A young girl found herself wandering through a forest at night. She could hear a Nightingale singing, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the moonlight, she could see the trees around her more distinctly. She could see silver birches, oaks, beaches. She found herself longing to know what the trees were thinking, to hear them talk. She imagined the birch's soft, showery voice and penchant for dancing, the oaks wizened but Hardy appearance, the beaches smooth and stately elegance.
Oh, trees, trees, trees, whispered Lucy Wake, don't you remember it? Don't you Remember Me? The trees rustled as if they could hear her, but nothing else happened, and Lucy went to sleep that night, disappointed. But a few nights later, she woke out of the deepest sleep you could imagine, and heard a voice calling her back into the woods. She sat up, not with fear, but with excitement. The trees were moving, not waving. Walking. She walked towards them, her
heart beating wildly. She could almost hear a tune in the sounds that they were making, and she could catch glimpses in which they looked a little less like trees and a little more like strangely branchy and leafy people. She danced fearlessly among them until she saw in the center the reason for it all, the great lion Aslan.
Over the years, I've noticed these scenes from CS Lewis's Prince Caspian, which most of you will be familiar with, have a strange and pretty universal effect on people. Prince Caspian is set in a disenchanted Narnia, and when Aslan arrives, trees and rivers and all sorts of things are awakened. And when we reach these scenes with Lucy, we almost read them in a hush. It's as if we know that even for our world, there's something true about them. But what exactly is it?
Christianity doesn't teach pantheism, where we worship the creation or where we are simply an equal part of the creation, but neither does it teach Gnosticism, where nothing physical matters and the goal is to escape physicality. Yet in our modern age, Christians have been guilty of both of these extremes, and most of us don't really know what to do with stuff in between those extremes, whether it's a tree or a spoon or a path or a patch of sky.
How close is Lucy's perspective to what ours should be? Do dryads and naiads and river gods only exist in Narnia? What is the relationship between objects and the supernatural realm? What are we to do with trees? In this episode we will seek to reclaim a Christian vision for a re enchanted creation. Not just the big 30,000 foot view, but what to do with everyday things.
Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed podcast where we follow the great stories further up and further in in pursuit of the life of Christ. Welcome to Imagination Redeemed everyone. I'm Brian Brown. I'm joined by Amy Beckley and Sarah Howell today and we have been just prior to hitting, recording, debating and debating and debating just how exactly to do justice to this topic.
Because I've LED us in with a rather big claim that we want to reclaim a Christian vision for a re enchanted creation. That is in fact part of why the Ansem Society exists. But there are a lot of places we could go with that. And ultimately, we don't want to simply have a conversation about ideas, but we want to equip you and equip each other to be more fully present in the world that God has made because this is the only place that He's given us in which to meet Him.
And therefore this place cannot be irrelevant to that encounter. Before we get into the conversation, I should say out loud a little housekeeping, which is that if you go to andsoundsociety.org right now, you will see we have just announced our fall event. It is not CS Lewis themed, but it is JRR Tolkien themed. September 19th and 20th of this year, 2025, we will be gathering in Colorado Springs for a weekend of Middle Earth festivity.
We're calling it a long expected feast because this is our first weekend event since 2022, so if you would love to come and sing and tell stories and hear stories told and song sung, probably do some Middle Earth trivia. There will be a retreat component so that we can be encouraged and renewed. And we will conclude with a pub night of all the things that we are always putting on our social media channels because we enjoy doing them so much.
That is up on our website. The details are there. Tickets are going to go on sale on July 31st, but you can get on a wait list in the meantime. So go check that out after this episode. Or better yet, pause and pull it up right now before you forget because tickets are going to go extremely quickly for that and space is very limited. OK ladies, first of all, thank you for being willing to wade into this tricky topic with me and Sarah.
Thank you in particular for putting in a lot of work on the front end so that we could hopefully do it justice. I think I the easiest place for us to start. I think a lot of us have wrestled with this question of how to have a category for things that are not God and yet still matter. We are afraid of idolatry. We're afraid of, particularly in Protestantism.
There there's this sort of healthy suspicion of idolatry that can easily fall, fall backwards into an unhealthy almost like the almost like the dwarves in the last Battle being so afraid of being taken in that they can't see the magic when it's right in front of them. And it's great to to not want to assign more value to something than it actually has. But it's really easy to just sort of stop there and end up feeling unequipped. I've lived, for example, most of
my life in suburban contexts. Lots of man made things right, lots of concrete and asphalt and maybe some nature band aids here and there, but probably couldn't even have told you what most of those trees and bushes were. I certainly couldn't say that in any meaningful sense. I was a steward of them, a master of them. So it's pretty easy for us to feel alienated from the creation, maybe at that theological level, maybe at that just practical level.
