the thigh, Jacob limped forever after. Daniel, who had braved lions, trembled and fainted at the appearance of the Lord's angel. And John, on the Isle of Patmos, fell down as though dead.

We talked a lot about angels that day at Ayia Napa, angels as they appear in the Bible, and quite a few misapprehensions were cleared up. When they really examined themselves, most of the delegates found out that they did, after all, believe in angels.

I believe in angels; guardian angels; the angel who came to Gideon and told a shy, not very brave young man that he was a man of valour who was going to free his people; the angels who came to Jesus in the agony of the garden. And, what is less comforting, avenging angels, destroying angels, angels who come bringing terror when any part of God's creation becomes too rebellious, too full of pride to remember that they are God's creatures. And, most fearful of all, fallen angels, angels who have left God and followed Lucifer and daily offer us their seductive and reasonable temptations. If we read the Bible, and if what we read has anything to do with what we believe, then we have no choice but to take angels seriously; and most artists do, from Milton to Doré‚ to Shakespeare to…

The artist, if he is not to forget how to listen, must retain the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns and all the lovely creatures which our world would put in a box marked
Children Only.

How difficult we find the Annunciation (angels again!). And how could one young, untried girl contain within her womb the power which created the galaxies? How could that power be found in the helplessness of an infant? It is more than we, in our limited, literal-mindedness, can cope with, and so we hear, “I can't be a Christian because I can't believe in the virgin birth,” as though faith were something which lay within the realm of verification. If it can be verified, we don't need faith.

I don't need faith to know that if a poem has fourteen lines, a specific rhyme scheme, and is in iambic pentameter, it is a sonnet; it may not be a good sonnet, but it will be a sonnet. I don't need faith to know that if I take flour and butter and milk and seasonings and heat them in a double boiler, the mix will thicken and become white sauce. Faith is for that which lies on the
other
side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys. Surely it wasn't reasonable of the Lord of the Universe to come and walk this earth with us and love us enough to die for us and then show us everlasting life? We will all grow old, and sooner or later we will die, like the old trees in the orchard. But we have been promised that this is not the end. We have been promised life.

What would have happened to Mary (and to all the rest of us) if she had said
no
to the angel? She was free to do so. But she said
yes.
She was obedient, and the artist, too, must be obedient to the command of the work, knowing that this involves long hours of research, of throwing out a month's work, of going back to the beginning, or, sometimes, scrapping the whole thing. The artist, like Mary, is free to say
no.
When a shoddy novel is published the writer is rejecting the obedient response, taking the easy way out. But when the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.

Mary did not always understand. But one does not have to understand to be obedient. Instead of understanding—that intellectual understanding which we are so fond of—there is a feeling of rightness, of knowing, knowing things which we are not yet able to understand.

During the question-and-answer period after a lecture, a young woman said to me, “I read
A Wrinkle in Time
when I was eight or nine. I didn't understand it, but I knew what it was about.”

As long as we know what it's about, then we can have the courage to go wherever we are asked to go, even if we fear that the road may take us through danger and pain.

If the work comes to the artist and says, “Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist's talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the
Paris Review,
“Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”

To feed the lake is to serve, to be a servant.
Servant
is another unpopular word, a word we have derided by denigrating servants and service. To serve should be a privilege, and it is to our shame that we tend to think of it as a burden, something to do if you're not fit for anything better or higher.

I have never served a work as it ought to be served; my little trickle adds hardly a drop of water to the lake, and yet it doesn't matter; there is no trickle too small. Over the years I have come to recognize that the work often knows more than I do. And with each book I start, I have hopes that I may be helped to serve it a little more fully. The great artists, the rivers and tributaries, collaborate with the work, but for most of us, it is our greatest privilege to be its servant.

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly, than he knew; Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work. Getting out of the way and listening is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer.

Before I can listen to God in prayer, I must fumble through the prayers of words, of willful demands, the prayers of childish “Gimmes,” of “Help mes,” of “I want…” Until I tell God what I want, I have no way of knowing whether or not I truly want it. Unless I ask God for something, I do not know whether or not it is something for which I ought to ask, and I cannot add, “But if this is not your will for me, then your will is what I want, not mine.” The prayers of words cannot be eliminated. And I must pray them daily, whether I feel like praying or not. Otherwise, when God has something to say to me, I will not know how to listen. Until I have worked through self, I will not be enabled to get out of the way.

Someone wrote, “The principal part of faith is patience,” and this applies, too, to art of all disciplines. We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not; otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it.

