Art Won’t Make You a Better Person

A guest post from a Lutheran Sick Pilgrim, Joel Westerholm

I’m in what I hope is the final stage of writing a book, and I’m getting more and more aware of the fact that the book will not change its readers’ lives.

At least, not substantially.

I say this from experience: my experience as a reader of books written by people wiser than myself. I just finished two books by people I heard at the Festival of Faith and Writing: Norman Wirzba’s Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating and James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love. Both are immensely wise books, and in important ways, they have led me to shape what I do.

Wirzba’s book affirmed that my gardening and my buying local food are theologically sound, and I have begun saying grace in much more meaningful ways. Smith affirmed me in my attention to my church’s liturgy, in my appreciation for the bodily nature of the faith; I shall teach differently because I realize more fully that my students are not, in his phrase, brains on sticks.

But I won’t be a better person.

The books seem to assume (I’m pretty sure neither man would actually claim this) that if I do what the books instruct, I will be a better person. In fact, they even hold out hope for my influencing the world around me. They’re calling me to a kind of evangelical conversion: I have been blind, but thanks to these books, I see.

But if I see and do some things better, I won’t do them much better, or better for very long. Luther’s phrase for my condition is so common that even in Latin it is nearly cliché: simil justus et peccatur. I am at once a sinner and justified, never not a sinner, never not justified by Jesus. Whatever I do better, I will still be in the thrall of the world in inescapable ways. I’m capable of sustaining the frame of mind Wirzba describes, which I have thought necessary and right for more than a decade, for approximately 9 seconds.  I then immediately revert to being a self-centered, consumerist wretch indistinguishable from your nearest middle schooler at the mall.

Good principles; some good practices. Pathetic performance.

(Case in point: I just checked the spelling of an author’s name on the internet, and I saw an ad for hiking shoes, no doubt produced by my online search last night. You see, I need new hiking shoes. Now I’m slowly dragging my attention back to what I’m doing . . .)

My pathetic performance as a Christian who attends to the world and other people as Wirzba and Smith describe worries me partly because in the book I’m writing, I tell many personal stories, which would seem to imply that I’m good at what I describe. The title of the book is Attending to God (followed by the inevitable academic colon), so I suppose people will think that I usually do attend to God. The book explains that God is everywhere, and sometimes, after the fact, I can realize that I’ve been in God’s presence. Various forms of contemplating works of art are for me the most frequent occasions of recognizing God’s presence.

I ought to have had many more of these experiences than I’ve had. One of the wonderful features of the life God has given me is that I’ve had plenty of opportunities to enjoy, even to inhabit, works of art. I’ve spent my life in aesthetic production and contemplation. I am by avocation a maker of music (the amazingly clichéd singer-songwriter-guitarist; I’m guessing Twitter has reduced this to SSG?), and by vocation a professor of literature. As both a maker of music and a professor of literature, my heart has ached with beauty and pain, my eyes filled with tears of various kinds.

The experiences of works of art have spilled over into my experiences of nature; I have gone looking for windhovers in north Wales at Gerard Manley Hopkins’s inspiration, and prayed, according to Mary Oliver, by attending to terns. Art has taught me to be familiar with human suffering: contemplating a Pieta has taught me how to sit quietly by the bedside of hospice patients. In the book, I tell of how paying attention to works of art allows me to recognize afterwards that I have been in the presence of God.

The attention I describe is part of the larger wisdom of many Christian writers and books, like those of Wirzba and Smith. These writers have identified what I believe to be the essential error in the thinking of what Paul Gilroy has called the overdeveloped world (I can’t come up with a better term), thinking that has taught what is called “individualism”: that we should think of ourselves, for ourselves, with our self-interest paramount. Individualism, we’re told in essays, stories, songs, movies, and especially advertisements, is good and proper and will create the best social order we can hope for.

Many Christian writers are skeptical. Wirzba is particularly good at showing that out of individualism grows many of the ills that afflict the modern world: consumerism and all its dissatisfactions; pollutions and global warming; the horrors of industrial farming; the exploitation of child labor. Individualism is the spider at the center of this web of woes, teaching people to use the worlds (both natural and human) instrumentally, as tools for one’s own purposes and satisfactions. We pay attention to things, not as they are, but for how we can use them.

So I’m trying to explain how learning to pay attention to works of art can teach us how to pay attention to the rest of the world. But I’m not good at it myself.

Individualism is not new, of course.

Wirzba points out that individualism lies at the root of Adam’s decision to use the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instrumentally, as tasty food and as material to produce a desirable effect on himself. While individualism has always been around, the thinking of the overdeveloped world has taught us not to call it what it is: sin.

In biblical terms, individualism is sin.

In fact, at least as early as St. Augustine, sin was defined as being bent in on oneself; the Latin phrase was homo incurvatus in es.

The Christian way of being, in stark contrast to individualism, is to have the mind of Christ, as Paul says in Philippians 2, not being curved in on oneself, looking to one’s own interests, but in imitating Jesus to look to the interests of others. The Trinity itself is the model, say these Christian writers: the Three who are not three but One. The writers use the term perichoresis to describe this way of being, making room in oneself for the other–hospitality not simply in one’s home, but in oneself. Taking the other into oneself, not to consume, but to make that other at home there.

Surely, then, to be open to the other, to see oneself as part of the Body of Christ, to recognize that we are the product of a great cloud of witnesses: that is what acting as a Christian truly means. In what follows, I offer my own small contribution to this chorus of wise voices in saying that the arts can teach us how to appreciate things for their own sakes, so we can learn from them to attend to the other for the other’s sake, and not our own. For us to thus imitate Jesus is to experience God in his love. For to see or hear or touch a work of art is, well, to lose oneself in contemplation, to make room within oneself for the artistic work, whether it is music, or painting, or poetry, or story. When we learn self-forgetful appreciation of art, we can come to experience self-forgetfulness in our daily lives, in many different situations.

So I have learned that art becomes the practice that prepares us to know the presence of God.

Unfortunately, though, such moments of attending to God remain rare for me. (Yes, I am still thinking about those hiking shoes.) I am sure that what I write is true; I have even occasionally seen it work. But the experiences are brief, and I am inconsistent in applying them.

God forgive me.

I think that’s the point of this meditation: God does forgive me for all my solipsism and narcissism, all those times I am bent in on myself. My ego doesn’t want to admit that I don’t do what I know to be right and good, but the Holy Spirit won’t allow me to do otherwise. I suppose that my writing about what would be good if I could do it consistently is based on solid precedent, since Paul bemoaned his failures in Romans 7, and St. Augustine called one of his great books Confessions. If even Augustine had at least a few things that he’d gotten wrong that he needed to bring to light, I shouldn’t be too ashamed to admit to my failures.

Luther described this simil justus et peccatur condition–my condition—well. He also described the usefulness of knowing what would be good to do, even though we can’t do it. He taught that the point of knowing the Law is to recognize how far short we fall. Once the Law has shown us how much we need grace, we are prepared to receive that grace, to hear the Gospel. So I’m hoping my readers will imitate God, and be merciful to me, a sinner (with a nice new pair of hiking shoes).

Actually, my hope is a little stronger than that. It’s really based on Paul’s experience that he describes in 2 Corinthians 11, of having God tell him that God’s strength is made perfect in Paul’s weakness. This sick pilgrim is hoping that my weakness in failing to do what I say would be good to do will be an occasion for God to show his strength.

Especially since I don’t have any of my own.

Joel Westerholm is an SSG, a professor of English/instructor of music at Northwestern College in Iowa, and the author of the forthcoming book Attending to God.