A young girl found herself wandering through a forest at
night. She could hear a Nightingale
singing, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the moonlight, she
could see the trees around her more distinctly.
She could see silver birches, oaks, beaches.
She found herself longing to know what the trees were
thinking, to hear them talk. She imagined the birch's soft,
showery voice and penchant for dancing, the oaks wizened but
Hardy appearance, the beaches smooth and stately elegance.
Oh, trees, trees, trees, whispered Lucy Wake, don't you
remember it? Don't you Remember Me?
The trees rustled as if they could hear her, but nothing else
happened, and Lucy went to sleep that night, disappointed.
But a few nights later, she woke out of the deepest sleep you
could imagine, and heard a voice calling her back into the woods.
She sat up, not with fear, but with excitement.
The trees were moving, not waving.
Walking. She walked towards them, her
heart beating wildly. She could almost hear a tune in
the sounds that they were making, and she could catch
glimpses in which they looked a little less like trees and a
little more like strangely branchy and leafy people.
She danced fearlessly among them until she saw in the center the
reason for it all, the great lion Aslan.
Over the years, I've noticed these scenes from CS Lewis's
Prince Caspian, which most of you will be familiar with, have
a strange and pretty universal effect on people.
Prince Caspian is set in a disenchanted Narnia, and when
Aslan arrives, trees and rivers and all sorts of things are
awakened. And when we reach these scenes
with Lucy, we almost read them in a hush.
It's as if we know that even for our world, there's something
true about them. But what exactly is it?
Christianity doesn't teach pantheism, where we worship the
creation or where we are simply an equal part of the creation,
but neither does it teach Gnosticism, where nothing
physical matters and the goal is to escape physicality.
Yet in our modern age, Christians have been guilty of
both of these extremes, and most of us don't really know what to
do with stuff in between those extremes, whether it's a tree or
a spoon or a path or a patch of sky.
How close is Lucy's perspective to what ours should be?
Do dryads and naiads and river gods only exist in Narnia?
What is the relationship between objects and the supernatural
realm? What are we to do with trees?
In this episode we will seek to reclaim a Christian vision for a
re enchanted creation. Not just the big 30,000 foot
view, but what to do with everyday things.
Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed podcast where we follow
the great stories further up and further in in pursuit of the
life of Christ. Welcome to Imagination Redeemed
everyone. I'm Brian Brown.
I'm joined by Amy Beckley and Sarah Howell today and we have
been just prior to hitting, recording, debating and debating
and debating just how exactly to do justice to this topic.
Because I've LED us in with a rather big claim that we want to
reclaim a Christian vision for a re enchanted creation.
That is in fact part of why the Ansem Society exists.
But there are a lot of places we could go with that.
And ultimately, we don't want to simply have a conversation about
ideas, but we want to equip you and equip each other to be more
fully present in the world that God has made because this is the
only place that He's given us in which to meet Him.
And therefore this place cannot be irrelevant to that encounter.
Before we get into the conversation, I should say out
loud a little housekeeping, which is that if you go to
andsoundsociety.org right now, you will see we have just
announced our fall event. It is not CS Lewis themed, but
it is JRR Tolkien themed. September 19th and 20th of this
year, 2025, we will be gathering in Colorado Springs for a
weekend of Middle Earth festivity.
We're calling it a long expected feast because this is our first
weekend event since 2022, so if you would love to come and sing
and tell stories and hear stories told and song sung,
probably do some Middle Earth trivia.
There will be a retreat component so that we can be
encouraged and renewed. And we will conclude with a pub
night of all the things that we are always putting on our social
media channels because we enjoy doing them so much.
That is up on our website. The details are there.
Tickets are going to go on sale on July 31st, but you can get on
a wait list in the meantime. So go check that out after this
episode. Or better yet, pause and pull it
up right now before you forget because tickets are going to go
extremely quickly for that and space is very limited.
OK ladies, first of all, thank you for being willing to wade
into this tricky topic with me and Sarah.
Thank you in particular for putting in a lot of work on the
front end so that we could hopefully do it justice.
I think I the easiest place for us to start.
I think a lot of us have wrestled with this question of
how to have a category for things that are not God and yet
still matter. We are afraid of idolatry.
We're afraid of, particularly in Protestantism.
There there's this sort of healthy suspicion of idolatry
that can easily fall, fall backwards into an unhealthy
almost like the almost like the dwarves in the last Battle being
so afraid of being taken in that they can't see the magic when
it's right in front of them. And it's great to to not want to
assign more value to something than it actually has.
But it's really easy to just sort of stop there and end up
feeling unequipped. I've lived, for example, most of
my life in suburban contexts. Lots of man made things right,
lots of concrete and asphalt and maybe some nature band aids here
and there, but probably couldn't even have told you what most of
those trees and bushes were. I certainly couldn't say that in
any meaningful sense. I was a steward of them, a
master of them. So it's pretty easy for us to
feel alienated from the creation, maybe at that
theological level, maybe at that just practical level.
But if this is the place that God has given us to meet him,
we've got to find a better answer than that.
