Transcript
Speaker: Hello, welcome back to Be Make Do, a Soulmakers podcast, where we explore what it takes to live out your call in the arts with spiritual wholeness and creative freedom. I'm your host, Lisa Smith, here with my producer, Dan ABH. Hello, everyone. and it's our passion, as always, to encourage you to become who you were created to be, make what you were created to make, and do what you were created to do.
Speaker: Now, in our last episode, we talked about the idea that there is always a world behind the work, no matter who you are, that what shapes us eventually shapes also what we make. And I wanna stay with that idea for a little while longer because it raises another question that I think is really even more challenging.
Speaker: So if there's a world behind the work, what is it? What's actually shaping us? What is our life organized around? So today I'm gonna share some thoughts based on the work of theologian Alan Jones in his book, Soul Making.
Speaker: Let's dive in.
Speaker: So I really do love this older book that I came across many years ago called Soulmaking. You might guess that it had some kind of impact on me.
Speaker: And this book is written by minister and theologian Alan Jones. And I, of course, I don't agree with everything he writes. I don't agree with everything anybody writes. But his questions and his exploration, his honest exploration of his Christian faith is so refreshing and helpful.
Speaker: And one of the things he talks about in the book is that in order for us to become persons, to fully become human, our lives have to be organized around a center.
Speaker: And in fact, consciously or not, everyone finds a center. Which makes sense. We do. We have to. We find something around which we organize our understanding of ourselves and the world, something that tells us what matters, what's real, what's possible, what makes life meaningful. We all find something that helps us interpret everything else. And that's that world behind the work that we were talking about.
Speaker: You might think about it as a worldview or a paradigm. it's It's a larger pattern through which all of the smaller patterns get interpreted.
Speaker: And Joan says something that I think is really important. He says we don't simply choose that paradigm. In a sense, the paradigm also chooses us.
Speaker: So once we begin to inhabit a particular way of seeing reality, that way of seeing begins to shape the kind of people we become.
Speaker: So imagine I begin with the assumption that a successful artist is an artist whose work is seen. So success to me means an audience, recognition, opportunities, sales, invitations, followers, etc. Some visible evidence that my work matters.
Speaker: So at first, that may simply just seem like a belief that I have about success, but I've chosen a paradigm. And then that paradigm begins choosing me. So then i start noticing, i just subconsciously find myself noticing what kind of work gets attention.
Speaker: And I start to compare my progress to artists who have larger audiences than me. And i maybe I start to become reluctant to spend six months making something that may never sell.
Speaker: Or I say yes to opportunities because they're good for visibility even when they pull me away from the work I actually feel compelled to make.
Speaker: Or maybe i start choosing subjects or styles or projects according to what I think people are going to respond to. So eventually, yeah i'm not I'm not even consciously thinking success means recognition.
Speaker: The paradigm that I'm in has trained me and it's determining what I notice, what I value, what I fear, what choices seem reasonable, even really what I love.
Speaker: I chose a definition of success. And over time, that definition of success began choosing the artist I was becoming. So I think this is kind of what Jones is getting at on ah ah a variety of levels. A paradigm isn't just an idea sitting in your head.
Speaker: you actually begin to inhabit it or it inhabits you. And once that starts happening, it begins organizing your desires, your attention, your choices, and eventually your character.
Speaker: Which is why choosing Christ as our center isn't simply choosing a different definition of success. It's allowing the reality revealed in Christ to begin reshaping what we notice, what we desire, what we love, what we're afraid of, what we believe is worth doing, and ultimately the kind of person and artist we're becoming.
Speaker: So he uses this phrase, choose and be chosen. Everyone must choose and be chosen. And I think that this is where it gets pretty serious because we can be Christians and still have a gap between what we say is at the center of our lives and what is actually functioning as the center.
Speaker: Like I can believe in Jesus and I can go to church and I can pray and I can read scripture and i can believe Christian doctrine and sincerely try to follow Jesus.
Speaker: But then when it comes to the way I actually interpret the world, how I understand success and failure, what I fear, what I desire, how I see other people, or what I think is going to make me happy, or how I understand my work, I might discover if I really play pay close attention that I'm seeing these things through a very different lens.
Speaker: So this comes back to this question, which model are you choosing? Which paradigm are you choosing? Which framework are you choosing? Because we're all choosing something and being conscious of those choices is really important.
Speaker: He named some of the possibilities that human beings have organized themselves around. There's a quote on page 148. He writes, um No one can avoid choosing or being chosen by a paradigm. It's where we locate our sense of identity, where we find ourselves, our place.
