Art For Its Own Sake

Mitchell, Brody, Shannon, and Shelby,

And Anne, for taking the time to proofread this,

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1:28)

Later, in Genesis 2:15, God placed man in the Garden of Eden and gave him the responsibility of taking care of it.

This provides what we know of mankind, that he is to take care of a garden, and to have a certain degree of dominion and ownership over it.  As a child, I interpreted this merely as a maintenance position, but after taking some biblical foundations classes in college, I learned to call this the "cultural mandate."  God commanded mankind to become many nations, and even scattered mankind out intentionally after the flood when they tried building the tower of Babel, giving them many languages, many cultures.

This should have been evident from the beginning.  God didn't plant Adam on a farm.  He planted Adam in a garden.  A garden is more than a utilitarian means of growing food.  It's a work of art.  It's sometimes functional, but its primary purpose is to be beautiful.  Gardens have a variety of plants, and can be planned in a plurality of ways.  There's no such thing as one definitive garden; each is unique in its own way.  Some have flowers arranged in every color of the rainbow (although no such thing existed before the flood).  Some branch out to include every genus of tree.  Some only have a few select flora, but arrange them in artistic ways, and perhaps trim their hedges to form living sculptures.  Some even make gardens out of rocks.

A garden is a holistic concept.  It includes not only static objects, but a climate, and sometimes all breeds of fauna.  Most of all, gardens cannot exist without gardeners.  It's interactive; we not only tend to the garden, but we shape ourselves in the process.  We decide how we are to walk through the garden, the character we are to cultivate in ourselves as gardeners.  We do whatever we want in the garden, choosing whether we simply admire it and walk among it, or dress ourselves in its goods, or we can immerse ourselves in it by making sure to touch everything, or we can put use to it thoroughly and invent games to be played among its landscapes.  We can be minimalists and tend the garden by keeping our patch of it consistent, or we can try doing every last possible thing that we could think of.

All of the things that we can do!  If we can make gardens out of stone, then surely we can make gardens out of clay, and bricks, and metals.  We can take these elements and out of them forge gardens that we call "towns."  We can take ink from coal and pulp from wood and write handwritten letters and roll out books on the Gutenberg Printing Press.  We can derive fabrics from plants and worms to create cloths, and we can make clothes according to whatever we deem beautiful and seemly.  We can fashion out of wood and metal and ivory tools devoted to music, which we can play in this garden if gives a good atmosphere.

We can create gardens with unending creativity and novelty, or we can pause to recreate what has already been created. We can cause some aspects of our gardens to imitate what's already there.  We are made in the image of God, and the garden is shaped into the image of our passions, and we can make art to reflect on our work.  Using substances from too many sources to pick from, we can cover canvases with pictures of things that were or are or will be in the garden.  We can paint the insides of cathedrals, the domes of capital buildings, the tops of sidewalks, the glass fragments of windows, and even our own faces.  Some use dyes.  Others use knives or glowing metal to change the skin itself.

We can breed the beasts of the earth.  We are given ultimate freedom to even choose what sorts of parents we wish to be.

What do we do with all of this freedom?  What does it all mean?  Why have a garden?

Because we're precious to God, and He wants us to experience something of what He experiences.

What I find fascinating is that art can mean something, or absolutely nothing at all.  Take, for example, this piece of art, called "Sinful Man" by artist Kyla Nicole Wiebe:

Sinful Man
Kyla Wiebe

It has a deeper meaning.  It was intended to have a deeper meaning, and intended to communicate an idea.  Kyla is a passionate Christian artist determined to use art as a means of serving God and bring His Spirit to those who have never experienced it.  Art like this gives people a glimpse of God's revelation, a foretaste of scripture, so that they may understand the language of Grace in a familiar, non-liturgical context.  It's meant to illustrate the Message, and to get people to think about it.  Unreached people might discover a goodness they've never known before, and Christians can deepen their faith by incorporating the beautiful metaphors that she illustrates into their internal spiritual language.

It's interesting, because when I showed this picture to my father, his only reaction was, "It's nice to look at."  That's more or less his reaction to all art.  None of it really means anything, and it's just there.  How good are the technical details?  Is the style okay?  Does the person understand light, proportions, and most important of all, geometry?

Speaking of geometry —  and I know that this is a tangent —  circles are incredibly useful symbols in art.

Now, is it a terrible thing if Kyla Wiebe designed art to teach people and provoke them to think and feel, and my father thinks and feels nothing when looking at it?  Not necessarily.  She tries to succeed in all areas, and doesn't want to merely create crude drawings that get her point across.  If you look at her website art page, kylart, you will see that she puts 100% into everything that she creates.  Even if it doesn't affect everyone the way that it's meant to, no one is going to deny that the world is artsier and somehow better for her art for having been in it.

Because art doesn't have to serve a utilitarian function.  It very well can exist simply because we'd like to have something to hang up on our wall.  It can exist purely because we desire to appreciate someone's skill.  Take, for example, one of my drawings.

Do you see that picture of a hand?  It serves no purpose other than to exist for its own sake.  It doesn't represent anything.  It isn't the hand of a person that I know.  It holds no sentimental value to me.  I don't feel any emotions when I look at it.  Do you want to know why I have this?  I had an art class in high school and wanted to create something fancy.  I saw Michelangelo's David and appreciated the attention to detail.  I decided that I wanted to look at a photo of the carving and notice every single subtle shade of gray, and on a pure kinesthetic level, I enjoyed the experience of being this meticulous.

Similarly, I have created portraits of family members using pencil that have no real function other than to be slightly cooler than the old photographs that I based them off of.  I felt like the pencil portraits had more value simply because they took more time and intention to create.  The art didn't create anything new, other than a statement to anyone looking at them that someone cared enough to spend hours looking at every details of his family members' faces, and knowing them intimately.

