Last week, I had the privilege of being invited to speak at Audiofeed, a music festival in Urbana, Illinois. My time at Audiofeed was deeply sweet. The gracious opportunity I was given to speak is far outranked in my memory by the genuine community, compelling performances, and encouraging conversations I enjoyed there. I’m grateful to Kevin Schlereth for the invitation to share my story and convey my confident belief that there’s no such thing as the sacred/secular divide because there is a sovereign and irresistibly gracious Christ. If we find the Hound of Heaven is chasing us down, we’ve never been safer. He will use everything at His disposal, which is, well…everything. And thank God.
I also want to thank all who chose to attend this rando’s moment at the mic. The gift of your presence and attention is so much.
I continue to be abysmal at choosing titles — so much so that the working title became the title, and, even as I copy it here now, remains the title. Love for italics also going strong.
But I digress. Here’s the transcript:
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My name is Abbey Sitterley and I’m a writer, musician, and church communications director from Rochester, NY. I’m super stoked to be here with you today. It’s been a goal of mine to make it to Audiofeed for a few years because I love community, especially community that gathers around the intersection of faith and art.
We are all here, traveling from far and wide to be at a music festival, so odds are good that most of us are at least art appreciators or artists ourselves. The arts have this magnetic effect on people, right?
The working title of this talk has been pretty straightforward, Artistic Witness, and you might be wondering two things at the outset: (1) who is this rando? (2) is she gonna say we should make more art to evangelize about Jesus?
The answer to the second question is “No,” and you’ll understand why because of the first.
I’m from a small town outside of Rochester, NY, an only child from a Christian home. And when I was little my family went through a significant church hurt experience that ended with us losing much of our community. Predictably disillusioned by the moral hypocrisy of Christians who were known more for their hatred of secular culture than their love for one another, I was pretty bitter, and this bitterness churned and grew well-into my high school and college years. Yet, despite my complete disregard for religion, I couldn’t suppress the reality of a spiritual dimension to my life. And so, I went on a deep dive into all sorts of things, from Eastern mysticism and chakras to theosophy and whatever else I could fit into my cafeteria-style approach to spirituality. I was willing to consider everything but the faith I grew up in.
I was working on my creative writing degree and so much of this searching I did happened on artistic rails: poetry, film, fiction, zines, whatever. This stuff was my god. Somehow, I stumbled into the world of Catholic mystic poetry, Catholicism being distinctly non-evangelical enough to be slightly entertained. I poured over the beauty in Julian of Norwich’s writings, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, and baptized my pretentious literary student angst in the appeals found in St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul.
I started reading Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, like The Turkey, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and Revelation shocked and unnerved me. Here was God as the Hound of Heaven staring down characters caught between the paws of grace, trying to wiggle free to no avail. I felt just as, in O’Connor’s terms, ‘Christ-haunted’ as the south they were set in. As deeply gothic fiction, O’Connor’s stories are clearly crafted to neither comfort nor convert. Rather, they merely escort the reader to meet the startling contrast of man before his Maker and promptly abandon one there.
At the same time as I became acquainted with the beauty and terror of Christianity, a side I’d never known, so-called secular art was also doing a work on me. I began watching The X Files for its reputation as a cult classic sci-fi series and found that same spiritual longing underpinning the show’s entire framework. The tagline phrase ‘I want to believe’ was a touchstone for me, a new openness. Mulder’s unslakable thirst for truth alongside Scully’s empirically-driven skepticism mirrored the same tension happening in my own heart.
I couldn’t escape the existential reckoning. Films like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Mike Cahill’s I-Origins, gave me an unflinching view of human frailty and futility. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy novels broke my mind on the rock of nihilism and absurdity.
Meanwhile, I’d discovered my all time favorite band (and Audiofeed alumni, actually) the Soil and the Sun, who sang lines of Scripture like it might have really happened and could maybe, possibly, potentially, be true. I was being hollowed and wooed at the same time. It was while reading George MacDonald’s Lilith that I realized I not only believed Christianity was true, I wanted it to be true.
