Yesterday at our 9:00 and 11:15 services, Cornelia van Voorst, an artist in our community, shared some powerful reflections on the process of her artwork.
Her artwork should be viewed at her website here: https://vanvoorstart.com/artworks/. See particularly: “The Other Side of War” https://vanvoorstart.com/the-other-side-of-war/
With her permission, I print the text of yesterday’s address below:
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On the 12th of March 2017, I gave a talk that ties in with my exhibition “The Other Side of War.” The talk was given during the sermon time at St Philip Anglican Church in Oak Bay, Victoria, BC, Canada.
My working title for this talk has been Art and the Nature of Good and Evil. There is nothing like diving into the deep end; but if you bear with me, my reason for that title will become clear.
I want to take us back to the very beginning- to the story of creation and I want to draw our attention to something about that story.
God separates in order to create. From the dark God calls forth light, the land is separated from the sea, the night from the day, unique creatures are made and put into their own unique place. From those separations life evolves. God even separates woman from man.
The only thing God did not separate in the 7 days of creation is good from evil. When we are introduced to that duality, we are told that the knowledge of good and evil will surely cause humans to die and that is why we are not to eat of that famous tree.
Well we know the story, and here we are, caught in a world that is a battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, a world that has death and suffering and hatred and hurt teeming within it; a world that is dangerous and violent and chaotic and unpredictable. We live in a world that we need to be saved from, and one day good will win and it will all be healed and bleed into one, and all our tears will be dried away and we will live in non-dualistic forever bliss.
No. I don’t believe in that version of how the battle of good and evil will be solved, because I am an artist. And as an artist I think I might have an inkling as to how maybe God is thinking as a creator.
In Proverbs 8 there is a stunning passage about wisdom; it starts of describing how wisdom helped God create the earth:
The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old;
I was formed long ages ago,
at the very beginning, when the world came to be….
Then I was constantly at his side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in his presence,
rejoicing in his whole world
and delighting in humankind.
But, it gets better than that for me as an artist because the NIV translation in its footnotes points out that this passage may also be read as though Wisdom is saying this:
Then I was constantly at God’s side as an artisan or as a little child.
Wisdom is described as an artist. Wisdom is described as a little child. Wisdom is at God’s side being joyful in the world and towards humanity. It is wisdom- the artist and the child- who is at God’s side forming the earth; and it is Wisdom who is also described in Proverbs as a woman.
Now as someone who has devoted her life to children, and as an artist, and as a woman I am pretty chuffed about that; but I am also very curious about it because it seems to me that in history, and especially Christian history it is women, art and children, that have been marginalised in our discussion of who God is.
Christianity has suffered under the weight of God being worshipped as father, as king, as ruler and lord, a warrior, a judge, and in those descriptions we have had no inkling that right beside that glorious majesty is a bright, joyful, creative, imaginative, lovely, light- hearted and light- handed being of beauty. We have essentially written the artistic, womanly and childlike nature of wisdom out of the scriptures and placed her as a footnote.
In Proverbs and in the Song of Solomon, Wisdom calls out loud, runs upon walls looking for her lover wondering where he could be, she is desperate for him, longing for him. Can we imagine feeling that way in our longing for God or in our longing for the world?
What I notice about Wisdom in the Proverbs 8 passage is that all of the world is a delight, and all of humanity is loved. It reminds me of that passage in Matthew 5 in which we are told to be perfect as our father in heaven is perfect. God makes the sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends the rain on the just and the unjust. The contrast between those two passages is this: in Proverbs we are seeing Wisdom at the dawn of creation taking delight in all of the world; in Matthew 5 we are in the midst of the broken world. But what has remained the same is that to God it is still a world upon which love is showered.
As an artist I get that. To artists, all of life is worth our attention, all of life whether good or evil or beautiful or rotten, we make something of it. We can take broken pieces of junk and make an amazing sculpture of it; we take human pain and write a novel or make a painting of a film; to an artist everything in the world is potentially a source of beauty, of creativity, of renewal. In a very real sense artists do not think of the world in terms of good and bad, but more in terms of: what can we make of this? What can we draw out of this, what might we celebrate, enhance, what might we return to the raw material of life and make something new of it?
