“The double question we must always ask is,‘How does faith inform art?’ and ‘How can art animate faith?’”

Imagination, appreciation of beauty, creativity: all of these qualities have been given to us by God. For the Christian artist, the drive to create something wonderful is also a means to glorify and better understand our Lord. Using excerpts from her own works as well as those of writers who have gone before her—Emily Dickinson, Annie Dillard, C.S. Lewis, and others—poet and writer Luci Shaw proves that symbolism and metaphor provide ways for humans to experience God in new and powerful ways.

Shaw offers a rich and thought-provoking exploration of art, creativity, and faith. Believing that art emanates from God, she shows how imagination and spirituality “work in tandem, each feeding on and nourishing the other.” Faith informs art and art enhances faith. They both, for each other, are “breath for the bones.”

Provocative, enlightening, and above all, inspiring, Breath for the Bones will help readers discover the artist within, and bring them further along the path to God Himself.

Include s Discussion Questions and Writing Exercises

Breath for the Bones

Art, Imagination, and SpiritBy Luci Shaw

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2007 Luci Shaw
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8499-0334-2

Contents

Note to Readers.............................................................................viiIntroduction................................................................................ixpart one The Basics of Creativity: Foundations of the Creative Process1. Discovering the Creative Heart of God....................................................32. Entering into Beauty.....................................................................193. Meeting the God of Metaphor..............................................................354. Learning from Story......................................................................555. Celebrating Imagination..................................................................636. Listening to the Muse....................................................................73part two The Details of Creativity: Exploring the Creative Process7. Beginning with Journal Writing...........................................................918. Learning to Risk.........................................................................1019. Paying Attention.........................................................................11310. Cultivating Creativity..................................................................12911. Understanding the Shadow Side of Creativity.............................................14912. Tracing the Creative Process of Poets and Poems.........................................171Appendix A: Writing Exercises and Questions for Discussion..................................187Appendix B: Creativity Books-A Reading List.................................................199Acknowledgments.............................................................................201Notes.......................................................................................203

Chapter One

Discovering the Creative Heart of God

Years ago, I was talking with my uncle Max, a hardworking, hard-bitten, shrewd, practical New Zealand apple farmer. Hearing that a new book of my poems had just been published, he asked me, with genuine bewilderment, "But-what good is a poem? What earthly use is it? Why can't you say what you want to say in a straightforward way that ordinary people can understand?"

At that moment, I was at a loss for words. How do you explain poetry-or any form of art or the creative process-to someone for whom it has no appeal, no meaning? Uncle Max's idea of art was probably summed up in the form of a well-pruned apple tree or a perfectly formed, ripe Cox's orange pippin, the hybridized apple for which his orchards were famous.

A few years and many internal debates later, I think I know how I could have answered him. I'd tell him that poetry, and any art, says something in a way that nothing else can, and that something that art says is so qualitatively different that it demands a radically different expression. Where linear, logical thinking may produce prose with a specific function-information or historical record or critical analysis or instruction-art selects and reflects on a small slice of human experience and lays it out there, a gift to anyone who is willing to savor it and enter into the artist's experience even in a minimal way. The artist, ideally, communicates experience in images and forms so precisely tailored, so personal, so multileveled that its insights go far beyond bare facts or mere usefulness.

David Jones, a British author, wrote:

Man is a creature whose end is extra-mundane and whose nature is to make things and that the things made are not only things of mundane requirement but are of necessity the signs of something other. Further, that an element of the gratuitous adheres to this making.

It is true that much art has no practical use. While instructional prose may teach us how to approach a problem or outline the steps in developing a romantic relationship, the art in poetry is that it tells us cognitively what it feels like to have a sudden flash of understanding or to experience the wonder and exhilaration of being in love. It's my soul crying out to your soul: This is what I see and how I feel. Can you see it? Can you feel it too?

My uncle's questions apply to any art form: What good is it? What does it accomplish? Why does art even show up in the first place? And for us as Christians, what is its significance? No matter what period of history or slice of international culture we examine, we find human beings attempting to express beauty and meaning-from the primitive figures scratched on Stone Age cave walls to the sophisticated photography of Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell.

Think of art's extraordinary diversity. It speaks from Aztec jewelry, Norse ballad, Indonesian batik, Russian folk dance, Inuit Indian carving, as well as from Greek drama, Roman sculpture, Gothic architecture, Oriental porcelain, the illuminated manuscripts of medieval monks, the baroque music of Bach and Scarlatti, iridescent Venetian glass, Italian grand opera, the architecture of Le Corbusier; the paintings of Correggio, Rembrandt, El Greco, and O'Keeffe. The decoration of human dwellings, artifacts, and bodies, and the elaboration of song and story are graphic demonstrations of the human impulse that moves beyond practical necessities toward something called beauty, which is further refined into art.

Alexsandr Solzhenitzyn, in his lecture on being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, said:

Archeologists have not yet discovered any stage of human existence without art. Even in the half-light before the dawn of humanity we received this gift from Hands we did not manage to discern. Nor have most of us managed to ask: Why was this gift given to us, and what are we to do with it?

Art is what we say, what we sing, and what we show (in bodily movement or the work of our hands) about what is bubbling up within us, that which cries for recognition and response. Because it seems so special, so wondrous, so extraordinary to us-this upwelling from our creative imaginations-we want to share it with kindred spirits. And so we have poetry readings and gallery exhibits of art and concerts and square dances and films and fashion shows and coffee-table books.

If we are honest, we all will admit that we have been moved by such impulses from time to time. Especially when we are young, we try to draw, to write a sonnet, to use finger paint, or to bake a gingerbread man. We run and dance when we are too happy simply to walk, or we sing and whistle when speaking is inadequate to express what we feel.

But why? Where do these impulses spring from? And why are they so universal? For the Christian believer it is significant that though we have been uniquely "made" by God, we sense that we are not merely mechanisms whose sole purpose is to function efficiently, sustaining our lives, performing mental and physical work as part of our social infrastructure, and reproducing ourselves in an endless cycle of birth, growth, life, and death. We who believe we bear God's image will realize how that image includes the capacity to imagine and create, because God is himself an imaginative Creator.

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If we grant that as artists, our ways of creating and seeing begin with the creativity of God, then let's look at the root of that imaginative impulse. What did the...