Another piece of art that exists for its own sake is Toccata and Fuge in D Minor, by Johann Sebastian Bach.  Kicking off the first Fantasia movie, with the image of a seemingly all-powerful conductor standing before nothing and creating light with the wave of his hands, I can't help but be reminded of God, with His divine sovereignty and His Graceful will to initiate Creation and fill it with all sorts of technical details for no reason other than it should bring Him pleasure to do so.  The music doesn't seem to follow a narrative.  It's just there.  It represents a style, and it's memorable.  It's filled with complexity and challenging details that are hard for amateur musicians to think up.  It has a mathematical precision, and many people have said that this piece exists purely to for organists to demonstrate their mastery over their instrument.

To quote the the film on the matter:

Now there are three kinds of music on this "Fantasia" program. First, there's the kind that tells a definite story. Then there's the kind that, while it has no specific plot, does paint a series of more or less definite pictures. And then there's a third kind, music that exists simply for its own sake. Now, the number that opens our "Fantasia" program, the "Toccata and Fugue", is music of this third kind, what we call "absolute music." Even the title has no meaning beyond a description of the form of the music. What you will see on the screen is a picture of the various abstract images that might pass through your mind, if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music.

 The way that he phrases that, "absolute music," suggests positive connotations, as if this music is "truer" than other forms of music.  I wouldn't make that claim, but certainly wouldn't say that it's less true than other forms of art.  Some people might use less flattering words of absolute music, choosing to equate its meaninglessness as shallowness.  If it exists only for no sake, then it has no purpose.

The First Day
Kyla Wiebe

Yet, when God sat on his thrown and conducted light into existence, he didn't give a specific reason for its existence.  He didn't have to justify it.  He called it good, even though at that point in time it fulfilled no utilitarian purpose and didn't yet contribute to any human narrative.  The Divine Conductor loved it simply for existing, for being His.

This is how it was in the beginning.  This was good.  One day, when Christ returns, He promises to restore the universe to a state where once again it can be good, no asterisks.  Things can exist once more simply for their own sake.  No pragmatist will have any reason to denounce art as a waste of time.

Today, we must obey the laws of life, where we must work to earn bread.  We must divide up our time between the ones that we love because time is limited.  We must make haste as well, because the Kingdom of God is at hand.  We must use our stewardship to bring God to those who haven't heard.  But one day all will have heard.  All will have been said and done.  What do we do when all of this is over?  What lives to we live after the war?  What do we do in a world where our purpose in life has been fulfilled?  Consider a career in piracy?  Make Princess Bride references?

We will all be together.  It will be like Christmas, when you have your family, and you can enjoy the small things.  Everyone has each other.  Everyone is happy.  Everything is right.  And God is right there.

Imagine creating art on Christmas.  It doesn't have to be a painting.  It could be garden work, or making a homemade film, or building houses, or inventing recipes.  Why would someone create art on Christmas?  Do we do it because we need to work?  No.  I'd imagine that we do the things that we do on Christmas because we enjoy doing them, because they make the moment more special and enhance the time that we have with our families, because we realize that we have an abundance and choose to exercise that abundance.  They are outward reflections of how an unassuming Jewish baby proved that our lives are under the spotlight of love.  We make a work of art out of our lives because in the eternal day of Christ to come, everything will exist for its own sake.  We will be like our Lord who wants us to understand what He feels when He looks at His work and says, "It is good."

We even have that now, because faith in Christ's promise makes this future as good as the present.  There's a school, called the School of Cartooning and Animation for Missions.  It does exactly what its name suggests.  That artist that I mentioned earlier, Kyla Wiebe, leads this school, and her view of her work is very straightforward.  "Lives are at stake.  When you introduce people to Christ, you are saving lives."  Her view on the urgency of this is uncompromising.  With that in mind, you might imagine that the School of Cartooning and Animations for Missions, or SoCAM for short, only cares about results.  They might treat their art in the same way that Michael Bay treats a cash cow 80's franchise — it has to be just good enough in order to get the numbers rolling in.

Yet, that isn't their mentality.  They want people working with them who are not only passionate about missions, but passionate about art.  They don't only want the art to be effective, but good all on its own.  Why?  Because the beauty of God demands nothing less.  Kyla consistently says that she wishes to pursue excellence, and never settle for art that doesn't satisfy her.  She doesn't only create art because it's the right thing to do, but because it's a pleasure and she enjoys it.

This is the attitude of SoCAM.  They spread the Gospel not only because it's urgent, but because they've been touched with Love, and art the language through which they express their joy at being loved.  They create not out of fear and duty, but out of  joy and relationship.  Art reveals who they truly are under God.  Therefore, even though this art serves a purpose, in its own way, it exists for its own sake.  It exists because of the urgency to reap the harvest, but also in confidence of what has already been completed and what has been promised to us so as to be as good as completed.  They don't wait until the mission is over before they delight in the gifts that God has given them, since art is indeed a gift.  These are expressions of these artists' truest selves, the selves that we will see in the coming age.

It we all treat our lives like this, and everything that we set out to do like this, imagine the joy that we will know when we can rest on the Sabbath and say, "It is very, very good."

Soli Deo Gloria,
John

Christian Predications

Mitchell, Brody, Shannon, and Shelby,
And also Nick,

Two years ago, when I lived alone in that fateful apartment where I wrote my first twenty-nine letters to you, I picked up a sheet of paper and began writing down a a free-flowing chart of Christian topics.  It took several days to complete.  I had a goal of writing down every imaginable theme that I could touch upon in my book series, which was about God, which meant that it was about everything.  The scope of what I planned to write was huge.  The result of my completed chart looked a little bit like this one, except around four or five times more cluttered.  I wrote down everything that I wrote down here, plus a comprehensive list of other things that ultimately had new meaning when seen through a Christian light, from wine-tasting to eminent domain.

That chart still exists out there somewhere.  I'm sure it's at my mother's house, under a pile of other papers, because I remember seeing it while shuffling through other notes.  I actually had pans for putting it up on this blog someday.  That didn't happen, and what you're getting is this list that keeps things at their basics.

The reason I revisited the idea of this chart is because I though, "If you're going to write a story about one Christian subject, what other subjects do you need to cover in order to explore that one subject as thoroughly as possible?"  Every story has its themes, and then there are the sub-themes.  As it turns out, the answer to my question is "all of them."