It has often struck me with awe that some of the most deeply religious people I know have been, on the surface, atheists. Atheism is a peculiar state of mind; you cannot deny the existence of that which does not exist. I cannot say, “That chair is not there,” if there is no chair there to say it about.

Many atheists deny God because they care so passionately about a caring and personal God and the world around them is inconsistent with a God of love, they feel, and so they say, “There is no God.” But even denying God, to serve music, or painting, or words is a religious activity, whether or not the conscious mind is willing to accept that fact. Basically there can be no categories such as “religious” art and “secular” art because all true art is incarnational, and therefore “religious.”

The problem of pain, of war and the horror of war, of poverty and disease is always confronting us. But a God who allows no pain, no grief, also allows no choice. There is little unfairness in a colony of ants, but there is also little freedom. We human beings have been given the terrible gift of free will, and this ability to make choices, to help write our own story, is what makes us human, even when we make the wrong choices, abusing our freedom and the freedom of others. The weary and war-torn world around us bears witness to the wrongness of many of our choices. But lest I stumble into despair I remember, too, seeing the white, pinched-faced little children coming to the pediatric floor of a city hospital for open-heart surgery and seeing them two days later with colour in their cheeks, while the nurses tried to slow down their wheelchair races. I remember, too, that there is now a preventative for trachoma, still the chief cause of blindness in the world. And I remember that today few mothers die in childbirth, and our graveyards no longer contain the mute witness of five little stones in a row, five children of one family, dead in a week of scarlet fever or diphtheria.

George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble—times when I have seen people tempted to deny God—when he says, “The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.”

Jesus, too, had to make choices, and in the eyes of the world some of his choices were not only contrary to acceptable behaviour, but were foolish in the extreme. He bucked authority by healing on the Sabbath; when he turned his steps towards Jerusalem he was making a choice which led him to Calvary.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

This ability, this necessity to choose, is an important element in all story. Which direction will the young man take when he comes to the crossroads? Will the girl talk with the handsome stranger? Should the child open the forbidden door?

Oedipus killed the man he met at the crossroads, and even though he did not know that the man was his father, that did not allow him to escape the retribution which followed his choice. He married a woman he did not know to be his mother, but his lack of knowledge did not make him innocent. Though we may cry out, “But I didn't know!” our anguish does little to forestall the consequences of our actions. To the nonbeliever, the person who sees no cosmos in chaos, we are all the victims of the darkness which surrounds our choices; we have lost our way; we do not know what is right and what is wrong; we cannot tell our left hand from our right. There
is
no meaning.

But to serve any discipline of art, be it to chip a David out of an unwieldy piece of marble, to take oils and put a clown on canvas, to write a drama about a young man who kills his father and marries his mother and suffers for these actions, to hear a melody and set the notes down for a string quartet, is to affirm meaning, despite all the ambiguities and tragedies and misunderstanding which surround us.

Aeschylus writes, “In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

We see that wisdom and that awful grace in the silence of the Pièta, in Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems, in Poulenc's organ concerto; but we do not find it in many places where we would naturally expect to find it. This confusion comes about because much so-called religious art is in fact bad art, and therefore bad religion. Those angels rendered by grownups who obviously didn't believe in angels and which confused the delegates at Ayia Napa are only one example. Some of those soppy pictures of Jesus, looking like a tubercular, fair-haired, blue-eyed goy, are far more secular than a Picasso mother and child. The Lord Jesus who rules my life is not a sentimental, self-pitying weakling. He was a Jew, a carpenter, and strong. He took into his own heart, for our sakes, that pain which brings “wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

It is impossible for an artist to attempt a graphic reproduction of Jesus in any way that is meant to be literal. I sympathize with the Hassidic teaching that it is wrong to try in any way to make pictures of God or his prophets. The Muslims have this philosophy, too, hence the intricate, nonrepresentational designs on the mosques.

But in a way both miss the point which the Eastern Orthodox artists are taught when they study the painting of icons. The figure on the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, nor what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some
quality
of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God. Icons are painted with firm discipline, much prayer, and anonymity. In this way the iconographer is enabled to get out of the way, to listen, to serve the work.

An icon is a symbol, rather than a sign. A sign may point the way to something, such as:
Athens—10 kilometers.
But the sign is not Athens, even when we reach the city limits and read
Athens.
A symbol, however, unlike a sign, contains within it some quality of what it represents. An icon of the Annunciation, for instance, does more than point to the angel and the girl; it contains, for us, some of Mary's acceptance and obedience, and so affects our own ability to accept, to obey.

