I’ve wanted to post something here for a week or so, but I haven’t had anything good enough to post, so instead I will share what has been encouraging me recently, and maybe all of those things together will make an interesting enough post! And maybe you’ll be encouraged as well.
This is a video that Riley showed me about an artist named Makoto Fujimura who is working on some abstract paintings for an edition of the ESV Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that are being published to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the KJV Bible. It discusses a little bit of the art/faith things we’ve talked about here before, plus the paintings are beautiful. It’s worth the 8 minutes.
I think my favorite thing about this, though, is that he is effectively making contemporary illuminated manuscripts, which is what the monks did when they copied down the Bible before the printing press was invented. They would use colorful paint and gold, silver and bronze leaf to embellish the first letter of paragraphs, and make really intricate borders. It’s kind of a cool parallel.
I came across this article from the gospel coalition about Jesus’ Prayer for us to God really interesting and encouraging.
Also, there’s been a fantastic song by Andrew Peterson stuck in my head for the past week. It’s called The Good Confession (I Believe) and it’s wonderful:
Download a .pdf of the chord chart here. I love his writing. If you don’t listen/watch to the whole thing (which you should!), then at least start from 2:55. Then you’ll be convinced it’s worth it and start from the beginning anyway. So you should just watch the whole thing 
Fujimura wrote this essay (http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/articles/issue-32/makoto-essays) after September 11, and I was pretty much blown away. There were a few really good essays written after 9/11 (John Updike’s New Yorker essay being the best), and this is up there with the most compelling. The whole thing is worth reading, but I was struck by this:
“Art cannot be divorced from faith, for to do so is to close our eyes to that beauty around us. Every beauty also suffers. Death spreads all over our lives and therefore faith must be given so that we can see through the darkness, through the beauty of “the valley of the shadow of death.”
Our prayers are also made of broken, pulverized pigments. Beauty is in the brokenness, not in so-called perfection, not in “finished” images, but in incomplete gestures. I wait for my paintings to reveal themselves. Perhaps I will find myself rising through the ashes.
The Japanese ideogram for beauty is built with two Chinese characters, sheep and great . Evidently, in China , beauty meant a “fat (great) sheep.” In Japan , the word for beauty became more abstract, more refined, and became associated with death and its sorrow. Mono-no-aware, an expression that captures the sentiment of sorrow (literally “sorrow of things”) points to the notion of beauty as sacrifice. To enjoy the feast at a banquet, a sheep must be sacrificed. Autumn leaves are most beautiful and bright as they die. The minerals I use must be pulverized to bring out their beauty. The great post-war writer Ryunoske Akutagawa wrote, before committing suicide at the age of thirty-five, “But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity.”
I did not realize, when I wrote the above, that my family and I would witness firsthand, and survive because of, the sacrifice of hundreds of firefighters. They, along with other heroes of September 11, redefined life’s true expression, something we’d forgotten in recent times, with our emphasis on theory: their art was in their sacrifice. Their lives were offered up in response to the terrorist’s art of vengeance-their “last extremity.” Theirs was the metanoia, turning 180 degrees to face death head-on rather than fleeing. They are examples of great sheep, and from their example of sacrificial love, we can begin to know and experience true beauty.
Our family left Oneonta early on the Sunday morning of September 16, the car full of apples the children had picked from the Sheesleys’ yard, and drove back to New York City . We needed to return for a time of mourning at our church, The Village Church. We found out that a few members had escaped from the towers. A few, like us, had been displaced. None was lost.
On that Sunday, C.J. was to be confirmed as a full member and take his first communion, his first public expression of faith. He had been meeting with our pastor throughout the summer in preparation. We wanted to invite family members and friends to join us. We were planning to have a party for him. Now, the best we could hope was to get to the service on time. I asked him, as I negotiated the Catskill Mountains , if he still wanted to go through with it. “Dad, I can’t wait. I want to take communion today,” he said.
After my fellow elders and our pastor prayed for him, officially recognizing him as a communicating member, he expressed his exuberance with a victory gesture I had seen him give after scoring a goal in soccer. At Communion, he came up to me, his hands cupped as I broke the bread for him, and the voice of Shalom filled my heart again.
“This is Christ’s body, bread of heaven,” I said to C.J. If God can turn ordinary bread into a sacrament, God can turn anything into a sacrament. There is power of resurrection in this piece of bread going into the hands of a child. These hands, covered in asbestos dust last Tuesday, would be redeemed. God would take the very dust of death and turn it into life, twisted metal into a memorial of hope, and even the broken city of New York into the City of God.”
Zach, thanks for posting most beautiful and yes I want a copy of the Four Gospels with his illustrations. I have a few older Bibles that have pictures in them and I miss that in our modern translations.
The music was wonderful!
Andrew, that’s really awesome. I was reading some of his essays on his website yesterday, and was really struck by his letter to young artists.
This is an awesome post!!!!
This is good stuff
I very much enjoyed both videos! Thanks for sharing 