Makers by Nature

Photo: bruceherman.com

One spring weekend several years back, we hosted Bruce Herman in our home. A talented and thoughtful painter, Bruce was in town to speak at our church and meet with local artists. Driving him around, sharing tacos at the lucha libre-themed place, comparing notes on favorite books—the whole weekend was a rich, meandering conversation with a kind, generous man. By the time we dropped him off at the airport that Monday, Bruce was no longer just an artist whose work we admired. It felt we had crossed into friendship territory.

Those conversations came to mind as I read Makers by Nature: Letters from a Master Painter on Faith, Hope, and Art (IVP Academic), Herman’s new book in what he calls the “old-fashioned genre of epistolary essay.” The letters themselves are “imaginary,” but written to actual people “with whom I have had substantive discussions (and real correspondence) over several years, in some cases covering decades.” The letters are gathered in thematic chapters with titles like “Process and Risk: Letters to Steve” and “Glory: Letters to Bryn.” 

I’m glad Herman chose to write this kind of book. When he reflects on ambiguity as the “raw material” of an artist, or makes reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ term “inscape,” I hear the words all over again, in his own voice. I see his hand gestures. The impassioned look on his face. Had he been persuaded to write a more traditional book about the intersections of faith and art, we certainly would have learned a lot and found some measure of inspiration. But we may have lost Bruce. We may not have had this conversation with a trusted friend.

“We’re invited into the mystery of being a maker, a participant in the divine outpouring of grace and beauty and visual extravagance,” Herman writes. “And that, I think, is the first thing we can notice about God’s making—that it is infinitely extravagant, profligate beyond any human capacity to comprehend.” The creativity of our Maker lies beyond the realm of human comprehension, “but we can sing about it, write poems and psalms about it, make art about it.”

Such art will often surprise or even disturb us. In one of his letters, Herman writes that Elegy for Bonhoeffer, from his series of paintings about martyrs, “was a major discovery for me.” In the painting we see a male figure upside down. His face is obscured, seeming (to me) to melt away. Behind him, a riot of color. The lower part of the painting is covered in gold leaf.

Here’s Herman on what he discovered:

The idea of a person descending into gold, into glory, was novel and strange. I’d never seen anything like it before. It was, like so many of my better works, a gift. But this brings me back to my reason for this excursus about Bonhoeffer. I think God’s glory is altogether mysterious, and in Scripture it is seemingly always tied to paradoxical realities like suffering and brokenness—even to death. We are told that the greatest divine glory encountered in cosmic history is the cross of Christ. . . . His descent into gold in my painting has come to be emblematic for me of the upside-down aspect of God’s glory. A kind of symbol of beauty-in-brokenness. And one last thought on Bonhoeffer’s execution as rearguard action by Axis forces—this is what the axis of spiritual evil is doing even now—it is all rearguard action, cruel and horrible, but ultimately spelling out its own defeat. Love and grace and forgiveness have already won.

Herman’s earlier line about participating “in the divine outpouring of grace and beauty and visual extravagance”? Elegy for Bonhoeffer is a prime example. “The amount of 23-karat gold on that painting and the number of places where I scraped it away, painted over it, or simply abraded it,” he writes, “well, let’s just say it was rather extravagant for a painter living almost entirely on a professor’s salary from a small, financially strapped institution. But it had to be costly to mean something.”

In a world of limited resources and widespread need, it may strike some of us as odd—if not downright offensive—for an artist to use 23-karat gold in a painting. Not just as a glimmering final touch, but as a “wasteful” part of the messy, uncertain process. To scrape it, paint it, abrade it, and then to scrape, paint, and abrade some more. What’s this guy thinking?

I’m reminded of the story in the gospel according to John, where Jesus comes to the home of Lazarus, “whom he had raised from the dead.” Together with Mary and Martha, they enjoy a meal. Then one of the sisters does something utterly preposterous:

Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said,  “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it  so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me” (12:1-8).

I appreciate the on-the-nose-ness of those parentheticals. And indeed, this kind of whataboutism isn’t unique to Judas. In my work with 1MISSION, we periodically receive emails and social media comments from concerned citizens, let’s call them, who demand to know why we fund housing and community development initiatives in Mexico—instead of, say, for unhoused veterans here. We could theoretically respond by going into the personal and relational history of our organization, and the varying degrees of poverty in different places, and how the imago Dei knows no borders. But we don’t.

Instead, with full sincerity, we say something like this: “It’s great to hear of your passion for responding to the housing crisis in your own city, and for your commitment to making sure veterans are well supported. Fortunately, there are a lot of social service organizations here in the United States, including local chapters of Habitat for Humanity that provide housing for veterans and others in need. We'd encourage you to support these organizations as generously as you're able! If you need help finding an organization like this where you live, please let us know. We’d be glad to connect you.”

We have sent a lot of those messages. To my knowledge, no one has ever taken us up on the offer.

(To state the obvious: the housing crisis in the United States, for all its complexity, is not the result of too many people supporting poverty alleviation programs in other countries. Viable solutions to the problem are to be found considerably further upstream.)

But again, I come back to Herman’s haunting line: It had to be costly to mean something. I think of the hospitality I have received over the years from people living in situations of poverty. As a kid in the western highlands of rural Guatemala, my missionary parents would take us on hikes to visit the homes of neighbors, indigenous campesinos with nonexistent profit margins. Shooing away the guard dogs, these mothers and fathers would usher us into their adobe homes and dust off plastic chairs to make us comfortable. Inevitably they would offer us steaming mugs of coffee or atol, if not a full-blown meal of rice, beans, and tamalitos. Every time.

Talk about extravagance. Talk about costly.

Those who’d assert the extravagance of art as something in opposition to, or taking away from, the extravagance of caritas—the Christian love of humankind, from which we get the word “charity”—would do well to spend time with the people this world has marginalized. Families living on the edge, in my experience, know better than to skimp on beauty and delight. You see it in overflowing improvised flowerpots, in brightly-painted walls, and in the low-cost but high-value works of art hung on those same walls. You see it in an abiding love for dogs, our faithful companions.

Life, for all too many of us, is a lot to survive. But extravagant beauty can help. That, and generous friendship. We’re wired to long for it and to offer it to others. Echoing Augustine, Herman writes, “We were made by a Maker to be makers, and our hearts are restless until we make something—something beautiful.”