“Things mean things.”
That’s what Jeffrey Overstreet‘s high school English teacher taught him about poetry and literature and films and art and he has carried that lesson with him as a movie critic and author and teacher.
Objects and words and images have meaning. Sometimes the creator uses them intentionally to convey specific ideas or truths, and at other times, the meaning is personal to the one who is engaging with the art. The work speaks to us in ways the creator may never have intended, but we get the message nonetheless.
Years ago, I visited an Annie Leibovitz photography exhibit at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. I only remember one portrait. It’s the one in the White House of members of the Bush Administration’s war time cabinet. Something in that portrait jumped out at me and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.
It was a band-aid on the thumb of Donald Rumsfeld.
The way his hand is positioned in the portrait told me I was MEANT to see the bandage. Leibovitz seemed to be saying “look at this!”
Here was this huge portrait of some of the most influential and powerful people on the planet at that time and one of them had a boo-boo. The meaning, to me at least, was that these are human beings, just like me. They are fallible and weak and easily injured, just like me.
It was a powerful experience with art and one I hope I never forget.
As a Christian, I believe that Scripture is the only infallible source of authority for faith and practice. I also believe God’s voice can be heard in art and nature and through others. God, the ultimate Creator, speaks through the creations of his image bearers. But we have to be curious and we have to engage and we have to slow down and pay attention. We have to remember that things mean things and that requires something of us, some effort to discover the meaning.
Works of art, whether a novel or painting or a play or anything else, has an impact on the way we see ourselves and the world and maybe even God. As Paul Klee says, “Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.” And I would add that it broadens and deepens and changes what we see and HOW we see.
But we have to pay attention.
In his excellent book, THROUGH A SCREEN DARKLY, Overstreet talks about “the God Room”. That’s what Hollywood people call the room where they meet with the Christian journalists and movie critics. At first it was an insult but those who have been in the God Room with these believers have discovered that they often have the deepest and most profound conversations about art there.
That’s because Christians see the world differently. We are looking for God and truth in what we see on the screen and when we see it, we point it out and ask meaningful questions about it. And in doing so, these Christian film critics have often shown the artists themselves something they didn’t realize was in their own work.
When was the last time you engaged art looking for the voice of God?
Change the way you see.
Joseph McBee 