This past year has taught me a lot of things about the world and myself. I sought to answer the question of how our perspective in life changes once we finally recognize our brokenness in this world as something beautiful and see ourselves as the remarkable art we were created to be. In order to truly understand how we can perceive the beauty of this broken world, I read three books taking place in three different locations in the world. I am intrigued by the different ways that culture defines beauty and art, so I decided to investigate what these differences might mean when it comes to understanding the art of life. I chose the novel A Room With a View by E.M. Forester to further understand the varieties of forms that art has taken over time in a cross-cultural context such as Italy or London, two places that have captured my artistic interest. Then I read Makoto Fujimura’s autobiography, Refractions, which covers his artistic life and how he has grown throughout the hardship he has faced in it. I therefore expounded upon my current knowledge of what art looks like in the U.S. from a Christian perspective. Finally, I ventured to read The Bone People, a novel by Keri Hulme, in order to experience the story of an artist who lives in New Zealand, a place that has captured my heart, my art and is ironically where I will be going in January.
Beauty through brokenness... sounds a bit like a paradox doesn't it? I thought the same thing too when I first sought to prove it. The world and this life seem to be very complex and difficult to understand until you realize it wasn't meant to be at all. It was made to be very simple actually: it was meant to be a story. Now sure, there's a bunch of freaky weirdo stories out there that you could consider to be an exception to this "simple idea" I'm getting at. But all good stories follow the same plotline as the story. The story where everything seems good at first, a "Utopia" if you will, but then something always goes wrong: the bad guys show up and flip everything upside down. All seems to be lost until... the heros come in, restore peace and everyone lives happily ever after! See? Simple.
Well okay maybe it's a little more complicated than that. But in the end it all comes down to this: we were all created to live a story. A beautiful, wonderful story. The same story where Jesus plays the main role.
We were created to be like God, in his image. But when it came down to it, we didn't want to be like him, we wanted to be him. God makes all the calls right? Seems easy enough, I think I can take it! How many times have you told yourself that lie only to fall flat on your face? It's the same lie we've been told from the beginning: "God's holding out on you. He can't be trusted. Better off fending for yourself." What a load of bull! But what did we do? We believed it. And sometimes we still believe it.
The beautiful part of the story is that God doesn't give up on us when we go and screw everything up. He instead makes a promise that he's going to give us the happily ever after we dream of. And he's the one who's going to save the day.
Here are the foundations from which I concluded the Art of Life:
We have to start perceiving people not as the society has depicted them to be, but as individually beautiful to the way they were created to be. We are all art, molding and shaping everyday. Art does not always start out pretty, or it can appear to be something it is not, but until we actually get our hands and hearts in it, we will never know for sure. As Keri Hulme says in her novel, The Bone People, "People make other people."
We must be willing to be broken in order to refract the beauty imbedded inside of us. We all have our own stories. They can be defined by success, failure and everything in between, but there is one pattern that cannot be denied: the beauty that comes through our brokenness. There is so much insight into how our experiences, whether they are good or bad, shed light on the beauty of our stories. One of the quotes where I got the inspiration to do a creative art project to display the Art of Life is “We must be willing to be broken ourselves into prismatic shards by the Master Artist, God, so that Christ’s light can be refracted in us.” -Refractions by Makota Fujimura
Experiencing another culture’s artistic beauty can add deeper meaning and help you to understand even more what your purpose is in this world. Reading three books taking place in different places in the world only confirmed this theory for me.