Reflections about Walking on Water
This year at DTS, Paul Lanum is doing a writing internship with me. Paul got his start at Disney working on "The Lion King," and after involvement in a number of other films was the production manager for "Chicken Little." Recently he read Madeleine L'Engle's non-fiction book, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, and with his permission I am copying below his remarks to me about it.
I found Walking on Water delightful. Madeleine L’Engle discusses issues that I have been thinking about recently, including maintaining a proper attitude of humility and what constitutes “Christian” art.
She has such a refreshing sense of humility, both about herself and about the artist’s role in creation. She speaks of the art coming to the artist, with the artist’s responsibility to obey (pg 10) and that the artist must have courage and faith to abandon control (pg 191). When I think back to my time at Disney, both for myself and in my peers, one of the primary motivating factors in creating art, whether it was writing a screenplay, acting in a film or play, or supervising animation on a character, was personal glory. Even in those times when something almost miraculous happened, when we did something or wrote something and weren’t quite sure where it came from, yet it worked, magically, how quickly we credited ourselves and not God.
After watching "Flywheel" for the first time, I watched the “making of” documentary. What a completely different way to make a movie. These two pastors, with no film-making experience, prayed and felt moved by God to make a film. So with $20,000 they embarked on this adventure with no idea how it was going to come together. But one thing they did do was pray each step of the way, ask for guidance on each decision, including the story and the script, and gave God the credit. (Not that this is a recipe for success. How unnerving that God so chooses sometimes to heap vast quantities of talent on the most arrogant ingrates.)
Of course I want to succeed, but if there is that “great American novel” in me, then my Creator put it there, and while there is no excuse for laziness, no matter how hard I work, it still isn’t me. I love how a best-selling, obviously brilliant writer reminds me that, “if we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own” (pg 67). “The important thing is to recognize that our gift, no matter the size, is indeed something given us, for which we can take no credit, but which we may humbly serve, and, in serving, learn more wholeness, be offered wondrous news” (pg 237).
The odds of being a successful writer, or artists of any type, are pretty slim. So I think people are often surprised by success, and therefore not prepared for it. Now, I have no idea what God has in store for my future. From a worldly perspective, my past was successful, yet God may decide that the lessons I need to learn and the best path to becoming like His Son is through suffering failure. But, if I wake up one morning and find myself able to support myself writing and making films, may I always remember and acknowledge the true source.
L’Engle throws in some excellent one-liners:
O senseless man who cannot make a worm, and yet makes gods by dozens. - Montaigne (pg 95).
If you think you understand, it isn’t God - St. Augustine (pg 150).
The other line of thought that she keeps coming back to throughout the book is the idea of “Christian” vs. secular art. At one point she writes, “much so-called religious art is in fact bad art, and therefore bad religion” (pg 22). I do recall taking a class where a certain professor stressed the need for Christians to take a moment to ponder if the art that they created was indeed “good.”
There was a bit where she discussed a friend taking her young daughter to a Museum of Modern Art, but the girl didn’t like it because, “she didn’t like chaos untouched by cosmos” (pg 162). What an interesting way to describe the difference between art created by individuals with opposing worldviews. Some create cosmos from chaos, others revel in chaos.
I’ve spent some time debating with myself the best approach to take with writing and film-making. I’ll ask questions like, “Do I pursue overtly Christian material, or do I make it more subtle.” L’Engle clearly feels responsible to reach not just the Christian reader, but a much wider audience, almost in an evangelistic sense, yet without “pushing” Jesus. She is sensitive, kind, and caring towards the unbelieving. “The Christian artist is to be in this world, but not of it…in [it] as healers, as listeners, and as servants” (pg 57). L’Engle has a classic phrase regarding those who write with Jesus “in your face,” in that it shows “like a slip hanging below the hem of a dress” (pg 143). Ultimately L’Engle concludes that the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist is “the purpose of the work…which is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home” (pg 194).
One of her barometers for content, or what type of art to be involved in, was if they would be okay with their kids reading or seeing it. It reminded me of something John Lasseter said in a story meeting once, that he wouldn’t include anything in a Pixar movie that he didn’t want his mother to see when she went to the movie theater.
I love L’Engle’s profound disappointment with fragmented Christianity. I love her willingness to ponder the impossible, to be fascinated with the Transfiguration, to consider that God is still beyond our understanding, and to love Him for that.