At one point, a friend of mine recommended Madeleine L’Engle’s classic work Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art. L’Engle was different than other Christian authors I’d read. In Walking on Water, she explains how the doctrines of Christianity gave intrinsic spiritual worth to creativity. Not only were we image-bearers of God, we were called to partake as co-creators in the world. And as co-creators, we had to humbly admit that our work isn’t really ours, but rather a profound gift of God’s goodness and divine will.
See, these pieces of art were blasting my worldview apart. When the Soil and the Sun sang, “The Lord is my God, He created me,” they weren’t doing that in an evangelistic way, they were telling a story. But I walked around campus for a week marvelling at the idea of being a created thing, not an accident, but something fearfully and wonderfully made by Someone.
Synecdoche dragged personhood and the psyche out into the open and stripped mortality bare. What’s the point of “doing my little job, living my little life, eating my little meals?” It evoked realization of what John Vervaeke calls the Meaning Crisis - 21st century man’s loss of meaning and purpose that has us disconnected from ourselves, each other, and the world. What was telos, the purpose, of my life? Am I just a ghost driving a flesh machine around playing games?
I believe that the questions, the fear, the awe, the marvel all these cultural artifacts were evoking in me was divine revelation, directed by the sovereignty of God, to baptize my imagination by the power of the Holy Spirit — to see both a need for Christ and a beautiful Christ for my need.
For me, one of the deepest ways I know Christianity is true is because I wanted nothing to do with it when Christ ambushed me. I was not looking for it. I wanted anything but. Christianity is true because God not only uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, but He uses both art that acknowledges Him and art that refuses to, for His own purposes, for His glory and our good.
And this makes total sense. We were created to co-create with the Uncreated Creator. Creativity is His business. This is partly why evangelistic propaganda feels so fake and plastic — we don’t fit Him into our work, He fits us into His. All of our art, all of it, says way more than we ever intend. Art is God’s work first, so there’s an eternal quality to it.
And artists have been having this debate for eons, haven’t we? What is behind artistic inspiration? Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God has put eternity into the heart of man. This is where art meets us, doesn’t it? Beyond words and explanation? David Lynch always refused to explain the meaning behind his work and I think he’s really acknowledging that there’s something to art beyond explanation. It also speaks to the subjectivity of art, that art, human co-creation, naturally tells on the human condition as well.
There’s been a lot of great work done by missiologists with the idea of ‘subversive fulfillment.’
Based on the work of J. H. Bavinck and re-contextualized by Daniel Strange, subversive fulfillment is a really helpful framework for understanding how we live out from the eternity in our hearts and how the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only thing that can meet it.
According to Bavinck, and later Daniel Strange, there are five magnetic points of the human experience that we are either “consciously or subconsciously” talking about in any given time. Expressed through our values, our choices, our conversation, and of course our art, these five points “itch” at us, Strange says, and we are always trying to scratch them.
The five points are:
Totality = a desire to connect
Norm = a code of life
Deliverance = a way out
Destiny = a way we control
Higher Power = a way beyond
I really commend Daniel Strange’s book Making Faith Magnetic for deeper dives into each of these than I’ll touch on here, but just upon description, one or two of these might resonate with you at the top, right?
Maybe you sense a deep desire to want to connect with others, to feel a part of something, for a global interconnected world, or maybe you are obsessed with wanting to know God’s will for your life, or are really captivated by the idea that we’re not alone in the universe and they’re really get at something in the X Files.
I bet if you take a look at the art you’re making, or the art you just enjoy, you’ll see one or two of these pop out loud and clear. Think about the music, movies, poems, and novels that have impacted you. I would bet each of them touches on one of these magnetic points:
Totality, Norm, Deliverance, Destiny, and Higher Power.
These magnetic points are everything we’re longing for at one point of time or another. We want to be a part of something, to live flourishing lives, to be delivered from our fears, to know where we’re going, and to know why we’re made.
The nature of these longings come into clearer focus when we look at them from a Christian anthropology, a Christian understanding of man.