And the reason that we started with this Prince Caspian story
is because in this fictional fantasy world context, that's
kind of what happened. She ultimately finds Aslan, but
she does it through these waking trees.
Not not by walking away from the waking trees going, no, you are
not Aslan and finding anywhere else, but actually through what
he has made and what he is waking up.
So just low hanging fruit way to start the conversation.
I'd love to hear any thoughts that you have on observations
you made about this story or about this larger challenge, how
this challenge has manifested for you.
My challenge fundamentally starts with a improper
understanding of creation. The fancy term, the doctrine of
creation states that everything is good.
The Bible begins with God creating out of nothing and
saying that it is good and it it's, it's a little easy to
maybe just a sense to that sentence.
Yes, everything is good, but it's a different thing to
recognize and allow for that to change the way that you look at
the world. I often don't think of this
world as my father's world. I think I often start my
understanding of the world at the fall and that and that
everything is decaying and decrepit.
That's actually the way that I interact with the world more
often than not, because that's how I interact with perhaps
myself and other people. And while there is obviously
truth in the fact that the next part of the biblical story is
the fall, we can't forget about who is the father of this world.
Yeah. Yeah.
So that's that's where my challenge begins.
Yeah, it's it's easy to functionally live that way and
forget that God's response to Adam and Eve's sin was not OK.
Sir. Brent, you win.
I'll come back later. I think I'm often Co opted into
thinking that the world is runs off of the survival of the
fittest scientific, you know, reality wherein where I I think
it might actually be more true that because the world is good,
I'll I'll be damaged. It is primarily working off of
more than just survival. And so I, I think I often see
nature against man, man versus nature, rather than seeing
nature being something that could actually work with or care
about man. Yeah, Amy, what about you?
I mean, you've, I feel like there were even places in your
book that talked about different chapters of ways that created
order had or lack thereof in a given context that either
alienated you or kind of pulled you in.
What's been your your experience with either this line of
thinking or or a different one as far as how to how to relate
to the creation? Yeah, well, I think when I was
talking about it in my book, it had a lot to do with my fraught
history, with my perception of beauty.
And so I came of age, I guess, as a Christian, in a time when a
lot of things were considered luxuries, I guess I would say,
when it came to beauty. And so beauty was a superfluous
thing, and it wasn't something that was inherent or built into
creation or meant really to enrich or deepen your
understanding of God. I mean, I've told the story I
think a few Times Now of how as a Bible study leader in my
college fellowship, we decided to go for a no frills approach
to our Bible study. So no snacks, no, no chatty time
beforehand. We were going to get straight
into Scripture and dwell there and stay there.
And that was, I think maybe it was it was necessary for me at
that stage. I think it did help us to value
the word of God. But that kind of symbolizes, I
think what my view of beauty was like at the time.
And it, and then it was after a, a mental breakdown in 2016 that
I think the way that I started to notice the presence of God or
to become sensible to the presence of God in my everyday
again was to notice him through creation, mostly through nature.
And, and so it's interesting to me thinking about your question
now, because I'm about to answer this as a person who has been in
the Anslem society for close to 10 years now, whose outlook on
beauty and nature and creation have been wildly upended, I
guess. And I would say my challenge now
in regarding creation would be trying to wrap my mind around
the nature of creation in all its brokenness and beauty so
that we're aware that there was a fall.
I am now aware that God speaks the creation and through beauty
in ways that if we ignore them, we ignore them to the peril of
our souls. Because it's like you're
shutting off an Ave. of communication that is constantly
being given to you of who he is, that you matter, that he is the
God of the cosmos and galaxies and but he's also the God of
anthills. And so how much do you matter in
all of this? Those are all good things that
need to be driven home to our hearts.
But yes, I think I'm at a place where I'm trying now to do my
best to notice what I can in creation, but I'm still living
in a world where there are wildfires and flash floods and
diseases and I don't know, resistance to antibiotics and
all of that. And so it does not do to just
swallow nature wholesale and say that all of it is good now and
that all we need to do is to pay attention to it.
How do we navigate our way in the world?
How? What are we supposed to be
paying attention to as we navigate our way through a world
that is full of things to notice?
I guess is where I am. Yeah, you and I were talking the
other day and I I mentioned this book Beauty of everyday things
that I've been reading by Soet. So Yanagi, who as far as I know
is not a Christian and, and yeah, he kind of frames it that
last way that we've, we've gotten so far from the way that
the rest of nature operates, that we've, we've lost the
ability to listen to nature and, and, and therefore could sort of
to be, to take our rightful place as part of nature.
And as a Christian, I'm, I'm first of all noticing a bunch of
very, very useful observations in, in his writing, but I'm also
noticing limitations. And that's one of them.
That's not the whole story. That's not the whole story of
the creation, as you just alluded to.
And it's not the whole story of our place in the creation as as
the imago Dei. We're not just here to be either
like parasites on the one hand or nothing on the other.