But if this is the place that God has given us to meet him, we've got to find a better answer than that. And the reason that we started with this Prince Caspian story is because in this fictional fantasy world context, that's kind of what happened. She ultimately finds Aslan, but she does it through these waking trees. Not not by walking away from the waking trees going, no, you are not Aslan and finding anywhere else, but actually through what he has made and what he is waking up.
So just low hanging fruit way to start the conversation. I'd love to hear any thoughts that you have on observations you made about this story or about this larger challenge, how this challenge has manifested for you. My challenge fundamentally starts with a improper understanding of creation. The fancy term, the doctrine of creation states that everything is good.
The Bible begins with God creating out of nothing and saying that it is good and it it's, it's a little easy to maybe just a sense to that sentence. Yes, everything is good, but it's a different thing to recognize and allow for that to change the way that you look at the world. I often don't think of this world as my father's world. I think I often start my understanding of the world at the fall and that and that everything is decaying and decrepit.
That's actually the way that I interact with the world more often than not, because that's how I interact with perhaps myself and other people. And while there is obviously truth in the fact that the next part of the biblical story is the fall, we can't forget about who is the father of this world. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's where my challenge begins. Yeah, it's it's easy to functionally live that way and forget that God's response to Adam and Eve's sin was not OK.
Sir. Brent, you win. I'll come back later. I think I'm often Co opted into thinking that the world is runs off of the survival of the fittest scientific, you know, reality wherein where I I think it might actually be more true that because the world is good, I'll I'll be damaged. It is primarily working off of more than just survival. And so I, I think I often see nature against man, man versus nature, rather than seeing nature being something that could actually work with or care
about man. Yeah, Amy, what about you? I mean, you've, I feel like there were even places in your book that talked about different chapters of ways that created order had or lack thereof in a given context that either alienated you or kind of pulled you in. What's been your your experience with either this line of thinking or or a different one as far as how to how to relate
to the creation? Yeah, well, I think when I was talking about it in my book, it had a lot to do with my fraught history, with my perception of beauty. And so I came of age, I guess, as a Christian, in a time when a lot of things were considered luxuries, I guess I would say,
when it came to beauty. And so beauty was a superfluous thing, and it wasn't something that was inherent or built into creation or meant really to enrich or deepen your understanding of God. I mean, I've told the story I think a few Times Now of how as a Bible study leader in my college fellowship, we decided to go for a no frills approach to our Bible study. So no snacks, no, no chatty time beforehand. We were going to get straight into Scripture and dwell there and stay there.
And that was, I think maybe it was it was necessary for me at that stage. I think it did help us to value the word of God. But that kind of symbolizes, I think what my view of beauty was like at the time. And it, and then it was after a, a mental breakdown in 2016 that I think the way that I started to notice the presence of God or to become sensible to the presence of God in my everyday again was to notice him through creation, mostly through nature.
And, and so it's interesting to me thinking about your question now, because I'm about to answer this as a person who has been in the Anslem society for close to 10 years now, whose outlook on beauty and nature and creation have been wildly upended, I guess. And I would say my challenge now in regarding creation would be trying to wrap my mind around the nature of creation in all its brokenness and beauty so that we're aware that there was a fall.
I am now aware that God speaks the creation and through beauty in ways that if we ignore them, we ignore them to the peril of our souls. Because it's like you're shutting off an Ave. of communication that is constantly being given to you of who he is, that you matter, that he is the God of the cosmos and galaxies and but he's also the God of anthills. And so how much do you matter in all of this? Those are all good things that need to be driven home to our hearts.
But yes, I think I'm at a place where I'm trying now to do my best to notice what I can in creation, but I'm still living in a world where there are wildfires and flash floods and diseases and I don't know, resistance to antibiotics and all of that. And so it does not do to just swallow nature wholesale and say that all of it is good now and that all we need to do is to pay attention to it. How do we navigate our way in the world?
How? What are we supposed to be paying attention to as we navigate our way through a world that is full of things to notice?
I guess is where I am. Yeah, you and I were talking the other day and I I mentioned this book Beauty of everyday things that I've been reading by Soet. So Yanagi, who as far as I know is not a Christian and, and yeah, he kind of frames it that last way that we've, we've gotten so far from the way that the rest of nature operates, that we've, we've lost the ability to listen to nature and, and, and therefore could sort of to be, to take our rightful place as part of nature.
And as a Christian, I'm, I'm first of all noticing a bunch of very, very useful observations in, in his writing, but I'm also noticing limitations. And that's one of them. That's not the whole story. That's not the whole story of the creation, as you just alluded to. And it's not the whole story of our place in the creation as as the imago Dei. We're not just here to be either like parasites on the one hand or nothing on the other.