That is how I think God sees the world. Not as a world divided into good and evil, but a world that is still altogether a world to be loved. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. “Whoever” being the operative.
Dividing the world into who’s in and who is out, who is good and who is evil, who is Muslim , who is Jew, who is white who is worthy, who is damned- is not God’s style. Yes God did indeed separate in the beginning of creation, but that was to bring forth life. We humans, for the purposes of war, separate to end life.
Now, if it is true that knowing the difference between good and evil brings death then making that distinction cannot be of God for the simple fact that God is life, and so it is impossible for God to divide the world into good and evil and so bring death to us.
In God, good and evil have found their peace; in Christ the battle between good and evil is already won, if in fact it ever began. The battle between good and evil began in us, not in God. It’s why we are commanded to love our enemies. We were never meant to destroy them in order to prove we were on God’s side. It is by loving our enemies that we show ourselves to be on the side of God– perfect just as our father in heaven is perfect.
So if love is our purpose what have we as human beings been doing waging wars in the name of battling evil?
I believe it is because the child-like, feminine, artistic heart of wisdom has been disallowed to inform the values of our human patriarchal Christian culture.
This is where this talk gets hard for me. This is where I have to speak about my own reality of being an artist, a woman and a carer of children and address what I know of the reality of war and the so-called battle of good and evil.
My art work dives into the intersection of personal story with collective history, and brings a tender approach to a society that we remember as anything but tender. In my art practice over the last couple of years I have been working with the story of the bombing of civilians during WW2, a story that has been overlooked because it happened to children of the enemy- an enemy that is guilty of awful violence toward civilians: 11 million of them, including 6 million of Europe’s Jews. My own father fought for that enemy.
Yet this is a story that is deeper and broader than Germany – it is a story about women and children and the violence of patriarchal attitudes that still affect our world today.
Some words by Churchill provide an insight to those attitudes. He wrote of the bombing of Germany that there was a higher poetic justice at work and
that those who have loosed these horrors upon mankind will now in their homes and persons feel the shattering strokes of a just retribution.
In the context of what the Nazis have done, Churchill’s words ring true. But in reality, these words are the most stunning evidence of the pervasive negation of the lives and person- hood of women and children; they were considered nothing more than extensions of the lives of men.
It was women who were at home, not steely jawed Nazis; women who were always frightened, trying to keep their families alive while their men were absent. Women who had very little say in how the world was formed and run, let alone how wars were fought. But even if they might have made a difference to the direction of the war, I am left with this question:
- What have children to do with war?
- What have children to do with the Holocaust?
Children are the evidence that goodness, light, love, hope and innocence exist in every society, no matter how dark that society might have become.
We cannot return to the past and undo our fathers and grandfathers wars. And we cannot really judge them especially as many of us have not faced war ourselves. But we can decide how we carry the memory of war into the future.
A statue of a little girl is now facing the Wall Street Bull in New York and because of it, I remember the etching by Picasso that depicts another little girl shining a light while facing the blind monstrous Minotaur of war.
I cannot help but hope that we will in every city place statues of little children with their feet planted firmly on the ground, wind in their hair facing the monolith of destruction. But more than that, I hope we each of us might face the world with open eyes and a heart that does not see it divided into good and evil but a world that needs to be loved even if it has to be stood up to. I hope and pray that each of us today would be brave and become as that little child.
May peace be with us all.
In A Spacious Place 
5 comments
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March 13, 2017 at 9:13 am
vanvoorst
Thank you Christopher!
Working on this talk gave me insight about a bone of contention ( ha ha ref. bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh) as to why in the creation story woman was made from man. I now think the point is that God did not like the idea of men being on the earth alone doing whatever they wanted with no-one to be accountable to. We were meant to be God’s ambassadors of Wisdom to men.
Yet woman was made from flesh- the “spirit breathed” raw material – and not from clay so that she could not be mistaken for being subservient or “other”. Of course patriarchal thinking and interpretation has managed to twist our role into being nothing more than a help meet to men ….but when you discover what the Hebrew words really mean that are translated into help meet it paints a very different picture of who women are meant to be.