I want to go back to something you said just before that
though, which was you talked about how turning away from the
other things, the other physical things that God has made being
akin to turning off an Ave. of communication that he has with
us. I would love to hear more about
that. Yeah, that's coming from a
specific season in my life when I so I have anxiety disorder
that at that particular time manifested itself as an almost
armored, deafened sense to the presence of God.
And not because I wanted it to be, but because I think in my
darker hours, the thing that I tend to struggle with is
mortality and the fact and the situation of living on an earth
where nature is wild, diseases run rampant, children can get
into accidents at any time, and you don't know what will happen.
And on top of that, we're living in a world now where the
articles that we read, the stories that we're exposed to
seem very intentionally to be the kind of stories that are
that say things like, if she hadn't caught this detail in
time, here are the statistics telling you how likely you are
to survive to the next decade of your life.
These are the things that you need to do well.
But we don't really know what the scientific causes are for
this. And so we're all doing the best
that we can. And so it, a lot of times it
just feels like either a game of Russian roulette or, or you
know, I guess you could go back to ancient conceptions of fate
and the wheel. At the time that I felt most
cloistered in my mind, the things that started to
breakthrough were the things that I could see with my own
eyes. And very often that was right
out the window that I'm sitting beside here.
We have a small garden and it was things like, well, the sun
setting seems like a very cliche thing to say, but it might have
been the way that the sunsets, you know, differently every day.
And the fact that a baby Robin can come through the yard and,
and be so clumsy fluttering around your yard.
But you you get to watch it being fed by its mother.
And the way that a magpie and a squirrel can set up a squabbling
match on the fence. There were just little things
here and there that I started noticing almost in spite of
myself. And at some point it became a
thought progression for me to think that if God was sovereign
over everything. And here I am looking at this
thing that reminds me that, I guess to quote Sam Weiskampshi,
that there is some good in the world, that there's some beauty
to be noticed. How is that not a personal note
of communication from that sovereign God to me even in that
moment? And so I guess that's something
that I've grown more and more convinced of over the years, but
that was basically how that went.
Yeah, Thank you. That's really that's
illuminating. Oh, gosh, You just talked about
sunset and I said it was illuminating.
OK All right then. Yeah.
Well, probably one thing that is useful to introduce into this
conversation early is the the framework that that Christians
have historically used for understanding the relationship
of what God has made, even in its sickened state.
Health is often the the metaphor that's used in in early church
theology to talk about the effects of sin.
If you're sick, that doesn't mean you cease to be human.
It doesn't mean you die. It means you are sick.
That is a you are a fundamentally healthy creature
who has an illness. And the, the, the three sort of
layers to this are that the way that we've historically framed
it or kind of translated it and Psalmist that the creation is
good, was made good. And we can add the fall
asterisk, but that's a sickening thing, not a destroying thing.
It is good. It is symbolic and it is
Sacramento or another way of saying those same three things.
Creation is from God. So yeah, it's a, it's quite a
thing to, to take this thing that is from God and reject it.
It is of God. That's what the symbolic part
means, that the the the creation bears its creator's
fingerprints. And that's worth attending
podcast series by itself, but we can get into it at least a
little bit. And then it's Sacramento, which
is to say it is it is for God. It is all here for for worship
and as a place in which we can meet God.
Understanding that, one of the things that strikes me about the
kinds of examples you used, Amy, is that the, the problem that
you read in, in some of those articles you mentioned always
kind of zeroes in on, you know, that that newest thing you're
supposed to be afraid of, many of which are very legitimate to
be afraid of. And and then on the flip side,
you get the other articles, which are here's the here's the
silver bullet. Here's the magic potion.
Here's just here's the one thing that is, is the answer to that
other thing this workout routine or this diet or whatever and
almost like a monotheistic sort of a thing.
It's, it's always just this one thing.
And as Christians, Christianity, Christianity is much more
comfortable with things like paradox and layers and levels of
meaning. I have a book of the the sermons
of Saint Ambrose, and one of the things that has struck me in
reading his sermons is anytime he's talking about historical
events in Scripture, he takes as a given two things.
One, that they really literally happened and that they mean
something else, that they actually participate in a larger
story. So the story of Joseph and the,
the son being rejected, but then being the means of salvation of
his people is its own story that really happened.
And it is a foreshadowing of what's going to happen in the
Gospels. And as you read through a lot of
the, the early church writers, a lot of the Mystics, a lot of the
reformers, you can kind of pick a, a, a, an intellectual stream
and you will find this in all of them.
If as long as you're not reading something too terribly recent,
that creation is worth paying attention to, to his for its own
sake. It is good.
It is symbolic and participates in that larger reality.
The word symbolic means two things brought together and then
Sacramento. All of this is here for us to
participate with God. With that, with that layering in
mind, even just focusing on this question we're dealing with
today, that which is most relevant to the first question,
what does it mean to to relate to the creation like it is good,
given all of the downsides you've identified, Amy?
It puts us in that context where when we sit, when we're asking
ourselves how to be fully present to something, how to
look at something for what it is, how to appreciate it
properly. It's not just this is a rock.
How can I learn to love the Rock?
It's that would be that would be an exercise in and of itself
well worth it. St.