I want to go back to something you said just before that though, which was you talked about how turning away from the other things, the other physical things that God has made being akin to turning off an Ave. of communication that he has with us. I would love to hear more about that. Yeah, that's coming from a specific season in my life when I so I have anxiety disorder that at that particular time manifested itself as an almost armored, deafened sense to the presence of God.
And not because I wanted it to be, but because I think in my darker hours, the thing that I tend to struggle with is mortality and the fact and the situation of living on an earth where nature is wild, diseases run rampant, children can get into accidents at any time, and you don't know what will happen.
And on top of that, we're living in a world now where the articles that we read, the stories that we're exposed to seem very intentionally to be the kind of stories that are that say things like, if she hadn't caught this detail in time, here are the statistics telling you how likely you are to survive to the next decade of your life. These are the things that you need to do well. But we don't really know what the scientific causes are for this. And so we're all doing the best
that we can. And so it, a lot of times it just feels like either a game of Russian roulette or, or you know, I guess you could go back to ancient conceptions of fate and the wheel. At the time that I felt most cloistered in my mind, the things that started to breakthrough were the things that I could see with my own eyes. And very often that was right out the window that I'm sitting beside here.
We have a small garden and it was things like, well, the sun setting seems like a very cliche thing to say, but it might have been the way that the sunsets, you know, differently every day. And the fact that a baby Robin can come through the yard and, and be so clumsy fluttering around your yard. But you you get to watch it being fed by its mother. And the way that a magpie and a squirrel can set up a squabbling
match on the fence. There were just little things here and there that I started noticing almost in spite of myself. And at some point it became a thought progression for me to think that if God was sovereign over everything. And here I am looking at this thing that reminds me that, I guess to quote Sam Weiskampshi, that there is some good in the world, that there's some beauty to be noticed. How is that not a personal note of communication from that sovereign God to me even in that
moment? And so I guess that's something that I've grown more and more convinced of over the years, but that was basically how that went. Yeah, Thank you. That's really that's illuminating. Oh, gosh, You just talked about sunset and I said it was illuminating.
OK All right then. Yeah. Well, probably one thing that is useful to introduce into this conversation early is the the framework that that Christians have historically used for understanding the relationship of what God has made, even in its sickened state. Health is often the the metaphor that's used in in early church theology to talk about the effects of sin. If you're sick, that doesn't mean you cease to be human. It doesn't mean you die. It means you are sick.
That is a you are a fundamentally healthy creature who has an illness. And the, the, the three sort of layers to this are that the way that we've historically framed it or kind of translated it and Psalmist that the creation is good, was made good. And we can add the fall asterisk, but that's a sickening thing, not a destroying thing. It is good. It is symbolic and it is Sacramento or another way of saying those same three things.
Creation is from God. So yeah, it's a, it's quite a thing to, to take this thing that is from God and reject it. It is of God. That's what the symbolic part means, that the the the creation bears its creator's fingerprints. And that's worth attending podcast series by itself, but we can get into it at least a little bit. And then it's Sacramento, which is to say it is it is for God. It is all here for for worship and as a place in which we can meet God.
Understanding that, one of the things that strikes me about the kinds of examples you used, Amy, is that the, the problem that you read in, in some of those articles you mentioned always kind of zeroes in on, you know, that that newest thing you're supposed to be afraid of, many of which are very legitimate to be afraid of. And and then on the flip side, you get the other articles, which are here's the here's the silver bullet. Here's the magic potion.
Here's just here's the one thing that is, is the answer to that other thing this workout routine or this diet or whatever and almost like a monotheistic sort of a thing. It's, it's always just this one thing. And as Christians, Christianity, Christianity is much more comfortable with things like paradox and layers and levels of
meaning. I have a book of the the sermons of Saint Ambrose, and one of the things that has struck me in reading his sermons is anytime he's talking about historical events in Scripture, he takes as a given two things. One, that they really literally happened and that they mean something else, that they actually participate in a larger story. So the story of Joseph and the, the son being rejected, but then being the means of salvation of his people is its own story that really happened.
And it is a foreshadowing of what's going to happen in the Gospels. And as you read through a lot of the, the early church writers, a lot of the Mystics, a lot of the reformers, you can kind of pick a, a, a, an intellectual stream and you will find this in all of them. If as long as you're not reading something too terribly recent, that creation is worth paying attention to, to his for its own sake. It is good. It is symbolic and participates in that larger reality.
The word symbolic means two things brought together and then Sacramento. All of this is here for us to participate with God. With that, with that layering in mind, even just focusing on this question we're dealing with today, that which is most relevant to the first question, what does it mean to to relate to the creation like it is good, given all of the downsides you've identified, Amy?
It puts us in that context where when we sit, when we're asking ourselves how to be fully present to something, how to look at something for what it is, how to appreciate it properly. It's not just this is a rock. How can I learn to love the Rock?
