Why Art Matters for the ChristianSample

Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” The battle over the beautiful is close to God's heart, for beauty holds the reins of the human heart. We are drawn to beauty, we long for more of it. Our eyes gaze upon it and where our eyes are fixed our feet tend to follow.

Paul writes in Philippians 4:8 to dedicate our attention to the beautiful. Beauty can reshape the human heart. This is why I believe that art matters so much for the Christian journey. Art is the exploration of the broken and beautiful in our story. It causes us to linger, to wonder, and sometimes to recoil in horror at what we discover about ourselves.

Art, for a brief and humbling moment, allows us to see the world from someone else’s vantage point. It can frame the picture from a place we have never been, to experience the world in a way that is beyond the limitations of our time, space, and history. Art, particularly great art, draws our attention to something beyond ourselves. And when our attention returns, we find that we have been changed. The out-of-body experience changes us.

In 2017, I felt the culture around me losing the ability to have empathy. Politics had made its way into close relationships and in our arguments over policy, we lost sight of the humanity behind political warfare. I was raised in a conservative evangelical family and the topic of abortion was a black-and-white issue. The Scripture is clear that God “knit us together in the mother’s womb” and that God knows us intimately before we ever draw our first breath. But in the heated atmosphere, I wanted to see the issue through the lens of empathy.

Which led me to the poem “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks. And this work of art changed me. It’s worth the five minutes it will take you to read it.

It retells the story of abortion through a different set of eyes. It draws out the sadness, the longing, the regret, and that “even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.” The words of Gwendolyn Brooks didn’t change what I believed, but they changed how I believed. It brought humanity back into the discussion and I could no longer see the issue without also seeing the desperate grief of the mother.

This work of art helped me see the world from a perspective that is more like God, one that leads with compassion and mercy toward the broken parts of the world. One that looks more like the Good Samaritan healing the broken than the Pharisees gripping a stone and taking aim.