Speaker: Human beings have found their sense of identity in such diverse models and paradigms as celibacy, sex, war, reason, equality, buffaloes, snakes, tea, peyote, alcohol, tranquility, money, ecology, psychoanalysts, Mao, and Christ. Choosing, therefore, is very important because who we are and where we stand will depend on our choice.
Speaker: We find a center and then we begin organizing our lives around it. So for Christians, the question isn't simply, do you believe in Jesus? The harder question is, am I actually learning to see through Jesus?
Speaker: Because for Christians, the paradigm at the center of our lives isn't primarily an idea or a philosophy or a set of rules or even a religion. It's a person. Jesus Christ, his life, his death, his resurrection, that becomes the lens through which everything else in the world and our lives is interpreted.
Speaker: There's this beautiful phrase in Acts 17, him we live and move and have our being. And I love that because it conveys something so much bigger than Jesus being one important influence among a bunch of other influences in my life.
Speaker: I don't simply subscribe to his philosophy or agree with his teachings. And then I add those things to the way I already understand the world.
Speaker: Jesus is the center. He's the reality from which I understand everything else. So think about that. Like, he's truth.
Speaker: That is what is according to what we understand in the Bible. And then everything else revolves around that. Everything else has to make sense in light of that, not the other way around. I don't make sense of Jesus according to these other things in the world or other things I understand. If something has to bend, it's the other things around this one truth.
Speaker: Abraham Heschel talks about God as the contingency of reality. Contingency basically means that something depends upon something else for its existence.
Speaker: So to recognize God as the contingency of reality is to recognize that None of this had to be. like The world itself is a gift.
Speaker: Our lives are a gift. Our capacity to perceive and imagine and make something out of what we encounter is gift. Everything that exists is dependent upon God. Everything only makes sense, only works in light of being in alignment with God.
Speaker: And if that's true, then what we're talking about is something a lot deeper than intellectual agreement with a Christian worldview or a particular set of values or rules.
Speaker: We're talking about perception. Am I actually living as though God is the reality upon which everything else depends?
Speaker: Am I learning to understand myself, other people, the world, my work, my desires, my fears, my ambitions, even my imagination from there?
Speaker: Because if I'm not seeing the world from there, I'm going to see it from something else. Something is going to tell me what is real.
Speaker: Maybe it's success, or maybe it's security, or approval, or money, or status, or politics, or fear, or scarcity, or just my own desires.
Speaker: Or maybe it's simply the assumptions of the culture around me, or my friend group, or my family that I've just completely absorbed so that I no longer even recognize them as assumptions.
Speaker: And this is why Jones's idea that we both choose and are chosen is so helpful to me because these ways of seeing don't remain abstract ideas outside of us.
Speaker: They're something that we inhabit and then they shape us. So Jones says choosing therefore is very important because who we are and where we stand will depend on our choice.
Speaker: That's a much bigger claim than what do you believe? It's asking who are you becoming because of the reality you believe you're living in?
Speaker: And this has been particular significance, I think, for artists because artists deal in perception. We take something that another person may have passed a hundred times without noticing and say, look at this.
Speaker: So if our own perception of reality is being organized by something other than the reality revealed in Christ, that's not simply a private, personal, spiritual problem.
Speaker: It makes its way into our work, and ultimately, we're living in a lie. And this raises the stakes considerably for those of us who understand our calling as stewards of cultural imagination.
Speaker: Because if we want to help other people see what they aren't seeing, we have to become people who are willing to rigorously examine our own sight and the gaps between what we say we believe and what we're actually living.
Speaker: We need the theological awareness to recognize the larger reality that we're living in and to have the artistic sensitivity to perceive what is actually there.
Speaker: And then the courage to follow what we're seeing even when it challenges our assumptions or runs up against the assumptions of others. And that requires much more than us simply putting Christian ideas into our art.
Speaker: It requires a transformed perception. All of us, even those who of us who have been Christians for a long time, maybe even especially those of us who have been Christians for a long time, need to do the rigorous work over and over again to be transformed by the renewing of our minds that we're invited into in the New Testament.
Speaker: And that's a very different invitation. It means that I don't begin with, I know what the Christian answer is, so how do I communicate it through my work?
Speaker: I begin always by submitting my own sight to Christ. Teach me to see and submitting my loves. Teach me to love.
Speaker: Jones writes about this too. He writes, being in love is a key metaphor for understanding this process the lover is mesmerized besotted by the vision of the beloved it is the prism through which the whole world is viewed anyone who's been in love even if for a short time knows what it is to see the world through a particular lens The lover is swept away and carried along by the passion for the beloved.
Speaker: It's a kind of conversion experience, and like all conversion experiences, can be lived into or betrayed. And here's another piece of Joan's thinking that I i think is really important.
