Book Review: Makoto Fujiwara’s Art + Faith

Part of what makes great books great is that they arrive at the proper time.I first grew interested in Makoto Fujimura’s Art + Faith when I read an interview eons ago by Christian musician Andrew Peterson, who cited the book as seminal to his approach to creativity and to his conceptualization of The Rabbit Room.    I bookmarked it on my wish list and then promptly forgot about it until recently.When I purchased it a month or so ago, I did so as a desperate attempt to cheer myself up during a particularly trying time.  And then I read it, and discovered it was one of those books: the transformational ones that make you think about life and faith differently, that God uses to change you in new and startling ways.Fujimura, a renowned artist, approaches the book as a way to get at the theology of “making”—of being creative.  But to do so, he first diagnoses a problem in the modern church that has long disturbed me but that I have not been able to articulate:“…after many decades of the church proclaiming “truth,” we are no closer as a culture to truth and beauty now than we were a century ago.”  Later, he adds, “Could it be…that we have missed the essence of the gospel message by focusing merely on an industrialized, commoditized way to convey the information of the gospel, or even to “sell” the Good News in the most efficient manner prescribed by our entrepreneurial or industrial mindset?”In touching—gently, correctively—on this issue, Fujiwara seems to call out the brand-heavy, marketing-focused characteristics of the modern American church.  But, as he points out, with an emphasis on being good “advertisements” for Christ, we have left behind much in the way of culture: we have neglected to reveal God to the world through art, truth, beauty, and imagination.  The solution then for Fujimura is simple.  “…what may be gratuitous, the “extra” of our world, may turn out to be the most essential.”  And so he envisions a beautiful, generative turn into another way of living out our faith:“What if we began to live our lives generatively facing our darkness?  What if we all began to trust our intuition in the Holy Spirit’s whispers, remove our masks of self-defense, and create into our new identities hidden in Christ beyond the darkness?  What if our lives are artworks re-presented back to the Creator?”For Fujimura, this is not a theoretical question.  He was a close witness to 9/11; his grandfather witnessed the ruins of Hiroshima.  His insistence that we are made to make—to sub-create, reflecting glory back to God—stems from real tragedy and suffering in his own life, and the realization that making, that generation, can be a way of speaking back faith into the world.And so the rest of the book follows this thread, dedicating itself to an exploration of what it might mean to engage in “culture care” rather than “culture war,” in being unafraid to let our imaginations take flight, in recognizing that sometimes God can reveal himself to us not just through His word or a well-crafted sermon but through a painting, a song, a dance.  That we, ourselves, may encounter God in those places.I’ll put my cards on the table and admit that I am one of these people.  I am a writer by nature, an artist at heart.  I love making.  I often feel close to God when I’m making things.  And it is through the art of others—Tolkien’s writings, a particular song, a painting—that I have come into deeper understandings of God on a level I can’t really understand but know is present.I’m struggling through a difficult period myself, one where I am learning to live with the grief over losing my mother and one in which my career is in lightspeed change, and reading Fujimura’s work made me stop focusing on all of problems and sorrows and ask a simple, solitary question:What can I build here?  What can be made?  What grows in the dark?  How can God create through me, here, or encourage my creativity and imagination?  What can be done?It’s a refreshing, exhilarating way to approach a period of difficulty.  And it’s deeply encouraging, inasmuch as it has allowed me to recenter my focus on the truth that God’s kingdom is present.  My priorities have shifted.  My way of approaching arguments and disagreements has shifted.  The way that I think about what my faith can create in me, or through me and to others, in a difficult time has shifted.Drawing heavily on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle, Fujimura acknowledges that anything we can create or do artistically in the present is “making sandcastles.”  We know and acknowledge we are vapors. And yet his fervent belief is that God will bless those sandcastle efforts, and that because love endures into eternity, God will make use of our sandcastle offerings we make for Him in a redeemed world in ways that we cannot fully understand.Fujimura closes the book with a story that I’ll leave for your reading, but that details an artistic encounter with a stranger.  Fujiamura and his companions leave the encounter exhilarated; the stranger leaves deeply moved.  It is the thesis of Art and Faith that this moment, this encounter, is as meaningful in terms of ministry as any the other more ‘traditional’ things we might do: that bringing people into an encounter with God through art, and encountering God ourselves through making or experiencing art, can speak to the heart and the soul in a way little else can.Blessed be our sandcastles.  I am grateful to Makoto Fujimura for this sandcastle of a book he has offered forward to God’s servants: whether the waves take it away or not, my encounter with it certainly left me changed—and eager to turn my making, in whatever way, toward the glory of experiencing and sharing Christ.