This is where I get nerdy, because I'm tying this whole thing to an engineered logical language called Lojban.

The basic premise of Lojban grammar is that it's based off of predicate logic.  A Lojban statement follows the pattern of [(argument1)(argument2)(argument3)(argument4)(predicate relationship)].  These statements are called bridi.  The arguments are called sumti, and the predicate relationships are called selbri.   With me so far?

Alright, so let's comme up with a random statement.  Let's say that I said, in Lojban, [John Mitchell Lojban English cu tavla].  What do all of those words mean?  What purpose do they fill within the bridi?  That is determined by the selbri (cu tavla).   "Cu" marks the beginning of a selbri, and the selbri in this case is tavla.  Tavla is the element of the statement that defines the relationship between all of the prior words.  The word tavla predicated a speaking relationship, and the pattern for tavla statements is "this is a speaking relationship, therefore we know that there is a speaker (argument1), and that there must be someone being spoken to (argument2), and there must be a subject being spoken about (argument3), and the speaking must be in some sort of language (argument4)."  To translate my original statement, I basically said "John talks to Mitchell about Lojban in English."

When making this statement, one doesn't have to fill in all of the arguments, but it's implicitly understood that all of them are there.  Perhaps the arguments are unknown, or they are obvious.  In any case, the existence of one necessitates the existence of the others.  For example, I could just make the elliptical statement that argument1 is talking, in which case I say [John cu tavla].  This basically translates as "There exists a speaker, known as John (who speaks to someone about something in some language)," or more simply, "John speaks."

In English, the only elliptical statements that we can make are those with the subject and the predicate.  However, I could also make an elliptical statement with only the audience, and say something that translates to "Speaks Mitchell," or more fully, "There exists an audience consisting of Mitchell (who is spoken to by someone, on some topic, inn some language."  I could also say "Speaks (about) Lojban" or "Speaks English."  All of these, by their very nature, assume that there is, in the broadest sense, a speaker, an audience, a subject, and a language.

When defining each of the arguments, they are each defined by their relationship with the other arguments in the predicate relationship.  So ve tavla, which means "the fourth argument in the tavla relationship," would have to be fully defined as not just "a language," but more fully as "the spoken language of a speaker for an audience about a subject."  Due to the nature of the selbri, we have to specifically refer to spoken languages when using the term ve tavla as an argument.

Let's talk about how one can create an argument by modifying a selbri.  The word klama refers to the selbri relationship "There exists a go-er (argument1), which therefore means that there is a destination (argument2), which also requires a rout (argument3), and a means of transportation (argument4)."  Let me put in a few words, then, and some of them are going to be Lojban words, so bear with me.  [ve tavla Quebec ocean klama cu klama].  Translation: "The language travelled to Quebec across the ocean via the means of the go-ers."  I put the words that were originally in Lojban in italics.  To put it in a far more extended English, I could say "There exists the fourth argument of the tavla relationship, which is the spoken language(s) of a speaker(s) intended for an audience(s) (which, by the way, may or may not be themselves), which is also the first argument in the klama relationship and therefore the go-er, which goes/comes to the destination of Quebec, across the route of the ocean, using as a means of transportation the first argument of the klama relationship, which is the go-er(s) who, like the language, travel to a destination by a means by some unspecified other means of transportation."

Can you see how each argument within the predicate relationship also implies another predicate relationship?  In theory, if you were to fill in every detail possible, you'd keep on going on forever until you had a cumbersome, but otherwise completely unambiguous statement that told you not only that a travelers brought their language to Quebec with them, but probably everything about that language, and the history of the travelers, and the history and geography and culture of Quebec, and list of every species of fish known to swim in the Atlantic Ocean.

Are you getting an idea of what a predicate relationship is?  I hope so, because this thing is pretty hard to describe without charts and diagrams, which I'm not about to draw up for se tavla.

Anyway, I'd imagine that the Lojban word "cevni," which mean refers to a selbri relationship in which the first argument is "god," would imply a predicate relationship with an awful lot of arguments.

[There exists a (god), according to (believers), of (nature), with (personality), who (does things that he is capable of doing, by his nature, and inclined to do, by his personality), who is glorious by (standard of glory), who claims (people) as his own, whose existence implies (certain things about humanity), who has (a given relationship with some humans), and (a certain different relationship with other humans), who is understood by (a certain means of understanding . . . ect.]

You'd probably get something that included everything on my flow chart.

I remember one reading 1 Corinthians 14:19, in which Paul said that he would rather speak five intelligible words that would spread the Gospel than thousands of unintelligible words in tongues.  I once shared this this verse, and it ticked off a biblicist who said that I was preaching blasphemy to suggest that the Gospel could be shared in just five words, and that in order to be saved someone had to absolutely read all of the words of the Law and instructions for Christian living.  But I do believe that if you just share some of the most important Christian particulars, then you're really shared everything else.  All the rest is implicit after certain key details have been revealed.  I believe that so long as you can impress upon someone what Grace is, that all the rest will come with time.  They will develop a theology, a sense of holiness, a sense of relationship, simply by exploring Grace.  So perhaps, in most cases, people would need more than five words, but if they're taught the basics of Jesus' ministry, which reveal His character, and also the revelations of God, such as His existence as a Trinity, that are particular and not things that we could have come up with through philosophy, most of the rest will come to people as they explore the related truths that these particular revelations predicate.  First and foremost, they should see the character of God in these things and see that His character is defined by Grace.

Soli Deo Gloria,
John

Letter from the Generose Psychiatric Clinic

Dear Mitchell,

At the Mayo Clinic on the St. Mary's campus in the Generose building is a psychiatric ward where I spent fourteen days last spring.  My motives for self-harm had never been so crystal clear, and I carried a burden heavy enough to necessitate an admission into the ward.  Had my mother not walked in on me, the steak knife would have done more damage than the quickly-healing surface wound that now sneers back at me in the mirror.  The cut only grew longer when, on my first full day in Generose, I turned the rough end of a tube of toothpaste into a weapon against myself, and rubbed until the friction cut away further at my flesh.  The nurses put me in a special room — a better room — that kept me safe under video surveillance.  I was here when I began putting notes together, notes that eventually became this letter.

