What to Do With Beauty and Gratitude

I go back on occasion to The Stories of John Cheever and am never disappointed. I know he is supposed to be a minor writer, but the stories, and the novels such as Falconer and the two Wapshot books, tell us things about post-World War II America that almost nobody else tells as well. Cheever’s own life was in many ways a wreck; there were multiple collisions with lechery, alcoholism, and deep funks. But I once read an interview in which he was asked why he went to church. He answered, as best I recall, “I go for the Eucharist. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t know what to do with my gratitude.”

That answer came to mind again as I read an interview with Makoto Fujimura, an artist whom I recently met. He lives with his family over in the TriBeCa district of Manhattan, where he also has his studio. His paintings are awe-full. Highly abstract, to be sure, but visibly tethered to points of reality in a way that makes them, if not representative, certainly not self-indulgent to the point of narcissism, which is the manner of so much contemporary art. (You can get some sense of what I mean by checking him out on the Internet.)

Fujimura is part of a small group of Christian artists in New York who are leading something like a renaissance in work of spiritual consequence. As with Fujimura, some of them have been inspired and sustained by the remarkable community that is the Church of the Redeemer, led by the Rev. Tim Keller. Presbyterian in orientation, Redeemer meets in midtown, with subgroups elsewhere in the city, and has a well-deserved reputation for reaching young New York achievers with the gospel of Jesus Christ. More on that some other time. Here is part of the interview I mentioned. Fujimura is asked why, by the use of layers of silver and gold foil, his pictures have built into them a process of change. What is the significance of that? He answers:

It is a very Japanese way of thinking. Rather than trying to make something permanent, they appreciate what has aged. Once you accept the fact that things are not permanent, you approach the ephemeral with a renewed perspective. You can see the permanent and the ephemeral as parallel tracks and can find value in something that is aged, rusting, or decaying . . . Japanese artists have always considered silver, for example, to symbolize our lives and death because it oxidizes over time and tarnishes. Painters deliberately use this oxidizing process to symbolize time itself. The paintings are made so that, as the silver tarnishes, certain aspects of expression are revealed that would not originally have been seen. In the recent Koetsu [a sixteenth century artist] in Philadelphia, many of his paintings were heavily tarnished, but they had this incredible glow to them. He was certainly aware of what was going to happen to those paintings, and here we are four hundred years later looking at works that will continue to evolve over time.

And here is the part of the Fujimura interview that put me in mind of John Cheever’s reflection:

I came to a point where I couldn’t justify what I did, although I knew that it fit who I was as a person and the expression I was longing for. Yet when it came down to looking at this sublime grace that was flowing out of my own hands, I didn’t know how to justify it. The more I thought about it, the more depressing it became. I knew that when I was making art it was very rich, very real, very refined, and very beautiful. Yet I could not accept that beauty for myself. I knew that inside my heart there was no place to put that kind of beauty. And the more I painted, the more I realized that this schism between what was going on in my heart and what I was able to paint was growing larger. When I finally embraced the faith that there was this presence, this Creator behind the creation, then I had a way to accept this beauty, because I had been accepted by someone even more sublime. There was a purpose behind everything; Christ came two thousand years ago and lived in Palestine. He walked among us; he felt the same dirt we feel today and that to me was an amazing realization. If this beauty had a home then I could accept it for myself as small and frail as I am, because of the work that Christ himself poured out for me. But without him, it was impossible.

I read the other day yet another theologian explaining that people today can make no sense of the Church’s language about being justified. To be justified means, among many other things, the discovery that beauty and gratitude, and gratitude for beauty, have a home.