It's that would be that would be an exercise in and of itself well worth it. St. Basil said that you could you could spend your entire life contemplating the goodness of of a blade of grass and the hand that made it, and that would be a a life well spent. But anytime you were you are wrestling with this practical question of how do I live? How do I look?
How do I be fully present? There are these other layers behind it. You can have this confidence that there is there's a further up and further in. What do you mean by other layers? So if I'm looking at, well, let's use your sunset example, shall we? All right, when and I and I and I agree, yes, it's, it's an easy one, but is it Psalm 19, The heavens declare the glory of God. I always get my numbers mixed up there. There's part of that Psalm that's just isn't this
beautiful? There's a lot of references to nature in the Psalms, often in the context of just meditate on the glory of this thing. But then almost immediately David is talking in symbolic language. Almost immediately he's talking about bridegrooms. The sun is a bridegroom, and he's referring to stars, which throughout Scripture are used as metaphors for God's people.
But also it's strongly suggested that in some way they're mixed up with angels, and some people have taken that to mean they are angels. Lewis hints that he had some sympathy for this view and voyage of the Don Treader when he says even in your world, star is not a flaming ball of gas. That's just what a star is made of. Even just looking at the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars there, there's the layer 1 of this is beautiful. This is good. And layer 2 is and it means
something. And that's a lot of what Psalm 19 is dedicated to. Just sort of begging you. No, no, no, don't just look at it and say, ah, nice sunset and move on. Meditate on its meaning. Meditate on the fact that God put us in a world where in the face of light and darkness, there is always a light in the sky that is above it. That's Lord of the Rings reference to Sam Sam Gamji reference to right.
And the you get the Sacramento layer of and there really is a God and there really are heavenly hosts and heaven and the heavens have some kind of relationship with each other in, in, in scripture. And it's, it's not God lives in the sky, full stop. But it's not these have these things have nothing to do with each other either. Does that help? So like when, when you're looking at the one thing, it's never just the one thing.
Even appreciating it fully will just, if you let it, will take you further up and further in into these other layers, especially if you're reading God's Word in dialogue with the pictures He provided, so to speak. Right. So you've reminded me of the early Christians being aware that they needed to pay attention to the book of Scripture, but also the book of
creation. And you asked earlier about what I said about shutting off an Ave. of knowing God in a way through creation that maybe we don't get otherwise. And I think that's the key thing that in Romans one, it says that his eternal power and divine nature are made evident to us through creation and in fact have been evident in creation
since the beginning of time. And if we shut our ears and our eyes off to that, if we just view the world through empirical, experimental eyes, then we miss all of that. But I think one of the delightful things is that we talk often about, or we have talked in the past and at Anselm, about having an enchanted worldview.
I think once that becomes established, that when you are looking at creation in many ways you are looking at, I don't want to say lessons, but demonstrations of the character of God. Once you know that, then even the things that we're talking about as symbols sometimes from the Psalms, there's a wonder in even looking at those symbols, because are they only symbols when Job talks about the morning stars singing together as the sons of God shout for joy or or
we or the way a child can walk into the forest and think that the trees are talking to her. That and and this passage from Narnia. I think one of the telling things about it is that when Lucy tries to wake the trees on her on her own for their sake, for the sake of her remembrance and of what each tree's character is like, it doesn't work. And you pointed out earlier that when she meets Aslan, when she sees him again, then those trees
are dancing. But what she walks into is the response of creation to Aslan. And I feel like the closer that we get to well, Aslan as we know him in our world, the more and more we're able to see creation with enchanted eyes. And that's not to say that we see them with falsely colored, rose colored glasses, but perhaps we see them everything more truly for what it is. Also because it's in its proper
place in our minds. We're not looking at creation as something special and and superhuman unto itself, but it's something created by God, loved by God. And when we approach it in its right position like that, then we too see more of God, but we also see creation more truly as it is. Yes, what I, what I almost heard in what you just said is that plants and animals are worshipping by being themselves by, you know, they don't, they don't have the level of agency and choice that that we do.
But a sunflower literally stretching toward the sun. We have sunflowers in our garden. We have, I watch this every day when the sun goes away, they change direction and the sun comes back out wherever. Like they're they're literally doing this over the course of a day as the sun moves. If that's not an act of worship, I don't know what is. Just I can look out my window and be reminded this is what I am made for, yeah. There is that third layer, the Sacramento layer of what this is
all for. And I think as humans with a particular vocation given to us by God with by being made in his image and being told to multiply and have dominion. I think an aspect of why I don't want to care about and look at the material world around me is because it reminds me very
quickly that I am responsible. That it in some particular way, my specialness in creation means that I'm more responsible for the flourishing or the destruction of these things that are by nature worshipping God through the way that they were made. And that in my nature I need to be born again and be remade into the image of the new Adam in order to do what the flower is already doing, right.
