Francis Schaeffer on Christian Imagination

From Mr. Schaeffer's book He is There and He is Not Silent:

"I live in a thought world which is filled with creativity; inside my head there is creative imagination. Why? Because God, who is the Creator, has made me in His own image, [and] I can go out in imagination beyond the stars. This is true not only for the Christian, but for every person. Every person is made in the image of God; therefore, no person in his or her imagination is confined to his or her own body. Going out in our imagination, we can change something of the form of the universe as a result of our thought world--in our painting, in our poetry, or as an engineer, or a gardener. Is that not wonderful? I am there, and I am able to impose the results of my imagination on the external world.
"But notice this: Being a Christian and knowing [that] God has made the external world, I know that there is an objective external reality and that there is that which is imaginary. I am not uncertain that there is an external reality which is distinct from my imagination. The Christian is free; free to fly, because he has a base upon which he need not be confused between his fantasy and the reality which God has made. We are free to say, 'This is imagination.' [...] As a Christian I have the epistemology that enables me not to get confused between what I think and what is objectively real. The modern generation does not have this, and this is the reason why some young people are all torn up in these areas. But Christians should not be torn up here.
"Thus the Christian may have fantasy and imagination without being threatened. Modern man cannot have daydreams and fantasy without being threatened. The Christian should be the person who is alive, whose imagination absolutely boils, which moves, which produces something a bit different from God's world because God made us to be creative."

Echoes of Heaven: Love Comes with a Rattling Sound

"Sold out souls,
Hollowed out holes
Scattered, shattered,
Forgotten forever on the
Wasteland.

"We are the wounds in the world where
Endless slings and arrows have been hurled
And disappeared.
Do not stand too close,
Lest ye fall in
And disappear as well.

"I am a broken man,
My bones left out to dry;
Our bones made bare to all.
Death is our only parade.

"Love comes with a rattling sound,
With a mighty noise
Like the wind.
It fills up the ground
With a rattling sound,
With a mighty noise
Like the wind.

"Fill up the barrenness,
Fill up the wilderness,
Fill up the dry earth.
Fill up all the sticks and stones
And all the broken bones
Forgotten forever on the
Wasteland.

"Love comes with a rattling sound,
With a mighty noise
Like the wind."

-Jon Vowell (c) 2008

Echoes of Heaven: Our Burning

"Love is the movement; love is a revolution. This is redemption: we don't have to slow back down." -Switchfoot

"Cursed to be paused:
Allowed neither the dignity of slow motion,
Nor the possibilities of neutral;
Only stillness and static
Forevermore.

"I know why the lowest pit
Is ice:
Life is in motion;
If you are frozen, what good are you?
You are dead, and good for nothing;
To be cast out,
And trodden under the feet of men.

"I would take fire over ice.
Fire is motion; burning is life.
If I am to be in the pit,
Oh God, let me burn and not freeze!

"Is there no fire in Heaven?
No divine dancing sparks
With which to have and to hold
Till death do us bind?
Is damnation my only hope?
Can I burn in Heaven
As well as Hell?

"Does holiness burn?
Does it burn at the touch
Like a sword through the skin?
Like a nail through the hand?
Holiness is a fire
Spilt like blood;
Blood so amazing,
So divine.

"No news is never good news.
No news is stillness;
Good news is motion.
What good news is there?
The sparks have danced with the dust,
Holy blood has burned the stillness and static
Forevermore.

"They dance,
They burn,
With us,
Forevermore.

"Silence, oh static stillness;
Love burns eternal.
All things, great and small,
Menial and monumental,
The dust, and the Divine,
And the damned,
All move to Empyrean Love.
In thus we live and move
And have our burning."

-Jon Vowell (c) 2008

Echoes of Heaven: Beautiful Defilement

"The divine has danced with the dust.
How shall we survive such a touch?
From dust we came; to this Dust we must go,
Or return to the dustbin
As ashes to ashes."

-Jon Vowell (c) 2008

Solzhenitsyn on Art and Literature

The following is the first section of the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1970 Nobel Prize Lecture. After you have whetted your appetite here, I suggest you go and read the whole thing. His thoughts on the role of art and literature are amazing to read and necessary to know:

Just as that puzzled savage who has picked up - a strange cast-up from the ocean? - something unearthed from the sands? - or an obscure object fallen down from the sky? - intricate in curves, it gleams first dully and then with a bright thrust of light. Just as he turns it this way and that, turns it over, trying to discover what to do with it, trying to discover some mundane function within his own grasp, never dreaming of its higher function.
So also we, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement - right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another - grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel - for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.
But shall we ever grasp the whole of that light? Who will dare to say that he has DEFINED Art, enumerated all its facets? Perhaps once upon a time someone understood and told us, but we could not remain satisfied with that for long; we listened, and neglected, and threw it out there and then, hurrying as always to exchange even the very best - if only for something new! And when we are told again the old truth, we shall not even remember that we once possessed it.
One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today's ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public.
Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God's heaven; then, however, his responsibility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence - in destitution, in prison, in sickness - his sense of stable harmony never deserts him.
But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings - they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist's vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers.
Archaeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it?
And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die - art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?
Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited - dimly, briefly - by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.
Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see - not yourself - but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan.

A Comment to Master Jenkins about Christianity and Culture

In regards to Christian Guitar Hero:

Making knock offs of culture does not influence the culture. It merely reveals the opposite, that we are influenced by the culture, and that we are just a bunch of johnny-come-latelies. Is Christianity so shallow and uninteresting that not only can we not produce any great art, but we also cannot produce even good entertainment?
Seriously now, no joke: what would happen if a Christian truly applied the mysteries of the Trinity or the Incarnation or the Atonement to a video game, or a comic book, or a commercial, or an animated series, or a movie, or a novel, or a sermon, or our individual lives? Have our wells run dry? I think not; it is we who have run dry, we who have left off the living waters of Jacob's well for the paltry dust of the world.