Art Lectures with Bruce Herman

The weekend of March 11, a friend and artist Bruce Herman will be with us at Christ Church. Bruce is a gifted painter, and an art professor at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. On Friday, March 9, Bruce will give a lecture in the Parish Hall titled, “Odyssey or Pilgrimage? A Painter’s Personal Wager on Transcendence,” in which he will share about how his life as an artist intersects with his life as a Christian. Along the way he’ll raise theological questions, and will invite those in attendance to engage with him. There will be a reception after the lecture. Please attend, and please do invite friends who might be interested.

On Saturday morning, Bruce will meet with a group of artists to discuss what it means to live faithfully as a follower of Jesus as well as pursuing artistic excellent. If you are an artist broadly defined—painting, writing, acting, sculpting, etc.—please let me know if you’d like to attend. We’re trying to keep this group at around 20 or so. If you know of someone who might benefit from this time, don’t hesitate to let me know and I can extend an invitation.

Finally, on Sunday morning Bruce will lead Adult Education, and his presentation is “Broken Beauty: How Christ’s Cross Changes EVERYTHING in the Arts,” which will discuss a project Bruce is currently working on with a composer and a poet called “Ordinary Saints.” Please do plan to attend.

Below is a section from some of Bruce’s writing about his conversion from new age spirituality to Christianity, and how it has impacted his art. You can learn more about Bruce at his website, bruceherman.com.

I suppose the easiest way to describe how faith in Christ affects me and my art is to say that though I had intuitively understood God’s character from the beauty and majesty of the created world, I never fully grasped what God’s person was like – the inexorable love and fierce jealousy over my soul that God has. My idolatry of my art and my guru were both shed quickly in the refining fire of faith in Jesus, and my marriage and family were transformed as well. I actually felt that I would need to give up my art after my conversion, mired as all that was in egotism and Eastern mysticism – but Christ made it abundantly clear that he did not want me to quit painting. My wife Meg (the one who stood to lose the most from my commitment to making art) was the most forceful voice declaring that I must continue painting – only that I must do it for Christ.
I have never looked back since making a renewed commitment to paint to the glory of God, and though I am painfully aware of my failures and my continued faultiness, I sense day after day a growth toward the light of God’s glory in my work as a painter. It is a humbling craft, as I said earlier, because it demands everything you’ve got and promises almost nothing. Yet attempting to make art sacrificially for God’s glory rather than for my own has been the most liberating thing imaginable. My earnest hope is that my paintings simply point toward God and the mystery of the Incarnation – toward the Real Presence of the Face of God in Christ Jesus. 
As T.S. Eliot says so poignantly in Four Quartets:

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

Peace,

Chris