Lucas Kwong on Interning at Image 0 comments

Luci Shaw Fellow Lucas Kwong, a Yale student from Vancouver, BC, who spent his summer interning at the Image office—and joined us as a fiction-writing student and gopher at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, where we also fed him corn fritters. Here he reflects on what he learned and how his experience changed him.

For most people, the term “Christian art” evokes soft-focus Jesus paintings in which the Messiah looks pleasantly stoned, and in which His hair is so perfectly coiffed you’d think He was pitching Herbal Essences instead of heavenly reward. As for the non-visual arts, thus saith Brandon Ebel, the formerly alcoholic owner of a Christian rock label: “I always tell people that Christian music drove me to drink.” I must confess that, a few years ago, I too would have read Christian art its last rites. But, thanks to my time as one of the 2006 Luci Shaw Summer Fellows, I’ve become convinced that there exists a remnant of serious artists in the Church who may hold the key to saving the culture at large from the dredges of mediocrity—and Christendom itself from its own worst instincts.

My epiphany unfolded in two cities known for their artistry: Seattle, home to a flourishing indie music scene, and Santa Fe, where Catholic mysticism collides with a starkly beautiful landscape and where the only high rise buildings are Gothic cathedrals. At Image’s home office in Seattle, the litmus test for publishable material is whether it intelligently grapples with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Moreover, selecting material is only half the battle, as I learned when head editor Greg Wolfe sat down and walked us Fellows through the nuts and bolts of the publication process. As anyone who’s seen my wardrobe knows, I am not a guy who places a lot of emphasis on appearances, and so I’d never really thought about the relationship between the cover and the contents of a publication. Learning about Image’s meticulous attention to layout, then, was tremendously insightful.

While in Seattle, the left side of my brain also underwent some kind of synaptic explosion of creativity, for which I have to credit Image as well. During my downtime, I read back issues of Image in the groovy bachelor’s pad that came with the internship; within its pages, I found Catholic painters brushing up against Protestant poets, who rubbed shoulders with prose steeped in Greek Orthodoxy. To this day, I’m not sure exactly what happened, only that, in the midst of reading Image, sleeping eight hours a night, and enjoying the natural scenery of the Fremont neighborhood, I started to write songs, something I hadn’t done in years. If memory serves me correctly, I wrote about nine songs in one week and have steadily been writing ever since. (Shameless plug: if you’re interested, you can find some of the songs I wrote that summer at www.myspace.com/lucaskwong).

My adventures in art, faith, and mystery culminated in the Glen Workshop, an annual artist’s conference held in Santa Fe. The Glen is living proof that Christians are anything but a sea of homogenous automatons. Among those attending the workshop’s fiction, poetry, and visual arts classes were kindly grandmothers, 15-year-old college sophomores, a former resident of Communist Poland, and an ex-roadie for Ricky Van Shelton. All in all, I had a lovely week hosting the open mic, attending to Eugene Peterson’s bags, and generally assuring the attendees who had paid by credit card that I was not going to steal their identities.

If nothing else, my time as part of the Image staff opened my eyes to the twin challenges posed by the union of art and religion. In recent years, mainstream culture’s weakness for faddism has graduated from occasional amusement to constant obsession: we want our reality TV, Da Vinci Code, and updates on Britney Spears’ maternal misadventures. One of the reasons for this idolization of novelty – and there are many – is a loss of respect for the time-tested religious traditions that once inspired society’s most cherished artists. Without the bedrock of enduring images and mythical tropes supplied by religious heritage, the secular imagination has nothing to feed on but the ever-passing moment. Meanwhile, believers are challenged not to backward, but to press forward. For every organization like Image, there are millions of churches who mistake aesthetics for dogma, as if hewing to traditional Christianity means wearing your hair in a bun and banning drummers from the house of the Lord. Contrary to such po-faced religiosity, finding creative ways of expressing timeless convictions is essential to nourishing the weary soul of modern Christendom. Should serious contemporary Christian art gain enough momentum within the Church, it could finally force the hand of those fundamentalists who still think that “Led Zeppelin” is really code for “Long live Satan.”

High-flown talk of art and faith aside, I am eternally grateful to Image Journal for allowing me to take part in an internship more stimulating than the mail-sorting variety, and also for allowing me to sort mail related to famous people: I once had the privilege of sending a package to Bono, a memory I proudly cite whenever U2 comes up at parties and dinners. If you’re reading this, Bono, I hope you appreciated how symmetrical the stamps on that letter from Greg Wolfe were.