Barry's Blog

"The culture at large is neither 'Christian' nor 'secular' but fantastically pluralistic, defying conventional categorizations. In each culture we will no doubt find evidences of trauma, like the ashes of Ground Zero...We can choose to disengage from such intractable reality...Or we can accept the splintered condition of culture as a kaleidoscope of common struggles, a reality that only the golden rays of God can restore and recreate via broken humanity. The latter is my starting promise in writing this book. As you journey with me in the refracted light, I pray the Spirit will indeed reveal God's presence in the undiscovered recesses of our creative journeys."

With these words, the internationally celebrated artist Makoto Fujimura introduces his winsome book, Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture (NavPress, 2009). Fujimura's works are represented by the Dillon Gallery in New York as well as Tokyo, and public collections including The Saint Louis Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the Time Warmer/AOL/CNN building in Hong Kong. He was also appointed to the National Council on the Arts, a presidential appointment, in 2003. He is also a thoughtful Christian who heads the International Arts Movement, a pioneering effort to integrate a discerning Christian faith alongside art and culture.

While his book provides a feast of various vignettes dealing with the intersection of faith and culture, the chapter titled, "Fallen Towers and the Art of Tea," caught my attention for its theological precision and his own experiences of living in New York City with his family. As he raised his ten-year-old son, C.J., he observes that it was the World Trade Center that used to shade them, and give them respite and a sense of security from the hot summers of Little League games in Murray Street nearby. But all that changed amidst a cloudless, azure sky, right over the schoolyard, as two airplanes "cast sinister shadows upon our modern presumption, our trust in the twin vision," that day of September 11, 2001.

Observes Fujimura, like the poet-prophet that he is of our own day: "It has been said that we worship what our tallest buildings symbolize. Church spires defined city skylines in previous centuries. But they have been replaced by those 'punch-card' towers, the pride of our progress." He then quotes from another literary prophet from an earlier day, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote his lamentation, "My Lost City," from the top of the Empire State Building on another dark autumn in 1931:

"From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood--everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limitzations--from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

Fujimura observes: "The crowning error of the city, pride, is in all of us. For the artist, as for Fitzgerald, cities represent both the height of our success and the depth of our failures. Both success and failure expose the error within, showing us that even the greatest city has limits. But the earthly city is not limited because of her boundaries. No, the earthly city is limited because her foundation is selfish ambition, the desire to control...Fitzgerald imagined falling towers long before the World Trade Centers were built."

And the story of humanity, our story, is the story of selfish ambition, unchecked hubris, as the Greeks called it. It is perhaps best epitomized in the Old Testament book of Genesis, chapter 11, where ancient man seeks to "make for ourselves a name," by building a tower that reaches into the heavens, the Tower of Babel. Yet despite however high he builds it, God still has to "come down" to see what feeble man has constructed. Malcolm Muggeridge, in his wonderful little book, "The End of Christendom," observes that in the medieval cathedrals, where you had the steeples climbing up into the sky symbolizing all the wonderful spiritual aspirations of human beings, you also had, at the same time, set in that same roof, these little grinning gargoyles staring down at the earth. Muggeridge comments: "The juxtaposition of these two things might seem strange at first. But I contend that they are aspects of the same essential attitude of mind, an awareness that at the heart of our human existence there is this mystery. Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious..."

So why is it that such an accomplished artist as Makoto Fujimura, who happens to be a Christian, is so rare in our own day? I want to know. Can anyone tell me?