"The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions ..."
     --Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

I RETURN TO MY laptop from the US corporate world--from gray carpet and black, bottom-line aspirations. While I find no padding in my pocketbook, I do find several inter-connected ideas. One, the artist's world is far more fulfilling than working merely for a paycheck. Simultaneously, it's both more work and play than I've done in a long time. I mean that it's an holistic work--combining my mind, body and soul in ways that have been largely disconnected for three years. So, it's an exhausting discipline.

Yet, as Madeleine L'Engle reminds all artists, it's also an Incarnational discipline--a creating by the Creator through a creator. And surely we live by more than "bread alone" (Deuteronomy 8:3). I live, once again, by many questions: "What should this short script be about?" "How can this film article be relevant--to not only contemporary viewers but fellow artists?" "Are other writers pondering these same topics?"

For instance, many preachers use this as a rhetorical question: "How did God show He loved us?" Typical answer: "He died on the cross for us." It's the answer many of us memorized from Sunday School. The "safe" answer. The one every serious Christian knows. Maybe we should ponder our wild, unexpected God a little longer. Because I don't think any artist--particularly one who calls herself Christian, and is thus called to wholeness in life and art--can afford to give typical answers.

"How did God show He loved us?" He lived for us. Before you laugh in spiritual astonishment or guffaw in orthodox angst, consider this: Jesus lived among humans for 33 odd years, and He never sinned. As Madeleine L'Engle puts it, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist" (Walking on Water, p 31).

Is what is true in Christ's life true in our own? For we are no greater than our Master. Yes, Christ's life proved He had a Divine source. He did miracles. He got off the pallet in the morning, rolled it up, and thanked God for His job in the carpentry shop. He helped His mother carry water from the well, without complaining. He worked from sunup to sundown and never cursed when He hit his thumb with the hammer. Every day for 33 odd years.

He lived with the old guy who told the same story every time he saw Him. And Christ never rolled His eyes once. He lived with the young woman who constantly talked about how fat she was. And He offered her neither chocolate nor herbal laxatives--only encouragement. He lived with the homeless man who traveled from town to town and thought He was God. And He smiled. Every day for 33 odd years.

Yet, He is our Master--our Creator. And if He wasn't God, His death would have been as effective as a lumberjack with a pick-ax in a forest. Or an astronaut with binoculars in space. Or a bedecked ballerina on a glittering stage with a sleek, muscular partner and sneakers. Good intentions, but ineffectual outcome. If He hadn't proved his uniqueness as God-man every day for 33 odd years.

An ocean condensed into a droplet. The Great Red Spot of Jupiter caught up in a speck of dust. An ever-expanding cosmos shrunk to a quark. For those comic book fans: the Hulk in a pair of spandex biking shorts. (I know; do we appreciate that picture?) Eternity collapsed into the blink of an eye. He lived as one of us. Confined every day. 33 odd years.

Christ's life is why He's our high priest. Why He understands our faults and temptations. Why He can say He knows our weaknesses. He lived among us. Indeed, "as Christians we are not meant to be less human than other people, but more human, just as Jesus of Nazareth was more human" (p 59). Truly, Christ could never have died a scandalous death if He hadn't lived--a blameless, repetative, sometimes dreary life.

May these thoughts encourage those like myself, artists and critics who are also Christians, to lean into fresh areas with our telling (and our experience of) the Good News. Into a more holistic appreciation of life and art--into, say, dance, and cooking, and fishing. Into a more complete picture of the media's potential--not only a newspaper's Religion section and the typical TV evangelism.

In meshing theology and film, let's expand from the seemingly epidemic End Times theme into the off-beat, like film noir or comedy (aka, "the chicken guy" on celluloid). Into the complexities of humanity, not only the Otherness of the Divine. Not into simplistically avoiding profanity, nudity or violence, but into creating film art and criticism that points to Incarnational reality--as God lives among and loves His messy creation.

Please don't misunderstand: Movies like The Passion of the Christ can be awe-inspiring; and, here I'll sheepishly admit I find value in the dated Thief in the Night movie franchise. But, let's move beyond the Left Behind phenomenon; let's focus not only on death and pain. As artists bearing God's fingerprints, let's include life and laughter, as well. More Babette's Feast and Wings of Desire; less The Seventh Seal.

At the same time, may each of us embrace the truth that we have many more questions than answers. As John Donne puts it, "Would you know the truth? Doubt, and then you will inquire" (p 134). May our inquiries stop us from taking ourselves so seriously; and, may both what we know and what we don't know keep us enjoying life--and art, too. Let us eat and drink, taking in all God would have for us. In the here, and in the now.

For my part, the set of short scripts I'm currently exhausting over is a (re)vision of key Old Testament figures and their surprisingly contemporary questions. I call them "church-fomercials", and they have a flavor similar to the black-and-white billboards that started lining US city streets and bus-stops a couple years ago. The God billboards: "Keep using my name in vain, I'll make rush hour longer." "C'mon over and bring the kids." "Don't make me come down there." Exhausting.

I don't believe these thoughts will come as a clarion call to those critics and filmmakers who long to combine what we experience of God with our daily lives. Most of us realize it's through the living, present God of creativity that "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). We might also recognize it as St Francis who said: "It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching." When all is said ... it remains to be done. If nothing else, it's good to remind myself. For the Gospel is much more than the typical answers.

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