The portrait I'm painting doesn't sound like the John Hooyer that you grew to know.  Self-harm rarely tempted me until about a year or two ago, and on April 1, I became dangerously wounded — spiritually — enough that I became vulnerable to my own thoughts.  I had a desire to mutilate my face during my weekend with family, and finally made an attempt on April 3, which also happened to be my father's 53rd birthday.  It would be nice to explain to you why these thoughts became so critical, but for the time being, that isn't really appropriate for me to reveal my pain.  It's a highly private affair, but I have faith that you will understand that my suffering was severe.  Sometimes we're afflicted by misfortune, but every once and a while, true and perverse evil strikes our lives.  This was one of those times.  Only something truly evil could have brought me to this.

This.

Of all things I thought I'd be inspired to do after an energizing weekend with family, staying at a psychiatric ward only made the list as a joke.  By God, I actually did it.  I actually, properly put myself in a psychiatric ward.  And quite literally, by God.

Let me explain.

My kneejerk reaction, when faced with the dilemma I created for myself, was to question the kind of Christian I was.  I especially wondered what other Christians would think of me.  Would my faith be somehow less compelling because I sank to such a point that I destroyed myself?  Could a self-destructive individual be a mature Christian?

Ever since then, I've known that I need to open up about this.  I need to claim this experience.I can't continually wonder, "Who is safe enough to share this information with?"  It has to be something that I can talk about with anyone, without shame.  If I keep it pent up inside, then I haven't made peace with it.  I continue to carry it as a burden, and that burden is contagious.  If I do share it with someone, they must keep my secret.  If this suffering controls me, then I will inevitably also use it to leverage control over others.  I don't want that, so I'm coming clean, and writing an open letter for the world to know.  There are other spiritual wounds that I must endure that I do still keep private, but this one should be known.

It isn't easy.  It's a no-win scenario.  Some people will think less of me now that they know that I abandoned the comforting guidance of the Great Comforter.  Others won't think less of me, but they'll have sympathy.  Sympathy easily turns to pity, and pity eats away at people like an invisible, inaudible lotus swarm.  I don't want anyone's pity.  Pity shrouds people in their shame.  So, I've come to conclude that there is no victory for me in sharing this account.  However, there is a victory in it for Christ, who is in this story.

The first few days were bleak.  At every passing moment, I wished that I had some means of leaving scars on my face.  They had to be there, in particular, in order to be as public as possible.  They had to display for the world to see the twistedness of my suffering, and that when I suffered, I suffered as only a giant can suffer.  This mutilation was a part of my identity, my calling, my destiny.  It was what the very name "John Hooyer" stands for, and, I feel, a part of the identity of all Hooyers.  To be a Hooyer, and particularly John Hooyer, is to be at the forefront of the war with Satan.  I wanted people to see that I had looked at evil directly in the eye, and this was part of who I am.  I had been wounded.  I was tired of hiding all of that pain, all of that terror that I had endured.  I wanted to be incapable of pretending to anyone, ever again, that it never happened.

I am married to that war, that suffering.  That war is my wife, the only woman that I feel comfortable introducing to my family.  And my family is the only thing that I trust with the burden of this war.

Then, the obsession with making myself hideous subsided into something less overwhelming, something that I could manage.  There were people out in the lounge, fellow patients.  When I first came, I didn't want to associate with them at all.  It was easier to spin around in the whirlpool of my own torments, laying in bed from morning until night, coming out only to eat and use the bathroom.  I reached a point when I was able to be my normal extroverted self again, and started getting to know them.

There was someone named Joseph, a young Hispanic college student who I instantly took a liking to.  We had some things in common.  There was also someone else named Thommas (I'm not misspelling that), who was an INFJ personality and a fellow Dutchman.  Somme of these individuals had, like me, been voluntarily admitted, but others had been turned in by their concerned families.  Almost everyone wanted to get out of the psychiatric ward.

Going out with the other people made me feel better, although it didn't negate my depression.  The evil that had befallen me had never left my mind.  It left permanent scars.  It leaves an impact on my life story that can never be undone.  There was a whiteboard in the lounge, on which I wrote the lyrics to "Hurt" that I had long since memorized.  That song has a lot of meaning for me, and it had a particular meaning for a patient in the psych ward.  Some of my peers appreciated the lyrics.

The highlight of every day was when family came to visit.  We talked about good things and bad things.  Sometimes we just kept ourselves entertained.  At other times we cried and didn't stop crying.  We would also discuss serious matters of mental health.  They helped me get through, and with their guidance, I was able to leave the ward.

Part of me is still in that ward, though.  It never left, nor should it ever leave.  I will always need that psychiatric ward.

One thing that I noticed is that most people talked about when they expected to get out.  There was one exception: man named Eric, who was a homeless man with a long beard that made him look like he belonged on Duck Dynasty.  My uncle actually graduated with him, and one of the people in the ward recognized him as someone he had once worked with.  In a way, I rather admired that he was able to admit his complete dependence on the ward.  If he absolutely couldn't handle the world outside, then there really wasn't any option but to resign to the care of doctors and nurses.

St. Mary's is a Catholic hospital.  I was able to talk about my faith with the staff.  With one in particular, I talked about demons.  I talked about how my family and I had warred with Satan, and how this war must never leave the confines of my family.

Inspired by Ravi Zacharias, who had found a Gideon Bible beside him when he was on a bed of suicide, and came to Christ, I brought my own Gideon Bible along with me.  That nurse that I talked with showed me verses from it to comfort me.  There was another Bible out in the lounge.  I read from it when I wasn't in the mood for King James English.

There was also a Qur'an.  Out of curiosity, I picked it up and read from it.  There wasn't much to impress me, since all it did was sit back and condemn sinners from its ivory tower and say that the Kingdom of God was only for the godly.  That wasn't particularly helpful for someone stuck indefinitely in the psych ward because of his ungodly desire to harm himself.

