In this lecture from the Anselm Society's 3rd annual Rocky Mountain Artists Retreat, Father Jeromie Rand from Denver’s Church of the Advent, explores how learning how to love God through your craft can unleash the full potential of who you were made to be.

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Loving God: Integrating Faith and Craft

Living with a renewed imagination—one that has an ability to believe that we are a part of God’s story, no matter what our circumstances—is at the very heart of what it means to be a faithful Christian. A redeemed imagination is necessary for us to live with the virtues of faith and hope. How else are we supposed to believe in things not yet seen if we can’t imagine them?

Artists have a special place in helping us develop that gospel-shaped imagination. It is artists who are tasked to look beyond the appearance of things and see beauty where others might miss it. Artists can name things as they really are, and then tell (or paint, or write, or sing, or dance) the church and the world the true nature of the story we are living in. You are not alone in that task, of course. All of us are called to be good storytellers, telling a holy gospel story. But for most of us, our ability to do that well is shaped by the art that we take in: the stories we read, the images we see, and the movies we watch all help us develop that holy imagination.

I am excited to be here today, among a group whose goal is a renaissance of the Christian imagination. Because living into this calling is hard. We need one another for support and encouragement. We need to work together to develop our imaginations around what it looks like to do work as Christian artists, to be holy storytellers, to engage the disciplines that God has given each of us to do in a way that is shaped by the gospel story.

It is especially important for us to be here together as artists, because many of us have faced a lifetime surrounded by false narratives that diminish or distort the significance of art.

Fighting False Narratives

There’s the story that’s common in our culture: that science represents the possible salvation of the world, and art is only for entertainment. It’s unnecessary. So we push people into studying science and kind of ignore the significance of art in education.

There’s the story that truth is all relative. It doesn’t matter what stories we tell as long as they resonate with somebody, as long as they can find an audience.

There is the story that beauty is unnecessary, and function is all that matters. If you’ve seen Arapahoe Community College, where I teach, the building was built during the brutalist period of architecture. People who drive by and don’t read the sign out front think it’s a prison. I spend most of my workday in a portion of the building that has no windows, so I go into this gigantic concrete enclosure and I have no idea what’s happening outside. Oftentimes that same message is reinforced in our churches by a stripping away of beauty, where all that is left is things that are functional.

There’s the story that only facts matter. That story says that fiction or fantasy is a waste of time, and if you are working on the craft of telling stories then your vocation lacks value.

There’s the story that there is a wall between the sacred and the secular. Only art or music that explicitly talks about Jesus has any real value for the church. If it doesn’t do that, then it’s not really worth it.

You could probably name dozens more of these false narratives and tell of ways that you have been injured by hearing these stories or seeing them lived out, both inside and outside of the church.

I don’t think I need to try to convince you that those messages are wrong. Most of us can recognize that we need to reject these stories. But hearing them over and over again still has an impact.

We can pick up some of those attitudes ourselves and start to believe our artistic calling is unnecessary to the mission of the church. Or we can become defensive about the disciplines we engage in and feel like we have to justify ourselves every time that we talk to somebody about our role as an artist.

If those messages have come from the church, we can be tempted to pull away from church altogether and try to look for more welcoming communities that will affirm us, but without the knowledge of Jesus. Or perhaps we just feel confused about where we belong in the grand scheme of things.

So we turn away from these stories, these false narratives, and we say, “No.” But it’s not enough to just reject the false story. We have to have a good story to tell in its place. Not just a story that’s more pleasing: one that is more true.

That’s part of why we’re here as artists: because we want to tell the truth, but we also want to tell the truth beautifully. We want to tell a story that is big enough to explain how our creative work connects us to God, and to the church, and to the world. A story that is shaped by the gospel. That’s what I want to try to offer you today: a way of thinking about Christian art that I do believe is beautiful and true, and beautiful because it is true.

Bringing Art to the Altar

My story starts in my family’s kitchen on a Sunday morning. Our church has communion every week, and different people in the congregation take turns baking the bread that we use for communion.

My wife is on the rotation, so on weeks that it’s her turn to make bread she’ll get up a little bit earlier than usual and mix water and oil and flour and honey and salt into a simple dough. Then she’ll roll it out flat and use the outline of a bowl to carefully cut it into three evenly sized round loaves. She’ll score each loaf with a cross which, as a priest, also conveniently makes it easy to break. On one of those loaves, the one that’s going to sit on top, she’ll mark it with the letters IC XC NIKA, which harks back to the ancient Greek phrase, “Jesus Christ Conquers.” If our kids wake up before this process is complete, they’re likely to get a few bites of uncooked dough or sometimes a little mini loaf of their own.

We’ll take these simple loaves into our church on that Sunday morning, where they’ll sit in the back as people gather in the sanctuary and prepare for worship. And then together, as a congregation, we will bless the Lord, and we will sing, and we will hear the words of holy scripture read and preached. We will declare our faith in the words of the ancient creed. We will pray and confess our sins, and we’ll pass the peace of God to one another. And then, when the time comes, someone from the congregation will carry the loaves up to either me or one of the other priests, and they’ll bring the wine forward with it. And I or whoever is celebrating that day will take it, we’ll bless it, we’ll break the loaves, and then we’ll give it to the congregation as the body of Christ and we will meet with God in the feasting upon it.

