Where Have All the Artists Gone?

I remember a few years back realizing that the best sermons I had ever heard came not from a preacher, but from Caedmon's Call: a Christian band that was probly my favorite band at that time. It wasn't that the messages of their songs were truly all that profound, but instead just the fact that they came to me subtly in music.

There are lots of reasons for my aversion to preaching. I could go on and on with the personality conflicts and my general irritations at it, but I won't. The truth is I don't like preaching for a variety of complex reasons, and I'm only aware of a fraction of them. Recently though, I came to a better understanding of why. I finished reading this book called Finally Comes the Poet. The book itself was fairly technical, and aimed purely at preachers looking to improve their craft. Yet, it was the gist of the book that I found powerful. The idea is that we have lost in many aspects our life a sense of poetry. We have become confined to prose. The author did not imply this in a purely literary sense, but in a representational kind of way wanted to show ways in which our lives have become limited. We have had our lives, and especially our spiritual lives, reduced to rigid rules and formulae. This is prose. In a sense, we all live lives reduced to a conformist expression based on what is acceptable and normal. Prose still has meaning. It still has truth. Yet it is confined. It is life lived in a stifled reality.

In contrast, there is the spirit of the poet or prophet. His point is that the role of the Old Testament prophets is parallel to that of the Greek poets. Either of which could serve as a refreshing model for preaching in our day. Poets live outside the constricting reality of mundane experience. They offer up a vague, emotive representation of things as they are, and even more of things as they could be. Their call is presented with language subtle and free enough to reach beyond our reasonable concepts and invoke our hearts and imaginations into action!

This means first that we can read Scripture in an entirely new way. We are not confined to a singular meaning behind the words of our Bibles. Instead of one specific implication, Scripture is given in the language of poetry intended to free our hearts to think outside our accepted reality. Regardless of what prosaic reductions we have caged our experience in, the Bible frees us to see beyond. We are not confined by scientific dogma, just as we are not confined by literalistic assertions that fundamentalists would impose on the Bible. The language of Scripture is the language of freedom to open up entirely new realms of thought and action.

In this we can also find another truth: We live by poetry. Poetry is not just a realm of ambiguity and unfamiliar words. Poetry is art. It is a desire to rise above painting by numbers, to let our colors bleed over the blackened lines of coloring books, and to take authority to live life beyond what convention would allow us to. Our world is filled with a system that markets us with "meaningful things". As people unsure of how to find depth within ourselves and in our own experience, our world offers us depth based on what some other expert would give us, for a price.

Our lives are easily controlled by catalogues, fashion trends, celebrities, and the opinions of "experts". From so many outside sources we find thick black lines laid down for us with instructions to color inside as we would like. We find grammatical rules controlling the speech by which we should be freed to imagine. And, that is what poetry does. By poetry we are set free into the dreams which we may then speak and act out into reality.

We come to church with the desperate need to find a new poetic voice. We have lived for too long in the preconceived notions of our popular culture. We need to hear something refreshing. Something that sets us free.

Instead we often hear a bland, prosaic rephrasing of the same old crap we've dealt with our whole lives. We are presented with life as structure. Life as grammatical correctness. Life as a molded, cookie cutter reality. Life ordered from a catalogue. We receive Bible classes packaged neatly into quarterly series. We receive sermon titles tritely copying slogans from our consumer culture. We receive worship broken down into increments of time, with no sense of freedom, no place for improvisation, no room for syncopation to break the same numbing rhythm we've heard for decades.

Scripture is presented as a legal document, with clauses and factual preceding cases limiting its potential to mean something new.
Advice is given as a formula that applies to all normal situations.
Life is treated as a series of moments to be lived in propriety before judgment comes.

Opposed to this, the question remains, where are the poets? Where are the artists? Maybe the Body of Christ has too often run off those it needs the most to speak to it words of life, and open its eyes and hearts to a reality surrounding us, one of freedom! Maybe we should stop paying preachers who extrapolate life from Scripture in outline form and thus deprive Scripture and the audience of any sense of life, indeed of God. Maybe instead we should hire poets, whose ambiguous words contain enough grace to open up our eyes to a world completely different than what our own ideas had previously allowed us to see. Perhaps we need less bludgeoning with doctrinally sound interpretation, and instead need a gentle artistic proposal that opens up our minds to find our own interpretations in the freedom of God's Holy Spirit.