There used to be an old argument between two competing metaphors for art. Is art a hammer, or is art a mirror? Does it shape culture, reflect it, or a little of both? It was the sort of question that seemed designed to pester freshman Art Appreciation students into their first serious considerations of the role of art in culture. It was also a question being asked by Christians coming for the first time to believe that art might have some relevance to their faith. Can one use the arts as a kind of high- pressure nozzle for the pneumatic force of the Spirit to drive home the Christian message? Or is that too close to propaganda, the alternative being to use the arts to reflect back to us our best values and deepest spiritual commitments?
It always was an unanswerable question, though it’s one that still rattles in the background of numerous Christian discussions on the role of the arts in worship, missions, evangelism and education. Which is regrettable, since neither of those two metaphors comes remotely close to picturing the nuanced and complex relationship of art and Christian faith. What’s more, they really are not all that different from one another. They are more like the yin and yang subsets of a dominant metaphor for the arts that has severely limited Christian thinking about the subject.
Our first clue to this metaphor is that sneaky little word “use” that shows up in the first paragraph. A tiny word, and so easy to ignore. But it’s like an invisible, radioactive molecule. If you’re not careful, it can mutate everything.
The very idea that we can use art either as a hammer or a mirror suggests that one of our core assumptions about the arts is that “art is a tool.” And whether it’s a mirror, hammer, prod, or downy comforter, analgesic or amphetamine, the tool metaphor for the arts generates a myriad of misunderstandings—some quite damaging—that have kept the Western church from fully embracing the arts on their own terms.
In a sense, our story of working in the area of “the arts and worship” over the past twenty years is always first about dismantling this metaphor as a way of clearing the ground before we can even set up camp.
That’s because art is made from a way of engagement with the world that depends for its life on discovery and risk, surprise, gift, and grace. It’s never bout exercising mind over matter. It’s always about discovering the mind of the matter. When it succeeds, it extends that way of participating to the viewer/audience— en-livening, reorienting (or disorienting), and reforming our sense of being in the world. Which means that whatever else it sets out to accomplish, the primary role of art in worship is to help set up the conditions for the congregation’s own original insight and discovery. Not simply to reinforce or decorate (to retool) all our foregone conclusions.
The other big problem with this metaphor is that as long as art is a tool, it will never be seen as intrinsic to the act of worship. The arts may be imported like an undocumented nanny to sing us some sweet songs, but that’s about as close to citizenship as they can get.
That seems more than a little removed from the Bible’s portrayal of our worshipping heritage. Biblical descriptions of worship range from the Hebrew Testament’s processions and feasts—full of both noisy and subtle instruments, poetry readings and dancing, and clouds of incense blended from sacred formulas—to the democratized and unpackaged, Spirit-orchestrated potluck worship of the early church, perhaps with invitations sent out for everyone to bring a song or a prophesy or a prayer. If such events were able to weld the community’s imagination again and again to the Presence of God with them, it is because they immersed their participants in metaphor, and so functioned both as worship and as art.
Walter Brueggemann refers to biblical worship as “constitutive metaphor,” in that it both forms and feeds the heart of the community. Behind all the diverse liturgical and denominational traditions of worship we encounter today, this re- mains our deepest spiritual legacy, the abiding tradition of responding—with all our hearts, multi-intelligences and senses—to God’s own self-expression in the multi-media forms of the world. The arts belong in worship because they allow us to join the conversation of creation and revelation in God’s own vernacular.
This is to suggest that the arts and worship share much of the same vocabulary and syntax—are speaking the same language, in fact, with only a slight difference in dialect. And not even the anthropologists, as they trace the near simultaneous appearance of primitive forms of art and worship, can decide which is a dialect of which.
It’s a distinction the Bible never bothers to make. Just as Jesus spoke in parables not because it was a nifty technique, but because Jesus thought in metaphors, the arts belong in worship the way your heart belongs in your chest. Without them, it’s all tubes and gurneys and pumping machines.
If it’s true that worship and the arts are as closely related as two dialects of a single language, we need to ask just what sort of language it is. Accustomed as we are to think of language as exclusively made up of words that are containers for data or information, a quick dip into the Bible’s own pool of metaphor might help refresh our understanding.
“The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork . . .” So begins Psalm 19 with this great proof-text for the beauty of creation (or is it the other way around?). But in the next couple of verses our semantic assumptions begin to lose their grip, and our thoughts ping-pong like a cartoon bullet off the strange surfaces of the text. “Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”
Of course, everybody loves a scenic overlook, and “the beauty of nature” can work like a mega-dose of aesthetic vitamins to recharge our souls. But this text suggests that it’s actually telling us something. Not only that. This communication of “knowledge” is taking place in creation via a mode of “speech” far removed from our modern notion of language as an envelope for data or ideas. The psalm asserts that creation itself is a text of God, whose power and clarity are self-evident. It is the word of the Lord.
And when the Word becomes flesh in Jesus, we should not be surprised at his choice of two direct metaphors to sum up the incomprehensible mystery of Incarnation. “This is my body. This is my blood.” These words—meaningless apart from the taste and texture and act of chewing and swallowing the bread; the slight sting as the wine goes down, full of its fruit and strength—anchor us once and for all in the metaphor of the world, released at last to be filled with the presence of God.
