Some Thoughts on Faith, Art, and Beauty (PresbyterianExpress contribution)

Recently contributed this piece to the PresbyterianExpress, an online publication by the English Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of Singapore

"As a child, my parents often visited the late Elder Yeh Shu Jen’s home for fellowship, and I would tag along with my siblings. I enjoyed hanging out with her grandchildren upstairs while the adults were in the living room below. However, going upstairs also meant passing by the framed, imitation Mona Lisa that graced the bare walls of a dimly lit stairwell. I would run up or down the stairs as fast as possible to avoid her gaze, which I felt was always following me. I barely stopped to examine the portrait since it made me uncomfortable just by being around it; I was satisfied with simply knowing that it was a famous painting by Leonardo Da Vinci and tucked this piece of trivia into my back pocket.

Faith and art are strange bedfellows. For most of human history, faith made art both possible and impossible. Discoveries of art from the Upper Paleolithic Age found in the caves of Lascaux carry mystical overtones of rituals, ordeals, and the divine—suggesting that since time immemorial, faith and art have shared desires of transcendental values such as truth, goodness, and beauty. To this day, we do use art in our faith expressions of truth, goodness, and beauty. Early theologians such as Irenaeus writes that “the glory of the Lord is human living being, and human being lives for the vision of God;” thus we sing about looking into God’s holiness and gazing into God’s loveliness, and declare God’s glory through proclaiming the beauty of God’s name and creation. Yet when it comes to viscerally representing this beauty in the church, we often become fearful."

Full article here.