To borrow Francis Schaeffer’s term, we were created by the infinite-personal God, YHWH, and as His handiwork, we are imprinted in His image. In the beginning, God made us and said man was a good thing. We had relationship with Him, Adam walking in the cool of the day with God in intimacy and fellowship. Then God said, “It’s not good for man to be alone” and created woman from Adam’s side.
But then Adam and Eve fell, fell out of right relationship with God, out of right relationship with each other, and out of right relationship with the world. And as their children, we reap this same broken whirlwind, cosmic rebels against God, bent toward sitting on the throne of our own hearts rather than surrendering ourselves to the only one who was made to satisfy us.
Just as we are made in God’s image and therefore bear His mark, His creation speaks of Him by what we call ‘general revelation.” The Higher Power magnetic point surges when we encounter beauty and grandeur in creation, the sense of Norm when we see the way God has used cultural myths and fairy tales to set the stage for what Tolkien calls the True Myth. The eternity in us screams there is an infinite-personal God, but as Paul says in Romans 1, we suppress this reality.
Romans 1:18-23: The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
In that last verse there, we see that we not only suppress the truth of the infinite-personal God, but we substitute created things instead: power, money, sex, material things, created things.
And so, these magnetic points, which are meant to find their full expression in the love and power of God, are fed and dulled by lesser things. Yet, as I said earlier, art tells on us. What we create tells us what our substitutes are (romantic love, the American dream, politics, social identity) but it also shows their incompleteness.
Because creativity was God’s work before it was ours, its eternal nature has the potential to awaken us from our suppression. Even idols can’t help but point to what they fail to be.
I like how Peter Leithart puts it:
“Now, we need to add that the God imaged in our speaking and making is not some abstract and unknown character, some God-in-general, but the God revealed in the story revealed in creation, history and Scripture. If we cannot help but manifest God's character in our creations (including our story-telling), and if the character of God manifested in our creations is known through a story, it follows that we cannot help but retell His stories in our own.
God's story tells of a good creation, marred by a rebellion and a curse, which is overcome by the coming of a Redeemer to restore the world. All other stories are contained in that basic story. This does not at all mean that every writer is self-consciously and deliberately writing Christian allegory. It means that every writer tells stories that reflect in some way God's story ... Because of the way God created and governs the world, and because knowledge of the Creator and Governor of the world is inescapable, the rebellion of the imaginative writer is constrained. Somewhere, even in the stories of the most self-consciously rebellious story-teller, God’s story shines through.”
I love that, “the rebellion of the imaginative writer is constrained.”
Mankind’s broken attempts to suppress and substitute the general revelation of God do not succeed. The Unmoved Mover will have His way, will pursue us with an irresistible grace that we can’t escape from.
And this is what the Gospel does. It subverts our suppression, showing us the bankruptcy of our pathetic patchwork attempts to shroud the general revelation of God, and it fulfills us, giving us the specific revelation of God’s word: that we are not our own, that meaning and destiny are only found in God’s will, that only the one who made us can tell us how best to live, that there is only one Deliverer and His name is Jesus.
The Gospel is exciting! And it’s the power of God working for repentance, not of our own making. This subversive fulfillment is happening all the time, and I argue that the arts are a potent vehicle for this work of God. We don’t need to be tied to explicit evangelism as artists, because again, creativity is God’s businesses before it was ours. The eternity in your heart calls out to the eternity in mine, and we converse over the same questions humanity has been asking since the fall - these magnetic points of totality, norm, destiny, deliverance, and higher power - and the Lord uses it in His own timing to call us into the fold.
And so the Christian artist, with this in mind, can find freedom in obedience to the creative call. Obedience modeled by the mother of Jesus.
Here’s Madeleine L’Engle:
“The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver…
...I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.
As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.”
When we like Mary, walk in humble, courageous obedience, we find a creative freedom like never before, to create in celebration of our God-given stewardship as co-creators. To make art that is worshipful in the explicit sense, yes, art that plainly declares the lordship of Jesus Christ in word, yes, but also art that simply arises from the worldview of what it looks like to live “coram deo” before the face of God. To borrow from G. K. Chesterton, creativity understood in this way simply allows “room for good things to run wild.”
