theologian. He was God who told stories.”
Yes. God who told stories.
St. Matthew says, “And he spake many things unto them in parables…and without a parable spake he not unto them.”
When the powers of this world denigrate and deny the value of story, life loses much of its meaning; and for many people in the world today, life
has
lost its meaning, one reason why every other hospital bed is for someone with a mental, not a physical, illness.
Clyde Kilby writes, “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything….It is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.”
The well-intentioned mothers who don’t want their children polluted by fairy tales would not only deny them their childhood, with its high creativity, but they would have them conform to the secular world, with its dirty devices. The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs but in truth.
When I was a child, reading Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, reading about Joseph and his coat of many colours and his infuriating bragging about his dreams, reading
The Selfish Giant
and
The Book of Jonah,
these diverse stories spoke to me in the same language, and I knew intuitively that they belonged to the same world. For the world of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, is the world of story, story which may be able to speak to us as a Word of God.
The artist who is a Christian, like any other Christian, is required to be
in
this world, but not
of
it. We are to be in this world as healers, as listeners, and as servants.
In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.
We write, we make music, we draw pictures, because we are listening for meaning, feeling for healing. And during the writing of the story or the painting or the composing or singing or playing, we are returned to that open creativity which was ours when we were children. We cannot be mature artists if we have lost the ability to believe which we had as children. An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith.
—
Bach is, for me, the Christian artist
par excellence,
and if I ask myself why, I think it has something to do with his sense of newness. I’ve been working on his C Minor Toccata and Fugue since college, and I find something new in it every day. And perhaps this is because God was new for Bach every day, was never taken for granted. Too often we do take God for granted. I’m accustomed to being a Christian. I was born of Christian parents who were born of Christian parents who were…
That’s all right when one is a child, that comfortable familiarity with being Christian, because to the child, as to Thomas Traherne when he was small, everything is wonderful and new, even familiarity. The edge has not been taken off the glory of God’s creation. But later on there comes a time when this very familiarity can become one of those corrupting devices. We learn this early, in our attachment to certain bedtime routines of bath and story and prayer and teddy bear and glass of water and good-night kiss—and the routine must never be varied because this is security in what the child learns early is an insecure world.
This past winter, while our three grandchildren were with us because their parents were in the Holy Land, I knew the joy again of a bedtime routine with a two-and-a-half-year-old. Edward and I sang “Molly Malone” and “Speed Bonny Boat” at the piano. Then came bath and bed and more songs, and finally the great moment of the bedtime routine came when he looked at his great-grandmother’s charm
Yes. God who told stories.
St. Matthew says, “And he spake many things unto them in parables…and without a parable spake he not unto them.”
When the powers of this world denigrate and deny the value of story, life loses much of its meaning; and for many people in the world today, life
has
lost its meaning, one reason why every other hospital bed is for someone with a mental, not a physical, illness.
Clyde Kilby writes, “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything….It is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.”
The well-intentioned mothers who don’t want their children polluted by fairy tales would not only deny them their childhood, with its high creativity, but they would have them conform to the secular world, with its dirty devices. The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs but in truth.
When I was a child, reading Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, reading about Joseph and his coat of many colours and his infuriating bragging about his dreams, reading
The Selfish Giant
and
The Book of Jonah,
these diverse stories spoke to me in the same language, and I knew intuitively that they belonged to the same world. For the world of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, is the world of story, story which may be able to speak to us as a Word of God.
The artist who is a Christian, like any other Christian, is required to be
in
this world, but not
of
it. We are to be in this world as healers, as listeners, and as servants.
In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.
We write, we make music, we draw pictures, because we are listening for meaning, feeling for healing. And during the writing of the story or the painting or the composing or singing or playing, we are returned to that open creativity which was ours when we were children. We cannot be mature artists if we have lost the ability to believe which we had as children. An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith.
—
Bach is, for me, the Christian artist
par excellence,
and if I ask myself why, I think it has something to do with his sense of newness. I’ve been working on his C Minor Toccata and Fugue since college, and I find something new in it every day. And perhaps this is because God was new for Bach every day, was never taken for granted. Too often we do take God for granted. I’m accustomed to being a Christian. I was born of Christian parents who were born of Christian parents who were…
That’s all right when one is a child, that comfortable familiarity with being Christian, because to the child, as to Thomas Traherne when he was small, everything is wonderful and new, even familiarity. The edge has not been taken off the glory of God’s creation. But later on there comes a time when this very familiarity can become one of those corrupting devices. We learn this early, in our attachment to certain bedtime routines of bath and story and prayer and teddy bear and glass of water and good-night kiss—and the routine must never be varied because this is security in what the child learns early is an insecure world.
This past winter, while our three grandchildren were with us because their parents were in the Holy Land, I knew the joy again of a bedtime routine with a two-and-a-half-year-old. Edward and I sang “Molly Malone” and “Speed Bonny Boat” at the piano. Then came bath and bed and more songs, and finally the great moment of the bedtime routine came when he looked at his great-grandmother’s charm
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