By Barbara J. Elliott
T.S. Eliot’s
quote on beauty gladdened my soul.
The past several days I have had the opportunity to pull back from my otherwise consuming activities serving at-risk inner city teenagers, recovering drug addicts, prisoners transitioning into employment, nonprofit management and the inexorable necessities of fund raising, to focus on something altogether different: Beauty. In particular, the intersection of faith, art, and culture where the True, the Good and the Beautiful take form. The Glen Workshop, sponsored by Image, attracts poets, painters, and playwrights, writers of fiction and filmmakers, illustrators, collage-makers and musicians from across the continent for a week in Santa Fe to deepen their craft or learn a new one. Many – but not all – are people of faith, wrestling with the calling that accompanies their gifts, struggling to give shape to the collision of the immanent and the transcendent, the irruption of spirit into the material realm, and the journey of the human soul from doubt to belief.
What value can art have in a world so distressed by war, ideological clashes, poverty, economic implosion, moral disintegration, unemployment, and all the other ills that afflict us? John Paul II addressed the value of work – all work – in his encyclical Laborem Exercens:
“When a man works he not only alters things and society, he develops himself as well. He learns much, he cultivates his resources, he goes outside himself and beyond himself. Rightly understood, this kind of growth is of greater than any external riches which can be garnered…. Hence the norm of human activity is this: that in accord with the divine plan and will, it should harmonize with the genuine good of the human race, and allow people as individuals and as members of a society to pursue their total vocation and fulfill it.” (Laborem Exercens, 23)
It is refreshing, and a little surprising for someone who has been so long entrenched in the dissolute realm of poverty and broken down neighborhoods and systems, to discover a gathering of serious souls involved in the hard work of creating beauty. By that I don’t mean the saccharine realm of prettiness, but the difficult kind of beauty incarnate in the suffering Christ and the scandal of the cross.
Art has the twin functions of reflecting a culture and shaping it. The problem that contemporary artists face is a difficult one: how to express meaning to a world which has become culturally over-stimulated by the spectacular, hyper-sexualized, dumbed-down by inanity, and increasingly antagonistic to manifestations of Christianity. Some of the artists who are here this week struggle to believe that the vocation as an artist – especially a Christian artist – has any meaning or value at all. They are at the edge of redefining and creating anew with moral imagination a vision of the True, the Good and the Beautiful that has been all but exterminated in Western culture.
