PHOTOFRIDAY - MASTERPIECE by JR Woodward
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When it comes to masterpieces, what piece of art, literature or architecture do you consider to be one of the greatest masterpieces ever produced?
Recently I was reading a book written by Fredrick Buechner entitled Speak What We Feel: Not What We Ought to Say. As a writer, he identifies the literary masterpieces of G. K. Chesterton, Gerard Hopkins, Mark Twain and William Shakespeare.
I like what he says in his introduction. “It is Red Smith who is reported to have said that it’s really very easy to be a writer – all you have to do is sit down at the type writer and open a vein. But typewriters are few and far between these days, and vein-openers have never grown on trees. Good writers, serious writers – by which I mean the writers we remember, the ones who have opened our eyes, maybe even our hearts, to things we might never have known without them – all put much of themselves into their books the way Charles Dickens put his horror at the Poor Law of 1834 in to Oliver Twist, for instance, or Virginia Woolf her complex feelings about her parents into To the Lighthouse or less overtly, Flannery O’Conner her religious faith into virtually everything she ever wrote. Buechner goes on to say, 'But opening a vein, I think, points to something beyond that.'”
"Vein-opening writers are putting not just themselves into their books, but themselves at their nakedest and most vulnerable. They are putting their pain and their passion into their books the way Jonathan Swift did in Gulliver’s Travels and Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, the way Arthur Miller did in Death of a Salesman, and William Maxwell in They Came Like Swallows. Not all writers do it all the time, even the blood bank recognizes we have only so much blood to give – and many good writers never do it all either because for one reason or another they don’t choose to or they don’t quite know how to: it takes a certain kind of unguardedness, for one thing, a willingness to run risks, including the risk of making a fool of yourself.
But the four writers these pages are about, each did it at least once, and that is the most important single thing they have in common. Shakespeare and Gerard Hopkins are both great writers. Mark Twain is a very good but very uneven writer. G. K. Chesterton, for all his wit and intelligence, is a writer who wrote too much for most of it to be first-rate. But what brings them together here is that in at least one work apiece, it seems to me, each of them wrote in his own blood about the darkness of life as he found it and about how far better or worse he managed somehow to survive it, even to embrace it – Hopkins is the Terrible Sonnets of his final years, Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, G. K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday, and Shakespeare in King Lear. It is at the very end of King Lear, in fact, that the Duke of Albany says, 'The weight of this sad time we must obey/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.' And that seems to me to be precisely what Shakespeare himself did in writing this greatest of all his plays and what in their own entirely different ways the other three did after him."
I like the way in which Fredrick Buechner talks about the literary masterpieces of these different authors, as people who opened up their vein and wrote blood. There is another author who is the greatest vein-opening author that I know. And He is currently writing an amazing letter with His blood to the world. You and I are that letter, that masterpiece that He is writing for the sake of the world.
Remember what it says in Ephesians 2:10 “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so that we can do the good things He planned for us long ago.”
Paul says that we are God’s masterpiece or God’s poem to this world. Masterpiece according to Webster means, “An outstanding piece of artistry or workmanship or a person’s best work.”
And what God says through the Apostle Paul is that WE are His masterpiece, the church, the new humanity that which is being formed from Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male and female, intelligent and ignorant, black and white, Asian and Hispanic. God’s masterpiece is collecting this diverse group of people and uniting them together in one body, one letter to display to the world and the cosmic powers.
HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE ART?
When I think of masterpieces, I think of art. How would you define art? I like the way that Thomas Hoving, who was the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York put it. He said, “Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.” I really like that, because as I reflect on my life, the life of the prophets, and the life of the people of God throughout time, I see how God does that with people. He crafts us to make a statement to the world.
Now how can you tell if a work of art is any good? Thomas Hoving has some great ideas about this as well. There are six good questions to consider when understanding the value of art:
1. Does it express successfully what it’s intending to express?
2. Does it amaze you in a different way each time you look at it?
3. Does it grow in stature?
4. Does it continually mature?
5. Does its visual impact of mysterious, pure power increase every day?
6. Is it unforgettable?
Those are helpful questions to think about when it comes to what God is doing in our lives and our communities. Jesus talked about us being lights and living in such a way so as to bring our Father great honor.
Andrew Wyeth, a famous artist, puts it this way when talking about great art. “As you climb the stairs of quality, you’ll meet individual works that you’ll need for the rest of your life, works that will thrill you, energize you, lift your soul, soothe you, make you smile, make you think about the fate of humankind and the universe, make you have to see them again and again for the good of your psyche, state of mind, and strength of heart.”
Wouldn’t that description be great to hear from someone who has come to visit your church or homegroup? If you continue to read the book of Ephesians, you begin to understand God's design of the church and how to become that Masterpiece as a community, a letter to the world, written with the blood of Jesus.
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