And so there is a, there is a burden if we look at it without the whole picture in mind, if we can basically just stop at the fall and don't recognize the next part of the chapter. Yeah. Because otherwise, yeah, otherwise it becomes, well, your job was to mobilize the earth to the worship of God. And you have failed and you will fail every day and. That's true, but that's not the end of the story. So what is the next part of the
story? Yeah. There was a 1st century Athenian convert Christianity who's remembered as Dionysus the Areopagite, and he was kind of writing about this like what God the creation? Like how does this whole relationship work? And and he makes it, I think, as a useful point, which is that God is infinite. So so yes, nothing can represent him or analogize him completely. Nothing can nothing.
There's nothing that he has made that that gives you the whole picture all by itself and gets you into the, the everything nests of God. But he's poured his goodness into what he has made and to even to praise him properly, to worship Him properly, to have things to to mobilize to his worship, you have to turn to all of creation. It's not that creation is God and it's not that you know, that
whole rabbit trail. But it's also not true that you guys have both made allusions to sort of material and supernatural distinctions and scientific and religious distinctions. And Dionysus just kind of shrugs all of those off and goes like, no, you can say, you can say that I breathe in oxygen and you can break that down to a molecular level all you want. It is still completely compatible with saying I have my life in him, literally that I am breathing in life from God when I'm doing that.
These are not actually separate categories. And because of that, this is a paraphrase, but he basically says because all things have their life in him, He is hidden in all things that exist. And now you that's 1st century, right? So Jesus is new to him in this in this picture. But to someone like that, the the incarnation and sacrifice and resurrection of Christ represents the invitation to see more fully.
The invitation to be be less blind to what is there, but also to participate in the work of Christ in doing all that stuff that was so impossible otherwise. So OK, we've talked a little bit about stuff and how it's not just stuff. We've talked a little bit about why it matters. Let's dig into this actual question of presence and participation. Because if, if a sunflower grows or a sunset appears or a maybe rabbit is born and them being themselves is their act of
worship. It's, it's not, it's not just your human imagination. When you walk outside and 100 birds are singing and, and it sort of just sort of feels like the morning is, is worshipping. It's not just your imagination. Let's talk a little bit about our place in it.
If those things matter more than we perhaps have thought and yet there's there's layers of things that matter even more and even more and it just go higher and higher and further up and further in. What then does it mean for us to be present to that? What's the goal? Who's goal? Mine. All right, I'm going to, I'm going to get up tomorrow morning, Amy. And I could, on the one hand, give myself over to anxiety and stress.
I could secede mentally from the physical world entirely and spend my entire day on screens and various forms of alternate reality. I could, I could even be a gardener or something and and still sort of turn away from the creation in a pretty real sense, just not wanting to see, not wanting to look. There are, there are lots of ways I could get this wrong and there are lots of things that are not, not my fault and I don't have to beat myself up for too terribly much that make it hard.
But I would love to not do those things. I would love to wake up tomorrow morning and be 1% more present to the good things that God has made than I was this morning. If that's sort of my intermediate going. Why? Why do I? Why do I want to do that? How do I do that? One morning, I don't know what possessed me to do this, but. That's a great beginning to a story. Isn't it though? If you've ever been around a baby, you've seen this happening.
You probably don't see it with 40 year olds very often. I woke up and I just looked at my hand. Before. I think it was about 10 minutes straight. I was just looking at, I mean, it's really look at it, it's not my hand, look at your hand, but just the, the flexibility of it, the fact that there are five fingers, this network of I seem to have a triangular pattern of skin on the back of my hand that allows it to be elastic.
I think for other people, it might be diamonds or squares, the fingernails, the creases running along the palm. And I just thought like, well, it's been a long time since I've seen somebody just check out their hand. But that is I, I think it's very easy for us to jump from that to say, see, how could things have just simply and bluntly evolved into something like this? This proves that there must be a
crater. So put putting that aside for a second just to look at it, just to, I mean, if we're going on a daily at a daily level of seeing, just to look at that hand, see if you're not moved to do something after that to think something to give thanks for something about that hand. I think, you know, we lament all the time that we don't have the ability to focus or concentrate on things for extended periods of time these days. And I think that's true.
But I think also, it's simpler maybe than we think to begin to pick up on some details and to just regard them and to just have the see if you can find a person or two to whom you can say, isn't this amazing? Isn't this beautiful? And hopefully you'll have at least one or two people around you who say, yeah, but let's say you do that. You get up from your bed, you've looked at your hand. You've gone through the usual rituals of getting ready for
your day. You go out to the garden and maybe you have a zucchini or tomato and you bring that inside. And The thing is, when you when you put that zucchini or tomato on your cutting board, you're not going to ask that zucchini to be a tomato. You're not going to ask the zucchini to be a key player in a Caprese salad, and you're probably not going to make a zucchini mashed sauce for your pasta if you're listening to the creation the way that Robert Farrah Capon listens to that
onion. And I know that we cite that chapter all the time, but if you have not read it, how much attention can you pay to an onion? But he does. And anybody who cooks, I think, is constantly paying attention to the ripeness of the ingredient, the way that things pair together.