Basil said that you could you could spend your entire life
contemplating the goodness of of a blade of grass and the hand
that made it, and that would be a a life well spent.
But anytime you were you are wrestling with this practical
question of how do I live? How do I look?
How do I be fully present? There are these other layers
behind it. You can have this confidence
that there is there's a further up and further in.
What do you mean by other layers?
So if I'm looking at, well, let's use your sunset example,
shall we? All right, when and I and I and
I agree, yes, it's, it's an easy one, but is it Psalm 19, The
heavens declare the glory of God.
I always get my numbers mixed up there.
There's part of that Psalm that's just isn't this
beautiful? There's a lot of references to
nature in the Psalms, often in the context of just meditate on
the glory of this thing. But then almost immediately
David is talking in symbolic language.
Almost immediately he's talking about bridegrooms.
The sun is a bridegroom, and he's referring to stars, which
throughout Scripture are used as metaphors for God's people.
But also it's strongly suggested that in some way they're mixed
up with angels, and some people have taken that to mean they are
angels. Lewis hints that he had some
sympathy for this view and voyage of the Don Treader when
he says even in your world, star is not a flaming ball of gas.
That's just what a star is made of.
Even just looking at the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars
there, there's the layer 1 of this is beautiful.
This is good. And layer 2 is and it means
something. And that's a lot of what Psalm
19 is dedicated to. Just sort of begging you.
No, no, no, don't just look at it and say, ah, nice sunset and
move on. Meditate on its meaning.
Meditate on the fact that God put us in a world where in the
face of light and darkness, there is always a light in the
sky that is above it. That's Lord of the Rings
reference to Sam Sam Gamji reference to right.
And the you get the Sacramento layer of and there really is a
God and there really are heavenly hosts and heaven and
the heavens have some kind of relationship with each other in,
in, in scripture. And it's, it's not God lives in
the sky, full stop. But it's not these have these
things have nothing to do with each other either.
Does that help? So like when, when you're
looking at the one thing, it's never just the one thing.
Even appreciating it fully will just, if you let it, will take
you further up and further in into these other layers,
especially if you're reading God's Word in dialogue with the
pictures He provided, so to speak.
Right. So you've reminded me of the
early Christians being aware that they needed to pay
attention to the book of Scripture, but also the book of
creation. And you asked earlier about what
I said about shutting off an Ave. of knowing God in a way
through creation that maybe we don't get otherwise.
And I think that's the key thing that in Romans one, it says that
his eternal power and divine nature are made evident to us
through creation and in fact have been evident in creation
since the beginning of time. And if we shut our ears and our
eyes off to that, if we just view the world through
empirical, experimental eyes, then we miss all of that.
But I think one of the delightful things is that we
talk often about, or we have talked in the past and at
Anselm, about having an enchanted worldview.
I think once that becomes established, that when you are
looking at creation in many ways you are looking at, I don't want
to say lessons, but demonstrations of the character
of God. Once you know that, then even
the things that we're talking about as symbols sometimes from
the Psalms, there's a wonder in even looking at those symbols,
because are they only symbols when Job talks about the morning
stars singing together as the sons of God shout for joy or or
we or the way a child can walk into the forest and think that
the trees are talking to her. That and and this passage from
Narnia. I think one of the telling
things about it is that when Lucy tries to wake the trees on
her on her own for their sake, for the sake of her remembrance
and of what each tree's character is like, it doesn't
work. And you pointed out earlier that
when she meets Aslan, when she sees him again, then those trees
are dancing. But what she walks into is the
response of creation to Aslan. And I feel like the closer that
we get to well, Aslan as we know him in our world, the more and
more we're able to see creation with enchanted eyes.
And that's not to say that we see them with falsely colored,
rose colored glasses, but perhaps we see them everything
more truly for what it is. Also because it's in its proper
place in our minds. We're not looking at creation as
something special and and superhuman unto itself, but it's
something created by God, loved by God.
And when we approach it in its right position like that, then
we too see more of God, but we also see creation more truly as
it is. Yes, what I, what I almost heard
in what you just said is that plants and animals are
worshipping by being themselves by, you know, they don't, they
don't have the level of agency and choice that that we do.
But a sunflower literally stretching toward the sun.
We have sunflowers in our garden.
We have, I watch this every day when the sun goes away, they
change direction and the sun comes back out wherever.
Like they're they're literally doing this over the course of a
day as the sun moves. If that's not an act of worship,
I don't know what is. Just I can look out my window
and be reminded this is what I am made for, yeah.
There is that third layer, the Sacramento layer of what this is
all for. And I think as humans with a
particular vocation given to us by God with by being made in his
image and being told to multiply and have dominion.
I think an aspect of why I don't want to care about and look at
the material world around me is because it reminds me very
quickly that I am responsible. That it in some particular way,
my specialness in creation means that I'm more responsible for
the flourishing or the destruction of these things that
are by nature worshipping God through the way that they were
made. And that in my nature I need to
be born again and be remade into the image of the new Adam in
order to do what the flower is already doing, right.