Too bad that some churches have, in effect, turned Jesus’ words into “this is my cracker pellet, this is my grape juice.” For them, the engaging metaphor has been boiled down to a mere symbol. Sensual participation in the reality of the meal as a felt sign of Christ’s substituting his life for ours is reduced to an intellectual assent to the abstract ideas of incarnation and atonement that are referenced by this tasteless, watered down excuse for food.
Placed at the core of our worship, the metaphor of the Eucharist does what all metaphor does. It allows for participation in the real. The arts are intrinsic to worship simply because they draw us into the same level of participation in the mystery of metaphor as do the bread and the wine. Or as does the shouting firmament.
What does it take to allow the arts their rightful place at the table of our worship? To afford them more space than just the “special music” slot in our liturgical planning? In our experience as liturgical artists, the most “successful” pairings of the arts and worship we’ve seen have been in special worship celebrations (liturgical “high holy days,” conferences, ordinations, retreats), where the liturgical requirements of a normal service have been relaxed. These services have given us a vision of what’s possible when the arts, and artists, are let out of the corral of “this is how we’ve always done it.” Likewise, they’ve shown us what’s needed in liturgical planning for the artists to be fully empowered to bring their gifts.
First of all, the artistic elements are woven into the thematic architecture—the artists are there at the groundbreaking. Right from the start, the structure of the service is built as a latticework of multiple inferences toward its core images. Each element in the service is allowed to speak in its own voice, to mean what it means in its own way of meaning; to settle, saturate, or disturb. (Occasionally this will mean suspending the assumption that the “meat” of the service will necessarily be borne by the sermon.) Early on, careful consideration is given to the design of the physical space, its untapped possibilities and its rigid constraints, such as light and sightlines. When possible, the seating is rearranged to allow freer movement through the space for both dancers and worshippers, to break down the barrier be- tween “performers” and “observers,” and to encourage a fuller bodily participation in worship. Attention is paid to the relationship among the media, to the dramatic considerations of flow and segue, rhythm and dynamics as the worship leaders at- tempt to lay out the markers for the congregation’s journey toward meaning.
Finally, time must be allowed for each artistic offering to resonate in the worshippers’ hearts and minds. A common misunderstanding is that in advocating for the arts in worship we’re arguing for more stuff to be jammed into the service. But the way artists work is more like sculpting time and space and silence. The way a stone creates a pool in a swiftly flowing stream. It takes a certain quality of interior quiet to fully encounter a work of art. And it takes a period of external stillness to afford the time to really absorb what one has encountered.
When this all finally cooks, there comes into existence a kind of mutual permeability, wherein the interface/juxtaposition of all the elements in a service creates a synergy of meaning that surpasses the evocative power of any element by itself. Imagine a multi-part choral work. But instead of sopranos, altos, tenors and basses, you have sound, sight, smell, the kinesthetic empathy of bodies in motion as well as all the cognate powers of the mind working together within a multi- sensual metaphor of God’s loving presence. It doesn’t often get a chance to hap- pen, but when it does, you never forget it.
A comment we’ve heard many times following one of these services sums it up: “This is the church I want to go to! Where is it?” The truth is, it could be any church that gives its artists broad enough permission to do their best work, to offer their best gifts, not in isolation but in collaboration.
In our work over the years advocating for and designing liturgy that seriously incorporates the arts, we’ve come to realize that, really, we’re not talking about the arts at all. What we hope to find through the arts is nothing more than an approach to meaning that is more resonant with the “way” of God’s own self-disclosure. This is the big secret of God that Jesus reveals. It’s all metaphor; it’s all a poem. It’s all the meaning of God completely embodied. It’s a language that takes all our senses to understand. In their small and limited way, the arts are a light into this hidden subtext of God’s own speech—the mysterious coinherence of meaning and metaphor that renews our imaginations and redeems our intuitions, energizing them toward the possibility of a new creation.
(Reprinted from Where Faith Meets Culture: A Radix Magazine Anthology)
Susan English Fetcho was a Visiting Professor of Arts and Worship and Artist-in-residence at NCB. She was a performer, teacher, choreographer and administrator of dance and theatre for twenty-seven years. Her training was in dance/choreography, theatre, mime, Laban Movement Analysis, and video production. She was on the Performing Arts faculty at St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Oakland, California.
Susan, along with her husband, David Fetcho, served for fourteen years as co-artistic directors of the intermedia performance ensemble, New Performance Consort, writing, producing and directing fourteen original dance/music/theatre productions for both theatrical and liturgical venues. They’ve performed and taught in the greater San Francisco Bay area, and on tour to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, and Bali, Indonesia. As founders and creative directors of foundlight.tv, they brought their wealth of experience as performance directors to the creation of compelling video content. They also have organized conferences focusing on issues in theology and the arts, including several arts conferences for New College Berkeley, as well a national CIVA (Christians In the Visual Arts) conference in 1995.