To bloom blue
On beauty and the cost of losing my imagination
When I was a child, beauty had a hold on me. While my brothers were instinctively drawn to encyclopedias or entertaining others, I would find myself captivated by the dissonance of music, or the power of dance and visual arts. I could get lost in the stories I read or that I created in my mind. I felt everything deeply, and searched quietly for any nameless thing that could catch my heart ajar and blow it wide open.1 I ruminated introspectively, stoking my imagination by writing bad poetry or playing Debussy dramatically on the piano.
But in college I found myself buried beneath the sciences, barely passing each semester of nursing school. The moments left for creative output or intake were rare. The daunting tasks of passing chemistry and pharmacology were all-consuming. I made friends with painters, poets, and musicians, trying to glean from the riches of their artistic education by osmosis. I knew nursing was right for me, but I was envious of the attention my friends were receiving from professors and mentors who encouraged them to tend the garden their imaginations.
One day, an older British actor came to campus to speak at our chapel. He was gregarious, insightful, and an instant hit among the artists in my circle. I remember them sitting around him in the coffee shop on campus after he spoke. Tentatively I too sat down in this gathering of artistic disciples seeking to learn from this iconic wizard of sorts. He engaged kindly with each person in the group, asking who they were, what art form they were studying, and then offering some wisdom to encourage them in their artistic journey.
I started squirming in my seat as each person received a personal word about their study of English or sculpture or acting. When it was my turn I shared reluctantly that I was studying nursing. In his distinguished accent he parroted back the words, “The Art of Nursing”… but nothing followed. He had known exactly how to respond to each aspiring artist in the group, but in my case he could only offer an awkward pause before moving on. In that brief moment the fragile threads of my artistic longings frayed. His silence spoke volumes whether he intended it or not. Artists were people who studied art. I was studying science, so I was not an artist.
In a world that rewards efficiency, what is the value in art? Why invest in something that slows me down only to result in potential mediocrity? Why spend time on something that demands more and produces less? Isn’t that the opposite of effective time and resource management?
When I was spinning a thousand plates in the years after college, wearing myself down to the bone, I didn’t understand my own unmet artistic desires. The more strictly I stayed in what I thought was my lane, the more I had to push down the dissonance and desperation rising up within me. My patients needed science to help them— not art. For my own betterment I needed information, competence, and a completed to-do list— not art! I fed the machine-like monster of utility only to realize that it was consuming me.
It was during Lent that beauty began blow back into the cracked-open door of my soul. At the recommendation of a friend, I decided not only to fast, but also to add a concrete practice to draw my attention toward God. I kept fresh flowers in my room for the 40 days leading up to Easter. They offered a low-effort visual reminder of God’s generosity in creating something quiet, powerful, and beautiful. Seeing the blooms day by day, choosing the spend money on them week by week, I started to feel that the sail of my soul was beginning to unfurl.
In Scripture, the things defined as “beautiful” are intended to draw people into worship. Beauty is not superfluous in God’s economy, but is intended to inspire awe and communion between the Creator and creation. Somehow, divine transcendence and imminence can be perceived through the skilled mastery of a craftsman, or through the symbolism in an embodied performance.2 These gifts operate most profoundly when they orbit around God.
In the Old Testament, the first people to be named as “filled with the Spirit” were not the patriarchs but the craftsmen commissioned to build the Tabernacle.3 I remember when this little statement registered for the first time, and realizing it turned my long-standing assumptions about what was important to God so perfectly upside-down. Of course I knew the politicians and the powerful— past and present— were often consumed with self-absorbed agendas— including Moses. But even in Exodus it was the artist who learned to pay attention in practice, knowing the work was not ultimately for them. The goal was worship. The tapestries and gold pieces were the medium through which God communicated his holiness and his presence with his people. It was the artists who were invited to participate in creating something subversive and surprising (even to them), often at great cost to themselves. They were the ones who were learning to “serve the work,”4 and in that process to serve the Creator who commissioned them.
It was the painter Makoto Fujimura who taught me that the artists who produce the most powerful work are found at the margins, on the edges of cultural dissonance. They are “border-stalkers,” as he calls them— courageously naming the questions and contradictions that others would rather ignore, using their skills to bring clarity and even disruption, along with truth, beauty, and healing.5 It was then that I realized my career in nursing did not inhibit my creative voice, but enhanced it. My experiences and struggles gave me a distinct lens, regardless of my artistic pedigree (and yes, there really is an Art to Nursing).
"God Speaks in Blue" by Luci Shaw My friend hands me a gift from overseas. "Here," she says. "For you." The small packet rustles with dry particles; through thin paper my fingers feel the nubs. I thank her, turning over the plain brown envelope. There, from the other side, a photo-- the vivid, blunt cross of Mecanopsis Betonicifolia, a Himalayan Blue Poppy-- looks at me with its gold eye, four azure petals blazing. A blue to color a dream. The blue of Mary's mantle according to Raphael. The blue at the heart of a gas flame, within an ice cave, on a cerulean door in a white wall on Santorini, a kind of blue that catches my heart ajar and blows it wide open. Dry seeds and a picture, until next spring. But oh, if only I could be alive enough to burn like this flower. If only I could bloom as blue as this.
In a world that rewards efficiency, what is the cost of ignoring how beauty feeds the soul? What is the cost of bypassing the invitation to participate in the act of creation along with the Creator? What wisdom do we lose when we demand less to produce more? What if there is life to be found in the slow work of planting flowers, in beholding blue blooms beyond our control, in pressing into practices that slow us down enough to lift our eyes in worship?
Taken from “God Speaks in Blue,” by Luci Shaw
Consider the woman who anointed Jesus with perfume: “She has done a beautiful thing for me.” -Matthew 26:10, ESV
“Look, I have appointed by name Bezalel…. I have filled him with God’s Spirit, with wisdom, understanding, and ability in every craft to design artistic works….” -Exodus 31:2-4, CSB
From “Walking on Water,” by Madeleine L’Engle
He writes extensively about this in his book, “Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life.”
One of my favorites so far!
That is the bluest blue I have ever seen.