Tonight we celebrate and give thanks for this festival of arts and crafts. I know it has brought much pleasure.
There are of course different forms of pleasure. I enjoy a glass of wine or pint of beer, a country walk, and, great privilege of retirement, the very occasional siesta after lunch. What distinguishes the enjoyments which arts and crafts bring, from these? I would suggest that what makes them different and what all the arts have in common, is that they involve creativity. Being creative brings us pleasure, and when we hear singing or look at a painting, we enjoy the fruits of other people’s creativity. Now again, we can get high falutin about creativity. Radio 3 isn’t the only expression of human creativity. There are many ways of being creative-the most widely expressed form is in fact gardening, by far the most popular of all recreations. Another way, increasingly popular through TV programmes, is cooking. In gardening and cooking, as in music making, dancing or poetry, people put themselves, their most creative self, into what they are doing. And we all have a spark of creativity within us, because that is part of what is meant by being made in the image of God. God is of course the supreme creator, and only he can create de novo, out of nothing, but being made in the divine image, we too, working on and within his creation, can be creative, that is we can bring something fresh and revitalizing to our world. Rudyard Kipling brings this out well in a poem, in which he pictures heaven as a place in which each one of us in an artist.
And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he see It, for the God of Things as They are!
(“When earth’s last picture is painted”, Rudyard Kipling, Selected Verse, Penguin, 1983, p.98)
Each one of us is an artist, that is, each one of us has a spark of divine creativity within us. When we express that creativity we find pleasure, and others too can find pleasure in what we produce. One of my grandsons has quite a talent for drawing. We adults take pleasure in that, and what he produces. If we limited human beings can take such pleasure how much more does God take pleasure in our human creativity.
Sometimes a work of art evokes the comment that it is beautiful – and from a Christian point of view, all beauty, whether in nature or the arts, like all truth and goodness, has its ultimate source and standard within God himself. True beauty is not just prettifying. It can only come from a fierce artistic integrity and a desire to respond to life deeply and truthfully. But the result will in some way be characterized by harmony and elegance. As Aquinas put it, the characteristics of beauty are wholeness, harmony and radiance. Robert Grossteste a Bishop of Lincoln in the 13th century defined it this way:
For beauty is a concordance and fittingness of a thing to itself and of all its inward parts to themselves and to each other and the whole, and of that whole to all things.
But here we come across a real difficulty for the Christian. It may be highlighted by something Graham Greene wrote when he visited a Buddhist temple in Vietnam.
The features of Buddha cannot be sentimentalised like the features of Christ, there are no hideous pictures on the wall, no stations of the cross, no straining after unfelt agonies. I found myself praying to Buddha as always when entering a pagoda for now surely he is among our saints.
If we want serene beauty in an obviously appealing way, we look to faces of the Buddha, especially those of the Gandhara and Gupta periods or the 14th Sukothai art of Thailand. They certainly express elegance and harmony. But at the heart of Western Culture is the statue of a man being tortured on a cross.The artist Cecil Collins said he had been much struck by a remark of Goethe that it was a disaster to have an image such as that of the crucifixion at the heart of a civilisation.
I imagine we have all at one time or another been struck by this contrast. The face of the Buddha and the face of Christ on the cross. The one an image of serene beauty the other of agony. We can find outselves drawn to the one, and turning away in distaste from the other. This is not just a question of art or course, for it goes to the very heart of the two religions. Buddhism offers a way of detachment from the pain and suffering of the world, a disciplined journey away from all that disturbs us towards an ultimate release from the cycle of death and rebirth. Christianity sets before us a God who enters the flux of history in order to change it from within, who shares our travail and agony. As Denise Levertov put it in a poem based on a vision of Julian of Norwich
He took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
Even the lees of the cup:
Within the mesh of the web, Himself
Woven within it, yet seeing it,
Seeing it whole.
If it is disturbing enough having a tortured victim at the heart of our civilisation, there is another disquieting thought. We have turned this torture into some of our greatest works of art. What possible justification is there for this? Does it not take away from the reality of suffering? For the point about art, is that whilst it might disturb, at some deep level it also consoles, offers a suggestion of ultimate redemption. And this of course points us to this Easter season. For the figure on the cross is not just one amongst the millions of the world’s victims, but the one whom God raised from the dead. What we see on the cross is not just a battered and mutilated body, but a union of Divine and human love that no hate, rejection or death can destroy. The resurrection reveals that even in the dereliction and darkness of feeling completely abandoned, heaven and earth, God and man, are joined in a way that can never be unjoined. For having taken our human nature on himself Christ remains in solidarity with all human kind.
What God reveals in the resurrection of Christ is a truth for all humanity. In every human circumstance, however dire, God is ceaselessly at work bringing something new, something creative, above all something of our true self.
What links our human creativity with the ceaseless creativity of God trying to draw some good out of evil, are words of Ephesians 2, 10. “We are God’s poiema.” I love the translation of that as ” his work of art”. What a wonderful thought. We, each one of us, are God’s work of art. And if human works cannot be achieved without fierce integrity and much struggle, the same is true, but more so, for what it takes for God to achieve each one of us. If we recognize artistic integrity, that fierce and uncompromising persistence to express a particular way of seeing and feeling about the world, how can the integrity of Divine Love, wrestling to realize his vision for us, be less? It is said that someone once wrote on a wall “God is dead”. Then someone wrote under it. “No he isn’t. He is alive and well but working on a less ambitious project.” In fact of course, he is still working on that ambitious project, making us a work of art, a work of art that expresses not just his creativity, but through that creativity his truth and beauty and goodness. We are God’s work of art – and as the rest of the sentence goes on “created in Christ Jesus for the life of good deeds which God designed for us.”
So we give thanks for this Festival of Craft and Art. We give thanks for the creativity within each one of us. Above all we give thanks for the Gracious God for whom each one of us is a work of art. And we pray that we may discern and live out those good deeds which he has in mind for us to do.