You're listening to almost, if you'll allow me to put it imaginatively, it's like you're listening to what that creation is telling you it was created to be, what it ought to be, what it will be at the best of its abilities. And so as I was listening to something, I forget exactly what it was that Sarah was saying earlier, but it made me think of Michelangelo having that block of marble and chipping away.
I don't know if that story is actually true, but but if it is true that we can listen to creation to a certain extent as a reflection of its creator, and that creation itself knows that it was created for something beyond just being static, then the wonder that we get to engage with it being with it becoming a mode of praise to God, and that even in our making we are being called into a new mode of worship. That's an amazing privilege. It's an amazing, creative,
exhilarating thing. So that, you know, if you know, Michelangelo is looking at this block of marble and he's just chipping away the sculpture that he sees inside of it, Maybe it's not just a fanciful image or a way to say that he was creating. Maybe imagine it if that were true. What you're describing, Amy, sounds like a relationship getting to know something. Brian, you asked what the goal was, and it seems like the goal might be to just know something
more deeply. Like if we asked what the goal was for our friendship for for true friendship, what would be our answer? I don't know if the answer would be very much different for the creative things as well. And when you come into contact with reality, which is fundamentally interpersonal, right, like relational, and like you're saying in an imaginative way, you can say that they're
truly speaking to you. You're, you're diving more into and revealing and uncovering what they were made to be. That only allows for more and more possibilities. Yeah. Sarah as as an artist, have you ever had an an art teacher challenge you on anything like this or give you give you an exercise to to really look at something or to recognize the potential in something? Yeah, I think that all of art challenges us to do this all
representational art. When you when you are faced and forced to look at something and try to express it, you can't even communicate in our modern information based way what it means to draw an apple. Because it's not a two-dimensional thing. It's not just information, it's not something you can copy and paste. It's this dynamic living in some way, literally breathing thing that is in motion as it sits there, right?
It's it's moving towards decay. Now that it's off of the vine, your relationship to it constantly changes, even with the smallest amount of your head movement or your arm moving somewhere, which which tilts your head in a different way. And so there's this live interaction that just hits you in the face, just like the sunset does.
You can't deny it. And you have to at some point admit by the ugly drawing that you have produced that you did not pay attention, that you did not care to work through what you thought it was in order to just attend and allow it to disclose itself to you. Which means you have to sit and actually make what Doctor Esther, like Cap Meeks, calls a
covenant epistemology. Which is 2 really fancy words just to say that you've got to promise to love, honor and obey what you do not yet know sitting in front of you. That apple, if you're going to invite it to self disclose itself to you that so. So I love your question, and I don't know if there's a particular exercise. I'm using the example of drawing an apple, but it just seems like it's the extent of all of my experience in the visual
representational world. Yeah, well, it what I'm what I'm hearing you say is that submission comes before mastery. Yes. Definitely, you have to submit to the raw material. You have to submit to the reality of the thing and and approach it with humility before
you can master the craft. And that's a perfect analogy for the the point you made at the beginning of what you just said, which was that you don't know that it's that different relating to the rest of the creation as it is relating to the rest of the created humans. If I want to get to know a human well, that's a daunting task. Even if he or she wants to let me in and, and you know, be known. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's a stunting. I have to be willing to listen a lot.
I have to be able, you know, I'm not coming in saying I want to figure this person out and fill out, fill out my 3 bullets and move on or, or to control them. I have to be willing to pay close attention to who the person actually is. And that means a lot of looking and a lot of listening, not with an eye to saying the thing I want to say, but with an eye to actually hearing. And it's on some level looking at that person with, with, with wonder.
I also think that God is so kind to the way that he gives us the created world to interact with so that we can learn how not to have a self referential view. It's the same reason why we talk all the time in in Christian circles about how you cannot live in isolation, but to be a Christian is to be a part of the whole body of Christ, which is his church. That's true of the church in a very real and and beautiful specific way, but that's also true to a different degree in
terms of all of creation. God didn't just put us on like a flat white plain for us to just interact with humans solely. It's important for us to have other voices in the ensemble.
Yeah. Yeah, I forgot what I was going to say now, but I did have a question for you, Sarah, because as Brian was saying, when you're working on a piece of art and you're trying to take into account all that you're hearing, I was realizing that I think it works that way in writing too, although it's not necessarily with tactile materials that you can get halfway through a project and realize that the work you're working on is asking to become something else than
what you originally envisioned it to be. I guess kind of like Madeline Lingle talks about in Walking on Water. But do you ever finish pieces of art that you feel are more true to that vision and to that listening than others? Like have you ever gotten to the point where you say this is what I heard and this is what I saw and here it is represented fully?