And so there is a, there is a burden if we look at it without
the whole picture in mind, if we can basically just stop at the
fall and don't recognize the next part of the chapter.
Yeah. Because otherwise, yeah,
otherwise it becomes, well, your job was to mobilize the earth to
the worship of God. And you have failed and you will
fail every day and. That's true, but that's not the
end of the story. So what is the next part of the
story? Yeah.
There was a 1st century Athenian convert Christianity who's
remembered as Dionysus the Areopagite, and he was kind of
writing about this like what God the creation?
Like how does this whole relationship work?
And and he makes it, I think, as a useful point, which is that
God is infinite. So so yes, nothing can represent
him or analogize him completely. Nothing can nothing.
There's nothing that he has made that that gives you the whole
picture all by itself and gets you into the, the everything
nests of God. But he's poured his goodness
into what he has made and to even to praise him properly, to
worship Him properly, to have things to to mobilize to his
worship, you have to turn to all of creation.
It's not that creation is God and it's not that you know, that
whole rabbit trail. But it's also not true that you
guys have both made allusions to sort of material and
supernatural distinctions and scientific and religious
distinctions. And Dionysus just kind of shrugs
all of those off and goes like, no, you can say, you can say
that I breathe in oxygen and you can break that down to a
molecular level all you want. It is still completely
compatible with saying I have my life in him, literally that I am
breathing in life from God when I'm doing that.
These are not actually separate categories.
And because of that, this is a paraphrase, but he basically
says because all things have their life in him, He is hidden
in all things that exist. And now you that's 1st century,
right? So Jesus is new to him in this
in this picture. But to someone like that, the
the incarnation and sacrifice and resurrection of Christ
represents the invitation to see more fully.
The invitation to be be less blind to what is there, but also
to participate in the work of Christ in doing all that stuff
that was so impossible otherwise.
So OK, we've talked a little bit about stuff and how it's not
just stuff. We've talked a little bit about
why it matters. Let's dig into this actual
question of presence and participation.
Because if, if a sunflower grows or a sunset appears or a maybe
rabbit is born and them being themselves is their act of
worship. It's, it's not, it's not just
your human imagination. When you walk outside and 100
birds are singing and, and it sort of just sort of feels like
the morning is, is worshipping. It's not just your imagination.
Let's talk a little bit about our place in it.
If those things matter more than we perhaps have thought and yet
there's there's layers of things that matter even more and even
more and it just go higher and higher and further up and
further in. What then does it mean for us to
be present to that? What's the goal?
Who's goal? Mine.
All right, I'm going to, I'm going to get up tomorrow
morning, Amy. And I could, on the one hand,
give myself over to anxiety and stress.
I could secede mentally from the physical world entirely and
spend my entire day on screens and various forms of alternate
reality. I could, I could even be a
gardener or something and and still sort of turn away from the
creation in a pretty real sense, just not wanting to see, not
wanting to look. There are, there are lots of
ways I could get this wrong and there are lots of things that
are not, not my fault and I don't have to beat myself up for
too terribly much that make it hard.
But I would love to not do those things.
I would love to wake up tomorrow morning and be 1% more present
to the good things that God has made than I was this morning.
If that's sort of my intermediate going.
Why? Why do I?
Why do I want to do that? How do I do that?
One morning, I don't know what possessed me to do this, but.
That's a great beginning to a story.
Isn't it though? If you've ever been around a
baby, you've seen this happening.
You probably don't see it with 40 year olds very often.
I woke up and I just looked at my hand.
Before. I think it was about 10 minutes
straight. I was just looking at, I mean,
it's really look at it, it's not my hand, look at your hand, but
just the, the flexibility of it, the fact that there are five
fingers, this network of I seem to have a triangular pattern of
skin on the back of my hand that allows it to be elastic.
I think for other people, it might be diamonds or squares,
the fingernails, the creases running along the palm.
And I just thought like, well, it's been a long time since I've
seen somebody just check out their hand.
But that is I, I think it's very easy for us to jump from that to
say, see, how could things have just simply and bluntly evolved
into something like this? This proves that there must be a
crater. So put putting that aside for a
second just to look at it, just to, I mean, if we're going on a
daily at a daily level of seeing, just to look at that
hand, see if you're not moved to do something after that to think
something to give thanks for something about that hand.
I think, you know, we lament all the time that we don't have the
ability to focus or concentrate on things for extended periods
of time these days. And I think that's true.
But I think also, it's simpler maybe than we think to begin to
pick up on some details and to just regard them and to just
have the see if you can find a person or two to whom you can
say, isn't this amazing? Isn't this beautiful?
And hopefully you'll have at least one or two people around
you who say, yeah, but let's say you do that.
You get up from your bed, you've looked at your hand.
You've gone through the usual rituals of getting ready for
your day. You go out to the garden and
maybe you have a zucchini or tomato and you bring that
inside. And The thing is, when you when
you put that zucchini or tomato on your cutting board, you're
not going to ask that zucchini to be a tomato.