That is why the sentence “God even separated woman from man” in this talk is important. It is a contrast with the later phrase “women and children were considered nothing but the extensions of the lives of men.” We were never meant to be that. In the story God separated woman from man because we were never meant to be swallowed up in only men’s purposes. The Feminine as well as having it’s own life, is meant to be a challenge and support and ally to the Masculine, not hidden within it.
March 13, 2017 at 11:35 am
Christopher Page
I am pretty sure most reputable biblical scholarship views Adam’s statement, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” as an affirmation of absolute inherent equality and complementarity, in no way at all a gesture towards hierarchy and certainly not inferiority on the part of the woman! The point is man AND woman are equally distinct from the rest of the animals Adam has named. Man and woman are united in their essential nature, neither above the other. It is tragic how far astray, for the most part in the writing of self-serving men, this has gone. The consequences of this deviation have been, as you so eloquently point out, utterly devastating.
March 13, 2017 at 4:22 pm
tressbackhouse
I have only received this late in the day,but it is not too late I hope to comment that it was beautifully put.
April 17, 2017 at 11:14 pm
Bob
“In God, good and evil have found their peace; in Christ the battle between good and evil is already won, if in fact it ever began. The battle between good and evil began in us, not in God. It’s why we are commanded to love our enemies. We were never meant to destroy them in order to prove we were on God’s side. It is by loving our enemies that we show ourselves to be on the side of God– perfect just as our father in heaven is perfect.
So if love is our purpose what have we as human beings been doing waging wars in the name of battling evil?”
So the Jews and the British should have taken Gandhi’s advice and just surrendered to the Nazis? No point fighting evil?
What was that about selling your cloak to buy a sword? What are swords for again?
Who was Christ tempted by? What did Satan say, “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me..”
“The prince of this world cometh…” Who’s that again?? The Devil is the prince of this world? He gives the kingdoms of earth to whoever he wills? I didn’t see that on CNN!
“Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.”
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
Again, and again and again, Christ tells us clearly that ‘you are in or you are out’. There is no half way, no common ground, no ecumenicalism, no agree to disagree, none of the self-loving feel-goodism this article drips with. Sorry, read the Gospels and frame your ideas around the truths therein. If you can’t fit your ideas into the framework of the Gospels, if you cannot accept what Christ said, if you think you know better, well, “have fun with that”, but you are not a Christian.
“But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.”
April 22, 2017 at 12:27 pm
vanvoorst
After I first read your response I thought it would be a great opportunity to expand on my ideas and explain them better. Now all I would like to do is point out how you have not really responded to my talk at all.
I did not in my talk suggest that evil did not exist.
I did not suggest that the Nazis should not have been fought or resisted.
I did not write that there is no devil.
My talk was not about the temptation of Christ in the wilderness.
I did not write about who true believers are.
My talk is not about family in relation in the kingdom of God
I am not going to point out to you other scriptures like ” lay down your sword” or loving our enemies and doing good to those who persecute you. or that God is loving to both the evil and the good.
What my talk is about is locating evil only outside of ourselves. The battle of good and evil exists within us, and denying our own propensity for evil and locating it only in the “other side” leads us to do evil in the name of good.
Perhaps this might be a good time to expand a little on what that evil in the name of fighting the Nazis looked like.
Homes were the target. It was not collateral. The oft told explanation that most bombs failed to hit their target of industrial sites and that most happened to fall on homes because they were just hopeless at hitting their targets is a lie. The British had scientists researching what fabrics German women decorated their houses with, what their furniture was made of, what wood lined the walls of the buildings, they targeted the medieval sections of cities with wooden houses because those burned better.
The first “successful” bombing raid was on a little town of Wuppertal a medieval town with no industry to speak of but very burnable buildings. A hospital clearly marked by a red cross on it’s roof was hit directly. Thirty newborns and their mothers were incinerated.
The most remembered raids are Hamburg and Dresden but there were 130 other cities. Hamburg alone was pay back for every single Briton killed by German bombing in the whole of the war- 40,000 in one night.
Bombings like that continued for 5 years. Five years after the bombing of Coventry Cathedral at which someone decided to make a cross with the words “Father Forgive.”