Every once and a while, someone else would pick up one of these two books.  Joseph, who was raised with a Christian background, got curious and started reading the Bible.  It was interesting that he should suddenly take interest in it once he was in St. Mary's.  Before he read the Bible, though, he flipped through the Qur'an briefly.  I suppose he was open minded and looking for spiritual guidance.

Thommas had a lot of familiarity with Christianity, but was also fascinated by Islam.  During his thirty minutes of allotted computer time each day, he would study Arabic songs, and he would read through the Qur'an diligently.  There were several Muslims in the ward, and he talked with them every day, and insisted on eating from the special Middle Eastern menu.  He would eat with them and converse about the wisdom of the Prophet Muhammad.  He thought that due to his eating habits, and his prayers, that he was a fairly stable and righteous person, who didn't quite belong in a psych ward.

I had opened the Qur'an to educate myself on another faith, but I can't speak for the others.  Perhaps they were curious to learn about other people, but I was under the impression that they were looking to find wisdom anywhere, anything that could give them guidance.  Why did they want guidance?  Easy: they knew that they were in a dark place, and they wanted out of it.  They fell far from glory, and ended up in the shed where all insufficient things are stored.  Somewhere, in the backs of their minds, they thought:

"I'm better than this.  I'm going to get religion.  I'm going to improve myself.  I'm going to get to the point where I'm worthy of leaving this psychiatric ward, where I'm no longer a patient.  I can't believe I was admitted here in the first place."

When I thought about this, I wrote a note to myself, on a sheet of yellow paper that I have with me to this day:

To what extent does religious faith become a mere "positive thought" philosophy with a compilation of inspirational quotes that make us feel better?  And how do we share the Gospel — the good news — without turning it into a mere positive thinking exercise?  The Gospel is also brutally honest — but at the same time, the perfect news for the Sinner in the Psych Ward.  Jesus was a doctor for the sick, a God who redeemed the shameful, the lowly, and the meek.  He doesn't always leave them out of their shameful, lowqwly, and meek states, though, but assured them that they're redeemed because of it.

We're redeemed because of it because only a truly lowly sinner could admit himself to the psych ward.  I looked around me, and I began seeing Jesus in the doctors.  I realized that it wasn't a shame to be here, but a good thing.  Whereas some patients looked around them and saw sterility, I saw abundant life.  One other person, a well-off man coincidentally named Ward, actually realized just how privileged he was to be there.  He had voluntarily admitted himself, like me, and as a matter of fact came from across the country just to be there, because he wanted the best of the best, and to be in the care of the Mayo Clinic.

On another day, I wrote up on the whiteboard "Know thyself; know thy suffering and they joy and they life; take His yoke upon thee and learn of Him."

The job of the self-destructive person is incredibly simple.  It is to realize that there is no shame in living in the psych ward.  Our goal is not to get out, but rather to embrace the doctors there for helping to prevent us from destroying ourselves.  They are a blessing, not a curse.

Grace is a psychiatric ward.  We are all sinners who have hit rock bottom.  We have the option to never admit ourselves to the ward, and if we don't, we will inevitably destroy ourselves.  The natural outcome of our sin is suffering, despair, and ultimately death.  To some extent, we must all be like that homeless man named Eric, who knows that his only way of getting through life is by living in the ward.  And that's why part of me has never left, because I know that I need it.

The wonderful thing about the comfort that the Holy Spirit provides is that, unlike worldly psychiatric wards, you don't accept His Grace and get a six-thousand-dollar hospital bill.  Because of the blood of Jesus, God's psychiatric ward is completely free.  We could actually afford to live there forever.

Superficially, I got better, and I left the ward.  But that shouldn't fool anyone.  I'm still a sinner.  I'm still messed up.  I will die one day because of my sins.  The temptation will always be to think, "Wait a minute, I'm better than this!  I need to find religion again!  I need to start thinking positive thoughts!  I need to get on the right track!"  That won't lead me anywhere, though.  It will prevent me from ever receiving the healthcare of Christ that I so dearly need.

It truly is a bit humiliating to receive Grace.  People who receive it are undesirable misfits who hit rock-bottom and need to be babied by the psychiatric staff.  We don't look at the people in the psych ward and think, "I want to be like them."  They are pitied.  They are seen as victims.  They are the wretched refuse of society that we don't feel comfortable talking about.  And yet, they should be our role models.  Those who embrace the psychiatric ward are the most sane of us all.

Love,
John

Legalism Got Shacked by the Spirit

Mitchell, Brody, Shannon, and Shelby,

Like most Christian movies, The Shack wasn't the best.  By no means was is bad, but it's something that definitely good have been better.  It's every so slightly cheesy, although mercifully much less so than a Hallmark Channel original movie.  I watch Oscar-winning films all of the time, so I know what quality storytelling and filmmaking looks like.  I've seen films that evoke God which are truly great, and this isn't one of them.  I'd imagine that, realistically, a man having a conversation with God would be mighty impactful and would take some incredibly impressive writing in order to convey, but you don't see that in The Shack.  It does an acceptable job at doing what it's supposed to do, and many Christians going in will be pleased, but again, whenever I see a film like this that's merely okay, I think that its a wasted opportunity.  Christians who have the Holy Spirit in them should not only be able to confess the Truth, but be able to confess it more Beautifully than non-believers are able to confess untruths.  The Truth about God is powerful and moving, life-changing, but this is not one of the movies that has changed my life.  Schindler's List changed my life.  Dead Poet's Society changed my life.  Those weren't necessarily Christian films, and yet they deeply spoke to me as a Christian.  So why is it that Christian films, even when they reaffirm what I believe, don't really speak to me?

While my criticisms of the movie's shortcomings as a piece of art are plain and frank, that's not what I want to talk about here.  That's more suited for an official review of the film.  This is not a review of the The Shack, but rather, a review of some of the claims that people have made about it.  To my surprise, it wasn't just movie critics who were criticizing The Shack, but people of faith.  To quote some of the stronger language that I found, "You are accepting the doctrine of demons in place of the Word of God."