Absolutely, it has been the case where what I am deeply desiring to bring forth does come to fruition and praise God, that's a little moment of joy for the artist. But in a somewhat sweeter way is when you there's so much complexity, there's so much to swim in when you really get to attend to what's in front of you that it's going back to the self referential view. It it's, it's more boring almost to pick something out of it all to say.
But instead there's this joy of surprise that comes at the end when you have faithfully enjoyed and swum swam, swam in it all. And out at the end, God reveals something beautiful that wasn't that, that that has been, that is now expressed and is now memorialized and celebrated especially.
It's just it's, yeah, there's something about the surprise at the end that I think is actually more important and more wonderful for the artist than the artist having a particular vision that they see, that they want to capture and that they
have. Expressed, yeah, OK, so yourself referential reference, sorry, made me remember what it was I was going to say earlier, which was that as we're paying attention to creation as we're called to create under the the protection and the guidance of the master creator. I think one of the things that's also taking place in those instances is that we are practicing to become the people that we will be in the new creation.
Because in the new creation, I believe that we will be people who can listen better than we can now and people who create out of that, listening to create gardens out of the wilderness to create, I don't know, sculptures out of marble, as we were saying, delectable culinary dishes out of the ingredients that are at the peak of their powers. But that is also life that, as you said earlier, we have already been born again. We are already starting to live
into that existence now. And so I think that is one of the liberating things. But I also love that you said, I think this is what I caught in what you were saying too, that there are many modes of reality that we could communicate as artists or writers or poets or musicians about creation. And you can't do them all all at once.
Even having the apple in front of you, there's maybe a few ways that you can communicate the truth of that apple or express it, you know, in different ways, whether it's impressionistic or realistic or whatever. But I think I think that's one of the most beautiful things, the beautiful graces that God has given to us in our partnership in this creation, which is that, as you said, Esther Meeks was saying it has
to do with love. So, Brian, when we're getting up in the morning and we're thinking about how it is that we can engage with creation, how can how can we be more present to it? I think if we get out of bed with the intent to love his creation as a means of loving God, but also just realizing that those are things that go together, then the question doesn't become how do we perfectly do this? Because even in a friendship, you can come into a relationship thinking how, how can I be the
perfect friend? But there's so love. The word love itself and the concept itself opens up an ocean of possibilities. There's no one right way to love somebody. You just do. And it it it expresses itself in myriad creative, beautiful ways. But there's so much freedom in that that I think ought to be able to free us from am I doing this right? Am I stewarding this right? Am I crafting this right? You know, And so I think that's something very grace giving of
him. Yeah, that's so beautifully said. We just finished doing a four week study of Tom Bombadil. And the first part of that conversation was we put on this podcast. Hopefully many of you all have listened to it. But one of the things that we observed in that conversation, drawing from CR Wiley's book, was that he contrasts Bombadil with Saruman in in in the why of how they enter into the creation. Because for Saruman, it's about control. And it's easy to write him off
as, oh, he's the villain. Of course he's trying, you know, he's trying to use it for his own ends. OK, fine. But that's how we approached large chunks of our day and large chunks of the the things that we interact with. It's what what can I get out of this? I don't I don't walk into my kitchen at lunchtime thinking, how can I revel in the beauty of this, the ingredients in here? I walk in there going I my stomach is empty. I want it full.
And it's it's easy for that to just that consumption narrative to write itself into our our our neurons and become become default. And Tom Bombadil, on the other hand, his goal seems to be communion, not control, which gets at your your love idea. When he even when even when he's bossing around old man Willow, what does he tell him to do? He tells him be more like a Willow. It's not simply behave, although it is. It's. This is what you were made for.
Do this thing. I love that you brought up Sauron and and Sauron and they're they're such an overt dominating, needing control archetype. The story, though, that we've centered around today with Lucy and the trees, If we think about how Lewis has set up why the trees are asleep in the first place in the story, Prince Caspian, it's because the Telmarines have come in
conquered the area. And he never really says exactly why the trees are asleep, but that from the presence of the Telmarines who are fearful of them, they have gone to sleep and they don't want to wake for the Telmarines, right.
And I think bringing up the concept that Lewis images here of fear is, is interesting because in a lot of ways, this conversation can really easily fall in deaf ears because nothing is technically going to change about one's life if they go into the kitchen and say, I want my stomach full and then they move on. But what's happening is in your fear, in your scarcity, in your need for control and to just go from one thing to the next in that self referential way, you
just lose out. Like you're saying, Brian in Communion, because the things around you and all of their delights are asleep to you. So maybe we don't go around destroying the earth with every single conscious decision we make throughout the day. Though we do have blood on our hands, so to speak, with a lot of the ways that we have set up our systems and life in the world. But those everyday small acts aren't usually destructive in
our own intentionality. They are often, though, putting to sleep the things around us and ourselves. And I think it's important to go from that, that incredibly important observation and essentially pendulum swing back to where we think we should go because the the instinct is to go, Oh yes, we shouldn't be destructive. We should preserve, we shouldn't mess it up.
