Before becoming the critically acclaimed force behind some of the greatest indie music of the last decade, Sufjan Stevens, aspiring writer, graduated from the same Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program I began last fall. Stevens may have written songs like "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "In The Devil's Territory" (references to Flannery O'Connor's oeuvre) with or without a graduate degree in fiction, but when I realized that he also has a deep track named for Saul Bellow, another luminary from my first literature seminar's syllabus, I wondered if we didn't have this class in common. With O'Connor, the famously Catholic Christian writing from a sea of southern evangelicalism and Bellow, a harder-to-define transcendentalist by way of immigrant Judaism, Stevens shares an uncanny ability to create the kind of art that, at its best, forces us to look up and within.
It's possible to encounter O'Connnor's stories (you never really just read them) without explicitly discerning her deep, abiding belief in literary art as Christian vocation or her mission to show, as she said, "the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil." Clear as day about these motives in her essays and letters, she's almost never so obvious in her fiction. Perhaps because she uses the evangelical cosmologies of her neighbors as Tolkienesque proxies for her own traditional Catholic systems, it's easy to infer a sort of distance between O'Connor's art and faith where she in fact saw none. In the same way, it's possible to listen to Stevens' biggest hit, "Chicago", without immediately sensing the plaintive Christian hymn at its core, but "Casimir Pulaski Day", "Oh God Where Are You Now?", "The Lord God Bird", "To Be Alone With You", "God'll Ne'er Let You Down"... well, these and others comprise a body of work that, like O'Connor's, raises and answers questions about what makes art "Christian." Like O'Connor, Stevens operates outside of expectation: his confessional work is among his best, but you'd never call him a Christian artist the way, say, Amy Grant is a Christian artist.
A few weeks before I followed Stevens to aspiring-writer school, I had a conversation about all of this with some people who'd come to see a mutual friend play an open mic night at a local coffee house. When I got there, a group of teenagers were doing old, obscure Christian indie covers, primeval Sufjan, maybe with irony but certainly with gusto. "Is this, like, the new punk?" one of us wondered. "It's just ... indie," a friend of my friend said. "Indie defies categorization. It's just indie. You know, independent? Not mainstream. Is this Christian? I don't know. Everyone listens to it. It's just good music. It's just good art."
The thing about good art seems to be that sometimes it finds an audience. O'Connor's fiction isn't Christian the way Jerry Jenkins' is. Stevens is not a praise band leader. Flannery and Sufjan resonate in larger circles, yes, but their work, like Tolkien's, casts wide nets of longing, questioning, devotion, anxiety, suffering, redemption, and grace. In this sense it could be no more Christian. In this sense it's more Christian than much of what you might find in Christian bookstores and Christian music aisles. Even though O'Connor believed in her Church with utmost conviction, good art ask the kinds of questions religious structures try and finally fail to answer. The balance of her work is no exception. Stevens wrestles with the glory of a Lord who he says took our place on the cross but who also seems to take our shoulders, shake our face, take and take and take. The depravity of O'Connor's characters, the tensions Stevens finds ways to name and grapple with in lo-fi indie beauty, these elements are more biblical, more in the spirit of the oracles and psalm poetics of the scriptures than your typical Christian book or album.
Perhaps, even for Christians, questions like "is this art Christian?" are finally not the point. Saul Bellow was capable of conjuring sublime, leveling visions from expository scenes about rickshaw rides and cutting to the core of religious anxiety in an increasingly pluralistic America. Leonard Cohen uses images of piety and longing more viscerally than anyone. Perhaps for Christians the questions ought to be: does this song make us stop? Does this book make us think? Does this art feel like the suffering we know and the hope we hope for anyway? Is this art big enough to suggest the great vast God we call an Artist? Does it inspire us to a live a better art, to live before our God more artfully? Is the art we produce Christian in the only sense that matters?
Are we?
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Some of it is created with an agenda by people who don't respect or understand creativity, talent or humanity -- in other words; ART. True inspiration is scarily close to spirituality -- which some of you will recognize as closely related things, but for those who hold a strict adherence to black-and-white religious LAW can't process and don't trust. As a result, the "art" they make is unimaginative, bland, formulaic, uninspired and uninspirING. This is what we've come to think of in relation to "Christian art" which is sadly comes from the group we've allowed to steal the name of Christianity in general.
But from those who are capable of feeling music move within them, as well as feeling the spirit move, we have some truly inspiring gospel music, we have Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, we have U2 -- and though not Christian, much of Bob Marley's oeuvre is very blatantly religious (or more precisely, spiritual), though I've never heard a single atheist gripe about THAT. Once you recognize the SPIRITUALITY in music, rather than the RELIGIOSITY, you start seeing some great works that reach out to "God," by whatever name.
As far as listening to or writing about Sufjan Stevens because I want to feel hip, well, that's a little ad hominem, don't you think?
I admire Flannery O'Connor for her ability to freeze the readers blood. 'Good Country People' metes out a nasty fate to its insufferable one-legged heroine. And if you're not horrifed as 'A good Man is Hard to Find' marches towards that shocking conclusion (and the grandmother gets hers) you're not alive. I cannot find any such bitter, horrifying qualities in Sufian Stevens sometimes ravishing compositons. I haven't made it all the way through 'Everything that Rises Must Converge' yet. Started it a decade ago.
Speaking of Christian art...check out this environmental art piece
from a music/arts pastor in Atlanta.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wIYiZr3kBk
was provably the work of a man or a woman--a HUMAN in other words.
Give credit where credit is due. Make mankind your god and the world will be a better place.
Live honorably, create your art with all your passion -- give your thanks to God for your ability or to yourself as you choose.
But try to stay on topic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuy7-c38Z6M
Horus was the Egyptian god, the sun being just one of his areas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horus
He thinks that his lyrics spark what the listener wants to hear in them like a big Rorshach blot. And if the listener desires a Christian message they get that and the rest tumbles by as backdrop.
ma ~ " hey we'zz gonna spend eternity listening to a harp 'n hymn concert! "
pa ~ " ah wonder iffin ah kin sneak out during first inter-missin'. "
What a bunch of nobodies...
But mostly, the items labeled "christian" are ill considered choices of outrageous hideousness.
Well in the case of beloved xtian "artist" Thomas Kincaide, it has to suhc.
“Delight in creation and take your dreams into our politics and institutions...move from domination to partnership, and begin by educating our young in awe and wonder, not how to take tests. Awe leads to reverence, which leads to gratitude, which will reinvent our species. This is the task of our generation: to regain awe. The three R’s need to be balanced by the ten C’s: contemplation, creativity, chaos, compassion, courage, critical consciousness, community, celebration, ceremony, and character...
http://wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1424&Itemid=224