Francis of Assisi says that “in pictures of God and the blessed Virgin painted on wood, God and the blessed Virgin are held in mind, yet the wood and the painting ascribe nothing to themselves, because they are just wood and paint; so the servant of God is a kind of painting, that is, a creature of God in which God is honoured for the sake of his benefits. But he ought to ascribe nothing to himself, just like the wood or the painting, but should render honour and glory to God alone.”

I travel with a small icon, a picture pasted on wood, which was given to me with love, so that the picture, the wood, and the love have become for me a Trinity, an icon of God. Of themselves they are nothing; because they are also part of God's munificent love they are everything.

(A parenthesis here about quotations and credits. I was taught in college how to footnote, how to give credit where credit is due, and in the accepted, scholarly way. But most of the writers I want to quote in this book are writers whose words I've copied down in a big, brown, Mexican notebook, what is called a commonplace book. I copy down words and thoughts upon which I want to meditate, and footnoting is not my purpose; this is a devotional, not a scholarly notebook. I've been keeping it for many years, and turn to it for help in prayer, in understanding. All I'm looking for in it is meaning, meaning which will help me to live life lovingly, and I am only now beginning to see the usefulness of noting book title and page, rather than simply jotting down, “Francis of Assisi.”)

An iconographer is a devout and practicing Christian, but all true art has an iconic quality. An Eastern Orthodox theologian, Timothy Kallistos Ware, writes (and where? in a magazine called
Sobornost,
probably about a decade ago, edited by the Rev. Canon A. M. Allchin, of Canterbury Cathedral, England) that

an abstract composition by Kandinsky or van Gogh's landscape of the cornfield with birds…is a real instance of divine transfiguration, in which we see matter rendered spiritual and entering into the “glorious liberty of the children of God.” This remains true, even when the artist does not personally believe in God. Provided he is an artist of integrity, he is a genuine servant of the glory which he does not recognize, and unknown to himself there is “something divine” about his work. We may rest confident that at the last judgment the angels will produce his works of art as testimony on his behalf.

(Angels again!)

We may not like that, but we call the work of such artists un-Christian or non-Christian at our own peril. Christ has always worked in ways which have seemed peculiar to many men, even his closest followers. Frequently the disciples failed to understand him. So we need not feel that we have to understand how he works through artists who do not consciously recognize him. Neither should our lack of understanding cause us to assume that he cannot be present in their work.

A sad fact which nevertheless needs to be faced is that a deeply committed Christian who wants to write stories or paint pictures or compose music to the glory of God simply may not have been given the talent, the gift, which a non-Christian, or even an atheist, may have in abundance. God is no respecter of persons, and this is something we are reluctant to face.

We would like God's ways to be like our ways, his judgments to be like our judgments. It is hard for us to understand that he lavishly gives enormous talents to people we would consider unworthy, that he chooses his artists with as calm a disregard of surface moral qualifications as he chooses his saints.

Often we forget that he has a special gift for each one of us, because we tend to weigh and measure such gifts with the coin of the world's marketplace. The widow's mite was worth more than all the rich men's gold because it represented the focus of her life. Her poverty was rich because all she had belonged to the living Lord. Some unheard-of Elizabethan woman who led a life of selfless love may well be brought before the throne of God ahead of Shakespeare, for such a person may be a greater force for good than someone on whom God's blessings seem to have been dropped more generously. As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, “To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.”

The widow's mite and Bach's
St. Matthew Passion
are both “living mysteries,” both witness to lives which affirm the loving presence of God.

Kandinsky and van Gogh say more than they know in their paintings. So does a devout man who is not a Christian but a Jew and a philosopher, Martin Buber. Listen: “You should utter words as though heaven were opened within them and as though you did not put the word into your mouth, but as though you had entered the word.” Buber was certainly not consciously thinking of the second person of the Trinity when he wrote that. Nevertheless his words become richer for me when I set them alongside these: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Plato, too, all that distance away in time and space from Bethlehem, seems often to be struggling towards an understanding of incarnation, of God's revelation of himself through particularity. Of course, because I am a struggling Christian, it's inevitable that I superimpose my awareness of all that happened in the life of Jesus upon what I'm reading, upon Buber, upon Plato, upon the book of Daniel. But I'm not sure that's a bad thing. To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all.

I don't mean to water down my Christianity into a vague kind of universalism, with Buddha and Mohammed all being more or less equal to Jesus—not at all! But neither do I want to tell God (or my friends) where he can and cannot be seen. We human beings far too often tend to codify God, to feel that we know where he is and where he is not, and this arrogance leads to such things as the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch burnings and has the result of further fragmenting an already broken Christendom.