But our relationship throughout scripture, throughout Christian theology, the the imago days relationship with, with wilderness is not to preserve it, but to make a garden. That's right. And so communion starts with loving the thing for itself. It starts with that almost act of submission. What? Who are you and how do I love you? But ultimately it's not just leaving it at that.
It's about it. Since it is about mobilizing the earth to the worship of God. We're not, we're not stopping at a certain point in including in our search for God and to grow closer to God. The way, the way out isn't the door is shut and the way and the way out isn't around. The way out is through all up. Throw in one one last anecdote
before we close. I was driving home with my family the other night and Colorado has weird weather in the summers and it was the most beautiful sky I've ever seen in my life because and and we didn't even bother trying to take a picture or video or anything. There's nothing that could ever have done it justice, but we
had. It was at sunset during a heat lightning storm, and as you looked across the panorama of the sky, it was almost like there were different chapters in a story represented in the sky all at once. Because there was the oh, look at sunset, beautiful orange against the black silhouette of the mountains. And then there was the different, different shades of kind of purple all the way to orange and yellow that that was casting on some of the white clouds and some of the Gray
clouds. And then over here, there's a patch of sky that's completely blue with beautiful white cumulus clouds as if nothing's going on at all. And there's, there's a spectrum across all of this of, of the lightning, like shooting across it. And we were all kind of tired. Neither of my kids had the greatest attitude in the moment. Nobody really, nobody was really in the mood to go, oh wow, look at that. They were all all in kind of the mood to shrug it off.
It wouldn't let us And, and to my wife's credit, she wouldn't let us. She kept kind of forcing us to look and the the one by one, each person caved to how beautiful it was and stopped being fully present to whatever they were sulking about, stopped, stopped staring at the cars going by and was just fully present to what God had put before us. And the same thought occurred to both Christina and I. And we said it to the kids and they were echoing it in their their own small ways.
There's no way that's just atoms and molecules. I don't know if that if that was God creating a work of art and that's all it was, if that's all it was, that's all we needed it to be, or if that really was, in some mysterious way, some element of cosmic reality playing out before our limited eyes. I don't know. But either way, it kind of felt like the latter, and it demanded that we be fully present to it. So this continues to be
challenging. There's a lot of life that tugs us in different directions and tells us a different story. So with that in mind, our next episode is going to be the audio from a lecture that the visual artist Josh Teason gave at an End Sound Society event recently, which is a perfect just lead on from this conversation, especially some of the points that Sarah has made towards the end here about well, OK, this is here's some of the destructive stuff we have done
in creation. What does it mean to look at the creation properly and to think about our role in it more deeply? If you want to prepare for that episode properly, look him up. Josh Teeson T i.e. SSEN and look up his Vanitas and Veriditas series and look at some of those paintings. We will have slides in the video version of the podcast, but yeah, look out for that. And after that, we will be doing a lot of feasting.
We will be getting together for our fall Middle Earth feasts, September 19th and 20th that you can all join us for whether you have to hop in a car or a plane. And we will be doing an episode on why we feast. And a lot of our fall episodes will be very focused on the the how shall we then live of all
this? If, if, if being still really matters so much, If being present really matters so much, if seeing the beautiful multiplicity of layers of of meaning and communion in what God has made, if that is all real, then how shall we feast? And we will be getting into that in the coming weeks. Amy, Sarah, thank you for joining me for this conversation. My. Pleasure.
And thank you all for listening. I want I'll close this out with a quote from Alexander Schemman. There must be someone in this world which rejected God, and in this rejection, in this blasphemy, became a chaos of darkness. There must be someone to stand at its center and to discern, to see it again as full of divine riches, as the cup, full of life and joy, as beauty and wisdom, and to thank God for it.
This someone is Christ, the new Adam, who restores that Eucharistic life which I, the old Adam, have rejected and lost, who makes me again what I am and restores the world to me. And if the Church is in Christ, it's initial act is always this act of Thanksgiving, of returning the world to God. The Imagination Redeemed podcast is the production of the Anselm Society. It's easy to see this world as disenchanted and to give up hope that there's more.
But you were made to see the world with the eyes of heaven and to live a bountiful life that participates in the life of God. Like in the great stories, the Ansome Society is a place where you can come in and experience that beauty, joyful celebration, and ancient wisdom and go out renewed, bringing that life to your vocation, your home, and your church. Join us next time as we pursue a renaissance of the Christian imagination together.