Surrounding Ourselves with Quality

I have inadvertently begun a small series on faith and the arts. I think that this will be the last essay in the series. Of course, I didn’t think that there was going to be any series at all. So, we’ll see. If you missed the first two, I would love for you to read about how ethics helps us live like a great jazz pianist and about some of the things that music teaches us about God. Today I’m moving away from music and toward the visual arts. Specifically, architecture.

 

 

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Are facts and logic the only things that point toward truth, or can beauty and good artistry move you toward the same truth?
Formula
Nativity
Does what you surround yourself with eventually affect your character, moving you closer to or farther from godliness?
Building a Timeless House
Brent Hull, author of Building a Timeless House in an Instant Age, believes so. Hull is a master house builder, trained in the art of historic design and museum quality preservation. He believes that the home you build communicates something about who you are.
The reason we study the pyramids in Egypt is that they tell us about Egyptians, leading us to an understanding of what they believed, what they valued, how they lived…The process of homebuilding has been so commoditized that we don’t recognize the fact that our choices reflect our values…The decisions we make for our homes weave a tale of our character, value, history, and heart. What happens when we examine our homes and lives with the same lens of discovery we place on the Egyptian pyramids? What do our homes say about us?
Beauty
Regardless of the kind of task that is currently in your focus, is your aim to create beauty or is it on the bottom line? Are you more concerned with creating something timeless or with getting the most for your dollar? Are you dishonest about what impression you present to the world while being content on the inside with cheap imitations?
Timeless
Notre Dame
These are weighty questions, questions that contain ideas that relate to more than just house building.
I don’t plan to build a house any time soon, but even as I furnish and change the inside of my home, what am I teaching my children? Am I teaching them that craftsmanship and quality furnishings that take time to create or to save up for are worthwhile or am I teaching them that it is better to buy cheap things that will soon break just so that I can gather more stuff?
Craftmanship
Quality
As I create our home, whether I’m building something or just purchasing a sofa, how can I communicate the values of honesty, integrity, strength, and wisdom to my children?
This is something I’ve pondered before in a broader sense, wondering what has happened in the Christian art world to the quality of our art. If God is creator and if beauty points back to Him, then Christians should be leading the world in the quality of our music, our literature, our visual arts, and yes, our homes as well.
Lovely
True
Why would you build an ugly home?
Hull writes that many authors from the Renaissance through the early 1900s wrote about character in buildings. The character of buildings and the character of community were thought to be closely tied together. Build honest homes and you will get honest citizens.
Don’t I want my children to chase quality rather than chasing price?
Emphatically yes.
And if the home is the place where we spend the most time, the place we want our children to return to, the place that is meant to be a safe haven from the world, then home is the place where we should put beauty and quality above all else.
Cathedral
Dome St Peters
To build a timeless house today, we need to desire beauty over cost. We need to wonder if building cheap houses doesn’t cause us to become a cheap culture. Now is the time to examine ourselves, our motives, and our hearts. When we do, the rewards are immense; high quality and meaningful design in our homes are but two of the many benefits. They endure even after we are gone. They enrich our lives for generations. ~ Brent Hull, Building A Timeless House in an Instant Age
May we, in all that we do, seek to enrich lives for generations.

Art credit: all photos of cathedrals by Kirk Sewell of R.K. Sewell Photography; Adoration of the Shepherds painting by Charles LeBrun

Ethics and Jazz

My kids live by their own code of ethics.
If a wrong has been done, every member of the family must be made aware.
Wronged
Upset
If a sister gets a new toy, all other sisters immediately claim playing rights. Unless it is their toy, in which case it belongs to them alone.
Sharing is hard
It belongs to me
All are mine
If one sister is playing with the baby, all other sisters must immediately leave whatever they were doing and try to take over the baby’s attention.
My baby
I want her
Ethics.
It is one of those seminary words, one of those university words, one of those first-day-in-the-workplace words.
Rather than the list of rules by which we live, it is actually a description of reality.
Perhaps it is better portrayed as a description of what we observe or know about the fabric of reality. It is a link between what we believe and how we live. A link between our mind and our heart.
Learning about ethics is often viewed as unnecessary, as irrelevant to our daily lives. Yet if we don’t understand the ethics of our faith, how can we know how to act in any given situation?
I, for one, am not able to memorize enough rules to cover any condition in which I might find myself. None of us want to live that way, constantly searching our minds for a rule to obey.
I would much rather live like a great jazz pianist.
Dave Brubeck quartet
Diana Krall
A jazz pianist, a really good one, knows his art intimately. It is a part of his spirit.
When he plays with a band, he knows what exists in the music. He knows the nature of the musical form, he knows the structure of the harmonics well enough to think quickly and compose something that fits in with the reality of the music.
It is so seamless it appears as though he had spent weeks composing it ahead of time.
This is how I want to live.
I want to know God and how He has created the nature of this life and this world well enough to know how to respond no matter what is happening around me. I want to be able to react so seamlessly that it appears I had spent weeks thinking through my reaction ahead of time.
I want, I suppose, to have the mind of Christ.
For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual…But we have the mind of Christ. ~ I Corinthians 2.11-16
May we know our own ethics and how they describe God’s reality so well as to be able to improvise our lives beautifully.
As beautifully as jazz.

Art credits: Dave Brubeck photograph by user:don’tworry; Diana Krall photograph by Rob Garland