The bread that was made in my kitchen, out of simple ingredients, is transformed by our act of thanksgiving, by our act of Eucharist. The simple gifts of the earth that God has given us—the wheat and the water—are mixed with human creativity as we make a loaf of bread which we offer back to Him. And then He gives it back to us, but He gives it back transformed into something that brings true life.

This is the calling of the Christian artist: we are to take what we have been given, our lives, our talents, our bodies, our words, our paints and pencils; whatever medium you use to create art. We offer it up to God in hope and faith that it will be transformed into something that offers light for our self and for others. This is a deep need of the world that only someone who is in Christ can fulfill. This is something that Christian artists can offer that can’t be created by artists—no matter how talented they are— outside of the church.

As Alexander Schmemann puts it in his book, For the Life of the World:

There must be someone in this world—which rejected God and in this rejection, in this blasphemy, became a chaos of darkness—there must be someone to stand in its center, and to discern, to see it again as full of divine riches, as the cup full of life and joy, as beauty and wisdom, and to thank God for it. This “someone” is Christ, the new Adam who restores that “Eucharistic life” which I, the old Adam, have rejected and lost; who makes me again what I am, and restores the world to me. And if the Church is in Christ, its initial act is always this act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.

This is what we are called to do when we create art. We are offering the world back to God, with thanksgiving. And when we do so, we are returning the world to God.

Living Eucharistically

This is a story that is big enough to contain what it is that we have been called to do. It’s a story that is true, and good, and beautiful, and it’s a story that has many implications for how we relate to God, to the church, and to our work as artists.

First and foremost, this story allows us to connect with God as the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in the creation of art. The Holy Spirit is not the only member of the Trinity who works in artists. Sometimes we can get the impression that he gives us inspiration, and then that’s where the God’s participation in the creation of art ends. It is true that the Holy Spirit inspires and works with us in the creation of art. But we also have the questions of, “How does Jesus relate to us in creating art?” and “How does God the Father relate to us in creating art?”

If we think of art as a Eucharistic activity then, as Schmemann says, it is Jesus who showed us what it looks like for a human to live Eucharistically. He came as a man and gave thanks to God for everything in the world. He gave thanks for things that people overlooked. He saw those that the world had seen as outcasts, and said God, “I give you thanks for these, for the poor, the broken, and the unwise, for the foolish.” He said, “God, you’ve given me this cup, that I don’t want, of suffering, and yet still I’ll offer this up to you as well.”

Jesus becomes our model for living a Eucharistic life, and the Father becomes the one to whom we are offering our art. He becomes our very first audience for everything that we create.

For some, the idea of God as audience is terrifying. It is easy to think of an audience as those who judge our work and tell us whether or not it’s good enough. If that is how we think of an audience, it’s easy to say, “I can never live up to the expectations of God. How can I possible do that?” But if we look at the idea of audience through this Eucharist lens, then God is both audience and a participant in the creation of our art, receiving what we have offered and making it something that can actually offer life.

The bread that my family makes on Sunday morning, it’s just bread. I mean it’s good bread, but it’s bread. It can keep my body alive if I eat it, but it doesn’t offer true, deep life. It’s certainly not the life that Jesus talks about when He said, “I am the bread of the world.” It is not the body of Christ until it is offered to God in the Eucharist. In the same way, my art is not complete until I offer it to the Father.

The Artist within the Body of Christ

This Eucharistic lens also changes how we relate to the church. The Eucharist is first and foremost an activity of the church. It’s something that we gather together to do. I don’t bless the loaves at home and then bring them into the Body. We come together as a group to offer thanksgiving.

This obviously doesn’t mean that we’re always within a group while we’re creating our art, but our identity as part of the church, as part of God’s people, is instrumental in our ability to fulfill the calling that God has given us as artists.

A Eucharistic model of artistic engagement places the artist, and their gift, firmly within the Body of Christ. The act of creation is a way in which the artist lives out what it means to be part of the priesthood of believers. Each of you has a priestly vocation, because you are offering the things of the world up to God, and blessing them, and receiving back something that is good, and beautiful, and complete: something that can offer real life to others.

A Eucharistic model changes how we think of the work itself, as well, because it allows us to view the creation of art as part of God’s plan for the redemption of the world. Just as God choose to offer grace through bread, so too he chooses to use art to work towards his aim of redeeming the whole world. Schmemann said, “We need to have people who are offering the world up to God in thanks.” The art we make is not just for ourselves. It’s also for the life of the church. This is something that our churches need to respond to as well. We need to understand that the creation of art is part of God’s redemptive process.

The creation of art is also for the life of the world outside the church. Art is one of the few places that we can tell the true stories that stand up against all those false narratives and hope that people will actually see them and pay attention. When we create things that are good, and beautiful, and true, then we guide people into this redemptive story that God is working through us.