So create with fervor, with freedom. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts and lean into the constrained nature of your creativity.
Creating in this freedom also means that we should resist judging the outcome. Of course you and I want others to know the reality of Christ’s lordship. And there’s a guarantee of this: “All those whom the father has called will come.” Even if our small obedient work only leads someone an inch, or wakes someone up to the knowledge of their need for a savior, isn’t that a miracle enough?
We need nothing more than the humility and hope the director Krzysztof Kieślowski who wrote,
“At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it.”
Realization of the soul today. Surrender of the soul at the acceptable time.
What I’m hoping to inspire is not more evangelistic art for Jesus, but art from a place of freedom and confidence in the Holy Spirit’s power to use our creativity for God’s slow, patient work in the world. To sow seeds of faithful, prophetic witness that may only stir the heart one small step toward a long obedience in the same direction.
And so just as there is no sacred / secular dichotomy, there is no creative dichotomy of creative and non-creative. Hospitality is an art. Loving your wife as Christ loved the church is an art. Making a meal for a struggling friend is creative. Raising your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord is an art.
If you are living and moving and having being, you are a co-creator, whether that’s in intricate ceramics or folding laundry.
So maybe you’re here and you don’t call yourself an artist necessarily. Maybe you’re raising a young family or maybe you just love a band so much it hurts. Just as the triune God, the first Creator, existed before time began in intimate community with each person of the Trinity, so do we need artistic community. Patronage, appreciation, feedback, encouragement, prayer, your presence, artists need people who will resonate with their work and share it with others, to stir up renewed passion for the arts as our cultural tastes become dulled by materialism and the consumeristic mindset.
Francis Schaeffer said,“Each generation of the church, in each setting, has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.”
My challenge to you today is to listen. Listen to the art you love, listen to the art you’re making. Listen to the culture, listen for the longings, the magnetic points, that are humming beneath our loves, our hates, our political fervor, our artistic tastes and temperaments. Where are there cries for deliverance? What is this novel saying about what defines a flourishing life? What longings does your art reveal in your heart? How is the general revelation of the infinite-personal God poking through like stars in the night of our rejection?
God uses the things we do not expect, art that even explicitly rejects Him, to draw His own to Himself. If you are a parent of a child who once professed faith but has walked away from God, take heart. If you are praying earnestly for a parent or a friend who has deconstructed, who has become cold or indifferent to the things of God, take heart. You never know what slow work of the spirit is already moving like saws in their heart, to cut away the misconceptions, the bitterness, the calcified self-awareness of their need.
This is my story, and the more I speak with others who have encountered YHWH through similar channels, the more I take comfort in God’s creative plan for salvation. Keep praying. Be earnest. Listen to their lives, to your own, and find ways to meet each other at the magnetic points - not trying to solve it for them, but simply walking alongside.
I’ve heard it said once that “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”
There are lots of ways to talk about where the bread is.
We can write essays and sermons about the bread.
We can paint arrows to the bread.
We can write songs describing the absence of the bread.
Make movies about feasting on the bread.
Poems about how we get in the way of the bread through the dumb ways we talk about getting to the bread.
At the end of the day, we are simply beggars. And if we’ll be obedient as co-creators to work authentically before the face of God…If we listen to the place and time we’re in and trace the longings of our human condition…And if we then lean into the freedom that rests and trusts in the sovereign, wise, kind mercy of God…
We’ll experience the unparalleled joy that comes from witnessing the Lord at work on this side of eternity.
As Andy Squyres says, “After we die, we will have no more chances to love God from impossible circumstances.”
May our artistic witness be a witness of obedience, of listening, of freedom. May we let good things run wild in our creativity. May we paint true the longings of our need for a savior and the excitement of having found the answer in Jesus Christ. May we resist the temptation to evangelize from our own strength and instead rest in the power of Holy Spirit’s slow, patient work. And may our excitement grow for the Christian answer, the explosive power of the gospel to subvert our sin and fulfill us as we were made to be filled.
The Hound of Heaven is hot on our heels. He will not rest until we rest in Him, to glorify and enjoy Him forever.
Thank you.