You're not going to ask the zucchini to be a key player in a
Caprese salad, and you're probably not going to make a
zucchini mashed sauce for your pasta if you're listening to the
creation the way that Robert Farrah Capon listens to that
onion. And I know that we cite that
chapter all the time, but if you have not read it, how much
attention can you pay to an onion?
But he does. And anybody who cooks, I think,
is constantly paying attention to the ripeness of the
ingredient, the way that things pair together.
You're listening to almost, if you'll allow me to put it
imaginatively, it's like you're listening to what that creation
is telling you it was created to be, what it ought to be, what it
will be at the best of its abilities.
And so as I was listening to something, I forget exactly what
it was that Sarah was saying earlier, but it made me think of
Michelangelo having that block of marble and chipping away.
I don't know if that story is actually true, but but if it is
true that we can listen to creation to a certain extent as
a reflection of its creator, and that creation itself knows that
it was created for something beyond just being static, then
the wonder that we get to engage with it being with it becoming a
mode of praise to God, and that even in our making we are being
called into a new mode of worship.
That's an amazing privilege. It's an amazing, creative,
exhilarating thing. So that, you know, if you know,
Michelangelo is looking at this block of marble and he's just
chipping away the sculpture that he sees inside of it, Maybe it's
not just a fanciful image or a way to say that he was creating.
Maybe imagine it if that were true.
What you're describing, Amy, sounds like a relationship
getting to know something. Brian, you asked what the goal
was, and it seems like the goal might be to just know something
more deeply. Like if we asked what the goal
was for our friendship for for true friendship, what would be
our answer? I don't know if the answer would
be very much different for the creative things as well.
And when you come into contact with reality, which is
fundamentally interpersonal, right, like relational, and like
you're saying in an imaginative way, you can say that they're
truly speaking to you. You're, you're diving more into
and revealing and uncovering what they were made to be.
That only allows for more and more possibilities.
Yeah. Sarah as as an artist, have you
ever had an an art teacher challenge you on anything like
this or give you give you an exercise to to really look at
something or to recognize the potential in something?
Yeah, I think that all of art challenges us to do this all
representational art. When you when you are faced and
forced to look at something and try to express it, you can't
even communicate in our modern information based way what it
means to draw an apple. Because it's not a
two-dimensional thing. It's not just information, it's
not something you can copy and paste.
It's this dynamic living in some way, literally breathing thing
that is in motion as it sits there, right?
It's it's moving towards decay. Now that it's off of the vine,
your relationship to it constantly changes, even with
the smallest amount of your head movement or your arm moving
somewhere, which which tilts your head in a different way.
And so there's this live interaction that just hits you
in the face, just like the sunset does.
You can't deny it. And you have to at some point
admit by the ugly drawing that you have produced that you did
not pay attention, that you did not care to work through what
you thought it was in order to just attend and allow it to
disclose itself to you. Which means you have to sit and
actually make what Doctor Esther, like Cap Meeks, calls a
covenant epistemology. Which is 2 really fancy words
just to say that you've got to promise to love, honor and obey
what you do not yet know sitting in front of you.
That apple, if you're going to invite it to self disclose
itself to you that so. So I love your question, and I
don't know if there's a particular exercise.
I'm using the example of drawing an apple, but it just seems like
it's the extent of all of my experience in the visual
representational world. Yeah, well, it what I'm what I'm
hearing you say is that submission comes before mastery.
Yes. Definitely, you have to submit
to the raw material. You have to submit to the
reality of the thing and and approach it with humility before
you can master the craft. And that's a perfect analogy for
the the point you made at the beginning of what you just said,
which was that you don't know that it's that different
relating to the rest of the creation as it is relating to
the rest of the created humans. If I want to get to know a human
well, that's a daunting task. Even if he or she wants to let
me in and, and you know, be known.
It's, it's, it's, it's, it's a stunting.
I have to be willing to listen a lot.
I have to be able, you know, I'm not coming in saying I want to
figure this person out and fill out, fill out my 3 bullets and
move on or, or to control them. I have to be willing to pay
close attention to who the person actually is.
And that means a lot of looking and a lot of listening, not with
an eye to saying the thing I want to say, but with an eye to
actually hearing. And it's on some level looking
at that person with, with, with wonder.
I also think that God is so kind to the way that he gives us the
created world to interact with so that we can learn how not to
have a self referential view. It's the same reason why we talk
all the time in in Christian circles about how you cannot
live in isolation, but to be a Christian is to be a part of the
whole body of Christ, which is his church.
That's true of the church in a very real and and beautiful
specific way, but that's also true to a different degree in
terms of all of creation. God didn't just put us on like a
flat white plain for us to just interact with humans solely.
It's important for us to have other voices in the ensemble.
Yeah. Yeah, I forgot what I was going
to say now, but I did have a question for you, Sarah, because
as Brian was saying, when you're working on a piece of art and
you're trying to take into account all that you're hearing,
I was realizing that I think it works that way in writing too,
although it's not necessarily with tactile materials that you
can get halfway through a project and realize that the
work you're working on is asking to become something else than
what you originally envisioned it to be.