Let me be clear about this: I do not think that The Shack teaches any sort of heresy.  The film is about a man named Mack whose daughter is murdered in the titular shack, after which his spiritual life dries up because he fundamentally doubts the goodness of God.  He gets in invitation from God to come back to the shack, and arrives to find that it actually was God who invited him.  He meets the whole Trinity there, and they spend a week talking about why God allows bad things to happen to good people.  Some of the points that God makes are that Mack is seeing the world through the lens of his suffering, that he doesn't understand that God entered in to that suffering, that God grieves too when loved ones die, that He loves the murderer, too, that we are to forgive those who sin against us, that Original Sin infects us all, and that He's all about relationship, among some other things.  The book went into a bit more detail on these subjects and discussed a wider variety of topics, but the movie is a little more focused and gives priority to discussing the subject matters pertaining to Mack's suffering.  In all this, I agreed with everything that it said, which wasn't too hard to do, considering that the film didn't say anything particularly controversial.  This was fairly standard Christianity.

It surprised me, then, when I discovered all of the distrust and accusations of heresy leveled against this film.  The first thing that I heard was that the film preaches a message of Universalism, which is the belief that since God loves all of us, we're all going to Heaven no matter what.  Nowhere in its runtime does The Shack preach this, or even suggest it.  Yes, it says that God loves everyone and forgives everyone, but it did not say that all were saved.  In fact, the book goes into a bit of detail about this.  God says that He loves the man who murdered Mack's daughter, but He also says that not everyone who is forgiven chooses to accept forgiveness.  The book actually mentioned it quite a bit that God is about relationship, and that while forgiveness makes a relationship possible, one must actually accept the relationship in order to be in it.  That isn't a Universalist message.  Granted, the movie doesn't find time for that particular bit of wisdom and thus isn't as explicit, but I still don't feel that at any point it suggested anything heretical.

God says that He is particularly fond of Mack.  Mack asks "Is there anybody you're not particularly fond of?"  God said "No."  This might have also been construed as being Universalist by some, but I think it would actually be more heretical if God had said the opposite.  If God is Love, and God created the entire world and everything and everyone in it, then God must be particularly fond of everyone.  If He didn't like someone, then He would admit to having made a mistake, and furthermore, if He didn't like sinners, He wouldn't have died for us.  A God who likes some righteous people and dislikes other, more sinful people who aren't in His Grace, reminds me of the false god of Islam, who selectively chooses people to forgive.

So far, still no heresy.

How about God being friendly and jovial?  Yes, people have in fact found issue with that, so let's discuss it.  Is it heretical for someone to have a conversation with God in which God isn't judging him, and isn't condemning him?  Possibly.  God is, after all, the final Judge, and one could say that The Shack trivializes that aspect of His personality by not evoking it much and instead focusing on His friendlier, gentler side.  But the Bible says that He will reserve that for a later day, which will become the Day of Judgment.  Yes, God desired holiness in your life, and God condemns wicked actions and foolishness,  but He doesn't get us to the point where He wants us to be by coercing us.  He gets us to that point by having a relationship with us, and through that relationship transforming our desires, which is what the film depicts.  He takes sin very seriously, it's true, but He takes the enjoyment of our relationship with Him even more seriously.  The most dangerous sins are those that distort our faith and prevent us from being close with Him, and it was such a sin that God lovingly extracted from Mack in the story.  Mack doubted God's goodness, and believed that he would make a better judge than God.  God didn't get demanding with Mack and didn't see him in terms of His sin, as a walking record of rights and wrongs, as a problem in need of judging and fixing.  He saw him as a child who had gone astray and needed extra attention and a taste of the joy that waited for him in Heaven.  Was He angry?  Not particularly, but God also mentioned that even though He loved everyone unconditionally, even though He was especially fond of everyone He had created, He still got angry sometimes.  That's scriptural, and it also works against the accusations people have made against the film that it's Universalist and that it depicts a hippie God who has no standards.  God does have standards; He just doesn't enforce those standards in ways that we find intuitively obvious.  Some people are under the impression that this movie has a false New Age god, but it's actually quite old-fashioned.

All these, so far, seem like really sloppy criticisms waged by people who haven't even watched the film, or weren't paying attention too much.  There was, however, one aspect of God that everyone noticed that you didn't have to look to hard to see.  I'm also utterly shocked that this is being considered heretical.

So let's get down to it.

First starting with the not-so-controversial: Jesus is depicted as a Middle-Eastern carpenter.  I think we can all agree with that.

A little more controversial now...not really, not in my mind, but apparently in the mind of enough people:

God the Father takes on the form of a black woman.  God the Holy Spirit takes on the form of an Asian woman.  Some people, including my sister (your cousin) have said "I've read the Bible and nowhere in it does it say that God can take any form that He pleases.  God is a man and would never present Himself as a woman!"  Those are interesting points, and I understand where they come from.  I, too, believe that we should understand God's character in terms of how He's revealed ourselves to us.  God is not all things.  He is not a God without a distinct personality.  He is not a featureless concept without peculiarities, as Plato imagined Him.  He isn't bland and predictable.  He isn't inoffensive.  He chose to be a certain way and we are to accept the manner in which He decides to identify Himself.  We like to think of God as being beyond names, beyond human language, but in fact He chose to give Himself a name in a human language, Yehweh.  God chooses to express Himself and His Love in ways that seem arbitrary.  He isn't a deistic God, but a personal God, who acts as a person and has the distinctness of a person, so we as Christians must believe in Him as He has chosen to be.  In scripture, He primarily identifies as a Father, and we are to take that very seriously.

But at the same time, the Bible also says that we are "born" in God.  He gives "birth" to us.  He is described sometimes as a womb, and as a breast.  In Isaiah, it says that "As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you."  Clearly, he has motherly characteristics.  And also, although the bible doesn't say that God can take whatever form He pleases, it never says that He can't.  Seriously, this is the all-powerful God, Creator of Heaven and Earth.  All of the diversity of the human race can be found in Him.  Both man and woman are created in His image.  Are people actually telling me that he can't appear as a black woman?

"Oh, but God would never compromise on his modus operandi!  He's described himself as being like a mother, but never actually as a mother!  He's always done things a certain way and he would never compromise on that for the sake of one person!"

