While there is much truth to Archbishop William Temple’s maxim, “Your religion is what you do with your solitude,” we are more than the collocation of ideas we fancy when our minds are at leisure. We are made as creatures with desires and affections, as Jonathan Edwards knew so well, inclinations or disinclinations that stand at the heart of who we are and which reflect and direct the ongoing formation of our character.
For artists, designers, and creatives, the implications are vast. Poetry, songwriting, instrumentation and melodies, sculpture, films, drawings, dramatic performance, and digital artwork can inspire and invoke the imagination, tapping the affective dimension of our humanity. Good art produces awe, opening up new realities heretofore unknown, including the reality of God.
Awe is a sense of wonderment, an overwhelming recognition of deep and profound beauty, wherein the soul is not only moved to contemplation, but is drawn in by that which is beholden. When the Church gathers, we make God visible and thus create space for the faithful — and our companions with reservations about Christianity — to have an encounter with God. This encounter can bring about not only a cognitive response, but an affective response that captures the heart. Media that points to God can lead us not only into newfound understanding, but to fall in love. Not only do we wish to take every thought captive for Christ; we strive to introduce people to the One who can satisfy the deepest desires that stand at the center of our being.
Liturgical Aesthetics :: Tapping Our Deepest Desires
Are human beings thinking things? Or desiring creatures? Is our character shaped more so by our thoughts, or by our loves?
James K.A. Smith, in his book Desiring the Kingdom, makes a strong case for the importance of our loves as constitutive of our character. This flies in the face of our common approach to ministry that focuses strongly on conveying ideas that are to be grasped through cognition rather than through the affections. We exert so much effort trying to convince others to think along the lines of orthodoxy, and while such emphases are incredibly important, Smith points out that that the way in which we capture the hearts of our people has greater potential for strengthening the witness of the Church.
Throughout his work, Smith focuses his attention on the power of liturgy. He correctly notes that the liturgies that guide and inform our weekend worship gatherings are not the only liturgies people encounter. There are countless other competing liturgies that vie for our hearts, whether it be the mall, the university, or, what Smith dubs the “military-entertainment complex.” The church, having strongly emphasized the intellect, has failed to take the affective dimension of our humanity into account in recent times, and has thus narrowed the effectiveness of our liturgy to challenge these dominant cultural narratives. Perhaps, in the process of worship planning, we should add the question, “How does our liturgy inspire our people to love God?” in addition to the question, “What do our people learn about God through this liturgy?” Our liturgies should be beautiful. They should awaken our love for God.
There is a temptation to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, focusing all our energies on matters of the heart, rather than continuing to stress rigor in the life of the mind. Please do not fall into that trap. Rather, the challenge here is to evaluate our worship gatherings, and our ministries as a whole, in light of a broader vision of the human person. This way, our approach might embrace the power of the affections, and alter the way we think about and plan our gatherings.
Loving the Lover of our Souls
Stanley Hauerwas has written, “in order to know and worship God rightly we must have our desires transformed — we must be trained to desire rightly — because, bent by sin, we have little sense of what it is that we should rightly want." The liturgies of the mall, the university, or countless other narratives that captivate and form us in ways that run antithetical to following after Christ must be named, exposed, subverted, and counteracted. Designers and creatives can help us immensely, opening our eyes to the grandeur, the glory, the awe-inspiring fullness of God. Musicians, poets, and artists can give us a vision of the One worthy of our love by appealing to our affections.
When our gatherings convey the right information about God in a way that not only entreats the intellect but also the affections, we are opening up the possibility for people to encounter God in a way that results in profound, lasting change. As James K.A. Smith has observed, “We are what we love.” While conveying important information about God, we should strive to kindle a flame of holy passion for the Trinity in the lives of our people. Worship is not only an occasion for learning, it is an occasion wherein we might fall in love with the Lover of our souls.
After having been immersed in the Christian world for the entirety of my life, I can recall numerous times in which the sheer beauty of corporate worship overwhelmed my heart in ways that I could not articulate at the time, but that have paid immense dividends concerning the degree to which I desired to stay on the path of pursuing God in later years. I was not talked into the Kingdom, I was drawn by a comprehensive vision of the really real. I was held by a vision of Jesus, who alone is worthy of all glory and honor and power (Rev. 4:11).
As Jonathan Edwards stated, “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.” Media, in all its forms, has the potential to be leveraged to create in us holy loves, directed toward Jesus Christ, by the Spirit, to the glory of God the Father.
Ben Simpson is a thinker and writer living in the Kansas City area. He’s also a regular contributor to COLLIDE. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/bsimpson.