I guess kind of like Madeline Lingle talks about in Walking on
Water. But do you ever finish pieces of
art that you feel are more true to that vision and to that
listening than others? Like have you ever gotten to the
point where you say this is what I heard and this is what I saw
and here it is represented fully?
Absolutely, it has been the case where what I am deeply desiring
to bring forth does come to fruition and praise God, that's
a little moment of joy for the artist.
But in a somewhat sweeter way is when you there's so much
complexity, there's so much to swim in when you really get to
attend to what's in front of you that it's going back to the self
referential view. It it's, it's more boring almost
to pick something out of it all to say.
But instead there's this joy of surprise that comes at the end
when you have faithfully enjoyed and swum swam, swam in it all.
And out at the end, God reveals something beautiful that wasn't
that, that that has been, that is now expressed and is now
memorialized and celebrated especially.
It's just it's, yeah, there's something about the surprise at
the end that I think is actually more important and more
wonderful for the artist than the artist having a particular
vision that they see, that they want to capture and that they
have. Expressed, yeah, OK, so yourself
referential reference, sorry, made me remember what it was I
was going to say earlier, which was that as we're paying
attention to creation as we're called to create under the the
protection and the guidance of the master creator.
I think one of the things that's also taking place in those
instances is that we are practicing to become the people
that we will be in the new creation.
Because in the new creation, I believe that we will be people
who can listen better than we can now and people who create
out of that, listening to create gardens out of the wilderness to
create, I don't know, sculptures out of marble, as we were
saying, delectable culinary dishes out of the ingredients
that are at the peak of their powers.
But that is also life that, as you said earlier, we have
already been born again. We are already starting to live
into that existence now. And so I think that is one of
the liberating things. But I also love that you said, I
think this is what I caught in what you were saying too, that
there are many modes of reality that we could communicate as
artists or writers or poets or musicians about creation.
And you can't do them all all at once.
Even having the apple in front of you, there's maybe a few ways
that you can communicate the truth of that apple or express
it, you know, in different ways, whether it's impressionistic or
realistic or whatever. But I think I think that's one
of the most beautiful things, the beautiful graces that God
has given to us in our partnership in this creation,
which is that, as you said, Esther Meeks was saying it has
to do with love. So, Brian, when we're getting up
in the morning and we're thinking about how it is that we
can engage with creation, how can how can we be more present
to it? I think if we get out of bed
with the intent to love his creation as a means of loving
God, but also just realizing that those are things that go
together, then the question doesn't become how do we
perfectly do this? Because even in a friendship,
you can come into a relationship thinking how, how can I be the
perfect friend? But there's so love.
The word love itself and the concept itself opens up an ocean
of possibilities. There's no one right way to love
somebody. You just do.
And it it it expresses itself in myriad creative, beautiful ways.
But there's so much freedom in that that I think ought to be
able to free us from am I doing this right?
Am I stewarding this right? Am I crafting this right?
You know, And so I think that's something very grace giving of
him. Yeah, that's so beautifully
said. We just finished doing a four
week study of Tom Bombadil. And the first part of that
conversation was we put on this podcast.
Hopefully many of you all have listened to it.
But one of the things that we observed in that conversation,
drawing from CR Wiley's book, was that he contrasts Bombadil
with Saruman in in in the why of how they enter into the
creation. Because for Saruman, it's about
control. And it's easy to write him off
as, oh, he's the villain. Of course he's trying, you know,
he's trying to use it for his own ends.
OK, fine. But that's how we approached
large chunks of our day and large chunks of the the things
that we interact with. It's what what can I get out of
this? I don't I don't walk into my
kitchen at lunchtime thinking, how can I revel in the beauty of
this, the ingredients in here? I walk in there going I my
stomach is empty. I want it full.
And it's it's easy for that to just that consumption narrative
to write itself into our our our neurons and become become
default. And Tom Bombadil, on the other
hand, his goal seems to be communion, not control, which
gets at your your love idea. When he even when even when he's
bossing around old man Willow, what does he tell him to do?
He tells him be more like a Willow.
It's not simply behave, although it is.
It's. This is what you were made for.
Do this thing. I love that you brought up
Sauron and and Sauron and they're they're such an overt
dominating, needing control archetype.
The story, though, that we've centered around today with Lucy
and the trees, If we think about how Lewis has set up why the
trees are asleep in the first place in the story, Prince
Caspian, it's because the Telmarines have come in
conquered the area. And he never really says exactly
why the trees are asleep, but that from the presence of the
Telmarines who are fearful of them, they have gone to sleep
and they don't want to wake for the Telmarines, right.
And I think bringing up the concept that Lewis images here
of fear is, is interesting because in a lot of ways, this
conversation can really easily fall in deaf ears because
nothing is technically going to change about one's life if they
go into the kitchen and say, I want my stomach full and then
they move on. But what's happening is in your
fear, in your scarcity, in your need for control and to just go
from one thing to the next in that self referential way, you
just lose out. Like you're saying, Brian in
Communion, because the things around you and all of their
delights are asleep to you. So maybe we don't go around
destroying the earth with every single conscious decision we
make throughout the day. Though we do have blood on our
hands, so to speak, with a lot of the ways that we have set up
our systems and life in the world.