Speaker: Finding a center doesn't mean that we simply construct a Christian circle around ourselves and then just stay safely inside it. Jones says that circles have a tendency to become smaller and smaller as we try to protect the center. We tighten the boundaries over time. We decide who's in and who's out. And we become more concerned with protecting the paradigm than allowing it to transform us.
Speaker: But Jones describes the life of faith as involving both making and breaking of circles. I love that because Christ gives us a center, but that center is continually challenging the smaller worlds that we build around him.
Speaker: Jones describes Jesus as the breaker of the charmed and charming circle that holds us in its spell. And I think this is incredibly important for artists because a Christian worldview should not make us less curious about reality. It should make us more capable of encountering it truthfully.
Speaker: If Christ is the center of an inexhaustibly rich reality, then there is always more to discover. There are always more questions to ask, more nuance to find.
Speaker: There are depths of the human experience that we haven't understood that need to be explored over and over again. There's beauty that we've stopped noticing and suffering we've avoided looking at.
Speaker: There are people that we've reduced to categories. There are assumptions we've mistaken for truth, things that are hidden beneath the surface that need to be revealed, and things that seem obvious that may need to be made strange again so that we can actually see them.
Speaker: So I choose Christ as the center, but then I have to allow Christ to break open the little world that I've constructed around him.
Speaker: I don't use Christ to confirm the world I already see. i allow Christ to teach me how to see Christ. And that means I have to be willing to be surprised.
Speaker: have to be willing to discover that some of what I thought was Christian might actually have come from somewhere else, or that some of what I assumed about success or money or power or other people or even art itself might have been shaped much more deeply by my culture, my family, my fear, politics, desire for approval, my own need for security, think about the vocation traps.
Speaker: That's why this takes real, conscientious, and disciplined self-knowledge. And eventually, all of these things makes its way into our actual work because art making is a series of choices about attention.
Speaker: This is where that worldview or those paradigms stop being abstract ideas and become artistic practice. Because when I decide which detail to keep or character to listen to or tension to resolve or what the song wants to become, these are artistic decisions.
Speaker: And they're decisions of attention. And like I said, our attention is being shaped by something. When I'm paralyzed by that doubt or I feel like I have to be careful or I need to make myself smaller or I'm afraid to explore a question or take a creative risk because of how it might be perceived or because I might be wrong or confused.
Speaker: It's worth asking, what paradigm am I allowing to choose me? right now. Jeremiah 6.16 says, stand at the crossroads and look.
Speaker: Ask for the ancient paths. Ask where the good way is and walk in it. I love that image because part of the soul making of the artist is learning how to return again and again to come back as beginners and recognize when something else happens.
Speaker: has started organizing our imagination. And then we get to return again Christ as the center. In biblical language, we call that repentance.
Speaker: It's turning around. It's looking again, ah allowing what's become distorted to just become corrected and allowing those circles that we've drawn too tightly to be broken open and then going back to work from there.
Speaker: It's not just about inspiration. it's It is about how we make ethics and responsibility in the way that we move through the world as artists.
Speaker: And if we want the theological awareness, the artistic sensitivity and boldness to be prophetic and visionary in our work, then I think we really have to take seriously the question of what is shaping our sight, not just what we say we believe.
Speaker: Not just whether we're going to church or praying or reading scripture. Those things matter. But the deeper question is whether we are allowing Christ to transform the way we are actually perceiving reality.
Speaker: And I will say that I don't think most of us are really truly aware. of how our perception of reality is being organized. I think that this is a call to specifically artists of faith to take time to really think that through and ask God to reveal to you where your center is.
Speaker: So think about the creative work you're making right now and ask yourself, what am I really believing? Am I believing my social media feed?
Speaker: more than I'm believing this the story of the Bible? Am I believing the news report more than I'm believing the story of the Bible?
Speaker: What am I choosing that I didn't realize that I was was choosing? What's starting to choose me? And is Christ actually at the center of that vision? Or has something else started clouding my sight?
Speaker: And then just really chew on that for a while. Because there is always a world behind the work. And if we want to become artists who can help others see, artists with theological awareness and sensitivity and courage, then we have to be willing to submit our own sight our own agendas to transformation, to choose and be chosen, to return to the center, to learn to see reality as it really is, and then make from there.
Speaker: If you want companions on this road to becoming the person your work requires, visit soulmakers.org. You'll find lots of tools, resources, groups, and gatherings to join the movement of wise-hearted artists called to be soulmakers.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to Be Make Do, a Soulmakers podcast. Be sure to leave us a review and rating to help others find us. If you want to get more information on Soulmakers and join the movement, visit soulmakers.org. All links pertaining to this episode can be found in our show notes. Catch you next time.
