An Artist's Prayer

M. Craig Barnes made the case that pastors are minor poets, in his book, The Pastor as Minor Poet. And Walter Brueggemann has said, "The business of the church is poetry." I believe both of those things. I also believe that the church collectively and its members individually are artists, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether fulfilled or failed. So I was blessed to read the acceptance speech for the 2014 American Academy of Religion Award in Religion and the Arts by one of my favorite living artists, Makoto Fujimura. It begins:

This speech is a prayer: a prayer uttered in the liminal zone between art and religion, a prayer to repair the schism between the two, a prayer to be — in T.S. Eliot’s words — “reconciled among the stars.”

I pray that some day, in the near future, our children and our grandchildren will see an age when faith and life, art and scholarship, the rational and the intuitive will be so integrated that there will no longer be a need for this award.

Read the whole thing here. It's beautiful.