But those everyday small acts aren't usually destructive in
our own intentionality. They are often, though, putting
to sleep the things around us and ourselves.
And I think it's important to go from that, that incredibly
important observation and essentially pendulum swing back
to where we think we should go because the the instinct is to
go, Oh yes, we shouldn't be destructive.
We should preserve, we shouldn't mess it up.
But our relationship throughout scripture, throughout Christian
theology, the the imago days relationship with, with
wilderness is not to preserve it, but to make a garden.
That's right. And so communion starts with
loving the thing for itself. It starts with that almost act
of submission. What?
Who are you and how do I love you?
But ultimately it's not just leaving it at that.
It's about it. Since it is about mobilizing the
earth to the worship of God. We're not, we're not stopping at
a certain point in including in our search for God and to grow
closer to God. The way, the way out isn't the
door is shut and the way and the way out isn't around.
The way out is through all up. Throw in one one last anecdote
before we close. I was driving home with my
family the other night and Colorado has weird weather in
the summers and it was the most beautiful sky I've ever seen in
my life because and and we didn't even bother trying to
take a picture or video or anything.
There's nothing that could ever have done it justice, but we
had. It was at sunset during a heat
lightning storm, and as you looked across the panorama of
the sky, it was almost like there were different chapters in
a story represented in the sky all at once.
Because there was the oh, look at sunset, beautiful orange
against the black silhouette of the mountains.
And then there was the different, different shades of
kind of purple all the way to orange and yellow that that was
casting on some of the white clouds and some of the Gray
clouds. And then over here, there's a
patch of sky that's completely blue with beautiful white
cumulus clouds as if nothing's going on at all.
And there's, there's a spectrum across all of this of, of the
lightning, like shooting across it.
And we were all kind of tired. Neither of my kids had the
greatest attitude in the moment. Nobody really, nobody was really
in the mood to go, oh wow, look at that.
They were all all in kind of the mood to shrug it off.
It wouldn't let us And, and to my wife's credit, she wouldn't
let us. She kept kind of forcing us to
look and the the one by one, each person caved to how
beautiful it was and stopped being fully present to whatever
they were sulking about, stopped, stopped staring at the
cars going by and was just fully present to what God had put
before us. And the same thought occurred to
both Christina and I. And we said it to the kids and
they were echoing it in their their own small ways.
There's no way that's just atoms and molecules.
I don't know if that if that was God creating a work of art and
that's all it was, if that's all it was, that's all we needed it
to be, or if that really was, in some mysterious way, some
element of cosmic reality playing out before our limited
eyes. I don't know.
But either way, it kind of felt like the latter, and it demanded
that we be fully present to it. So this continues to be
challenging. There's a lot of life that tugs
us in different directions and tells us a different story.
So with that in mind, our next episode is going to be the audio
from a lecture that the visual artist Josh Teason gave at an
End Sound Society event recently, which is a perfect
just lead on from this conversation, especially some of
the points that Sarah has made towards the end here about well,
OK, this is here's some of the destructive stuff we have done
in creation. What does it mean to look at the
creation properly and to think about our role in it more
deeply? If you want to prepare for that
episode properly, look him up. Josh Teeson T i.e.
SSEN and look up his Vanitas and Veriditas series and look at
some of those paintings. We will have slides in the video
version of the podcast, but yeah, look out for that.
And after that, we will be doing a lot of feasting.
We will be getting together for our fall Middle Earth feasts,
September 19th and 20th that you can all join us for whether you
have to hop in a car or a plane. And we will be doing an episode
on why we feast. And a lot of our fall episodes
will be very focused on the the how shall we then live of all
this? If, if, if being still really
matters so much, If being present really matters so much,
if seeing the beautiful multiplicity of layers of of
meaning and communion in what God has made, if that is all
real, then how shall we feast? And we will be getting into that
in the coming weeks. Amy, Sarah, thank you for
joining me for this conversation.
My. Pleasure.
And thank you all for listening. I want I'll close this out with
a quote from Alexander Schemman. There must be someone in this
world which rejected God, and in this rejection, in this
blasphemy, became a chaos of darkness.
There must be someone to stand at its center and to discern, to
see it again as full of divine riches, as the cup, full of life
and joy, as beauty and wisdom, and to thank God for it.
This someone is Christ, the new Adam, who restores that
Eucharistic life which I, the old Adam, have rejected and
lost, who makes me again what I am and restores the world to me.
And if the Church is in Christ, it's initial act is always this
act of Thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.
The Imagination Redeemed podcast is the production of the Anselm
Society. It's easy to see this world as
disenchanted and to give up hope that there's more.
But you were made to see the world with the eyes of heaven
and to live a bountiful life that participates in the life of
God. Like in the great stories, the
Ansome Society is a place where you can come in and experience
that beauty, joyful celebration, and ancient wisdom and go out
renewed, bringing that life to your vocation, your home, and
your church. Join us next time as we pursue a
renaissance of the Christian imagination together.