Yes, but there was no precedent for Jesus, either.  There was no precedent for Pentecost before it happened.  There wasn't precedent for God appearing as a flaming bush, either, nor has there been any incident of Him doing so since then.  Sometimes, God does something new.  I can see Him appearing as two woman and a man for the sake of one man.  In the book, as well as the movie, He said that He needed to shatter Mack's preconceived notions of God, that God was some bearded white man stoically executing judgment from afar, and that Mack would understand God better if He appeared to him as a woman.  God also acknowledged that Mack had a terrible father, and wasn't ready to understand God as a fatherly presence yet.  When Mack is finally ready, God comes to him as father.

"But God wouldn't compromise!  He never meets someone halfway!  He demands that you accept Him the way He is without first feeding you an adulterated version of the Truth!"  Okay, that's an interesting argument, and in some ways it's true.  God uses half-truths to His glory when people spread them, and uses evil when it occurs to work for His will, but God Himself doesn't tell us half of the Gospel whenever He directly speaks to us.  He always speaks the unadulterated Truth.  And as it happens, I thought that He spoke the unadulterated Truth in The Shack, or at least as much as the author could comprehend it.  It is true that God has described Himself as feminine and motherly.  It is true, as far as I can tell, that God can present Himself as a Mother if He so chose.  Perhaps it's controversial for the author to suppose any choice of God, since we don't know if He has chosen or ever will choose to appear to someone as a woman, but isn't supposing that He would never do that also a supposition of His character?  In any case, this is fiction, and the author isn't describing an actual encounter with God so much as a hypothetical one, and he's also trying to illustrate God in ways that will help people make connections that they might not have easily come to before.  I'm sure God is using this depiction of Him to His glory, even if He never has and never will present Himself in the exact same way as in the film.

The final criticism took me by surprise.  People said that the film promotes idolatry.  What's that?  Idolatry?  That's was a pretty serious accusation, and I kept it in mind before going on to the theatre.  Perhaps there was a humanistic moral in the story teaching that family is just as important as God.  Perhaps there was a mention of how good the creation is and how we are to love creation.  Something like that, something that would suggest that there are things that we are to put on equal footing with God.  There were no such themes.  Later, when I looked at these charges of idolatry in more depth, I saw that the issue that people had was that the film should depict God in any way, shape, or form.  You know how Islam prohibits anyone from from making any physical representation of a prophet, or depicting God in any form of art?  That was pretty much the outlook of these critics.  I saw a lot of people quoting of Exodus 20:4, "You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below."  To my ears, this is a very primitive and one-dimensional argument that doesn't appreciate the complexity and the purpose behind that command.  Most of us learn to understand the actual meaning of this command early on, and I wasn't expecting fully grown adults to have such a simplistic view on it.  They seemed very concerned with following the letter of the law but not necessarily the spirit of the law.

Allow me to explain idolatry.  Idolatry is, first and foremost, valuing anything more than God.  God must be the source of all value and the central focus of our lives, our reason for living.  That's how most adults understand idolatry today, and just about any church that I go to will make a point of mentioning that it's even possible to idolize our spouses and children.  We can idolize other things.  Some of us put our ultimate self-worth in our jobs, and that's idolatry.  I see many humanistic people idolize the arts; just listen to Viola Davis's acceptance speech at the Oscars, or what Meryl Streep said at the Golden Globes.  When you tune into those award ceremonies, you're basically watching a bunch of wealthy people congratulating themselves on the art that they created, and defining themselves by their artistic achievements.  It's completely disconnected from the real world that matters.

This is where I have to confess something, actually.  I worship art.  Specifically, good art.  Truly, I do.  I am idolatrous.  As an artist, I am particularly vulnerable to this, because I see art in a different way than others.  I become proud and attached to my own art when I've completed it.  I adore it.  What can I say?  I put hard work into it, so it's hard not to value it!  When I see good art, I tend to take it very seriously, more seriously than I should.  Perhaps I even become jealous of the artist who created it, because I wish I could have accomplished what they have accomplished.  I'm jealous of Steven Spielberg, because he gets to make films with John Williams scores.  I'm jealous of George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkien, because they created the two greatest works of fantasy in modern art that I'm always afraid that I will never live up to.  Because I idolize these images, I break another commandment, because I begin coveting my neighbor's wife.

Furthermore, I want to write my books series.  I put my self-worth in self-expression.  This self-expression in many ways makes me vulnerable, which is a virtue, but I begin idolizing that virtue instead of putting my faith in God's love for me. I begin making the meaning of my life all about how perfect I can make my art, but that's not why I was created.  I was created to be loved.  Idolatry distracts me from that.

That is the most dangerous kind of idolatry, and that is the evil spirit that Exodus 20:4 ultimately wishes to protect us from.  Boiling it down to this ridiculous formula of "All art depicting sacred things is bad" is oversimplifying the command, and missing the point.  God commanded the Jews to make many beautiful things, including statues of cherubim.  The trick here was that God didn't want the Jews to worship the art itself, but what it represented.  We humans are visual creatures, and often do need physical prompts to remind us of the things that we value.  When I went to a Greek Orthodox church last December, they handed me a pamphlet with a bunch of questions and answers about their style of worship, and one of the questions they addressed was why they had so many icons.  They said that they wished to worship God in every way, and that humans as physical beings were not only to worship God in our minds, but with our bodies and with everything that we created as well, hence the decorations in their church.  The Catholic church has a similar stance, saying that we create art in order to venerate the things that we value.  When I talk to people of the Reformed tradition, they believe in the same thing, and like to use the words "stewardship" and "cultural mandate," and they have formed a great deal of art to the glory of God.

That's what this film is about.  It's trying to glorify God.  It isn't asking for us to glorify Octavia Spencer, even though I'm sure some people walked out of the theatre idolizing her just as they idolize any actor who appears in a Christian movie, to which I say "Just because someone's famous and a Christian, that doesn't mean that they should be your role model."  It isn't taking itself too seriously as a piece of art, as some films do, such as basically anything by Quentin Tarantino, who is constantly gratifying himself with his writing and directing style.  The movie was trying to reach out to people who might have questions about their faith and answer them, and that's noble.  I don't see too many people bowing down and worshiping the image of God seen onscreen, not in the same way as they bowed down to idols in the Old Testament, because that's not the spirit in which this film was created.  It wasn't created to be a monument of religion to be adored.

