Art, Faith and the Beauty of Brokenness: An Interview with Makoto Fujimura (Part 2)
Don’t miss Part 1 of our interview, where Makoto Fujimura talks about God’s invitation for us to create with him, what we can learn from the powerful and profound Japanese art of Kintsugi, and what it means to be part of God’s “new-new” creation.
It strikes me that a message like that cannot be fully understood rationally. Like wabi-sabi, you can see it and know that is beautiful. But if you try to explain that beauty, it melts away a little, right?
Yeah. The analytical part, which is kind of a Western mindset, is a rationalism that has kind of taken over theology. A good example is an omelet. The test of an omelet is not the recipe, but how it tastes. I feel like we often argue over the recipe while rarely tasting the fruit of what we have made—whether it be in church planting, our lives, our theologies, pro-life issues, anything—these things have to be fruitful if they are true. It’s not enough to plant a seed to grow a tomato. You have to till the soil, water the sprout, raise it, nurture it, right?
But Christians often have kind of an exclusively pragmatic mindset. Recipe knowledge. We rarely talk about the fruit of what that belief is, or enjoy the simple taste of life in Christ. As an artist, my work is tested by the works themselves, I’m not there to defend them. They have to speak on their own. If the work doesn’t “taste” good, no one will want it. Given that, I feel a lot of our effort and preaching deals with information, and is not necessarily embedded in fruitfulness, or the fruit of the Holy Spirit, which is the final test. The ultimate test of our community is culture. Culture should be fruitful in that way, filled with love.
This reminds me of a conversation with Esther Lightcap Meek, whom you reference in the book. I was struck years ago when she discussed how this type of knowledge is often dismissed as subjective. But it’s actually objective knowledge, just impossible to communicate rationally. What can leaders do to reclaim those ways of knowing for their community?
Esther is such a gem. A Little Manual for Knowing is the one book I always give to people to begin that process. But as an aside, this kind of knowledge is not strictly Eastern. When you look back on Aquinas or Dante, there are plenty of Western models for this integrated path. It’s actually the basis of liberal arts and education in the West. Now, we have left that for a more pragmatic, transactional model of education. And that is decimating humanity because we don’t fully understand that the rational flows out of the intuitive. It’s not right brain or left brain. Intuitive knowledge is at the heart, the core, of the human knowledge base. The rational side, the analytical, flows out of that.
My friend Curt Thompson, a clinical psychologist, observes that when we are born into the world, we learn through touch and taste and smell. Then that travels into the affective part of our brain. We begin to feel things out of that knowledge. And then, later, words will come out of those experiences. So the analytical, rational side comes last. If you force-feed that side, you might be able to get some results, but it’s not a very good model for education.
By and large, we have been trying to ignite our imagination by having the right recipes. What we should actually be doing is simply making the thing that we want to make and failing over and over again until we finally figure it out. It’s not Western or Eastern—it’s fundamental to human knowledge.
“A lot of our effort and preaching deals with information and is not necessarily embedded in fruitfulness, or the fruit of the Holy Spirit, which is the final test.”
We have an epistemological default going on because we have created an idol out of certainty. We want to make sure that we have the “right” recipe when we haven’t really tested the recipe in the world. Our faith becomes disembodied, almost in a way that is more gnostic than really Christian.