There is no division between the sacred and the secular in our art. Bread in itself is not sacred, and yet when it’s offered up to God and we receive it back, it is something that becomes holy. It is set apart for our life and for our goodness. The same thing is true of art that we create as well. It’s not that art in itself is sacred. That again is one of the false stories that we can hear: that anything called art is something to be venerated. But when we offer it up to God with thanksgiving, then it becomes holy. This act of making things holy is at the core of what it means to live faithfully as a Christian artist.

Knowing that everything we create will be offered to God can influence what we decide to make. If he is participating in our creative work and blessing what we offer, we have to make art that is true to the story of the gospel, art that names things as they really are. Whether we write or paint or act, whatever we do, all of it should fit into the grand story of what we as Christians have to say about who God is, who the world is, and who we are. If we are going to tell these stories that are true, we have to know that story and be connected to it. We’ve got to know our own place in this redemptive work that God is doing and see that story something that is worth telling.

Ugliness that Leads to the Gospel

There are many stories out there that gain traction and popularity that are just ugly. They are neither good nor beautiful. They are telling lies about the nature of the world. They are drawing people into nihilism or hedonism, saying that anything that brings pleasure is in itself good simply because it brings pleasure. But we stand up and we say, “No.” We are telling you the true story of the gospel: we receive everything as a gift, and it is good, and it is beautiful, but we offer it up to God, and it is in him that it is fulfilled. This is how it has true life.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can’t tell stories that are full of tragedy. Another quote from Schmemann says, “Because we have first seen the beauty of the world, we can now see the ugliness, realize what we have lost, understand how our whole life (and not only some “trespasses”) has become sin, and can repent it.” We can do this in our art. We can portray the ugliness of the world. But it is not an ugliness that leads to a lack of hope and ultimate destruction. It is an ugliness that leads to the gospel, and the need for redemption, and the need for hope, and the need for Jesus most of all.

This Eucharistic model of creation also has something to say about the quality of our art. If we’re offering our work to God, if He is our first audience, we want to offer our best. But not in a way that we have to be fearful of him rejecting it. The loaves of bread that we make for Sunday mornings are not perfect. Neither will our art be perfect. We offer Him the best that we have, and He receives it and gives us a blessing.

This is consistent throughout the Bible. I think of Jesus looking at the widow offering two small coins, and saying she’s offering a true gift to God. As an artist, I probably have the widow’s budget for what I can offer up to God. But I offer the best that I can, and trust that in Him it is transformed and made into something that is beautiful, and good, and full of life.

That doesn’t mean that all of our work is all of the same quality, that we shouldn’t work on our craft, that we shouldn’t try to become better and make things that are as beautiful as they can be. There is definitely room for the church to applaud those that God has given great gifts, and say, “Look! This is beautiful, and good for all of us.” But that’s not at the core of what it means to be an artist. All of us can create because of what God has done for us. Because we are all part of his grand story.

Your Gifts Transformed

I used to do a lot of photography at one point. Life’s circumstances and a lost camera have pulled me out of that; I don’t get as much of a chance to take pictures anymore. But my favorite thing about engaging in photography on a regular basis was how it taught me to see the world. Even when I didn’t have a camera with me, if I was thinking through the lens of a camera, I would be looking for beauty. It taught me to see beauty even when I didn’t have my camera with me.

As we practice art, it helps us to prepare to live a Eucharistic life even when we are not in the midst of creating. As we practice a Eucharistic life, it helps us to prepare for making Eucharistic art. It is an amazing and powerful thing to walk around the city, to see people walking by, and to bless them. Not with any announcement of what we are doing, but just say to God, “I see these people. I see this city. And I offer it to you.” Just because it’s something that he’s given and it’s good. And in Him it can be redeemed, and it can be made holy. It changes the way that you see people around you. We can do the same thing with the tragedy in our lives. We can say, “I can’t see how you’re working through this. I can’t see the good end in this, but I offer it to you.”

So as we enter into this story, as we enter into this Eucharist life, we receive the things of this earth, we give thanks, we bless them, and we give them back to God. Then we find out that He returns them to us, and now we are people who have true life.

That’s what I would encourage you to do today: to think about what this story looks like for your own art. What does it look like for you to receive from God, to bless what you’ve been given, to offer it back up to Him, and to receive it back transformed? What does it look like for you to live into that story?

I will close with one more quote from Schmemann:

Now in the time in which we can thank God for Christ, we begin to understand that everything is transformed in Christ into its true wonder. In the radiance of his life, the world is not commonplace. The very floor we stand on is a miracle of atoms whizzing about in space. The darkness of sin is clarified, and its burden shouldered. Death is robbed of its finality, trampled down by Christ’s death. In a world where everything that seems to be present is immediately past. Everything in Christ is able to participate in eternal present of God.

Look at the world through these eyes, make art with these eyes, and thanks be to God.

Lecture: September 20, 2019, Glen Eyrie, Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Transcript edited by Fr. Rand.)

Jeromie Rand is an Anglican priest and computer professor