If there is an issue with idolatry, it isn't the film's fault, but our own.  We as Christians sometimes have a tendency to idolize the "goodness" of our sub-culture.  We idolize our name-brand.  Instead of making our only idol God's love for us, we put our ultimate sense of worth on "being Christian."  That's something we should be weary of.  You see this problem in the Jewish community.  Only about 10% of Jews in America are Orthodox, seeing themselves as in a covenant with God and following the commands of the Torah.  The rest are merely people born into Judaism, who like identifying with the Jewish culture, but don't live an actual covenant relationship with God.  They do many Jewish things and take pride in the tropes that are associated with being Jewish, which is the same thing as when we Christians take pride in our art, and our churches, and our charities.

Here are some other thoughts that I have on idolatry: some people who look at Exodus 20:4 and take the literal interpretation that we should never make visual representations of anything, especially God, still think that its okay to write music about God.  Isn't writing music sort of like creating an image, just for the sense of hearing?  If a composer writes a piece of music designed to express the character of God, that's painting a portrait.  Johann Sebastian Bach signed Soli Deo Gloria on every piece that he composed, "Glory to God Alone," and I always imagined that the piece "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" was all about creating an image of the things in heaven above above and the earth beneath and the waters below, expressing through the mathematical harmony of his notes the essence of a perfect Creator Who knows all things and is in control of all history.  Soli Deo Gloria.  He created this purely for the glory of God, and so God finds this sacrifice of praise acceptable, just as He was pleased by Abel's sacrifice.

Sometimes I am more like Cain.  I make offerings that seem like sacrifices, but they are for my own glory.  That's what I struggle with sometimes when I put so much time and effort into a piece of art, because I begin to idolize the art instead of the Person that the art is dedicated to.  That sacrifice becomes its own idol.  Also, I'm guilty of treating the music of Beethoven and Bach like idols.  Even though they are clearly inspired by God, and are of God, and point to God, I at times act like a wine-sipping cultural snob who's proud of himself for his pristine tastes in art.  At that point, I begin idolizing the image of this music in the same way that people in the Old Testament would idolize images.

Every time we create art, we're depicting God in some way, whether we're creating a visual of how we'd imagine he'd look like in a vision, or in more subtle ways, because essentially all art is making a statement of the character of God.  From my earliest days of writing, I understood that God was a major character in my stories because I was highly conscious that whatever happened in my stories could only occur if God willed for it to happen.  That made me feel odd at first, and it still sort of does, because as a writer I was aware that everything I described in my stories made assumptions about God.  I also felt weird that I was writing fiction, which involved me creating a world full of things that never happened in real life, the real life that God created and therefore intended.  In writing fiction, I was writing a world that God had not intended.  God reveals Himself and His character through history, and to write about something that never occurred in history is, in a sense, writing about a world with a God who revealed Himself in a different way than He has chosen to reveal Himself, and thus has a different character, and thus is a different God, and one can then claim that fiction is a false god.  If literalists wish to take their interpretation of the first commandment to its logical extremes, they're realize that all fiction, all poetry, and all music is blasphemous.

Yet Jesus spoke in parables.  He revealed Himself through His incarnation, but also through small bits of fiction.  Perhaps one could say that the fiction given to us directly from God can count as valid historic revelation, but I'd argue that we have Jesus' Spirit in us, and therefore have the liberty to tell stories just as He did.  If we are under the Law, then instead of learning to speak a living language, we'd just learn to recite quotes from the Bible all day long, Bible quotes would be the only things worth saying.  All other possible normal, everyday phrases, such as "I would like pancakes for breakfast," would be sacrilegious, because we'd be taking language into our own hands and saying things that weren't dictated to us through God's historic revelation.  True faith in the Law leaves no room for creativity, no room for progress, and no room for individuality.  When we are in the Spirit, we don't have to constantly second-guess ourselves, and we can be free to be who we are.  We are free to find new ways of revealing the character of God in new ways that have never been done before, and we know that our sacrifices to Him have His blessing, because though these are not revelations of the Law, these are still revelations of the Spirit.

When Jesus spoke in parables, He compared God to a woman who lost a coin and threw a party when She found it.  He compared God to a father who rejoiced when He reunited with His prodigal son.  We have the freedom to tell similar stories, because we have been moved and transformed from the inside so that we are now the Body of Christ.  God lets us find truth from one another as we tell stories about Him, because truth can be found in His church.  That's one of the ways in which I interpret Matthew 18:18, when Jesus says "Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."  God has revealed Himself by speaking from a flaming bush and through His incarnate Son, but He doesn't stop there.  He continues to reveal Himself through His church — through her sermons, through her worship, through her stories, through her art, through her music, through her lives.

The Shack strikes me as a retelling of the parable of the woman who lost her coin, as if the author, William Paul Young, were trying to tell it in his own words.  That's not blasphemy, and that's not idolatry.  That is teaching, as Christ taught, and it has His blessing, because the Spirit is talking through the author.  Even though it doesn't match the exact wording that Jesus used, and in a legalistic sense has fallen short of the glory of God, because no Christian artwork is technically perfect, the story still comes from the Spirit of God.  It saddens me when Christians so harshly judge other Christians and are slow to trust or forgive each other.  People have been telling others not to see this film, because they are paranoid and afraid, but fear does not come from the Spirit.  A Christian is capable of watching an imperfectly written screenplay and still getting the Spirit from it.  We sometimes become frightened and start judging God when He allows someone freedom to walk as they please in the Spirit, but we must learn to let that sense of judgment go.  Yes, we should always have wise discernment, but we're also called to be united.  What I have seen is division between Christians because of this film, and that isn't something that we can be content with.  If we can't all agree on finer theological points, that's okay, but we must remember that the Spirit that unites us is stronger than the spirit that divides us.

Soli Deo Gloria,
John