The Form of Faith 0 comments

WHEN, about a year ago, I saw the cover of a special arts issue of Re:generation, a journal I generally admire, I bristled. The cover headline read “Artists, Come Home!” and the illustration included a mock “personal” ad calling on artists to return to the church. What struck me as wrong, I think, was the implication that artists were inherently wayward folk, and that the journal was somehow in a position to call these children home. In a letter to the editor, I pointed out that the contents of that issue contradicted the cover, since the artists featured were all deeply ensconced in churches and communities. Moreover, I said, the idea of the artist as someone likely to stray from the fold reinforced a deep American prejudice, fueled by our religious history, that those who live by their imaginations are predisposed to wantonness of various sorts. That prejudice not only does a disservice to the many artists who live within church communities (men and women who frequently feel unappreciated by their brothers and sisters), but also sends a message to those on the outside, and not a terribly attractive one.

But to prove that I’m not troubled by the hobgoblin of foolish consistency, I’d like to say a word about those writers and artists who do find themselves estranged from communities of faith. It isn’t hard to empathize with creative people who feel profound ambivalence about organized religion. Any form of organization is going to exert a pressure toward conventional thinking and expression that will run afoul of the artist’s passion to “make it new.” Like families, churches can become dysfunctional and inflict wounds down to the bone of one’s psyche. (Anyone who studies art in any detail is also aware of the mysterious relationship between the traumas that religious groups can cause and the very budding and flowering of imagination in response to such pain.)

There are, however, countervailing pressures on the artist, pressures that lead in the direction of community, rather than away from it. Take, for example, the close connection between artistic vision and prophetic insight. Artists have often rightly considered their role in prophetic terms. But the prophet is never completely independent of community. In ancient Israel, prophets actually held an office; though they were more free to speak their minds than others, they were not autonomous. The office of prophet was not the same as that of priest or king, and the prophet had no right to arrogate those roles to himself. The tendency of a few artists to assume these other roles has been with us at least since the Romantic era, but it has done very little to contribute to the creation of enduring works of imagination.

An even more compelling argument goes to the heart of the creative act. All art involves an intimate union between form and content. So intimate is this unity that it would be wrong to describe the relationship merely by saying that form is like a vessel that contains content, as a bowl might contain milk. It is natural to speak of form as something exterior and content as something interior, but it is also misleading. We may speak of the theme of a work of art but we should never do so as if theme is something that can be detached from the work’s form. Form is mediation: it makes something intangible known to us—in and through tangible words, gestures, materials.

Now apply all this to faith. For the Jew, the content of belief, the existence of the Maker and Lord of the universe, is mediated through the form of the covenant, a relationship between the Lord and the chosen people. To be sure, there are various denominations within Judaism, but they do not divide the fundamental unity of the Jewish people. In Christianity, the content—the Gospel of salvation through Christ—is mediated through the form of the church. The perennial temptation for Christians is to believe that the message can be detached from the community of believers in that message. But the content of faith is precisely that we are members of one body, that Christ is made manifest in our coming together in faith.

The church, it is said, is a human institution, and a thoroughly fallible one at that. True, but as every artist ought to know, all our forms are imperfect—they are broken vessels. To acknowledge that brokenness is not to invalidate the need to create and strive perpetually to perfect those forms. The wonder of art, and of faith, is that we can still receive grace through the cracks in those vessels. As Leonard Cohen put it: “There are cracks, cracks, in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

In describing his writing process, C.S. Lewis spoke of beginning with a ferment of “mental pictures” colliding in his imagination. “This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form,” he concludes. All of us have been vouchsafed mental pictures of transcendent truth, but we need to find a form to give them coherence and meaning. In that sense, the church is not only form, but truly our home. Which brings me back to that cover headline. Yes, artists should come home, but no one can issue that call to anyone else from a safe, ensconced position inside that home. For we are all wayward, and only arrive home by daily seeking it out—preferably in the company of one another.